they occupied, where they stood not so far away, all the space between
the earth and sky, bulged over the forest at the end of every view. The
heat was luscious; but then I had nothing to do but to look on from a
hammock under the awning. The foliage which was pressed out over the
water, not many yards from the hurrying 'Capella,' had a closeness of
texture astonishing, and even awful, to one who knew only the thin woods
of the north. It ascended directly from the water's edge, sometimes out
of the water, and we did not often see its foundation. There were no
shady aisles and glades. The sight was stopped on a front of polished
emerald, a congestion of stiff leaves. The air was still. Individual
sprays and fronds, projecting from the mass in parabolas with flamboyant
abandon and poise, were as rigid as metallic and enamelled shapes. The
diversity of forms, and especially the number and variety of the palms,
so overloaded an unseen standing that the parapets of the woods
occasionally leaned outwards to form an arcade above our masts. One
should not call this the jungle; it was even a soft and benignant Eden.
This was the forest I really wished to find. Often the heavy parapets of
the woods were upheld on long colonnades of grey palm boles; or the
whole upper structure appeared based on low green arches, the pennate
fronds of smaller palms flung direct from the earth.
"There was not a sound but the noise of our intruding steamer.
Occasionally we brushed a projecting spray, or a vine pendent from a
cornice. We proved the forest then. In some shallow places were
regiments of aquatic grasses, bearing long plumes. There were trees
which stood in the water on a tangle of straight pallid roots, as though
on stilts. This up-burst of intense life so seldom showed the land to
which it was fast, and the side rivers and paranas were so many, that I
could believe the forest afloat, an archipelago of opaque green vapours.
Our heavy wash swayed and undulated the aquatic plants and grasses, as
though disturbing the fringe of those green clouds which clung to the
water because of their weight in a still air.
"There was seldom a sign of life but the infrequent snowy herons, and
those curious brown fowl, the ciganas. The sun was flaming on the
majestic assembly of the storm. The warm air, broken by our steamer,
coiled over us in a lazy flux. I did not hear the bell calling to meals.
We all hung over the 'Capella's' side, gaping, like a lot of boys.
"Sometimes we passed single habitations on the water side. Ephemeral
huts of palm-leaves were forced down by the forest, which overhung them,
to wade on frail stilts. A canoe would be tied to a toy jetty, and on
the jetty a sad woman and several naked children would stand, with no
show of emotion, to watch us go by. Behind them was the impenetrable
foliage. I thought of the precarious tenure on earth of these brown folk
with some sadness, especially as the day was going. The easy dominance
of the wilderness, and man's intelligent morsel of life resisting it,
was made plain when we came suddenly upon one of his little shacks
secreted among the aqueous roots of a great tree, cowering, as it were,
between two of the giant's toes. Those brown babies on the jetties never
cheered us. They watched us, serious and forlorn. Alongside their
primitive hut were a few rubber trees, which we knew by their scars.
Late in the afternoon we came to a large cavern in the base of the
forest, a shadowy place where at last we did see a gathering of the
folk. A number of little wooden crosses peeped above the floor in the
hollow. The sundering floods and the forest do not always keep these
folk from congregation, and the comfort of the last communion.
"There was a question at night as to whether our pilots would anchor or
not. They decided to go on. We did not go the route of Bates, _via_
Breves, but took the Parana de Buyassa on our way to the Amazon. It was
night when we got to the Parana, and but for the trailing lights, the
fairy mooring lines of habitations in the woods, and what the silent
explosions of lightning revealed of great heads of trees, startlingly
close and monstrous, as though watching us in silent and intent regard,
we saw nothing of it."
* * * * *
Once I knew a small boy, and on a summer day too much in the past now to
be recalled without some private emotion, he said to his father, on the
beach of a popular East Anglian resort, "And where is the sea?" He stood
then, for the first time, where the sea, by all the promises of pictures
and poems, should have been breaking on its cold grey crags. "The sea?"
said the father, in astonishment, "why, there it is. Didn't you know?"
And that father, being an exact man, there beyond appeal the sea was.
And what was it? A discoloured wash, of mean limit, which flopped
wearily on some shabby sands littered with people and luncheon papers.
Such a flat, stupid, and leaden disillusion surely never before fell on
the upturned, bright and expectant soul of a young human, who, I can
vouch, began life, like most others, believing the noblest of
everything. It was an ocean which was inferior even to the
bathing-machines, and could be seen but in division when that child,
walking along the rank of those boxes on wheels, peeped between them.
You will have noticed with what simple indifference the people who
really know what they call the truth will shatter an illusion we have
long cherished; though, as we alone see our private dreams, those honest
folk cannot be blamed for poking their feet through fine pictures they
did not know were there.
I had a picture of the Amazon, which I had long cherished. I was leaning
to-day over the bulwarks of the "Capella," watching the jungle pass. The
Doctor was with me. I thought we were still on the Para River, and was
waiting for our vessel to emerge from that stream, as through a narrow
gate, dramatically, into the broad sunlight of the greatest river in the
world, the king of rivers, the Amazon of my picture. We idly scanned the
forest with binoculars, having nothing to do, and saw some herons, and
the ciganas, and once a sloth which was hanging to a tree. Para, I felt,
was as distant as London. The silence, the immobility of it all, and the
pour of the tropic sun, were just beginning to be a little subduing. We
had come already to the wilderness. There was, I thought, a very great
deal of this forest; and it never varied.
"We shall be on the Amazon soon," I said hopefully, to the doctor.
"We have been on it for hours," he replied. And that is how I got there.
But the Amazon is not seen, any more than is the sea, at the first
glance. What the eye first gathers, is, naturally (for it is but an
eye), nothing like commensurate with your own image of the river. The
mind, by suggestive symbols, builds something portentous, a vague and
tremendous idea. What I saw was only a very swift and opaque yellow
flood, not much broader, it seemed to me, than the Thames at Gravesend,
and the monotonous green of the forest. It was all I saw for a
considerable time.
I see something different now. It is not easily explained merely as a
yellow river, with a verdant elevation on either hand, and over it a
blue sky. It would be difficult to find, except by luck, a word which
would convey the immensity of the land of the Amazons, something of the
aloofness and separation of the points of its extremes, with months and
months of adventure between them. What a journey it would be from Ino in
Bolivia, on the Rio Madre de Dios, to Conception in Colombia, on the Rio
Putumayo; there is another "Odyssey" in a voyage like that. And think of
the names of those places and rivers! When I take the map of South
America now, and hold it with the estuary of the Amazon as its base, my
thoughts are like those might be of a lost ant, crawling in and over the
furrows and ridges of an exposed root as he regards all he may of the
trunk rising into the whole upper cosmos of a spreading oak. The Amazon
then looks to me, properly symbolical, as a monstrous tree, and its
tributaries, paranas, furos, and igarapes, as the great boughs, little
boughs, and twigs of its ascending and spreading ramifications, so
minutely dissecting the continent with its numberless watercourses that
the mind sees that dark region as an impenetrable density of green and
secret leaves; which, literally, when you go there, is what you will
find. You enter the leaves, and vanish. You creep about the region of
but one of its branches, under a roof of foliage which stays the midday
shine and lets it through to you in the dusk of the interior but as
points of distant starlight. Occasionally, as we did upon a day, you see
something like Santarem. There is a break and a change in the journey.
