STRUGGLING DOWN TO GEORGETOWN
Ben Hart lived about forty yards back in British Guiana. Having passed
the frontier without sinking, we scrambled up the steep, sandy bank of a
river that had changed its name from the Mahú to the Ireng while we were
crossing it, strolled through a bit of bone-dry, bunch-grass prairie,
and turned in at the first house. We could scarcely have missed it, for
there was not another for many miles within the colony. Hart had built
it himself, with the help of his “siwashes,” as he called the Indian
boys who made up his indefinite retinue,—a temporary structure in the
approved style and only available material of the region, the walls of
brush and mud, an earth floor, and a thick, top-heavy roof of
palm-leaves. Later on he planned to build a real house a few miles up
the river. Cow-hides, worth nothing whatever in this region, but which
his employees were obliged to turn in to prove that an animal was dead,
were used for every imaginable purpose,—as doormats, wind-shields, rugs,
even to stand on down at the “old swimming-hole” where we took a dip
every night, though _pirainhas_ abounded and an alligator had recently
eaten Hart’s best dog.
He lived as everyone does and must in those parts, with certain
improvements of American ingenuity. A fire built on the ground was his
cook-stove, though he made a kind of bread-cake in an iron pot turned
into an oven, the only bread in all that region. We, too, ate _farinha_,
however, either dry or wet down with beef broth. This Brazilian staff of
life tastes exactly like sawdust, but swells to several times it
original size and is very filling and evidently nourishing. Then his
Indian boys cut up dried beef and boiled it; now and then Hart let go a
gun at a chicken, and occasionally a steer was killed, when
everyone—neighbors, servants, Indians, dogs, chickens, and
buzzards—gorged themselves for a day on fresh meat, after which the rest
was cut into strips, salted, and sun-dried. The dessert common to all
that region was “coalhado,” milk turned sour and thick as pudding and
eaten with sugar. Then there were plenty of eggs, and milk without limit
was to be had for the milking, since Hart already had hundreds of
cattle, as well as many horses, few of which he saw once a month.
Hammocks hung under the long protruding roof, as well as inside the
house, and a cool breeze was always blowing across the savannahs, as the
British call what the rest of South America knows as _campo_ or _pampa_,
in this region between three and four hundred feet above sea-level.
Hart’s closest companions were a pair of hounds, now with a litter of
pups. As the cur dogs of the Indians make a great hullabaloo at sight of
a white man, so breed dogs are at once friendly with an Englishman or an
American, but will not let an unknown Indian approach the house while
the master is away and never make friends with the aborigines. About the
hut hovered three dog-like Macuxy Indian boys, who did all the odds and
ends of work and lived on the odds and ends of beef and _farinha_,
neither getting nor expecting any wages, except a place they might call
home. They hung their hammocks under a thatched roof on legs some
distance away and now and then received a few yards of cotton cloth
which they turned into clothing, for it is surprising how these children
of the wilds can make even a tolerably fitting jacket. These Indian boys
were never hired, but were unconsciously acquired. One of them would
turn up and go to work without a word, cooking, washing, milking, and
doing the other tasks, all of which took perhaps four hours a day, and
it would not be until they had remained longer than is customary for
visitors that Hart realized they were permanent employees. Brazilians in
this region may during the course of a year give a cowboy or an Indian
servant a cast-off cotton suit; hence word of the greater generosity of
the American had quickly spread and the difficulty was not how to get
help, but how to keep rid of too much of it. There were also fourteen
_vaqueiros_, who lived with the cattle and were rarely seen at the
house, and to these Hart furnished _farinha_ and paid two milreis a day,
not in money but in cloth and other goods, for though the milreis serves
as a basis of computation, there is no fixed medium of exchange and
barter is still almost universal. The little actual money with which he
had arrived Hart had laid away months before and never seen since, and
he had no fear of its being stolen, though he kept well-locked the back
room in which he stored his piles of cloth. Indeed, when he set out with
me on a trip that might have lasted two or three weeks, it never
occurred to him to take money with him. The _vaqueiros_, of course,
killed a steer whenever they wanted meat, turning in the hide to show
that they had not sold the animal over the border. Neither Hart nor his
“siwashes” spoke any Portuguese worth mentioning, so that their
conversation consisted chiefly of grunts and brief gestures, with now
and then an American or Portuguese word which happened to be familiar to
both sides. The Indian boys had found that certain sounds represented
certain actions, so that when they were told to “build fire” they knew
what was wanted, though the separate words meant nothing to them. They
had learned a few expressions so well that they even ventured to
pronounce them, and each evening after the dishes had been washed and
the fire put out, they filed solemnly past us, each emitting a dubious
“Goot neety” on the way to their _barracão_. Their general attitude was
about like that of a cat. They drifted in from nowhere and stayed
unasked, quiet and unaggressive, yet in a way independent and in no way
affectionate. They knew that some day Hart would give them a hat or a
few yards of cloth, and even without that reward they were quite pleased
to have the prestige of living with so “rich” a man.
More than 12,000 square miles of this back end of British Guiana is
high, open savannah, splendid for cattle; but the government refuses to
sell it and merely issues “permissions to graze” on little patches of
fifty square miles, or 36,000 acres each, at the exorbitant rental of
three pounds a year! Hart was the sixth man to be issued such a permit,
one of the others being a German and the rest Englishmen, while in all
the immense savannahs of British Guiana only four Brazilian
_fazendeiros_ had chosen to remain after the boundary award. Hence, in
addition to his legal holding, there were some 200,000 acres more over
which his cattle might freely roam. The cattle, too, were obtained by
barter. Soon after his arrival, by way of Brazil, Hart had an entire
boatload of goods brought up from Georgetown,—dozens of cheap felt hats,
belts, soap, particularly many bolts of coarse, strong cotton cloth in
gaudy patterns. No one else for many miles roundabout had any such stock
on hand; hitherto the Brazilians over the border had been obliged to go
to Boa Vista, or even to Manaos, to get such things. Moreover, Hart did
not take unfair advantage of them, but charged the same prices as
prevailed in Manaos; that is, he asked 3$ or 3$500 for a yard of cloth
that cost perhaps six pence in Georgetown, so that they were delighted
to do their shopping so near home, and as they rarely had anything but
animals to pay with, he had already bought twelve hundred head of cattle
and eighty horses without making serious inroads on his boatload of
cloth. A Brazilian rancher anxious to give his wife or his own legs a
surprise would ride fifty miles or more across country, driving before
him a cow and a calf, and sell them to Hart for 60$—that is for twenty
yards of cloth which had cost Hart $2.50. The visitor would depart
highly satisfied with the exchange, while Hart branded the animals and
added them to his stock on “Good Luck Ranch,” known across the river as
“Fazenda Americana.” A horse and colt came to about 350$, say a hundred
yards of the best cloth, at an original cost of $14; a plump steer might
be worth two felt hats and a belt; yet Hart’s prices were considered so
reasonable that people flocked in upon him from all directions. Now it
might be an Indian of some property, who dined while his wife and child
waited out in the rain until he was done and called them in to eat what
he had left; or it might be a fellow-rancher who had neglected to keep
up his own supplies. Occasionally payment was long delayed, but was
almost always sure. Sometimes he was paid beforehand, as when a
_fazendeiro_ with whom he might spend the night would tell him to drive
such and such animals home with him, promising to come over later and
get some cloth. There was nothing of the skinflint about Hart. He
followed the time-honored custom of the region, with an American
generosity added; and of course there was the high expense and risk of
boating the stuff up the rivers, keeping it under lock and key in his
back mud room, and the shopkeeping bother of selling it. Once he lost an
entire cargo worth $2000, when the Indians who were bringing it to him
let the boat go over some falls. But he hoped to have four or five
thousand head of cattle in as many years, and to come to the rescue of
the world’s scarcity of beef and leather as soon as some means was
provided for reaching the markets. Just now the greatest drawback was
lack of transportation. The governor of the colony had recently made a
trip to the savannahs, and a railroad was planned, but the war had
postponed it. American capital would build the line, but only on
condition of certain land grants, and the governor was set on having it
a government railway.
