7 August
On the River

The Amazon is constantly on our minds, as we sail across the last few hundred kilometres of the River Madeira. We will soon reach the junction where the two rivers meet. We are currently located south of Borba, and here the river is a couple of kilometres wide. From where we are on the river, the far bank is just a dark grey smudge of trees.

Amazonian statistics

The sheer scale and size of the Amazon can only be appreciated when it is reduced to a list of statistics. The Amazon is second in length only to the Nile, but narrowly so. However, it tips out into the Atlantic twenty five times as much water as the Nile does when in flood. Every second, over seven and a half million cubic feet of water is sent out into the ocean!

At its mouth the Amazon is 200 miles wide, which is the entire length of the Thames River. A thick shelf of silt stretches out from the mouth of the river into the ocean, silt from among other places, the Andean highlands of Peru.

The catchment area of the Amazon, and its eleven thousand tributaries is just about the same area as the USA. We are in what some say is the longest tributary, the Madeira, which is fed by the Rivers Mamore and the Gnapore in Bolivia. This title is often disputed, as some credit the Urubamba-Cuayali River in Peru to be the longest tributary.

The first European to discover the Amazon, the Spaniard Vincente Yanez Pinzon, was sailing in 1499, over a hundred miles off the coast of what he thought was India. He noticed the sea was the colour of mushroom soup and full of floating logs. His men dropped a barrel in the sea and discovered that it was fresh water. He had stumbled upon one of the greatest phenomena in the natural world, the vast Amazon Estuary.