Moving blindly through the maze of green, there, hanging in the clear
day at the end of a bough, is a golden fruit.
* * * * *
"_Jan. 10._ The torrid morning, tempered by a cooling breeze which
followed us up river, was soon overcast. Disappointingly narrow at
first, the Amazon broadened later, but not to one's conception of its
magnitude. But the greatness of this stream, I have already learned,
dawns upon you in time, and if you sufficiently endure. It persists
about you, this forest and this river, like the stark desolation of the
sea. The real width of the river is not often seen because of the
islands which fringe its banks, many of them of considerable size. The
side channels, or paranas-miris, between the islands and the shores, are
used in preference to the main stream by the native sailing craft, to
avoid the strength of the current. We had the river to ourselves. The
'Capella' was taken by the pilots, first over to one side and then to
the other, dodging the set of the stream. The forest has changed. It has
now a graceless and savage aspect when we are close to it. There are not
so many palms. At a little distance the growth appears a mass of spindly
oaks and beeches, though with a more vivid and lighter green foliage.
But when near it shows itself alien enough, a front of nameless and
congested leaves. I suppose it would be more than a hundred feet in
altitude. Sometimes the forest stands in the water. At other times a
yellow bank shows, a narrow strip under the trees, rarely more than four
feet high, and strewn with the bleaching skeletons of trees and
entanglements of vine. There is rarely a sign of life. Once this morning
a bird called in the woods when we were close. Butterflies are
continually crossing the ship, and dragonflies and great wasps and
hornets are hawking over us. The sight of one swallowtail butterfly, a
big black and yellow fellow, sent the cook insane. The insect stayed its
noble flight, poised over our hatch, and then came down to see what we
were. It settled on a coil of rope, leisurely pulsing its wings. The
cook, at the sight of this bold and bright being, sprang from the
galley, and leaped down to the deck with a dish cloth. To our surprise
he caught the insect, and explained with eagerness how that the
shattered pattern of colours, which more than covered his gross palm,
would improve his firescreen in a Rotterdam parlour.
"Early in the forenoon sections of the forest vanished in grey rain
squalls, though elsewhere the sun was brilliant. The plane of the dingy
yellow flood was variegated with transient areas of bright sulphur and
chocolate. We were hugging the right bank, and so saw the mouth of the
Xingu as we passed. At midday some hills ahead, the Serra de Almerim,
gave us relief from the dead level of the wearying green walls. The
sight of those blue heights with their flat tops--they were perhaps no
more than 1000 feet above the forest--curiously stimulated the eye and
lifted one's humour, long depressed by the everlasting sameness of the
prospect and the heat. Later in the day we passed more of the welcome
hills, the Serra de Maranuaqua, Velha Pobre, and Serras de Tapaiunaquara
and Paranaquara, their cones, truncated pyramids, knolls and hog backs,
ranging contrary to our course. Bates says some of them are bare, or
covered only with a short herbage; but all those I examined with a good
telescope had forest to the summits; though a few of the inferior
heights, which stood behind the island of Jurupari (the island where
dreams come at night) were grassy. Those cobalt prominences rose like
precipitous islands from a green sea. We were the only spectators. One
high range, as we passed, was veiled in a glittering mesh of rain. The
river, after we left Jurupari, bent round, and brought the heights
astern of us. The sun set.
"The river and the forest are best at sundown. The serene level rays
discovered the woods. We saw trees then distinctly, almost as a
surprise. Till then the forest had been but a gloom by day. Behind us
was the jungle front. It changed from green to gold, a band of light
between the river and the darkling sky. Some greater trees emerged
majestically. It was the first time that day we had really seen the
features of the jungle. It was but a momentary revelation. The clouds
were reflectors, throwing amber lights below. In the hills astern of us
ravines hitherto unsuspected caught the transitory glory. The dark
heights had many polished facets. One range, round-shouldered and
wooded, I thought resembled the promontories about Clovelly, and for a
few minutes the Amazon had the bright eyes of a friend. On a ridge of
those heights I could see the sky through some of its trees. The light
quickly gave out, and it was night.
"We continued cruising along the south shore. The usual pulsations of
lightning made night intermittent; the forest was not more than 150 feet
from our vessel, and sitting under the awning the trees kept jumping out
of the night, startlingly near. The night was still and hot, and my
cabin lamp had attracted myriads of insects through the door which had
been left open for air. A heap of crawlers lay dead on the desk, and the
bunk curtain was smothered with grotesque winged shapes, flies, cicadas,
mantis, phasmas, moths, beetles, and mosquitoes."
* * * * *
Next morning found us running along the north shore. Parrots were
squawking in the woods alongside. A large alligator floated close by the
ship, its jaws open in menace. At breakfast time a strip of white beach
came into view on the opposite coast, a place in that world of three
colours on which one's tired eyes could alight and rest. That was
Santarem. Sharp hills rose immediately behind the town. The town is in a
saddle of the hills, slipping down to the river in terraces of white,
chrome, and blue houses. The Rio Tapajos, a black water tributary and a
noble river, enters the main stream by Santarem, its dark flood sharply
contrasted with the tawny Amazon. But the Amazon sweeps right across its
mouth in a masterful way. There is a definite line dividing black from
yellow water, and then no more Tapajos.
We passed numerous floating islands (Ilhas de Caapim) and trees adrift,
evidence, the pilots said, that the river was rising. These grass
islands are a feature of the Amazon. They look like lush pastures
adrift. Some of them are so large it is difficult to believe they are
really afloat till they come alongside. Then, if the river is at all
broken by a breeze, the meadow plainly undulates. This floating cane and
grass grows in the sheltered bays and quiet paranas-miris, for though
the latter are navigable side-channels of the river in the rainy season,
in the dry they are merely isolated swamps. But when the river is in
flood the earth is washed away from the roots of this marsh growth, and
it moves off, a flourishing, mobile field, often twenty feet in
thickness. Such islands, when large, can be dangerous to small craft.
Small flowers blossom on these aquatic fields, which shelter snakes and
turtles, and sometimes the peixe-boi, the manatee.
Obydos was in sight in the afternoon, but presently we lost it in a
violent squall of rain. The squall came down like a gun burst, and
nearly carried away the awnings. It was evening before we were abreast
of that most picturesque town I saw on the river. Obydos rests on one of
the rare Amazon cliffs of rufus clay and sandstone. The forest mounts
the hill above it, and the scattered red roofs of the town show in a
surf of foliage. The cliffs glowed in cream and cherry tints, with a
cascade of vines falling over them, though not reaching the shore. The
dainty little houses sit high in a loop of the cliffs. We left the city
behind, with a huge cumulus cloud resting over it, and the evening light
on all.