Meanwhile, I soon discovered, it was much easier to come in at the back
door of British Guiana than to get from there down to the front portal.
Small as it looks on a map of the whole continent, England’s South
American colony is more than twice the size of Great Britain. It was 340
miles down to the coast as the crow flies, and vastly more than that to
any but winged creatures. With 78,500 square miles of unbroken forest
and matted jungle, only the four-hundred-and-sixtieth part of which was
even under woodcutter’s license, there is no means of travel back of the
fringe of coast except by the rivers, and these are much broken by falls
and dependent on the season. Hart’s latest letter from the United States
had been five months on the way.
The first leg of a journey to Georgetown was to cross the divide between
the Brazilian and Guianese river systems, some fifty miles in its
narrowest part, but much more than that to the home of Commissioner
Melville on the upper Rupununi, which for several reasons was the
logical starting-point of a journey down to the coast. Hart had been
planning to go over to Melville’s within the next few weeks, and we
compromised on his getting ready as soon as possible, which was to be
within ten days. The delay I spent to advantage, for Hart was a pleasant
companion and the region full of interest. Now we trotted over several
hundred of his acres looking for a troop of mares in charge of a
tyrannical stallion; twice we roamed the lightly wooded savannahs
checking up on his cowboys and their charges. One day we went back to
Brazil to visit Antonino and his family, the only near neighbors and the
most nearly educated and civilized people in the vicinity. We brought
back with us twenty cows and as many calves, driving them to the river,
lassooing and dragging them down the bank, rolling in mud and drenched
with perspiration and tropical downpours, and taking each calf across in
the leaky dugout, the mother swimming behind. There are no frontier
formalities, the ranchers of both sides being their own sovereigns in
all matters, and Hart was as free to import cattle as he was to drive
them over to the Takutú at the beginning of high water and sell them to
the barges from Manaos.
We set out for Melville’s on June 5. Hart said it was a four-hour ride
to the St. Ignatius Mission, but I knew how deceiving distances can be
in South America, as well as the many unexpected obstacles that often
turn up in wilderness travel, and was not too pleased when we put off
the start until some time after noon. Hart rode a gray stallion with
Texas trappings and led a pack-horse carrying our baggage, as awkward as
packs always are and requiring frequent halts for adjustment. My bay
horse had plenty of life, but with only the precarious monkey-seat the
English call a saddle I was kept busy thwarting his frequent attempts to
leave me behind. The first hour across Hart’s broad grazing-lands was
fairly dry, though our delay had brought on the rainy season again.
Endless stretches of fine prairie-grass, alternating with thin scrub
forest, lay beyond. The first house was a ruin in thatch once occupied
by a Scotchman and his squaw; the next had belonged to an exiled
Brazilian. Every ruined hovel had its story. There was, for instance,
the one in which Hart had met and tamed the “Ocean Shark.” A giant negro
from the thickly settled coast, charged with two murders and many lesser
crimes, had so named himself when he fled to the interior. However good
a government may be, it is far away and hard to reach in so sparsely
populated a country, where every man must be his own law and protection.
When Hart first came, this black outlaw was roaming these upper plains
with a band of servile and frightened Indians, bullying even white men,
if they would stand for it. An Australian had picked up the Indian woman
abandoned by the Scotchman, with her daughter and son, and settled down
with her in the hut in question. One day he came home and found the
“Ocean Shark” already occupying his hammock.
“You see dat tree over dere?” said the negro. “Well, jes’ yō swing yō
hammock out dere. _I’se_ here now.”
The Australian, being a man who valued his skin more than his honor,
complied, and the negro acted as his domestic substitute for a week
before whim or rumor caused him to move on. He was constantly bullying
the smaller ranchers and killing their cattle, and at length he let word
drift out that he was going to do the same for Hart. The American,
however, well over six feet and weighing 190 pounds without an ounce of
fat, was built on “shark”-taming lines. Moreover, his partner had just
left for the war and he was feeling very blue and spoiling for a fight
when, on his way home to his new ranch, it was his good luck to find
that the “Ocean Shark” had camped in the chief hut of a nearby Indian
village. With him was his “secretary,” a small yellow negro named Cecil,
for the “Sha’k” could not read or write.
“What are you doing here?” demanded Hart, riding up to the hut.
“Ah don’ know what dat got t’do wid yō,” answered the “Sha’k.”
“You black ——!” said Hart. “I asked you what are you doing here.”
“Don’ yō curse me!” screamed the negro, in the bold terms of the British
“object” the world over, though already a bit tremulous from the
seriousness of his situation.
Hart was by nature anything but a belligerent man, but his future in the
colony depended on the evidence he gave at the start of being able to
take care of himself. He sprang from his horse, drew his heavy revolver,
and rapped the “Ocean Shark” over the head with the butt of it. Then he
thrust the weapon back into its holster and waded into the negro in
approved mining-camp style, rapidly changing his color from black to
red, and ended by giving him ten minutes to pack his traps and remove
his battered face forever from that corner of British Guiana. During
that time the Indians who formed the negro’s band ran back and forth
“just like ants” collecting his belongings, and every time his
“secretary” had to pass the American he took off his hat, ducked as if
to dodge a blow, and said, “Yessir! Yessir!” Soon the whole caravan was
on the move and the “Ocean Shark” had never been seen in this region
since, though fanciful tales continue to drift in of the “free city” he
and his obsequious followers have founded in another corner of the
colony.
