Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/221

Rh Macapá that we put into a channel on the island of Porquinhos to wait for the turning of the tide. I had already seen islands said to have been half washed away, and others built up, by the pororóca; and I had seen upon the shores the evidences of its destructive power in carrying away forests and cutting away banks; but it was on this island that I was first able to see some of its effects near at hand and at my leisure. After having seen so much, I was only the more anxious to see the pororóca itself; but my suggestions in regard to it were answered by an ominous silence on the part of the director, and my requests by additional expressions of horror.

As I shortly afterward met and conversed with a man who had seen the pororóca, I can not do better than give his description of it. This man was a soldier in the Brazilian army, and, on the occasion referred to, was going with a few other soldiers from the colony to Macapá in a small open boat. Arriving at the mouth of the Araguarý, they went down with the tide, and anchored just inside the bar which crosses the mouth of this stream, to await the turning of the tide, which would enable them to pass the shallows, and then carry them up the Amazon. Shortly after the tide had stopped running out, they saw something coming toward them from the ocean in a long white line, which grew bigger and whiter as it approached. Then there was a sound like the rumbling of distant thunder, which grew louder and louder as the white line came nearer, until it seemed as if the whole ocean had risen up and was coming, charging and thundering down upon them, boiling over the edge of this pile of water like an endless cataract, from four to seven metres high, that spread out across the whole eastern horizon. This was the pororóca! When they saw it coming, the crew became utterly demoralized, and fell to weeping and praying in the bottom of the boat, expecting that it would certainly be dashed to pieces, and they themselves drowned. The pilot, however, had the presence of mind to heave anchor before the wall of waters struck them; and, when it did strike, they were first pitched violently forward, and then lifted, and left rolling and tossing like a cork on the foaming sea it left behind, the boat nearly filled with water. But their trouble was not yet ended; for, before they had emptied the boat, two other such seas came down on them at short intervals, tossing them in the same manner, and finally leaving them within a stone's-throw of the river-bank, where another such wave would have dashed them upon the shore. They had been anchored, before the waves struck them, near the middle of the stream, which at this place is several miles wide.

But no description of this disturbance of the water can impress one so vividly as the signs of devastation seen upon the