But Obydos and sunsets and rain squalls, and the fireflies which flit
about the dark ship at night in myriads, tiny blue and yellow glow-lamps
which burn with puzzling inconstancy, as though being switched on and
off, though they help me with this narrative, yet candour compels me to
tell you that they take up more space in this book than they do in the
land of the Amazon. They were incidental and small to us, dominated by
the shadowing presence of the forest.
We have been on the river nearly a week. But our steamer's decks, even
by day, are deserted now. We lean overside no longer looking at this
strange country. The heat is the most noteworthy fact, and drives every
one to what little leeward to the glare there is. Our cook, who is a
salamander of a fellow, and has no need to fear the possibilities of his
future life--though I do not remember he ever told me he was really
thoughtful for them--feeling a little uncomfortable one day when at work
on our dinner, glanced at his thermometer, and fled in terror. It
registered 134 deg.. He begged me to go in and verify it, and once inside I
was hardly any time doing that. We have such days, without a breath of
air, and two vivid walls of still jungle, and between them a yellow
river serpentining under the torrid sun, and a silence which is like
deafness.
Under the shadow of the awning aft, in his deck chair, the Doctor is
preparing our defences by sounding a profound volume on tropical
diseases. This gives us but little confidence; though, as to our
surgeon, recently I overheard one fireman to another, "I tell yer
the--doc's a Man. That's what he is." (This is the result of the gin
with the quinine.) Yet, good man as he is, his book on the consequences
of the tropics is so large that we fear we all cannot escape so many
impediments to joy. But our health's guardian is careful we do not
anticipate anything from peeps into the mysteries. He never leaves his
big book about, much as some of us would like to see the pictures in it,
after what the donkeyman told us.
This is how it was. Donkey, in spite of instructions, and I know how
emphatic the Skipper usually is, slept on deck away from his mosquito
bar a few nights ago. He said at the time that he wasn't afraid of them
little fanciful biters, or something of the kind. I have no doubt the
Doctor would have had some trouble in making clear to Donkey's
understanding exactly what are the links, delicate but sure, between
mosquitoes and dissolution and decay in man. So he showed Donkey a
picture. I wish I knew what it was--but the surgeon preserves the usual
professional reticence in the affairs of his patients. For now Donkey is
convinced it is very bad to sleep outside his curtain, and when he tries
to tell us how unwholesome such sleeping can be, just at the point when
he gets most entertaining his vocabulary wears into holes and tatters.
You could not conjure that man from his curtain now, no, not if you
showed him, in a vision, Cardiff, and the fairy lights of all its dock
hotels. I know that in the Doctor's book there is a picture of a negro
who acquired, in a superb way, a wonderful form of elephantiasis, for
the Doctor showed it to me once, as a treat, when he thought I was
growing slack and bored.
We require now such childish laughter at each other's discomfiture to
break the spell of this land into which we are sinking deeper. Still the
forest glides by. It is a shadow on the mind. It stands over us, an
insistent riddle, every morning when I look out from my bunk. I watch it
all day, drawn against my will; and as day is dying it is still there,
paramount, enigmatic, silent, its question implied in its mere
persistence--meeting me again on the next day, still with its mute
interrogation.
We have been passing it for nearly a week. It should have convinced me
by now that it is something material. But why should I suppose it is
that? We have had no chance to examine it. It does not look real. It
does not remind me of anything I know of vegetation. When you sight your
first mountains, a delicate and phantom gleam athwart the stars, are you
reminded of the substance of the hills? I have been watching it for so
long, this abiding and soundless forest, that now I think it is like the
sky, intangible, an apparition; what the eye sees of the infinite, just
as the eye sees a blue colour overhead at midday, and the glow of the
Milky Way at night. For the mind sees this forest better than the eye.
The mind is not deceived by what merely shows. Wherever the steamer
drives the forest recedes, as does the sky at sea; but it never leaves
us.
The jungle gains nothing, and loses nothing, at noon. It is only a
sombre thought still, as at midnight. It is still, at noon, so obscure
and dumb a presence that I suspect the sun does not illuminate it so
much as reveal our steamer in its midst. We are revealed instead. The
presence sees us advancing into its solitudes, a small, busy, and
impudent intruder. But the forest does not greet, and does not resent
us. It regards us with the vacancy of large composure, with a lofty
watchfulness which has no need to show its mind. I think it knows our
fears of its domain. It knows the secret of our fate. It makes no sign.
The pallid boles of the trees, the sentinels by the water with the press
of verdure behind them, stand, as we pass, like soundless exclamations.
So when we go close in shore I find myself listening for a chance
whisper, a careless betrayal of the secret. There is not a murmur in the
host; though once a white bird flew yauping from a tree, and then it
seemed the desolation had been surprised into a cry, a prolonged and
melancholy admonition. Following that the silence was deepened, as
though an indiscretion were regretted. A sustained and angry protest at
our presence would have been natural; but not that infinite line of
lofty trees, darkly superior, silently watching us pass.
* * * * *
One night we anchored off the south shore in twenty fathoms, but close
under the trees. At daybreak we stood over to the opposite bank. The
river here was of great width, the north coast being low and indistinct.
These tacks across stream look so purposeless, in a place where there
are no men and all the water looks the same. You go over for nothing.
But this morning, high above the land ahead, some specks were seen
drifting like fragments of burnt paper, the sport of an idle and distant
wind. Those drifting dots were urubus, the vultures, generally the first
sign that a settlement is near. To come upon a settlement upon the
Amazons is like landfall at sea. It brings all on deck. And there, at
last, was Itacoatiara or Serpa. From one of the infrequent, low,
ferruginous cliffs of this river the jungle had been cleared, and on
that short range of modest, undulating heights which displaced the green
palisades with soft glowings of rose, cherry, and orange rock, the sight
escaped to a disorder of arboured houses, like a disarray of little
white cubes; Serpa was, in appearance, half a basketful of white bricks
shot into a portico of the forest.
That morning was no inducement to exertion, but when an Indian paddled
his canoe alongside our anchored steamer the Doctor and the Purser got
into it, and away. The hot earth would be a change from hot iron.
Besides, I was eager for my first walk in equatorial woods. Our steamer
was anchored below the town, off a small campo, or clearing. The native
swashed his canoe into a margin of floating plants, which had rounded
leaves and inflated stalks, like buoys. I looked at them, and indeed at
the least thing, as keenly as though we were now going to land in the
moon. Nothing should escape me; the colour of the mud, the water tepid
to my hand, the bronze canoeman in his pair of old cotton pants split
just where they should have been scrupulous, and the weeds and grass. I
would drain my tropics to the last precious drop. I myself was seeing
what I had thought others lucky to have seen. It was like being born
into the world as an understanding adult. We got to a steep bank of red
clay, fissured by the heat, and as hard as brickwork. Green and brown
lizards whisked before us as we broke the quiet. From the top of the
bank the anchored steamer looked a little stranger. Aboard her, and she
is a busy village. Now she appeared but a mark I did not recognise in
that reticent solitude. The Amazon was an immensity of water, a plain of
burnished silver, where headlands, islands, and lines of cliff were all
cut in one level mass of emerald veined with white. The canoe going
downstream appeared to dissolve in candent vapour. Cloudland low down
over the forest to the south, a far disorder of violet heights, waiting
to fill the sky at sunset and to shock our unimportance then with
convulsions of blue flames, did not seem more aloof and inaccessible to
me than our immediate surroundings.
