CRUISING THE RIVER SEA.

On numerous trips up the Amazon spanning over thirty years, our author captures the ebb and flow of Life along this complex waterway as far inland as Manaus

She had a heavenly name, Stella Solaris. She was Greek. She weighed eighteen thousand tons, a floating hotel big enough to carry six hundred guests in luxury. In mid-December 1983, she was the first transatlantic cruise ship to sail one thousand miles up the Amazon River as far as Manaus, halfway across South America. Her aging riveted hull drew thirty feet, sitting lower in fresh water than many three-times-larger cruise ships now being launched. Her owner had hired four Amazon River pilots--twice the usual number--in order to keep two on watch at all times to see that the ship with the sublime name would not get stuck in the mud.

Leaving astern the choppy trade-wind tantrums, she had steamed south into placid equatorial doldrums where the seawater is lightly browned by sediment eroded from the Andes and carried by the Amazon across the continent into the Atlantic Ocean. She entered the mouth of the river at night, lights ablaze. After the evening show, some passengers went to the uppermost deck, the Lido, for a midnight snack. The shipowner's wife, known in the cruise business as Mrs. K, was entertaining European aristocrats and American diplomats under a warm dark sky. In my stateroom I was sorting slides for my lecture the next day, "Amazon, the River Sea," about the complex of waterways that drain the greatest rain forest in the world.

Then came Mrs. K's voice on the telephone: "Loren! Quick! Come to the Lido! We're being invaded!"

Invaded? Pirates on the Amazon? As I ran to the stairway, flocks of bugs as big as hummingbirds came flying down into the lounge, thudding against furnishings. Passengers in formal dress were fleeing from the Lido, convoyed by squadrons of monstrous black beetles. In the Lido, soup, salad, and ice cream were alive with fluttering wings. The deck quivered and squished. Mrs. K stood staring into a swimming pool empty of water but filling with coleoptera. "Loren," she said, "As our resident Amazon expert you should have warned us about these kamikazes. Now what?"

I had no idea. And so I stammered, "It's hardly a mating urge, so I guess the beetles think they're flying to the moon. Why not turn off all topside lights? Except the running lights, of course."

Mrs. K agreed and phoned the bridge. We soon steamed out of the "wing storm" as it came to be called, but it took all night to rid the ship of insect suicides and stowaways. That was my sole experience with such hordes of hexapods, even though I made every Amazon trip on Stella Solaris until her last in the year 2000 (one way to escape Washington-area winters), and I lectured on other liners as well: four trips in 2001 alone.

Most of the cruise ships--some as big as twenty-eight thousand tons--enter the Amazon by the North Channel. They pause one hundred miles upstream to take on river pilots at Macapa, a city of 225,000 smack on the equator. Smaller ships, especially freighters, choose Belem, on the other side of the Amazon's mouth, two hundred miles away. Eighty miles up the Para estuary, Belem is the traditional port of entry. Its highway to Brasilia is the main commercial link between the northern waterways and southern Brazil's farms and industries. Belem's population has quintupled--to well over a million--since I made my first Amazon voyage as a teenage seaman on the West Notus out of San Francisco in 1935. I became enchanted with the seaport, its reptilian pets and tropical blossoms. I remember children in the streets, offering envelopes of sweet-smelling herbs and powders in obtuse English: "Smeou, meester?" Ladies dusted the scented talcs on bare necks and shoulders to relieve humidity.

There was a time when my ship might not have been allowed to sail on up the river. To withstand European attempts to gain footholds in the region, the Portuguese had closed the Amazon to foreign shipping for three centuries. Then, as now, most Brazilians suspected other nations of cobica, of coveting lands nearly empty of people but full of untold riches. In 1851, Lieutenant William Lewis Herndon, USN, descended the river from Peru to gather information for his epic book, Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon, published for the 33rd U.S. Congress. At the border, he was obliged to exchange his Peruvian vessel for one made in the Empire of Brazil. He said a circus rafting down from Peru was forced to build a new raft of Brazilian logs in order to continue its voyage. In mid-century, steam began to replace sail on the river.

To encourage traffic--despite uneasiness about cobica--in 1867 the Empire opened the Amazon and its fifty thousand miles of navigable tributaries for merchant vessels of all countries. Booth Line freighters were soon handling commerce between Liverpool and Iquitos, Peru, twenty-three hundred miles inland. They carried passengers during the rubber boom. After the boom burst, they found other exotic cargo such as barbasco, a root that Indians still use to poison fish. Pharmaceutical firms use it to manufacture insecticides.

