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heat wave that for the next three months raised temperatures ten degrees higher than normal. It was an exceptionally dry season, and the Tapajós’s banks were drawn low, exposing a two-meter strip of sand, rock, and cracked clay. As predicted, it would be at least two months, probably longer, before the ships would be able to make the final hundred miles to Boa Vista. 12

    Ford executives on the deck of the Lake Ormoc. Left to right: William Cowling; Edsel Ford; Einar Oxholm; Henry Ford; Pete Martin, in charge of production at Highland Park; Charles Sorensen; and Albert Wibel, head of company purchasing .
    For months local newspapers had talked about what would happen “when Ford comes.” Now, a year after the concession’s ratification, the moment had finally arrived. Santarém was founded as a fort in the early seventeenth century, when Portuguese slavers pushed up the Amazon River, obliterating the peaceful Tapajó Indians. Home to a few thousand people in the late 1920s, the city is located where the impressive Tapajós River comes to an end, giving way to the even more imposing Amazon. The juncture of the two rivers sits where the rocky bluffs of Brazil’s southern alluvial shield butt up against the lower and flatter alluvial plain, creating a sheer drop just off Santarém’s shore that allows large vessels like the Ormoc and Farge to pull up close. But despite a natural advantage that made the inland town a deepwater port, residents were used to big ships ignoring them, stopping only for a moment, or not at all, on their way to Manaus or Iquitos. Decades later, Elizabeth Bishop, poet laureate of the United States, visited Santarém and wrote an eponymously titled poem that captured the town’s languid, time-stopping qualities:
That golden evening I really wanted to go no farther;
    more than anything else I wanted to stay awhile
    in that conflux of two great rivers, Tapajós, Amazon,
    grandly, silently flowing, flowing east.
    Suddenly there’d been houses, people, and lots of mongrel
    riverboats skittering back and forth
    under a sky of gorgeous, under-lit clouds,
    with everything gilded, burnished along one side,
    and everything bright, cheerful, casual—or so it looked.
    I liked the place; I liked the idea of the place.
    Two rivers. Hadn’t two rivers sprung
    from the Garden of Eden? No, that was four
    and they’d diverged. Here only two
    and coming together. . . .

    A long river beach—which Bishop described in a letter to a friend as made of “deep orange sand”—and wharf served as the heart of the city, whose irregular cobblestoned streets, then lined with a mix of close-cropped blue and red stucco and tile houses and thatched straw huts, rise gently from the beach, like aisles away from a stage in an amphitheater. The town had one car, an old rusted Ford truck, and had recently built a small electric plant, which powered a few straggling streetlamps. Facing the river stood the bleached blue and white Nossa Senhora da Conceição, Our Lady of the Conception, the town’s turreted cathedral built in the eighteenth century. 13

    The scene rarely changed. Women beat dirty laundry on the beach rocks. Freighters, steamships, fishing boats, and the occasional timber raft vied for dockside space. Small boats filled with birds, monkeys, fruits, and “turtles of mammoth dimension” paddled to intercept ocean liners heading to Manaus. Dockmen hoisted steers onto cattle boats with a harness and a pulley rope. “Two rivers full of crazy shipping—people / all apparently changing their minds, embarking, / disembarking, rowing clumsy dories,” Bishop’s poem continues. There was also the strange confluence of the blue green water of the Tapajós and the muddy brown of the Amazon, each keeping its own color, flowing like two bands for miles without blending. Occasionally, a boat would discharge a fortune seeker or naturalist: Henry Wickham lived just outside the city before gathering the seeds that would