At two in the afternoon we reached the Manarí Creek and found it too
deep to cross on horseback, though when Hart had passed that way a week
before it had not been knee-deep. That is the greatest difficulty of the
overland trip from Manaos to Georgetown; one can only get up the Rio
Branco in the rainy season, which is the very time when the savannahs
are flooded and virtually impassable. Luckily I am fairly tall, and Hart
was taller. We unloaded, stripped, and carried everything, including the
saddles, across on our heads, the water just reaching my nostrils. Then
we gave the horses a bath, for which they seemed grateful, went through
all the loading process again, and rode on, the crossing having cost us
more than an hour. There were more bogs and creeks, but all were
passable, and we had only to stop occasionally to adjust the pack. All
the time we kept drawing nearer the Kanuku Mountains, now a long blue
range across the southern horizon. We had to pass around the end of this
to get to Melville’s, which was almost due south, though I was supposed
to be traveling north.
[Illustration: Dom Antonito and one of the ant-hills that dot the open
campo of the upper Rio Branco]
[Illustration: I crossed the boundary between Brazil and British Guiana
in a leaky craft belonging to Ben Hart, who lived on the further bank of
the Mahú]
[Illustration: Hart had built himself a native house on the extreme edge
of British Guiana]
[Illustration: Hart and his Macuxy Indian helpers]
It was five o’clock when we reached the first inhabited house, that of a
Brazilian family on a bank of the Takutú. The usual formalities included
insistence that we wait for coffee, and as Hart did not care to risk
making an enemy, we complied. These people assured us that all the
_igarapés_ were so swollen from the recent rains that it would be
impossible to get to Melville’s at this season. Not far beyond we came
to a stream which Hart had easily forded the week before. I drove my
horse in, expecting the water to come at most to his belly, when the
animal suddenly dropped and took to swimming, with the water about my
waist. There was no way of getting our pack-animal across without
ruining everything. We returned to the Brazilian hut, and while I took
such measures as my soaking and that of the saddle-gear demanded, Hart
stripped, tied his clothes around his head with a strap under his chin
to hold them, and swam the _igarapé_ to an Indian hovel where he
arranged for a canoe and two paddlers. These dropped down the stream to
us, and having hobbled the horses and put the saddles astride a pole
always provided for such purposes under the eaves of rural Brazilian
huts, we and the Indians lugged our baggage to the canoe and finally set
out in pitch darkness to paddle up the river to what Hart called the
“padre’s house.”
Like the one in which I had entered the colony, the canoe was a leaky
old dugout with rotting boards nailed along the sunken gunwale, through
which water gushed almost in streams. I had to hug the two bags on the
seat beside me and at the same time bail water incessantly, while the
Indian boys shoveled water at the bow and Hart made a poor job of
steering in the stern, because it was impossible to tell the shadows
from the tops of the trees under water near the bank, which we were
compelled to follow closely in order to make any progress against the
swift current. Even there and with the utmost effort we made barely a
mile an hour, and every loss of a stroke for any reason left us so much
farther down stream. The Takutú was about four times as deep as when I
had last left it, and was now a real river. Several times I was nearly
knocked off, bags and all, by unexpected branches of trees; then
suddenly I discovered that the boat was filling faster than I could bail
it out, the water quickly reaching my ankles and then my calves. It
wouldn’t matter so much to Hart, who had brought only a few tramping
necessities, but it was only a question of a very short time before all
my South American possessions, including even my money in the valise,
would be at the bottom of the Takutú, while I struggled ashore in my
heavy brogans with only my hat and my reputation. I shouted to the
Indians, who looked around and saw the water which they, being high in
the bow, had not felt, and by sheer luck they managed in the darkness to
tear a way through tree-tops and bushes to a spot on the bank with bare
land enough to hold our baggage. Here we found that a snag had kicked a
large hole in the stern of the rotten old craft and that water was
pouring in as from a faucet. This repaired as best we could, we bailed
out the boat and pushed on. For what seemed hours we fought against the
current and bailed incessantly before a faint light far away in the
night announced that we were approaching the mission. We could not seem
to bring the light nearer, but finally managed to land in the mouth of a
tributary, and, tearing through the jungle and stumbling over stony
ground in the black night, lugging our baggage, we at last ended at nine
o’clock the “easy four hours’ ride” from Hart’s ranch by entering the
mission of an English Jesuit, Father Ignatius Cary-Elwess.
It was a big, two-story, thatched building on the bank of the upper
Takutú, just across from Brazil. Indian men and boys, chiefly in
loin-cloths, though some wore a shirt and some the remnants of trousers,
swarmed about the place with perfect freedom, as the “padre” seemed to
have an easy-going way that had weakened his control over them. He was a
small, wiry man of middle age, dressed in an old soutane, quite English,
yet also quite Jesuit, which made a curious combination. Eleven years
before he had come out entirely alone and lived in their huts with the
Indians, under exactly the same conditions as they, until he had learned
the Macuxy tongue—at least as well as the average Englishman ever learns
a foreign language. He knew no Portuguese, and the naked Indian youths
spoke an amusing mixture of English and Macuxy, the former chiefly
represented by “Fader, yes,” with which all statements began, usually
continuing in the native tongue. The priest was “one of the boys” in the
stories he told, but he often drifted away into dreams. After nearly
four years in Latin-America it seemed strange to hear the English names
of things I had only known in Spanish, Portuguese, or Quichua,—“bush”
for _sertão_, “Savannah” for _pampa_ or _campo_, “’gator” for _jacaré_.
It was sixty-three days since the padre had last heard a word of the
world’s news, and the long time which elapsed before our generous supper
was ready we spent in bringing him up to date, getting out of our soaked
garments, oiling our revolvers, and swinging our hammocks.
