CRUISING THE RIVER SEA.

• Author: McIntyre, Loren

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...