Page:A narrative of travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro.djvu/294

 262 TRAVELS ON THE AMAZON. [June,

greater part of whom deserve no better name than pedlars, only they carry their goods in a canoe instead of upon their backs. As their distaste for agriculture, or perhaps rather their passionate love of trade, allows scarcely any of them to settle, or produce anything for others to trade in, their only resource is in the indigenous inhabitants of the country ; and as these are also very little given to cultivation except to procure the mere necessaries of life, it results that the only articles of commerce are the natural productions of the country, to catch or collect which requires an irregular and wandering life, better suited to an Indian's habits than the settled and continued exertions of agriculture. These products are principally dried fish, and oil from the turtles' eggs and cOw-fish, for the inland trade ; and sarsaparilla, piassaba, india-rubber, Brazil-nuts, balsam of capivi, and cacao, for the exports. Though the coffee-plant and sugar-cane grow everywhere almost sponta- neously, yet coffee and sugar have to be imported from other parts of Brazil for home consumption. Beef is everywhere bad, principally because there are no good pastures near the towns where cattle brought from a distance can be fattened, and no one thinks of making them, though it might easily be done. Vegetables are also very scarce and dear, and so are all fruits, except such as the orange and banana, which once planted only require the produce to be gathered when ripe ; fowls in Para are 3^. 6d. each, and sugar as dear as in England. And all this because nobody will make it his business to supply any one of these articles ! There is a kind of gambling ex- citement in trade which outshines all the steady profits of labour, and regular mechanics are constantly leaving their business to get a few goods on credit and wander about the country trading.

There is, I should think, -no country where such a universal and insecure system of credit prevails as here. There is hardly a trader, great or small, in the country, that can be said to have any capital of his own. The merchants in Para, who have foreign correspondents, have goods out on credit ; they sell on credit to the smaller merchants or shopkeepers of Para ; these again supply on credit the negociantes in the country towns. From these last the traders up the different rivers get their supplies also on credit. These traders give small parcels of goods to half-civilised Indians, or to any one who will take