When I rose in the early morning a cold wind was blowing across the open
country. About the mission building was a cluster of huts for the
converts, and many cattle were grazing nearby—for the good padre did not
neglect the practical things of life. He was already saying mass before
an outdoor altar set in the side of a mud house, assisted in his
formalities by otherwise naked Indian acolytes in red robes. A creek
near the mission, which one could generally step across, was so swollen
that we had to borrow a canoe, and the top branches of high trees just
peered out of the water. We soon came to another—whereupon Hart decided
that we were sure to lose the horses if we tried to continue the trip
with them. The only animal which can endure travel under such conditions
is man, and we concluded to resort to the only means of locomotion left
us. When we returned to the mission, the padre, who had been a famous
athlete in his younger days, left off a cricket game he was playing in
his flowing soutane with the Indian boys, and went with me to find us
Indian carriers. His rule was too lenient, however, and the day drifted
on without anyone offering to go. He would not order anyone to do so, as
most of the Indians had come for some Catholic celebration and the padre
felt that they could not be spared. “Anyway,” he mused, “by far the best
carriers are the women—women”—his eyes fell suddenly on Hart,
conspicuously masculine in his splendid frame and perfect
condition—“we—er—well, I’ll send for the chief and see if he can’t get
you two _men_”—the accent on the last word was probably unconscious.
It was afternoon before a father and his son were finally prevailed upon
to make the one-day journey to the next village, and at two we were off
across country. The man, about thirty-five in years, but already old for
his race, was as ill-fitted for his task as the average white man of
sixty, and was constantly being favored by his son of eighteen, in the
prime of life. We were soon stripping to wade a stream neck-deep,
clothes, revolver, kodak, and other odds and ends on our heads, and had
barely dressed again when we came to a swamp of such extent that we
swung our shoes over our shoulders for the rest of the day. It was stony
here and there, but more often swampy, with bogs in which we sank to the
knees and several streams waist or chest deep; but the water was
lukewarm and the going almost pleasant, though we envied the Indians
their natural leather soles. That evening we reached an Indian hut made
entirely of palm-leaves, and swung our hammocks from poles with the
family. Our carriers chattered long in the native tongue with our
otherwise taciturn hosts, using the word “fader” in nearly every
sentence. We made our own tea and ate our own _farinha_ and rather green
bananas, to which the Indians added a square foot or more of mandioca
bread, here called “cassava.” Gnats made life miserable for me, but Hart
and the Indians took turns snoring all night, while the wife of our host
stood or squatted in a far corner of the hut, stirring the fagot fire
every half hour or so, darkness evidently being a cause for fear, and
gently punching her fat husband every time his snoring grew uproarious.
Not only the men and children, but cur dogs and fowls slept in the
comfortable hammocks; but either it is immoral, by their tribal laws,
for a woman to lie down while there is a stranger in the house, or it is
the admirable custom for the woman to sit up all night and keep her
lord’s fire burning. Yet there is a vast difference in the comfort of
life between these tropical Indians and those of the Andes, a difference
due mainly to one thing,—the hammock. Their floors may be as hard and as
filthy, even as cold at times, but swinging above it in a soft,
native-woven hammock is like living in another sphere. The hammock is
the most important thing in the life of the Indian of this region, as,
indeed, of all residents. He is conceived in a hammock, born in a
hammock; a hammock is his chair, sofa, and place of siesta, it is his
bridal bed and his death bed, and usually it is his shroud, for it is
the custom to bury him in the hammock in which he dies. If he travels in
light marching order, the Indian may leave everything else behind,
except his loin-cloth, but he carries his hammock.
Rain fell heavily most of the night, and we did not once put on our
shoes during the next day. Our feet were under water certainly half the
time. Barely had we started when we had to wade a deep, muddy creek,
followed by a long swamp; and similar experiences continued in swift
succession. The vast savannah was dotted with scrub trees, but there was
no sign of life except occasional birds. The Kanuku Mountains,
everywhere heavily wooded and blue with the mist and rain that always
hangs about them, drew slowly nearer on our left. This region might be
dubbed the “Land of Uncertainty,” for one never knew what might be
waiting a mile ahead, whether we would have to come all the way back,
after struggling through most of the trip, because of some impassable
obstacle. Particularly the Suwara-auru, a branch of the Takutú which
foams down from the Kanuku range, was likely to prove such a barrier.
[Illustration: Fortunately Hart was a generous six feet or my baggage
might not have got across what had been trickling streams a few days
before]
[Illustration: We impressed an Indian father and son into service as
carriers]
[Illustration: Macuxy Indians with teeth filed or chipped to points]
[Illustration: An Indian village along the Rupununi]
We were already soaking wet, so that we paid little attention to the
roaring rain that soon began to fall, though I still strove to keep my
kodak from being ruined. Even the shoes on our backs were as wet as if
we had worn them. Our baggage, on the Indians’ backs, was covered with
old pieces of canvas, but the rain poured down in cataracts upon it and
promised to soak everything it contained. To make things worse, the
Indians could not keep up with us. The aged thirty-five-year-old man was
in sad straits, and we were in constant dread of his falling down in
some mud-hole. At down-pouring noon we reached the base of the range of
hills and began to skirt it, the storm making a tumultuous yet musical
sound on the dense forest. In dry weather, no doubt, it would be
screaming with parrakeets, though it is said always to be raining in the
Kanukus. Deep in the woods we stopped among mammoth trees at the bank of
a creek to assuage our gnawing hunger. It was pouring incessantly, yet
the older Indian got a fire started, roofed by green banana-like leaves,
and into this we thrust slabs of sun-dried beef spitted on sticks. We
made tea, also, and each ate his rationed half-pint of _farinha_, which
would soon swell to a quart. All this time we had not a suggestion of
shelter and the water ran down us in streams throughout the meal,
washing our fingers as rapidly as we soiled them. Yet somehow we felt in
unexpectedly good spirits. Hart rolled three cigarettes, handed two of
them to the Indians, and we were off again. The forest grew ever denser,
and the rain became an absolute torrent. Only in crossing the Malay
Peninsula years before had I bowed my back to such volumes of water,
water which, as the ground grew a bit hilly, rushed down the narrow ruts
worn by former travelers so swiftly as almost to sweep us off our feet.
With every step forward I grew more uneasy. We were drawing near the
notorious Suwara-auru, situated where the forest that spills down a spur
of the mountains is thickest and the rainfall is said to be the heaviest
in all British Guiana, and which, according to Hart, “the devil himself
often could not pass.” It may be knee-deep in the dry season, and a week
later fill up the whole gorge or valley with a rushing current half a
mile wide—a gorge still densely forested, too, for there are trees
everywhere, except in the bit of space occupied by the creek in the dry
season, and horses have been killed by the force with which the current
hurls them against the trunks. Of course man himself can pass under
almost any conditions; but it might well be impossible to get even such
baggage as I carried across, and I might have to go clear back to
Manaos, or wait for months until the rains subsided.