The clearing was a small bay in the jungle. A few statuesque silk-cotton
trees, buttressed giants, were isolated in its centre. A bunch of
dun-coloured cattle with twisted horns stood beneath them, though the
trees gave them no shade, for each grey trunk was as bare of branches
for sixty feet of its length as a stone column. The wall of the jungle
was quite near, and as I stood watching it intently, I could hear but
the throb of my own life. The faint sibilation of insects was only as
if, in the silence, you heard the sharp rays of the sun impinge on the
earth; your finer ear caught that sound when you forgot the ring and
beat of your body. It was something below mere silence.
We approached the wall to the west, as a path went through the harsh
swamp herbage that way, and entered the jungle. The sun went out almost
at once. It was cellar cool under the trees. We had no idea where the
path would lead us. That did not matter. No doubt it would be the place
desired. The Doctor walked ahead, and I could just see his helmet, the
way was so narrow and uncertain. I kept missing the helmet, for
everything in the half-lighted solitude was strange. One could not keep
an eye on a white hat on one's first equatorial ramble, and only when
the quiet was heavy enough to be a burden did I look up from a puzzling
leaf, or some busy ants, to find myself alone. There was a feeling that
you were being watched; but there were no eyes, when you glanced round
quickly. Do you remember that dream which sometimes came when we were
children? There were, I remember, empty corridors prolonging into the
shadows of a nameless house where not a sign showed of what was there.
We went on, and no words we could think of when we woke could tell what
we felt when we looked into those long silent aisles of the house
without a name; for we knew something was there; but there was no
telling what the thing would be like when it showed. That is your
sensation in a first walk in a Brazilian forest.
I stopped at lianas, and curious foliage, trying to trace them to a
beginning, but rarely with any success. There were some mantis, which
commenced to run on a tree while I was examining its bark. They were
like flakes of the bark. For a moment the tree seemed to quiver its hide
at my irritating touch. Then the Doctor called, and I pushed along to
find him stooping over a land snail, the size of a man's fist, which
rather puzzled him, for it had what he called an operculum; that is, a
cap such as a winkle's, only in this case it was as large as a crown
piece. I do not know if it was the operculum, for my knowledge of such
things is small; but I did feel this was the only twelfth birthday which
had come to me for many years.
Presently we saw light, as you would from the interior of a tunnel. Some
beams of sunshine slanted from a break in the roof to where a tree had
fallen, making a bridge for us across an igaripe, a stream, that is,
large enough to be a way for a canoe. The sundered, buttressed roots of
the tree formed a steep climb to begin with, but the buttresses going
straight along the trunk as handrails made crossing the bridge an easy
matter. Raising my hand to a root which was hot in the sun, and watching
a helicon butterfly, a black and yellow fellow, which settled near us,
slowly open and shut his wings, I jumped, because it felt as though a
lighted match had dropped into my sleeve. But I couldn't douse it. It
burned in ten places at once. It was a first lesson in constant
watchfulness in this new world. I had placed my hand in a swarm of
inconspicuous fire ants. The dead tree was alive with them, and our
passage quickened. We rubbed ourselves hysterically, for the Doctor had
got some too; and there was no professional reserve about him that time.
After crossing the igaripe the character of the forest changed. It was
now a growth of wild cacao trees. Nothing grew beneath them. The floor
was a black paste, littered with dead sticks. The woods were more open,
but darker and more dank than before. The sooty limbs of the cacao trees
grew low, and filled the view ahead with a perplexity of leafless and
tortured boughs. They were hung about with fruit, pendent lamps lit with
a pale greenish light. We saw nothing move there but two delicate
butterflies, which had transparent wings with opaque crimson spots, such
as might have been served Titania herself; yet the gloom and black ooze,
and the eerie globes, with their illusion of light hung upon distorted
shapes, was more the home of the fabulous sucuruja, the serpent which is
forty feet long.
A dry stick snapping underfoot had the same effect as that crash which
resounds for some embarrassing seconds when your umbrella drops in a
gallery of the British Museum. The impulse was to apologise to
something. We had been so long in the twilight, recoiling at nameless
objects in the path, a monstrous legume perhaps a yard long and coiled
like a reptile, seeing things only with a second look, that the sudden
entrance into a malocal, a forest clearing, which, as though it were a
reservoir, the sun had filled with bright light, was like a plunge into
a warm, fluid, and lustrous element.
In the clearing were the huts of an Indian village. Only the roofs could
be seen, through some plantations of bananas. Around the clearing, a
side of which was cut off by a stream, was the overshadowing green
presence. Some chocolate babies, as serious as gnomes, looked up as we
came into daylight, opened their eyes wide, and fled up the path between
the plantains.
If I could sing, I would sing the banana. It has the loveliest leaf I
know. I feel intemperate about it, because I came upon it after our
passage through a wood which could have been underground, a tangle of
bare roots joining floor and ceiling in limitless caverns. We stood
looking at the plantation till our mind was fed with grace and light.
The plantain jets upwards with a copious stem, and the fountain returns
in broad rippled pennants, falling outwardly, refined to points, when
the impulse is lost. A world could not be old on which such a plant
grows. It is sure evidence of earth's vitality. To look at it you would
not think that growing is a long process, a matter of months and natural
difficulties. The plantain is an instant and joyous answer to the sun.
The midribs of the leaves, powerful but resilient, held aloft in
generous arches the broad planes of translucent green substance. It is
not a fragile and dainty thing, except in colour and form. It is lush
and solid, though its ascent is so aerial, and its form is content to
the eye. There is no green like that of its leaves, except at sea. The
stout midribs are sometimes rosy, but the banners they hold well above
your upturned face are as the crest of a wave in the moment of collapse,
the day showing through its fluid glass. And after the place of dead
matter and mummied husks in gloom, where we had been wandering, this
burst of leaves in full light was a return to life.
We continued along the path, in the way of the vanished children. Among
the bananas were some rubber trees, their pale trunks scored with brown
wounds, and under some of the incisions small tin cups adhered, fastened
there with clay. In most of the cups the collected latex was congealed,
for the cups were half full of rain-water, which was alive with mosquito
larvae. The path led to the top of the river bank. The stream was narrow,
but full and deep. A number of women and children were bathing below,
and they looked up stolidly as we appeared. Some were negligent on the
grass, sunning themselves. Others were combing their long, straight hair
over their honey- and snuff-coloured bodies. The figures of the women
were full, lissom, and rounded, and they posed as if they were aware
that this place was theirs. They were as unconscious of their grace as
animals. They looked round and up at us, and one stayed her hand, her
comb half through the length of her hair, and all gazed intently at us
with faces having no expression but a little surprise; then they turned
again to proceed with their toilets and their gossip. They looked as
proper with their brown and satiny limbs and bodies, in the secluded and
sunny arbour where the water ran, framed in exuberant tropical foliage,
as a herd of deer.