Large liners sail the Amazon from December through May, while the river is rising--as much as forty-five feet at Manaus. Were a ship to run aground, rising waters would set it free. A ship stranded in July might be expected to remain for months until the river rose again. The channel is shallow near the mouth but as deep as three hundred feet upriver. Cruise ships hold to the north bank while steaming upstream from Macapa. On the port side, the south shore lies beyond a maze of islands. Both shores are forested--a surprise to those deceived by reports that Amazonia has been reduced to ashes. Not until Obidos, a town six hundred miles from the ocean, can voyagers see mainland on both sides. There, the river is six thousand feet wide and two hundred feet deep. Tourists accustomed to the Mississippi are amazed at the dearth of traffic. Every hour or so one may spot a freighter, a bauxite carrier, or a huge barge loaded with containers, but only a few of the twenty-five thousand licensed river craft are underway in the daytime. Most are loading and unloading passengers and freight in daylight and steaming from one lesser port to another by night. Small vessels may be hidden by islands while taking shortcuts from the main channel. As yet, few ports have paved roads leading very far from town. Distances are so great that Brazilians who can afford it--and there are millions--travel by air. Those who cannot may board double-decker riverboats carrying thirty to three hundred passengers. The few cabins are so stifling they serve mainly to lock up belongings. It is more comfortable to travel and sleep in hammocks, those portable, washable sleeping devices invented by American Indians. Travelers carry their own hammocks, slinging them criss-cross on decks open to the elements.

On their way upstream to Manaus, big liners keep their waste in holding tanks to avoid pollution. They touch two or three communities. A few are towns, others are enclaves where some passengers expect to contact Indian tribes--unaware that both blood and heritage of people along the mainstream have been diluted by many generations of European occupation. Most riverine settlers are caboclos, folks of Portuguese blood mixed with Indian and perhaps a touch of African. Their social structure is not tribal. An apparently primitive village may have a school and a telephone nailed to a tree, as at Boca da Valeria, where cruise ships anchor close offshore. Boca's river-bank village, Sao Paulo, has grown from a single house to thirty, nourished by the sale of curios, and gifts of money, food, and clothing from cruise-ship passengers and crew. As soon as a ship is sighted, kiosks are knocked together. Children don feather headdresses and round up pet parrots and sloths. At Santa Rita, a larger and older settlement atop a hill five miles inland, both the primary and the secondary school are recessed. In crowded canoes with scant inches of freeboard, pupils paddle down the Valeria inlet and out to the ship, hoping for handouts. At the landing, Valerians locate repeat visitors like me and press into their hands tightly folded pieces of note paper. They hold long lists, neatly written in Portuguese, of wanted medicines, school supplies, soccer uniforms, and money to repair a pump or build a house. Wishes may come true on subsequent visits by the same ship and crew. Some tourists object that such largess is "spoiling native culture by causing primitive Indians to expect payment for picture-taking." My view is that Valerian caboclos are neither primitive nor Indian. Nor are they stupid. They are practicing capitalism without the help of the Small Business Administration. Valerians are lucky to live close to a safe anchorage that fits the schedule of cruise ships bound for Manaus.

The only city on the way is Santarem, a trading center of 327,000 at the mouth of a large and lovely tributary, the Tapajos River. Since the annual rise and fall of the waters at this mid-point is less than fifteen feet, Santarem has the largest fixed dock in Amazonia. In its cemetery are tombs of Confederate veterans and their families who settled there after the U.S. Civil War. David Riker, for example, born in South Carolina in 1862, prospered by cultivating the first rubber plantation (100,000 trees) in Brazil at a time when the price of latex sapped from wilderness trees was soaring. A Santarem teacher of English, Henry Wickam (later Sir Henry), exported tons of seeds, which hastened the production of cheap plantation rubber in Asia that ruined Brazil's monopoly. Three of Riker's sons helped Henry Ford establish Fordlandia, a huge rubber plantation near Santarem. It failed. All three sons wound up in Detroit.