The gorge promised to be at its worst that day, for most of the streams
we had passed were near their high-water mark. Yet the Suwara-auru was
not. When we finally came to it I shouted above the storm to ask Hart if
this almost placid stream, which barely reached the lower branches of
the trees, was the mighty obstacle about which I had been hearing for
days. But such is the tenacity of a bad reputation that my companion,
never attempting to cross it as we had many others, tore his way
upstream with great difficulty, gashing his feet and tearing his
clothing in his fight with the jungle, to a half-submerged tree-trunk
that offered a possible but precarious crossing. Meanwhile I, skeptic
from birth, had thrown off revolver and kodak, waded in—and crossed with
the water barely to my armpits! Before Hart could fight his way back I
had taken the Indian youth over twice, with all my belongings on his
head, though he was so much shorter that the water came to his nostrils
and I had to walk close to him on the downstream side to keep him and,
what was more important, my possessions from being washed away. Then,
with my help, he carried his father’s load across, and the old man
managed to cross “empty.” Through it all it kept raining as I had never
seen it rain before, except once in the jungles of the Far East. Perhaps
the most surprising part of the whole episode was the much greater fear
of the elements shown by these children of the wilderness than was our
own. The superiority of savages in struggles with nature, as compared
with civilized man, is all very well in popular novels, but my own
experience has been that in real life the balance tips the other way.
Evidently the sources of the Suwara-auru were so far up in the mountains
that it did not respond to the rains as quickly as the other streams;
and a day or two later it might have been quite as impassable as it is
by reputation.
On the opposite bank was an immense rock with a sheer side up which we
could never have pulled the horses, even had we succeeded in getting
that far with them. Yet their loss on the trail would not have made Hart
any poorer, for when he returned one had died of snake-bite and the
other had injured itself so badly that it had to be killed. We coaxed
the worn and frightened Indians under their packs again and pushed on in
the drenching roar. For an hour or more we plunged on through dense
forest; then, as the nose of the mountain we were flanking receded, the
rain decreased and at length subsided almost to a drizzle, though the
rest of the day was bathed in successive showers. Having flanked the
range, our trail now turned more to the east and came out on swampy
scrub savannah again. All day it had been barely a foot wide, and so
seldom was it traveled, even by animals, perhaps not in months by a
human being, as to be almost invisible, except where it was deep enough
to be filled with water. But that was not the worst of it. Lack of
travel had let the long, sharp prairie-grass grow out over the path from
both sides so as almost to cover it, and the saw- and razor-edges of
this cut and gashed my bare feet until the tops of them were a
mosquito-net of bleeding scratches.
We expected to get a welcome and a plentiful meal that evening in
“George’s Village,” a small settlement since the oldest foreign resident
could remember, of which “George” was the Indian chief. Life itself
depended on the food and supplies we were to get there. Our feelings may
easily be imagined, therefore, when we came in sight of the village and
found it only half a dozen patches of charred timbers and broken pots,
even the heavy red-wood uprights that would not burn having been cut
down. It turned out that “George” had recently died, though news is so
sluggish in this region that few knew it. In much of tropical South
America it is the custom, upon the death of a chief, to burn down his
house, or even the whole village, after burying him in and under the
hammock in which he has died, and then to abandon the locality to escape
the “evil spirit” that has killed him. For no Indian of these regions
ever dies a natural death. He is always killed by some supernatural
spirit. “Did the spirit hurt him much?” the civilized man will ask the
Indian informant. “Why, he broke every bone in his body,” the Indian
will answer—no doubt because of the limpness of the corpse.
Miles farther on, across another thigh-wearying swamp, we sighted a
cluster of huts, and our spirits rose, only to fall again, for these,
too, had been abandoned, though not burned. There were half a dozen of
them, including two large ones of oval shape made entirely of thatch
palm, except the rounded ends, which had been plastered with mud. I
arrived with a tooth-rattling chill, but our Indians had faded away
behind us and we had no dry clothing. I stripped naked and rubbed down
with my wet garments, that being at least preferable to standing in them
in the penetrating chill of evening. We forced the door of the largest
hut, which was no great task, and found it a single room large enough
for fifty men, but chiefly full of emptiness. The only things left were
some cracked water-gourds and a few woven palm-leaf fire-fans, scattered
over a broad expanse of hard, uneven earth floor. When the carriers at
last arrived, we built a fagot fire inside, swung our hammocks, and made
tea of swamp- and rain-water with which to wash down our dry _farinha_,
wondering the while what we would live on ahead. The old man was
shivering with fever, and we feared he would not last much longer, even
if both did not refuse to go any farther. They swung their hammocks side
by side at some distance from ours and built another fire between them,
which the youth kept going all night. Whenever they had occasion to go
outside they went only in close company, like children afraid of the
dark. The hut had no windows, and both doors were closed against
insects, night air, and evil spirits. Yet the mosquitoes and gnats were
so numerous that I used my _mosquitero_ for the first time since buying
it in Manaos. Also the tiny _mucuim_, or “red bug,” crawled up from the
floor and bit our legs fiercely.
The moment I saw the darkness begin to gray through the many lapses in
the grass wall I tumbled out and aroused the others. Hart and I had tea
and dry _farinha_, but the carriers only the latter, for they did not
“know” tea and preferred to breakfast on mandioca meal alone. Our great
difficulty now was to get them not to abandon us. They had agreed to
carry our stuff only to “George’s Village,” and now insisted on
returning. They were at the outskirts of the Macuxy tribe, and to go
farther was to run the risk that their enemies, the Wapushanas, would
“blow on them”—not in the Bowery sense, but in correct English—and
thereby cast a spell over or an evil spirit into them which would cause
them to die soon after they reached home. It is likely that the
superstition comes from the former custom of using blow-guns with
poisoned arrows. The Wapushanas take up all the southern end of British
Guiana and once fiercely warred against the neighboring tribes; and
though they rarely resort to violence now, the younger generation, being
meek and unwarlike, thanks largely to the man we were trying to reach,
the ancient enmities remain and members of one tribe rarely enter the
territory of the other for fear of being “blown on.” We had the one
weapon of refusing to pay them anything if they left us in the lurch,
which was not a particularly powerful one. Luckily, the youth had made
one trip to Manaos and had not only learned enough Portuguese so that I
could talk to him, but had dulled the edge of his superstitions, which
eventually brought him on our side against his father. But all this
would have been inadequate without the most powerful aid of all, the
white man’s will-power, which, when brought into conflict with that of
the aborigines, will almost always win out, if one has patience. For
will-power, whether over fear or in argument, is rarely strong among
savages.