I had never seen primitive man in his native place till then. There he
was, as at the beginning, and I saw with a new respect from what a
splendid creature we are derived. It was, I am glad to say, to cheer the
existence of these people that I had put money in a church plate at
Poplar. Poplar, you may have heard, is a parish in civilisation where an
organised community is able, through its heritage of the best of two
thousand years of religion, science, commerce, and politics, to eke out
to a finish the lives of its members (warped as they so often are by
arid dispensations of Providence) with the humane Poor Law. The Poor Law
is the civilised man's ironic rebuke to a parsimonious Creator. It is a
jest which will ruin the solemnity of the Judgment Day. Only the man of
long culture could think of such a shattering insult to the All Wise who
made this earth too small for the children He continues to send to it,
trailing their clouds of glory which prove a sad hindrance and get so
fouled in the fight for standing room on their arrival. But these
savages of the Brazilian forest know nothing of the immortal joke
conceived by their cleverer brothers. They have all they want.
Experience has not taught them to devise such a cosmic mock as a Poor
Law. How do these poor savages live then, who have not been vouchsafed
such light? They pluck bananas, I suppose, and eat them, swinging in
hammocks. They live a purely animal existence. More than that, I even
hear that should you find a child hungry in an Indian village, you may
be sure all the strong men there are hungry too. I was not able to prove
that; yet it may be true there are people to-day to whom the law that
the fittest must survive has not yet been helpfully revealed. (This is
really the Doctor's fault. I should never have thought of Poplar if he
had not wondered aloud how those bathers under the palms managed without
a workhouse.)
Behind us were the shelters of these settled Indians, the "cabaclos," as
they are called in Brazil (literally, copper coloured). Each house was
but a square roof of the fronds of a species of attalea palm, upheld at
each corner by poles seven feet high. The houses had no sides, but were
quite open, except that some had a quarter of the interior partitioned
off with a screen of leaves. There was a rough attempt at a garden about
each dwelling, with rose bushes and coleas in the midst of gourds and
patches of maize. The roses were scented, and of the single briar kind.
We entered one of the dwellings, and surprised a young woman within who
was swinging in a hammock smoking a native pipe of red clay through a
grass stem. One fine limb, free of her cotton gown to the thigh, hung
indolently over the hammock, the toes touching the earth and giving the
couch movement. Her black hair, all at first we could see of her head,
nearly reached the ground.
A well-grown girl, innocent from head to feet, saw us enter, and cried
to her mother, who rose in the hammock, threw her gown over her leg,
smiled gravely at us, and alighted, to vanish behind the screen with the
child, reappearing presently with the girl neatly attired. Other
children came, and soon had confidence to examine us closely and
critically, grave little mortals with eyes which spoke the only language
I understood there. The men and women who gathered stood behind the
children, smiling sadly and kindly. They were gentle, undemonstrative,
and observant, with features of the conventional Indian type. The men
were spare and lithe, of medium height, wearing only shorts tied with
string below their bronze busts. The women were of fuller build, with
heavier but more cheerful features, and each was dressed in a single
cotton garment, open above, revealing the breasts.
The noon shadows of the hut, and the trees, were deep as the stains of
ink. A tray of mandioca root, farinha, was set in the hot sun to dry.
Under a gourd tree was a heap of turtle shells. A little game, a
capybara, and a bird like a crow with a brown rump, were hung on the
screen. But the most remarkable feature of the house in the forest was
its pets. A pair of parraquets ran in and out the bushes like green
mice. My helmet was tipped over my eyes, and, looking upwards, there was
an audience of monkeys in the shadow, quite beside themselves with
curiosity. My sudden movement sent them off like fireworks. One was a
most engaging little fellow, a jet-black tamarin slightly larger than a
squirrel. Presently he found courage to come closer, with a companion, a
brown monkey of his own size. As they sat side by side the Doctor
pointed out that the expressions in the faces of these monkeys showed
temperaments separating them even more widely than they were separated
by those physical differences which made them species. I saw at once,
with some pleasure and a little vanity, that I might be more nearly
related to the friendly cabaclos than I am to some people in England.
The brown chap would be no doubt a master of industry on the tree tops,
keeping a whole tree to himself, and living on nuts which others
gathered. You could see it in his keen and domineering look, and in the
quick, casual way he crowded his fellow, who always made room for him. I
have seen such a face, and such manners, in great industrial centres.
They are the marks of the ablest and best, who get on. His hard, eager
eyes showed censoriousness, cruelty, and acquisitiveness. But his
companion, with a sooty and hairless face, and black hair parted in the
middle of a frail forehead, was a pal of ours, and knew it. The brown
midget showed angry distrust of us, knowing what devilry was in his own
mind. But the black, though more delicate and nervous a monkey, his mind
being innocent of secret plots, had gentleness and faith in his looks,
and showed a laughable and welcome curiosity in us. He made friendly
twitterings--not the harsh and menacing chatter of the other--and
perfectly self-possessed, his pure soul giving him quiethood, examined
us in a brotherly way with an ebon paw which was as small and fragile as
a black fairy's.
A jabiru stork stood on one leg, beak on breast, meditating, caring
nothing for all that was outside its ruminating mind. There were parrots
on the cross-ties of the roof, on the floor, on the shoulders of the
women, and in the hands of the children, and they were getting an
interesting time through the monkeys when their faces were not cocked
sideways at us in a knowing fashion. And what looked like a crow was
giving bitter and ruthless chase to a young agouti, in and out of the
bare feet of the company. I have never seen creatures so tame. But
Indian women, as I learned afterwards, have a fine gift for winning the
confidence of wild things, and that afternoon they took hold of the
creatures, anyhow and anywhere, to bring them for our inspection,
without the captives showing the least alarm or anger. There were the
dogs, too. But they were like all the dogs we saw in Brazil, looking
sorry for themselves; and they sat about in case they should fall if
they attempted to stand. Our audience broke up suddenly, in an uproar of
protests, to chase the brown monkey, who was towing a frantic parrot by
the tail.
We continued our walk, entering the forest again on another path. Here
the growth was secondary, and the underbush dense on both sides of the
trail. The voices of the village stopped as we entered the shades, and
there was no more sound except when a bird scurried away heavily, and
again, when some cicadas, the "scissors grinders," suddenly sprang an
astonishing whirring from a tree. The sound was as loud as that of a
locomotive letting steam escape in a covered station. At a clearing so
small that the roof of the jungle had been but little broken, where a
hut stood as though at a well-bottom sunk in a depth of trees, we turned
back. That deep well in the trees contained but little light, for
already it was being choked with vines. The hut was of the usual light
construction, though its sides were of leaves, as well as its roof. I
think it was the most melancholy dwelling I have ever happened on in my
wanderings. It did not look as though it had been long deserted. There
were ashes and a broken flesh-pot outside it. The entrance was veiled
with gross spiders' webs. On the earth floor within were puddles of
rain. Round it the forest stood, like night in abeyance. The tree tops
overhung, silently intent on what man had been doing at their feet. A
child's chemise was stretched on a thorn, and close by was a small
grave, separated by little sticks from the secular earth. A dead plant
was in the centre of the grave, and a crude wooden crucifix.
