IF YOU’VE ever looked at the url line while buying a book on , you may have noticed that the word “obidos” appears in it. It functions as an identifier in the website’s sales system, but there’s more to the name than that: Óbidos is also a town on the real-world Amazon. It can hardly be coincidence, so the folks at must be indulging in a clever play on words.
What’s so special about this town? Situated between Manaus at the heart of the Amazon rainforest and the seaport city of Belém, Óbidos is small and sleepy today, but in the late 18th and early 19th centuries it was a big, bustling place with consulates from 16 nations, a busy port and packed warehouses. The source of its wealth was not rubber – that came later – but the Amazonian manatee, Trichechus inunguis (pictured above).
Large, slow, almost cylindrical and rich in fat and flesh, these 2-metre-long aquatic mammals were abundant at the time, though they are now endangered. Hunters would catch them by sticking wooden pegs in their nostrils as they came up for air. They yielded fine oil for export and coarser grades for local lighting. Manatee leather was cut into long strips that were used as drive belts in European factories.
Advertisement
“Hunters would catch manatees by sticking pegs in their nostrils”
Why would commemorate the site of manatee massacres? The people at Amazon won’t comment, but their use of the word probably relates not to Óbidos’s biology or economics but to its geology. The Amazon once flowed east-west, reaching the sea near what is now Ecuador’s principal port, Guayaquíl. Referred to in its westerly flowing incarnation as the Nozama (get it?), it turned into a vast lake when the rising Andes mountain range dammed it some 40 million years ago. Eventually the lake burst and the Amazon began flowing west-east back along the path of the Nozama, gouging a deep trench in alluvial sediments where Óbidos now stands.
The trench remains the deepest (at 60 metres) and narrowest (about 1.6 kilometres) part of the Amazon, which made this the ideal site for the Portuguese to build a city to protect their interests against Dutch explorers. Did adopt the name for their sales system with this history in mind? Again, they won’t say, but it seems appropriate anyway.
Go back to ‘s url line and you may see another word of Amazonian significance: várzea. This refers to flooded forests on white-water rivers. Its relevance to ? In flooded forests, currents move slowly but the system is highly productive – which is equally appropriate, since uses it on the part of its website where prospective sellers stash the books they are trying to sell.