Having lost two hours in discussion, therefore, our caravan got under
way again, Hart and I, knowing a long and hungry day was before us,
setting a sharp pace. Swamps began again at once, and more than half the
day’s walk was under water, from ankle- to chest-deep. In time this
weighed so heavily on the thighs and the small of the back that they
ached severely. The razor-like prairie-grass was almost incessant, even
under water, and a tiny twig, thorny and sharp as a keyhole saw, hung
everywhere across the faint path. In consequence, the tops of my feet
were virtually flayed and every step was more painful than the last. Yet
we could not have worn our shoes, for that would have been to lift some
twenty pounds of water with every step. Rain began again almost as soon
as we started, and kept up all the morning. The worry about my baggage
was constant, for in it was nearly all I possessed, including twenty
pounds in gold, and the will-power by which we had forced the Indians to
continue might lose its strength, once they were out of our sight. Yet
they could or would not keep up with us. If we waited for them, they
grew slower and slower; if we took our own pace, we were soon out of
sight of them, and I at least expected them to drop the stuff in the
trail and flee from the “blowing” Wapushanas. Yet as between having to
sleep out here on the flooded savannahs without food and losing a few
paltry possessions, there was only one choice. So after several delays
on a day when delay might be serious, until we caught another glimpse of
two specks crawling along across the vast, scrub-wooded plains behind,
as hard to see as an animal of protective coloring, we strode
unhesitatingly on. By and by we came to some of the undulations of the
Kanukus, hard and stony ridges that were torture to our feet, yet these
were now so swollen that it would have been worse torture to put on our
shoes. Down in a rocky hollow called the “Point of the Mountains” we
managed to build a fire of wet wood, but waited in vain for our Indians.
When we felt sure for the tenth time that they had abandoned us, they
came snailing over the rise behind us and dropped down as if utterly
exhausted. We divided with them the handful of _farinha_ left, and took
a long time to coax them to their feet again. Swamps disagreeably
alternated with stony patches. A hill in the blue distance was still
three miles short of our goal. The sun came out for the first time in
three days and quickly added sunburn and stiffness to our other
troubles. The country was faintly rolling in places, and on the tops of
slight ridges between lake-like swamps we glanced back, but though our
carriers had disappeared from the landscape, we dared not halt. Hart
assured me they would not abandon the stuff, and that if they did, it
would sit safely on the trail, even in the unlikely event of anyone else
traveling this route at this season, until other Indians were sent for
it; but I had not so high a faith in human virtue.
In mid-afternoon we sighted the Rupununi, a branch of the Essequibo
River that is the chief outlet to the coast; but Melville lived ten
miles upstream, and the trail was almost completely lost on these deeply
flooded savannahs. This greatly increased the chances of losing our
baggage, for the carriers, being in enemy territory where they had never
ventured before, could only guess at the road, while their fear of being
“blown on” would be greatly increased by our absence. We struggled on
through swamps and rocky spurs of hills, straining our thighs and backs
against water made doubly burdensome in many places by bogs and mud. I
seemed to be lifting a ton with every step, yet we were forced to make
wide detours. Several times I reached what I thought was the point of
exhaustion, yet kept on by force of will, that determination which
Indians and other primitive peoples lack in comparison with the white
man, because it is allied to reason. Toward sunset we came upon the
first footprints we had seen in two days, during which the only signs of
life had been the birds and a scattered herd of half-wild cattle. A line
of trees ahead showed the edge of the Rupununi, which we could not pass,
even in a boat, if we arrived there after dark. Just at dusk we reached
an Indian hut on the bank, and even before we asked for it a woman
brought us a bowl of _farinha_ wet with cold water, which we gulped down
like starved savages. This quickly put new kick into our legs. But there
was no boat on this side of the river, now miles wide and covering a
large forest. An Indian youth climbed to the top of a tree and hallooed
a peculiar musical call and the most pleasant sound I had heard in a
long time was a faint answering hail. I fired my revolver to suggest the
presence of white men, and by and by, after we had several times given
up hope, there grew out of the night the peculiar thump-thump of paddles
against a boat, common to all Amazonia, and then the voices of the
paddlers fighting against the forest. At last there crept out of the
flooded tree-tops a large canoe manned by four Indians, with a negro boy
of West Indian speech in the stern. His was the first native English I
had heard in the colony. We had crossed the divide between the Brazilian
and the Guianese river systems.
The paddlers were a long hour fighting the trees and recrossing the
swift river, born barely thirty miles above in the high forest and
rising and falling many feet in a single day; but we were finally
welcomed by Commissioner Melville in the best house I had seen since
leaving Manaos, and I dropped into my first “Berbice chair,” joyfully
stretching my weary legs out on the long folding arms of it. Two-story
houses are rare sights in these parts, but here was one with good
hardwood floors and all reasonable conveniences, of open bungalow build
and covered with “shacks”—that is, un-tapered singles split with a
“cutlass,” or machete—the servant quarters, kitchen, dining- and
store-rooms below, and a real white-man’s home above. We were loaned dry
clothing and given a mammoth supper, which left me highly contented with
life, even though all I had left in South America was a soaked revolver
and kodak and thirty pounds in five-pound bank-notes in an oilcloth
pouch about my neck. I painted my feet with iodine, but could not wash
them, though they were grimy and black as those of any Indian who had
never known shoes. Then we swung our hammocks in the “guest-house,” a
bungalow on stilts a few yards from the main building, and were heard no
more until late the next morning.
All that day I hobbled about barefoot, as was every person in the
region. To my astonishment and delight our Indians walked in toward noon
with our baggage, though most of it was dripping, and even my
indispensable kodak-tank, made of flimsy materials evidently stuck
together with flour paste, after the hasty American manner, had fallen
apart and warped out of shape. The bank-notes about my neck had been
soaked, too, and had run with color until they were all but illegible. I
spread them out in the sun to dry with the rest of my belongings, much
more pleased to have water-soaked possessions than none at all. To the
Indians I gave a gold sovereign, an exceedingly high reward for the
region, where the white settlers pay native carriers three or four
shillings for such a trip; but my generosity did them little good, for
Melville’s half-Indian son took the coin, to which the Indians seemed to
attach little value, and gave them each five yards of cotton cloth for
it. The unadvised traveler cannot know until he gets there that what he
should have brought to interior British Guiana is not money but goods.