* * * * *
We had plenty of opportunities for exploring Serpa, for the Amazon that
rainy season was slow in rising, and consequently it would have been
unsafe for us to venture into the Madeira. The tributary would have been
full, but it was necessary for the waters of the main stream to dam and
heighten the flood of its tributary before we could trust our draught
there. We were nine days at Serpa. The Amazon would rise as much as a
foot one day, and our distance from the shore would increase
perceptibly, with strong whirling eddies which made the trip ashore more
difficult. Then it would fall again. Some of the yellow Amazon porpoises
showed alongside occasionally, and alligators floated about, though
nothing was seen of them but their snouts.
Serpa is a small but growing place. It was but a missionary settlement
of Abacaxis Indians from the Madeira in 1759, and was called
Itacoatiara. When I was there it was renewing its old importance,
because the Madeira-Mamore railway undertaking had placed a depot a
little to the west of the village. The Doctor and I spent many memorable
days in its neighbourhood, butterfly-hunting and sauntering. Though
mosquitoes, anopeline and culex, are as common here as elsewhere in the
Brazils--the lighters which came alongside with cargo for us conveyed
clouds of them, and they took possession of every dark nook of the
"Capella"--it is noteworthy that Serpa has the reputation, in Amazonas,
of a health resort. I could find no explanation of that. There was
malaria at Serpa, of course; but compared with the really lethal
country, a country not so different in appearance and climate, of the
upper Madeira, the salubrity of Serpa is perplexing. That virulent form
of malaria peculiar to some tropical localities is a phenomenon which
medical research has not yet explained. In the almost unexplored region
of the Rio Madeira the fever is certain to every traveller, though the
land is largely without inhabitants; and it is almost equally certain
that it will be of the malignant type. Yet at an old settlement like
Serpa, where probably every inhabitant has had malaria, and every
mosquito is likely to be a host, the fever is but mild, and the
traveller may escape it entirely.
By now you will be asking what Itacoatiara is like, that community
contentedly lost in the secret forest. I am afraid you will not learn,
unless, in the happy future, you and I select a few friends, a few
books, and erect some houses of palm leaves to protect us from the too
vigorous sun there, and so, secure from all the really urgent and
important matters which do not matter a twinkle to the eternal stars,
noon it far and secure until the time comes for the gentle villagers to
carry us out and forget us; remembering us again when the annual Day of
the Dead comes round. They will leave some comfortable candles above us
that night.
There the earth is a warm and luscious body. The lazy paths are cool
with groves, and in the middle hours of the sun, when only a few
butterflies are abroad, and the grasshoppers are shrilling in the quiet,
you swing in a hammock under a thatch--the air has been through some
tree in blossom--and gossip, and drink coffee. Beyond the path of the
village there is--nobody knows what; not even the Royal Geographical
Society. One heard of a large and mysterious lake a day's journey
inland. Nobody knew anything about it. Nobody cared. One old man once,
when hunting, saw its mirror through the forest's aisles, and heard the
multitude of its birds.
The foreshore of the village is rugged with boulders richly tinctured
with iron oxide, and often having a scoriaceous surface. There we would
land, and scramble up to a street which ends on the height above the
river. It is a broad road, with white, substantial, one-story houses on
either side. The dwellings and stores have no windows, but are built
with open fronts, for ventilation. This is Serpa's main street. It is
shaded with avenues of trees. In the narrower side turnings the trees
meet to form arcades. One day we saw such an avenue covered with yellow,
trumpet-shaped blossoms. Ox-carts with solid wheels stand in the walks.
The sunlight, broken in the leaves of the trees, patterned the roads
with white fire, and so dappled the cattle that they were obscure; you
saw the oxen only when they moved. There is a large square, grass-grown,
in the centre of the village, where stands the church, a white, simple
building with an open belfry in which the bell hangs plain, bright with
verdigris. About here the merchants and tradesmen of Serpa have their
places. The men, hearty and friendly souls, walk abroad in clean linen
suits and straw hats, and their ladies, pallid, slight, but often
singularly beautiful, are dressed as Europeans, but without hats;
sometimes, when out walking late in the day, a lady would have a scarlet
flower in her hair.
By the foreshore were the cabins, of mud and wood, of the negroes.
Beyond the town, the roads run through the clearings, and end on the
forest. In the clearings were the huts, wattle and daub, and of leaves,
of the settled Indians and half-breeds. These were often prettily placed
beneath groups of graceful palms. It was in the last direction that most
often we made our way with our butterfly nets while other folk were
sleeping during the sun's height. The humid heat, I suppose, was really
a trial. One did perspire in an alarming way and with the least
exertion. The Doctor, who carries substance, would have dark patches in
his khaki uniform, and would wonder, with foreboding, whether any more
in this life he would catch hold of a cold jug which held a straight
pint in which ice tinkled. But to me the illumination, the heat, the
odour, and the quiethood of those noons made life a great prize. I will
say that my comrade, the Doctor, did much to make it so, with his gentle
fun, and his wide knowledge of earth-lore. There was so much, wherever
we went, to keep me on the magic side of time, and out of its shadow. On
the west of the town were some huts, with plantations of bananas,
pineapples, papaws, and maize, where blossomed cannas, mimosas,
passion-flowers, and where other unseen blooms, especially after rain,
made breathing a sensuous pleasure. There we tried to intercept the
swallow-like flight of big sulphur and orange butterflies, though never
with success. We had more success with the butterflies in the clearings,
where some new huts stood, beyond the village. Over the stagnant pools
in those open spaces dragonflies hovered, fellows that moved, when we
approached, like lines of red light. The butterflies, particularly a
vermilion beauty with black bars on his wings, and a swift flier, used
to settle and gem the mud about these pools. Other species frequented
the flowering shrubs which had grown over the burnt wreckage and stumps
of the forest. That area was full of insects and birds. There we saw
daily the Sauba ants, sometimes called the parasol ants, in endless
processions, each ant holding a piece of leaf, the size of a sixpenny
bit, over its tiny body. Tanagers shot amongst the bushes like blue
projectiles. We saw a ficus there on one occasion, of fair size, with
large leathery leaves, which carried a colony of remarkable
caterpillars, each about seven inches long, thick in proportion, blue
black in colour with yellow stripes, and a coral head, and filaments at
the latter end. They were pugnacious worms, fighting each other
desperately when two met on a leaf. The larvae stripped that tree in a
day. We were not always sure that the people in this part of Serpa were
friendly. Mostly they were half-breeds, varying mixtures of Indian and
negro, and no doubt very superstitious. The rodent's foot was commonly
worn by the women, who, if we took notice of their children, sometimes
would spit, to avert the evil eye. But when the thunder clouds banked
close, and the air, being still, became loaded with the scent of the
wood fires of the villagers, promising rain, we would enter a hut, and
then always found we were welcome.