Forty minutes by highway from Santarem, beside a splendid beach on the Tapajos, Alter do Chao is a village risen from an abandoned rubber grove. In 1983, when I helped the Stella Solaris owner check on its suitability as a port of call, Alter do Chao had no electricity, no telephone, nor paved road. Now it has fine weekend homes, and visits to its Center for Preservation of Indigenous Cultures are listed as the best of shore excursions by cruise-ship guests of several nations. The innovative center was created by David Richardson and his wife, Antonia Kashinawa, to preserve legends and artifacts of seventy-eight vanishing Indian tribes. It opened October 12, 1992, as a memorial marking, to the day, "five hundred years of genocide." Museum directors from the U.S. and Europe praise its evocative use of space. Now under control of a Coalition of tribes managed by Alvaro Tucano, the center survives through sales to tour guests of contemporary Indian artifacts.

The next upriver stop is either to anchor at Boca da Valeria or dock at Parintins, the cleanest and friendliest town on the river. Parintins is often skipped because the current is swift and its small floating dock is risky for a twenty-eight-thousand-ton liner, even if it drops an anchor well upstream and secures a bow line to a big tree that dominates the waterfront. In the evening, tour guests are escorted by Sea Scouts to a two-hour dance-hall version of the local Boi Bumba festival, somewhat similar to Rio's Carnaval. During the last days of June, the Boi Bumba attracts some eighty thousand guests by aircraft and riverboat, more than doubling the town's population.

Parintins clings to a hundred-mile-long island inside the eastern border of Amazonas, a state so wet that it is less than 2 percent deforested, and big--the size of Alaska plus two Hawaiis. The state capital, Manaus, is less than a day's run upriver. Manaus is one of those American cities whose names (Tacoma, Quito) honor Indians instead of saints. Ajuricaba, a heroic leader of the once-populous Manau tribe, is the best remembered of all the indigenous warriors who resisted the Portuguese. After his martyrdom in 1728, the tribe was reduced to slavery and extinction. The city did not prosper until John B. Dunlop invented a practical rubber tire. Much of its raw material, latex, was tapped from wild rubber trees scattered throughout Brazil's virgin forests and marketed by."rubber barons" who lived in Manaus. By 1897 the city boasted a world-class opera house and the first electric trolleys in South America. After competition from Malayan plantation rubber ruined the wild-rubber trade, the price of raw rubber bottomed at 1 percent of its 1910 value. For the next half-century, this oasis in the wilderness epitomized the long-gone opulence of the rubber boom, its empty opera house a symbol of faded glory.

Yet Manaus was never forsaken, as soon becomes apparent to shipmates after our vessel leaves the Amazon mainstream and turns up its largest tributary. Manaus lies to starboard on the bank of the stygian Rio Negro, not far above its confluence with the Amazon--touted as "the wedding of the waters." Early risers attend the wedding and snap pictures of the transit from brown waters to black. The Negro's color derives from the steeping of vegetation in warm swamps; its waters are faintly acidic and thus mosquito free. The shoreline unrolling to starboard has been almost unbroken green for the past nine hundred miles, but it now gives way to a multicolored splatter of factories, loading ramps for auto ferries, and marine railways for pulling big vessels out of the water for repair. We advance slowly, to avoid making waves.

Coming into view are tall buildings, the favorite Brazilian expression of urbanity. At least fifty have risen since the city was declared a free port in 1967. A few relics of the boom town remain, such as a riverside marketplace built ninety-nine years ago of ironwork wrought in Paris. The waterfront has been transformed from that which I knew in the "general cargo" days before standard containers revolutionized ocean shipping. Behind a sea wall higher than the crest of the disastrous 1953 flood, a loader stacks containers from many countries. Piled five-high, they almost conceal the century-old customs house whose building blocks are said to have been shipped from Scotland as ballast. My vessel approaches a wharf where dozens of double-deck riverboats too small to carry containers have relocated across the dock, side by side, to allow space for us. Stevedores run back and forth along narrow planks laid across open water, transferring cargo to and from boats and trucks. Every riverboat sports a shingle advising the day and hour of sailings, usually in the evenings, to various ports of call: eastward to Belem, westward to the Colombian border, as far south as Porto Velho, near Bolivia, and up the Negro almost to Venezuela.

As we draw alongside, a brass band plays "Brasil." My friend Jaqi is setting up her curio shop. The massive dock appears to be immobile, yet it is designed to rise and fall nearly fifty feet from high water the first of June to low water in November. Beside the shoreside end of a floating ramp from the dock to the seawall a great steel plaque displays ninety-seven dates, marking the high-water level for every year since 1903. In 1926 the river hardly rose at all. At high water, the dock has clearance for any ship of very deep draft--even an aircraft carrier, if one could ever venture this far from the ocean.

