Blogue-Blague

The SS Colorado creaked along a foggy South Atlantic, rocked by a crisp wind that made the waters choppy in that late March. The sun was dawning up and the wooden balusters were sweating up morning dew. Members of the crew were mopping up the remains of a quiet night...

William was intrigued by what he was reading these past few days, when he was not feeling so seasick. It was an account about an Irish expedition that landed in the Amazon in the Seventeenth Century. He was also startled by a jolt of energy he received upon reading Humboldt’s Travels the day before, prompting him to write a letter to his father: “…Hardly had I opened the book when I seemed to become illuminated… When such men are provided to do the work of traveling, exploring and observing for humanity, men who gravitate into their work as the air does into our lungs, what need, what business have we outsiders to pant after them and in a toilsome way try to serve as their substitutes?”

He got up from the wooden bench, letting the sea breeze sink down his lungs as he strolled starboard. Pretty soon Dr. Agassiz’s contingent would be together for breakfast, but he felt the dread that always accompanied him from a tender age when facing similar situations. The unspeakable pressure felt by all humankind at different levels, the rock solid certainty that he would not replicate his grandfather’s professional feats were too much for the young man mired in the deadly web woven by the arts and letters. Yes, unlike his grandfather. But, in fact, a chip off the old block. An entrepreneur. Of ideas. A peddler…

Dr. Agassiz started to outline, while eating, the main course of action for the expedition while the ship was bending down the Brazilian sinuous coast. Chief among his concerns was the vastness of the territory to be explored. He indicated to the group that the research would need focus. He also knew he could count on the multi-talented young William to do work that would go beyond collecting specimens. William’s penmanship and drawing skills were above average, and Agassiz fully intended to utilize them. It was expected – among other things - that William would replicate the local flora and fauna on paper.

Reverend J.C. Fletcher, co-author of a seminal work on Brazil with Reverend Daniel P. Kidder, was the one passenger in the SS Colorado, among 35 in total that made quite an impression on him. William held court around Fletcher, always throwing a brilliant aside and making an impression on the whole group. During lunch, in which the heaviness of preserved food helped to augment the effects of wine consumption, William mentioned an anecdote in the reverend’s book that most amused him. According to Fletcher, while landing in Recife, on Brazil’s Northeast, passengers disembarked from steamers and were carried to shore on a hammock held by two slaves who ran “…as hot sand burned their bare feet…while the strong wind close to the sand hurt the eyes…”

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William was apprehensive about the arrival in Rio. He marveled as the ship entered the eastern mouth of the gargantuan bay that had fooled its early explorers, who thought it was the delta of a river in that rainy January. The River of January. The ship curved, penetrating the bay’s mouth surreptitiously, and he could see the far off small flickering lights in the dusk. The approaching sunset to the southwest and the thought that the Emperor would be awaiting to meet the convoy and walk about the boat in five days was enough to jolt him. He remembered conversations that his father had with Ralph Waldo Emerson about the vivacious and precocious emperor Pedro, so admired by Abraham Lincoln. William left the States at the onset of the Civil War. He feared for his brother Wilky who would end up participating in the historical takeover of Fort Wagner down south. A tremendous moment of bravery, artifice, and communion of races. Buffalo soldiers fighting alongside conscripts and well-born sons of the North. Meanwhile, Louis paced around the table nervously as the sailors let the rope go down around the nook into the water. The reception was uneventful, but human beings did not matter. Rather, the matter was in the surroundings.

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On his second day in Rio, William was taken aback by the raw beauty and lushness of the place. He read editions of the Anglo-Brazilian newspaper given to him. One note on a recent story intrigued him, and he pursued it further with some of his hosts. It was another Irish story connected to Brazil, which seemed odd and incongruous, and yet piqued his interest. It concerned the Irish convoy from County Cork, led by Captain Cook, who was tricked to come to Brazil whereupon, so they supposed, they would get tillable land. As in anything that is Brazilian to its core, it was a half-truth, a hoax. Typical of some later vaudevillian act announced around Rio’s Central Avenue, this was not to be. The Irish, smelling deceit, rebelled. Ironically, the fiercest encounters were in tandem with Germans against newly freed Negro slaves. After the deafeat, part of the Irish group went to Argentina while another contingent went to Bahia, later departing back home.

The expedition set up headquarters at Rua Direita, one of Rio’s main streets then. In a letter to his family, William mentioned the impression Rio had on him: “No words of mine….can give any idea of the magnificence of this harbor and its approaches. The boldest, grandest mountains far and near, the palms and other trees of such vivid green as I never saw anywhere else.”

William quickly settled at Rua Direita, and was having the habitual pangs associated with his social uneasiness. A quick stroll to the marina was enough to restore his soul back to that state of affairs that was a betrayal to melancholy. The enmeshing of blue hues as the sea met the heavens at a tiny opening that was the bay’s mouth. Roundabout, the picture was framed by greenish hills that would span at all degrees.