Even when kept to the ship for any reason this country offered constant
new things to keep our thoughts moving. A regatao, the river pedlar,
would bring his roomy montario, the gipsy van of the river, his family
aboard--the wife, the grandmother, and the sad, shy, little
children--and offer us fruits, and perhaps his monkey and parrots.
Gradually the "Capella" added to her company. The Chief bought a parrot
which had many Indian and Portuguese phrases. It tried to climb a funnel
guy, in escaping the curiosity of our terrier, and fell into the river.
We fished her out with a bucket. The vampire bats came aboard every
night. They were not very terrible creatures to look at; but we
discovered they frequented the forecastle for no good purpose. Again,
stories filtered through to us of sickness on the Madeira, and abruptly
they gave the palms and the sunsets a new light. One man was brought in
from beyond and died of beri-beri. This shook the nerves of one of our
Brazilian pilots, and he refused to go beyond where we were. As for me,
there at Serpa the "Capella" was at anchor, and we were not near the
Madeira, and seemed never likely to go. I watched the sunsets. The
brief, cool evenings prompted me (fever in the future or not) to praise
and grace. Crickets chirped everywhere on the ship then, and the air was
full of the sparks of fireflies. You could smell this good earth.
There was one sunset when the overspreading of violet clouds would have
shut out the day quite, but that the canopy was not closely adjusted to
the low barrier of forest to the westward. Through that narrow chink a
yellow light streamed, and traced shapes on the lurid walls and roof
which narrowly enclosed us. This was the beginning of the most alarming
of our daily electrical storms. There was no wind. Serpa and all the
coast facing that rift where the light entered our prison, stood
prominent and strange, and surprised us as much as if we had not looked
in that direction till then. The curtain dropped behind the forest, and
all light was shut out. We could not see across the ship. Knowing how
strong and bright could be the electrical discharges (though they were
rarely accompanied by thunder) when not heralded in so portentous a way,
we waited with some anxiety for this display to begin. It began over the
trees behind Serpa. Blue fire flickered low down, and was quickly
doused. Then a crack of light sprang across the inverted black bowl from
east to west in three quick movements. Its instant ramifications
fractured all the roof in a network of dazzling blue lines. The
reticulations of light were fleeting, but never gone. Night contracted
and expanded, and the sharp sounds, which were not like thunder, might
have been the tumbling flinders of night's roof. We saw not only the
river, and the shapes of the trees and the village, as in wavering
daylight, but their colours. One flash sheeted the heavens, and its
overbright glare extinguished everything. It came with an explosion,
like the firing of a great gun close to our ears, and for a time we
thought the ship was struck. In this effort the storm exhausted itself.
* * * * *
The day before we left for the Madeira we took aboard sixty head of
cattle. They were wild things, which had been collected in the campo
with great difficulty, and driven into lighters. A rope was dropped over
the horns of each beast: this was attached to a crane hook, the winch
was started, and up the poor wretch came, all its weight on its horns,
bumping inertly against the ship's side in its passage, like a bale, and
was then dumped in a heap on deck. This treatment seemed to subdue it.
Each quietly submitted to a halter. Several lost horns, and one hurt its
leg, and had to be dragged to its place. But, to our great joy--we were
watching the scene from the bridge--the Brazilian herdsmen on the
lighter shouted an anxious warning to their fellows on our deck as a
small black heifer, a potbellied lump with a stretched neck, rotated in
her unusual efforts to free her horns. She even bellowed. She bumped
heavily against the ship's side, and tried desperately to find her feet.
She was, and I offered up thanks for this benefit, most plainly an
implacable rebel. The cattlemen, as punishment for the trouble she had
given them ashore, kept her dangling over the deck, and one got level
with her face and mocked her, slapping her nose. She actually defied
him, though she was quite helpless, with some minatory sounds. She was
no cow. She was insurrection, she was the hate for tyrants incarnated.
They dropped her. She was up and away like a cat, straight for the
winchman, and tried to get the winch out of her path, bellowing as she
worked. She put everybody on that deck in the shrouds or on the
forecastle head as she trotted round, with her tail up, looking for
brutes to put them to death. None of the cows (of course) helped her. By
a trick she was caught, and her horns were lashed down to a ring bolt in
a hatch coaming. Then she tried to kick all who passed. If the rest of
the cattle had been like her none would have suffered. Alas! They were
probably all scientific evolutionists, content to wait for men to become
kindly apple-lovers by slow and natural uplift; and gravely deprecated
the action of the heifer, from which, as peaceful cows, they
disassociated themselves.
The Indian says that if he eats a morsel of tiger he becomes fierce and
strong. I have not the faith of the Indian, or I would have begged the
heart of that heifer, and of it I would have brewed gallons of precious
liquor, and brought it home in jars for incomparable gifts to the meek
at heart who always do what the herdsmen tell them. The Doctor and I
made a pet of that black cow, to the extent of seeing she got her
rations regularly. It was no joke wading through manure among a press of
nervous animals on a ship's deck in the tropics, in order to see that a
brave creature was justly dealt with; particularly as she swore
violently whenever she saw us, looking up from her tightly tethered head
with eyes full of unabated fury, and tried to get at us on the hatch
above her, bound though she was. What a heart! For her head was fixed
immovably, unlike the others; yet, till we arrived at Porto Velho she
kept her fierce spirit, often kicking over her water bucket with her
forefeet. Curse their charity!
With two new pilots, we upanchored next morning; and full of cattle,
flies, and new odours, and a gang of cattlemen who at least appeared
villainous, and carried long knives, the "Capella" continued up stream
for the Madeira. The cattle were sheltered, as far as possible, with
awnings improvised from spare canvas, and their fodder was bales of
American hay. The Skipper did his best to meliorate the harsh native
methods with dumb things.
And now it seems time to explain why we are bound for the centre of the
American continent, where the unexplored jungle still persists, and
disease or death, so the legends tell us, come to all white men who stay
there for but a few months. If you will get your map of the Brazils,
begin from Para, and cruise along the Amazon to the Madeira River--you
turn south just before Manaos--when you have reached Santo Antonio on
the tributary stream you have traversed the ultimate wilderness of a
continent, and stand on the threshold of Bolivia, almost under the
shadow of the Andes. If you find any pleasure in maps, flying in shoes
of that kind when affairs pursue you too urgently (and I suppose you do,
or you would not be so far into this narrative), you will hardly thank
me when I tell you it is possible for an ocean steamer exceeding 23 feet
in draught to make such a journey, and so break the romance of the
obscure place at the end of it. But it must be said. Even one who
travels for fun should keep to the truth in the matter of a ship's
draught. As a reasonable being you would prefer to believe the map; and
that clearly shows the only way there (when the chance comes for you to
take it) must be by canoe, a long and arduous journey to a seclusion
remote, and so the more deeply desired. It certainly hurts our faith in
a favourite chart to find that its well-defined seaboard is no barrier
to modern traffic, but that, journeying over those pink and yellow
inland areas, which should have no traffic with great ships, a large
cargo steamer, full of Welsh coal, can come to an anchorage, still with
many fathoms under her, at a point where the cartographer, for lack of
place-names and other humane symbols, has set the word Forest, with the
letters spread widely to the full extent of his ignorance, and so
promised us sanctuary in plenty. I suppose that in a few years those
remote wilds, somehow cleared of Indians, jungle, and malaria--though I
do not see how all this can be done--will have no further interest for
us, because it will possess many of the common disadvantages of
civilisation's benefits: it will be a point on a regular route of
commerce. I am really sorry for you; but in the sad and cruel code of
the sailor I can only reply as Jack did when he got the sole rag of beef
in the hash, "Blow you, Bill. I'm all right." I had the fortune to go
when the route was still much as it was in the first chapter of Genesis.
