June 2, 1859--At length, on the 2nd of June, I left Para, probably forever; embarking in a North American trading-vessel, the Frederick Demming, for New York, the United States route being the quickest as well as the pleasantest way of reaching England.My extensive private collections were divided into three portions and sent by three separate ships, to lessen the risk of loss of the whole.On the evening of the 3rd of June, I took a last view of the glorious forest for which I had so much love, and to explore which I had devoted so many years.The saddest hours I ever recollect to have spent were those of the succeeding night when, the Mameluco pilot having left us free of the shoals and out of sight of land though within the mouth of the river at anchor waiting for the wind, I felt that the last link which connected me with the land of so many pleasing recollections was broken.The Paraenses, who are fully aware of the attractiveness of their country, have an alliterative proverb, "Quem vai para (o) Para para," "He who goes to Para stops there," and I had often thought I should myself have been added to the list of examples.The desire, however, of seeing again my parents and enjoying once more the rich pleasures of intellectual society, had succeeded in overcoming the attractions of a region which may be fittingly called a Naturalist's Paradise.During this last night on the Para river, a crowd of unusual thoughts occupied my mind.Recollections of English climate, scenery, and modes of life came to me with a vividness I had never before experienced, during the eleven years of my absence.Pictures of startling clearness rose up of the gloomy winters, the long grey twilights, murky atmosphere, elongated shadows, chilly springs, and sloppy summers; of factory chimneys and crowds of grimy operatives, rung to work in early morning by factory bells; of union workhouses, confined rooms, artificial cares, and slavish conventionalities.
To live again amidst these dull scenes, I was quitting a country of perpetual summer, where my life had been spent like that of three-fourths of the people-- in gipsy fashion-- on the endless streams or in the boundless forests.I was leaving the equator, where the well-balanced forces of Nature maintained a land-surface and climate that seemed to be typical of mundane order and beauty, to sail towards the North Pole, where lay my home under crepuscular skies somewhere about fifty-two degrees of latitude.It was natural to feel a little dismayed at the prospect of so great a change; but now, after three years of renewed experience of England, I find how incomparably superior is civilised life, where feelings, tastes, and intellect find abundant nourishment, to the spiritual sterility of half-savage existence, even though it be passed in the garden of Eden.What has struck me powerfully is the immeasurably greater diversity and interest of human character and social conditions in a single civilised nation, than in equatorial South America, where three distinct races of man live together.The superiority of the bleak north to tropical regions, however, is only in their social aspect, for I hold to the opinion that, although humanity can reach an advanced state of culture only by battling with the inclemencies of nature in high latitudes, it is under the equator alone that the perfect race of the future will attain to complete fruition of man's beautiful heritage, the earth.
The following day, having no wind, we drifted out of the mouth of the Para with the current of fresh water that is poured from the mouth of the river, and in twenty-four hours advanced in this way seventy miles on our road.On the 6th of June, when in 7' 55' N.
lat.and 52' 30' W.long., and therefore about 400 miles from the mouth of the main Amazons, we passed numerous patches of floating grass mingled with tree-trunks and withered foliage.Among these masses I espied many fruits of that peculiarly Amazonian tree the Ubussu palm; this was the last I saw of the Great River.
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