The first of the important seaports of Brazil that are accessible by steamer from New York is Belém, the capital of the State of Pará. It ranks only as the fifth in size, but to the tourist it is of surpassing interest because it is situated on the Pará River, the southern or commercial mouth of the Amazon, that mightiest and most majestic of all the rivers in the world. Imagine!—a river more than 3400 miles in length, with its source in the Peruvian Andes, 16,000 feet above the level of the sea—a river which, with its vast tributaries, many of them themselves from a thousand to two thousand miles in length, drains a territory of 2,300,000 square miles, two-thirds as large as our United States, and so rich in indigenous resources, and so fertile, that many years ago, when it was wholly a wilderness, the great scientist Von Humboldt said of it that “it is here that one day, sooner or later, will concentrate the civilization of the globe”—a river that is a mile and a half wide at Tabatinga, the last Brazilian port to the west, and gradually broadens on its way to the sea until it attains a width of 150 miles at its northern mouth alone, and discharges into the Atlantic a volume of water more than four times as great as the outpour of the Mississippi—a river that is navigable, that is now actually being navigated by _ocean liners_, for 2000 miles, clear across Brazil to Iquitos in the frontier of Peru. Yet, although as early as 1541 Francisco de Orellana, one of Pizarro’s little band of conquerors, who had crossed the Andes in quest of the fabulous country of _El Dorado_, and, after having traversed the whole course of the river through Brazil with a few companions in a canoe, had made his way back to Spain and told amazing stories of the wealth of the region he had discovered, and although a century later the astronomer La Condamine, and still later Baron von Humboldt, Castelnau, and others had successively published alluring accounts of their explorations in the same region, it was not until 1867 that the river was opened to free navigation.