Melville was an Englishman born in Jamaica, of good family and well
educated. Some thirty years before, in his early manhood, he had come to
British Guiana, soon striking out for the then unknown savannah. Here he
had lived for fifteen years without a single civilized neighbor, often
unable for a year at a time to hold communication with the coast. He
spoke the native tongue so well that he was now an authority on it, even
among the Indians, with whom he ranked as the “Big Chief.” No white
woman had ever yet been in this region, nor, until recently, anyone with
authority to perform marriages, so that the exiled Englishman could only
seek companionship among the Indians. Of the several mothers of his
children, none had ever spoken English, but the children themselves had
been sent to school not only in Georgetown, but in England. John, the
oldest, was a well-built man in the early twenties, as much Indian as
Briton in manners and features, speaking his fluent English with a West
Indian or Eurasian twist. All except this young man and a little girl of
three were away at school. John gave the impression of being an
improvement on the native stock, but his father, who was in a position
to know, said it was his experience that there is no essential
difference between an Indian and a half-Indian. Melville unconsciously
had come to treat his women much as the Indians treat theirs, with a
sort of servant-like indifference. The latest one he always referred to
as “my cook,” and even then not unnecessarily, leaving her in her place
below stairs, never unkind to her, yet never treating her as an equal.
Melville was a remarkable and rare example of a white man who has spent
most of his life alone in the tropics without letting himself go to
seed. Not only that, but he had made his isolation an opportunity to
improve himself, until his mind was as keen, his will as firm, and his
interests as wide as the best of his race living in civilization—with an
added something of New World initiative which the average Englishman
does not develop at home. With a large library on all subjects,
considerably traveled in Europe and the United States, and apparently
gifted with a remarkable memory, he had a veritable fund of sound,
thorough, and ever-ready information about all parts of the earth and
all the activities of mankind, and was practiced in everything from
photography to astronomy, from medicine to British law. His isolation
seemed to have rid him of the common trait of superficiality, and as
soon as he found interest in, or reason to know, anything, he went at
once to the bottom of it and did not stop until he had every detail at
his tongue’s end. He spoke Portuguese as well as Wapushana, and was
plainly a man equally at home barefooted among Indians or silk-hatted in
London. Naturally, having lived nearly all his life among inferiors,
Indians, negroes, and his own half-breed children, he had grown
assertive, but his information was so wide, exact, and fluent that his
dogmatism was rarely oppressive.
A generation before, he had found the Indians of the interior all
“blow-gun men,” every man and boy carrying a long reed tube, a quiver of
arrows, and the lower jaw of the fish known as _pirainha_. The arrows
were made of the midrib of the large leaf of the _carúa_ palm, were
pointed by drawing them between the razor-like teeth of the fish-jaw,
made poisonous with _urali_, and notched in such a way that the point
broke off in the victim and the arrow itself could be repointed and used
again. _Urali_, obtained from a tree up in the Kanuku hills, acts on the
nerves governing respiration and kills simply by halting the lung
action, without poisoning the flesh of the victim. If respiration can be
kept up artificially until the poison has run its course, death does not
result. It is rarely fatal to salt-eating white men, and can be cured by
rubbing salt on the wound at once. Melville had tried some of the
arrow-points as phonograph needles and found them excellent, eliminating
all harshness and giving the illusion of distance. Gradually he had
broken the Indians of the blow-gun custom, so that now only a few old
Indians know how to prepare the poison. He had long been accepted as the
chief of all the tribes of the region, who have become so meek under
this single-handed British rule that they now obey even a negro. Either
Melville or his Scotch assistant and deputy had only to drop in at a
village, call some Indian aside, and talk to him a few moments in a
confidential tone to have him accepted as chief by all the rest, who
thereafter took through him all orders from the government by way of
Melville.
The Macuxys and Wapushanas (or “Wapusianas”) are, according to this
authority, roughly of the Carib and the Arawak families respectively,
with different linguistic roots, the former being cannibals up to a
generation or two ago. The two tribes have always been enemies, with
little in common, and habitually regard each other with aversion. The
Wapushanas, in particular, are fatalists of passive demeanor. As an
example our host mentioned the case of an Indian who had recently walked
in upon another, lolling in his hammock, and announced in a
conversational tone, “I have come to kill you.” “Very well,” said the
other, throwing the two sides of the hammock over his face and allowing
himself to be killed without making the slightest resistance. The
religion of the Indians Melville had found entirely negative. They
believe the Good Spirit will never do anything but good, hence give all
their attention to placating the evil spirits, swarming everywhere, even
in various pools of the rivers, which boats must therefore avoid. They
call the rainy season the “Boia-assú,” or “Big Snake,” because the
constellation we know as the Scorpion and they as the “large serpent” is
then in the ascendancy.
When he planned to leave the region to return to civilization some years
before, the government had induced Melville to remain, by certain
concessions, including his appointment as commissioner for all the
Rupununi district, so that now he was virtually the whole British Empire
in the very sparsely inhabited southern half of the colony, being deputy
chief of police, deputy customs inspector, deputy judge trying all cases
in the back end of the country, and deputy almost anything one could
name. A most earnest and efficient government officer he was, too, one
of the few who rule well in the wilds without constant supervision and
overseeing. He was the only man, also, who owned land in the far
interior, another concession wrung from the unwilling government. The
latter prefers that the territory remain crown land, so that the College
of Keisers or Court of Policy, mainly made up of dark-complexioned
natives, cannot interfere with it. His homelike dwellings overlooked
what would be broad acres again as soon as the immense lake covering all
the surrounding region subsided, with a golf links and half the sweep of
the horizon beautified by blue range behind range of hills, the nearest
peak four miles away, the others isolated mounds and hillocks scattered
across the bushy but splendid grazing plains to far-off Mt. Roraima,
highest in the colony. When we arrived the houses were on an island in a
vast lake extending in all directions, with here and there the tops of
trees appearing above it and the huts of most of the Indians inundated.
Next morning more than half the lake had disappeared, and the river,
which had been completely lost in the inundation, so that thirty hours
before a boat could travel miles beyond it on either side, now showed
ten feet of sheer bank. Nowhere have I ever seen water rise and subside
with such rapidity.
We were still in the Land of Uncertainty. Melville expected any day a
cargo-boat he had sent down to Georgetown months before, bringing him
orders to go down a few days later; but though it might arrive
to-morrow, it might also not be here in a month. It would have been a
great advantage to continue my journey in a covered, well stocked
government boat, with the greatest authority in southern British Guiana.
