The whole area of this wonderful region is 2,330,000 square miles. This is more than a third of all South America, and equal to two-thirds of all Europe. All western Europe could be placed within its basin, without touching its boundaries, and it would even contain our whole Indian empire.
Perhaps no country in the world contains such an amount of vegetable matter on its surface as the valley of the Amazon. Its entire extent, with the exception of some very small portions, is covered with one dense and lofty primeval forest, the most extensive and unbroken which exists on the earth. It is the great feature of the country--that which at once stamps it as a unique and peculiar region. Here we may travel for weeks and months in any direction, and scarcely find an acre of ground unoccupied by trees. The forests of the Amazon are distinguished from those of most other countries by the great variety of species of trees composing them. Instead of extensive tracts covered with pines, or oaks, or beeches, we scarcely ever see two individuals of the same species together.
The Brazil nuts are brought chiefly from the interior; the greater part from the country around the junction of the Rio Negro and Madeira with the Amazon. The tree takes more than a year to produce and ripen its fruits, which, as large and as heavy as cannon balls, fall with tremendous force from the height of a hundred feet, crashing through the branches and undergrowth, and snapping off large boughs. Persons are sometimes killed by them.
Comparing the accounts given by other travellers with my own observations, the Indians of the Amazon valley appear to be much superior, both physically and intellectually, to those of South Brazil and of most other parts of South America. They more closely resemble the intelligent and noble races inhabiting the western prairies of North America.
I do not remember a single circumstance in my travels so striking and so new, or that so well fulfilled all previous expectations, as my first view of the real uncivilised inhabitants of the Uaupés. I felt that I was in the midst of something new and startling, as if I had been instantaneously transported to a distant and unknown country.