"But after all," you question me, hopeful yet, "nothing can be done with
5000 tons of Welsh cargo in a jungle."
People with the nose for dollars can do wonders. It would be unwise to
back such a doughty opponent as the pristine jungle with its malaria
against people who smell money there. In the early 'seventies there was
a man with one idea, Colonel George Church. His idea was to give to
Bolivia, which the Andes shuts out from the Pacific, and two thousand
miles of virgin forest from the Atlantic, a door communicating with the
outside world. He said, for he was an enthusiast, that Bolivia is the
richest country in the world. The mines of Potosi are in Bolivia. Its
mountains rise from fertile tropical plains to Arctic altitudes. The
rubber tree grows below, and a climate for barley is found in a few
days' journey towards the sky. But the riches of Bolivia are locked up.
Small parcels of precious goods may be got out over the Andean barrier,
on mule back; or they may dribble in a thin stream down the Beni,
Mamore, and Madre de Dios rivers--rivers which unite not far from the
Brazilian boundary to form the Rio Madeira. The Beni is a very great and
deep river which has a course of 1500 miles before it contributes its
volume to the Madeira. The Rio Madeira, a broad and deep stream in the
rainy season, reaches the Amazon in another 1100 miles. But between
Guajara-Merim and San Antonio the Madeira comes down a terrace 250 miles
in length of nineteen dangerous cataracts. The Bolivian rubber
collectors shoot those rapids in their batelaoes, large vessels carrying
sometimes ten tons of produce and a crew of a dozen men, when the river
is full. Many are overturned, and the produce and the men are lost. The
Madeira traverses a country notorious even on the Amazon for its fever,
and quite unexplored a mile inland anywhere on its banks; the rubber
hunters, too, have to reckon with wandering tribes of hostile Indians.
The country is like that to-day. Then judge its value for a railway
route in the early 'seventies. But Colonel Church was a New Englander,
and again he was a visionary, so therefore most energetic and
compelling; he soon persuaded the practical business folk, who seldom
know much, and are at the mercy of every eloquent dreamer, to part with
a lot of money to buy his Bolivian dream. We do really find the Colonel,
on 1st November 1871, solemnly cutting the first sod of a railway in the
presence of a party of Indians, with the wild about him which had
persisted from the beginning of things. What the Indians thought of it
is not recorded. Anyhow, they seem to have humoured the infatuated man
who stopped to cut a square of grass in the land of the Parentintins,
the men who go stark naked, and make musical instruments out of the shin
bones of their victims.
An English company of engineering contractors was given the job of
building the line, and a small schooner, the "Silver Spray," went up to
San Antonio with materials in 1872. Her captain, and some of her
officers, died on the way. A year later the contractors confessed utter
defeat. The jungle had won. They declared that "the country was a
charnel-house, their men dying like flies, that the road ran through an
inhospitable wilderness of alternating swamp and porphyry ridges, and
that, with the command of all the capital in the world, and half its
population, it would be impossible to build the road." (There is a
quality of bitterness in their vehement hate which I recognise. I heard
the same emotional chord expressed concerning that land, though not
because of failure there, only two years ago.)
But the Bank of England held a large sum in trust for the pursuance of
this enterprise, and after the lawyers had attended to the trust money
in long debate in Chancery, there was yet enough of it left to justify
the indefatigable colonel in beginning the railway again. That was in
1876. Messrs. Collins, of Philadelphia, obtained the contract. The road,
of metre gauge, was to be built in three years. The matter excited the
United States into a wonderful attention. The press there went slightly
delirious, and the excited _Eagle_ was advised that "two Philadelphians
are to overcome the Madeira rapids, and to open up to the world a land
as fair as the Garden of the Lord." The little steamer "Mercedita," of
856 tons, with 54 engineers and material, was despatched to San Antonio
on 2nd January 1878. Her departure was made an important national
occasion, and it is an historic fact, which may be confirmed by a
reference to the files of Philadelphian papers of that date, that strong
men, as well as women and children, sobbed aloud on the departure of the
steamer. The vessel arrived at San Antonio on the 16th February. They
had barely started operations when, so they said, a Brazilian official
told them, betraying some feeling, "when the English came here they did
nothing but smoke and drink for two days, but Americans work like the
devil." Yet, by all accounts, the English method was right. I prefer it,
on the Amazon. The preface to work there should be extended to three or
even more days of drinking and smoking.
Yet it must be said that if ever men should have honour for holding to a
duty when it was far more easy, and even more reasonable, to leave it,
then I submit the claim of those American engineers. Having lived in the
place where many of them died, and knowing their story, I feel a certain
kinship. There is no monument to them. No epic has been written of their
tragedy. But their story is, I should think, one of the saddest in the
annals of commerce. Of the 941 who left for San Antonio at different
times, 221 lost their lives, mostly of disease, though 80 perished in
the wreck of a transport ship. That is far higher a mortality rate than
that of, say, the South African or the American Civil War.
Few of those men appeared to know the tropics. They thought "the
tropics" meant only prodigal largess of fruits and sun and a wide
latitude of life--a common mistake. The enterprise became a lingering
disaster. Their state was already bad when a supply ship was lost; and
they hopefully waited, ill and starving, but with a gallant mockery of
their lot, as their letters and diaries attest, for food and medicine
which were not to reach them. The doctors continued the daily round of
the host of the fever-stricken, giving them quinine, which was a deceit
made of flour. The wages of all ceased for legal reasons, and they were
in a place where little is cultivated, and so most food has to be
imported in spite of a tariff which usually doubles the price of every
necessary of life. Some of the survivors, despairing and heroic souls,
attempted to escape on rafts down the river; they might as well have
tried to cut their way through the thousand miles of forest between them
and Manaos. The railway undertaking collapsed again, and the clearing,
the huts, and the workshops, and the short line that was actually laid,
were left for the vines and weeds to bury. But now again the conquering
forest is being attacked. The Madeira-Mamore Railway has been
recommenced, and our steamer, the "Capella," is taking up supplies for
the establishment at Porto Velho, from which the new railway begins,
three miles this side of San Antonio.