Passengers file ashore to enter air-conditioned buses for a tour of the city's museums, zoos, and opera house, or board riverboats for excursions into waterways and forests across the Negro. Boat trips afford snapshots of wildlife, 99 percent of it captive. Tourists who disdain packaging, and are reasonably fit and careful, prefer to haggle at the municipal market for Indian arrows and spirit-summoning herbs. Or push through the crush of sidewalk vendors and wristwatch repairmen to sample a modest lunch based on canja de galinha (chicken soup) for about two dollars at a pay-by-weight restaurant. Or even track down boom-town history at the Museu do Porto de Manaus. Downtown, near the port, there are countless shops as colorful as Hong Kong was between the two world wars. Bargains abound: for a gift, a wide Brazilian hammock, $18. Surprises await around every corner, but the trouble with walking is the heat--unless it rains. And it will. It is easier to accept a free, twenty-minute air-conditioned taxi ride from the port to an upscale 608-room riverside hotel, where a tourist can price gems, photograph free-flying macaws at a mini-zoo, and dine on exquisite tambaqui, a fish that feeds on rain-forest fruits that fall into the water.

More adventuresome guests, toying with notions of a future visit to Amazonia not tied to the ship, ask how to get closer to wilderness and wildlife--yet not so close as to get as burned and bitten as backpackers do. One answer is to book a stay at one of fourteen jungle lodges within hours of the city, some afloat, some aloft, some offering trips to fish for peacock bass. After the mandatory photograph, the big fish are thrown back into the black waters in the name of conservation. The largest lodge has lookout towers, dining halls, lounges, and even helicopter pads, all interconnected by walkways built into the canopy high above the unbroken forest floor.

No such amenities existed during my visit in 1969. A major industry was the curing and export of hides--mainly of felines and crocodilians whose hunting is now prohibited by the Constitution. The population was only 300,000 then. Today some of Manaus's 1,160,000 citizens manufacture motorcycles, electronic goods, and color film. I miss the old times when I came in from wilderness photo jaunts to charge my batteries. In 1961 I filmed four U.S. senators discussing President Kennedy's Alliance for Progress with Gilberto Mestrinho, at thirty-one the youngest governor of the largest state in the Americas. "Blame me," he said, "for what you see;" and showed us around on the official yacht. What goes around comes around. Mestrinho, now seventy-one, still draws more votes for mayor or governor than any rival in Amazonia. I met polymath Warwick Kerr in 1969, when he was head of INPA, the National Institute of Amazon Research, a renowned river and rain-forest laboratory where several hundred scientists of many nations work at the forested edge of town. Kerr confessed to being haunted by a biological boo-boo very much in the news. At his previous post in Sao Paulo, it was an employee of his who accidentally released experimental African killer bees into the Western Hemisphere.

One of the best ways for a visitor to capture an echo of bygone Manaus is to attend an evening performance at the Teatro Amazonas. For the second visit by Stella Solaris in 1984 and several years thereafter, the owner brought from Rio de Janeiro the entire Ballet Dalal Achcar. Nowadays, the shows are home grown and equally elegant, pageants portraying the city in Indian, Imperial, and modern (i.e., PG-13) times. One performance entertains passengers on their final night. Since all large liners turn around at Manaus, those upstream guests fly home the next day. The following evening, another show hosts new arrivals flown in for the return voyage.

My remembrances of the floating dock of Manaus do not easily let go, especially upon the departure of a cruise ship in the evening. So many times I have stood at a ship's high rail watching the primal ritual of parting: kisses in the shadows; sailors promising to return; girls promising to wait. Tears. Saudades. Watching a tardy tourist race for the gangway then stop short to bargain for one last T-shirt. Watching Jaci pack up her unsold trinkets and wave good-bye. A shaft from the setting sun illuminates the yellow-tiled cupola of the 105-year-old Teatro Amazonas--once attended by rubber barons whose shirts were said to have been starched in Paris; where Caruso was supposed to have sung but never did; and where Brazil's premiere ballerina, Aha Botafogo, delighted Stella Solaris audiences with her perky hat dance. I watch sailors take in mooring lines, just as I did in the hundred harbors of my youth. Answering to her engines and twenty degrees left rudder, the vessel sweeps past the liquid shimmer of a city where at this hour family televisions are tuned mainly to soap operas. Swinging 180 degrees to catch the black current of the Rio Negro, she steadies on a downstream course, bound for the Atlantic Ocean half a continent away, leaving astern a golden glow wrapped in forest and the dark waters of the River Sea.