When several days had passed without any news of the expected craft,
however, I decided to push on alone, and Melville loaned me the only
boat available—a fairly large but very ancient, worm-eaten dugout, with
the usual submerged gunwales protected by boards nailed along the sides,
through which water seeped constantly. With this he let me have a
tarpaulin to cover the baggage by day and serve as a tent by night, a
lantern, and necessary eating utensils, all of which, with the boat, I
was to leave at the mouth of the Rupununi for his men to bring back with
them. In his combined capacity as the government of the southern end of
the colony, the commissioner required me to fulfill all legal
formalities, writing out a detailed account of my arrival in the colony
and an explanation of why I carried a revolver and how many cartridges I
had. The onus for this I put on the Brazilians, rather than imply that
they might be needed in so modelly governed a country as British Guiana,
and formally asked permission to “carry them through the colony.” In
reply, the one-man government examined my belongings, gave me an
official letter saying I had reported to the constituted authorities,
had been found harmless and in proper form, and need not be waylaid and
examined by officials along the way, issued me a license to carry a
revolver, gave me an unofficial sealed letter to the governor, which no
doubt contained private opinions as to the reasons for my existence, and
finally, inasmuch as I was “going down to town” anyway, intrusted to me
several letters on official business, so that I was raised to the
dignity of being “On His Majesty’s Service.”
All this took time, and even then I could not go without supplies, but
must wait until they rounded up and killed a steer, sixty pounds of
which was cut into large slices and packed in a drygoods box, with salt
between, while every living carnivorous creature in the vicinity gorged
himself on the rest of the carcass. A half-bushel basket of _farinha_, a
can of matches, and two novels completed my outfit. All this was piled
on saplings laid across the bottom in the center of the boat and covered
with the tarpaulin. Our two Indians had not the slightest desire in the
world to be transformed from carriers into paddlers, but preferred to go
directly home as fast as their now restored legs could carry them. But a
judicious mixture of moral suasion and enlarging upon the danger of
being “blown on” if they traveled alone finally caused them to agree to
go as far as the Protestant mission on the Yupucari, which was really
nearer their own and from which Hart would return with them.
Several days after our arrival, therefore, we were off down a much
swollen and hence swift river that carried us, without seeing them, over
what most of the year were rapids with laborious portages and
waterfalls, that were now only ripples and small whirlpools through
which we raced at express speed. Hart and I, and a negro boy loaned us
as guide through the first nine miles of rapids, sat in the stern, and
our metamorphosed carriers steadily plied their paddles in the bow.
There was a strip of forest along the bank, but sometimes only the tips
of the trees were visible above the flooded savannah. At ten o’clock we
stopped to cook beef and to exchange the negro boy, who was to walk
home, for “Solomon,” an Indian chief and henchman of Melville’s, and the
first aboriginal South American I ever met who spoke any considerable
amount of English. We dropped him a few miles farther down, past what in
the dry season would have been half a day of portaging. Travel and
commerce in this region, I reflected, are about what they were in all
the world before the age of money; it was not only like going back to
nature, but back to the Stone Age. There was a good breeze, though not
enough to drive off the clouds of _puims_ or _jejenes_, here simply
called “gnats,” which seemed a weak term for those almost invisible
pests with a bite that leaves a torturing red itch for a week afterward.
Some name with a wide blue border would have been more appropriate.
We skirted close to the densely wooded Kanuku Mountains, now and then
glimpsing a small monkey and a few birds, but otherwise finding nothing
except insects and primeval solitude. About four o’clock we began to
look for a place to land, cook supper, and camp, but this was by no
means so easy as it sounds. The banks consisted of unbroken forest with
little more than the tops of the trees above water and with no signs of
land, the swift current making a halt doubly difficult. We did, however,
finally drag ourselves up to a bit of elevated ground, where the jungle
was so thick there was barely room for all of us to stand, to say
nothing of lying down. Moreover, it seemed a pity to lose the swift,
rapid-defying current that might be gone by morning, so after building a
fire of green wood with great difficulty and roasting a few slabs of
beef, we decided to travel until an hour or two after dark. We probably
never will again. The plan would have been all right had there been
landing-places; but surrounded on both sides by an absolutely unbroken
forest-jungle without a foot of land above water, except far back among
the flooded tree-tops where we could not penetrate, we soon found
ourselves in a precarious situation. The stars were out, but there was
no moon and a suggestion of mist, so that the darkness seemed a solid
wall on either side of us. Only with the greatest difficulty could we
see the river ahead or tell the shadows from the trees, and we were
constantly on the point of smashing full-tilt into some snag or
submerged tree-trunk that might easily have sunk the boat and all it
contained, leaving us floundering in the trackless forest-sea.
Toward midnight we decided we must get a bit of rest somehow, and in the
black darkness, increased by gathering storm clouds, we shot for the
bank and grasped wildly at the endless, impenetrable forest-jungle as
the river tore us past it at boat-smashing speed. The stupidity and fear
of our Indians made the task doubly difficult. Several times we clutched
at the slashing branches and tried to drag ourselves far enough into the
flooded forest to get out of the current, for there was no hope of
getting land under our feet; but each time we had to give up and tear on
down the river, to risk all our possessions, if not life itself, by
trying again. It was like attempting to catch an express train on the
fly. In one such effort we smashed into a great tangle of immense
branches through which the water tore and dragged us until we were
certain the boat would be knocked to pieces, or at least that some
refugee snake would drop upon us. Somehow we got through this, only to
strike instantly a whirlpool that sent us spinning into the tops of
several more trees out in what seemed to be the middle of the stream.
Then, unexpectedly, we struck a sluggish corner and were half an hour
dragging ourselves in among the bushes. Once fire-ants drove us out,
swiftly. Finally we tied up to a branch, from others of which I managed
to hang our hammocks while Hart steered the craft in and out among the
tops of the submerged trees. His own hung over the boat, but mine was
far out from it, with no one knew how many fathoms of water beneath me
and splendid chances of falling out among _pirainhas_, if not
alligators. Should the water recede during the night, we might be left a
hundred feet or more aloft.
The old Indian threw himself down on the cargo; the young one squatted
out the night in the boat, bailing it occasionally. All night long an
awful roaring came from off in the forest, a sound with which there is
none to compare, though an enormous engine blowing off steam in short
blasts, or an immense multitude of insane people screaming at some
little distance might faintly suggest it. It came from howling monkeys,
black apes about half the size of a man, according to Hart, who insisted
that there was only one of them, though it sounded like at least a
hundred in angry chorus. Everything portended an all-night downpour to
add to our pleasures, but this did not come until the first peep of
gray, just as we had gotten our hammocks down and stowed away under the
tarpaulin. Then a roaring deluge, cold as ice-water, drenched us in an
instant; but we could only sit and paddle and take it hour after hour.
There was room for one of us under the tarpaulin, but that would have
been selfish to the other. The rain beat so hard on the surface of the
water that thousands of little fountains sprang upward under the impact.
As it showed no signs of let-up, we decided we must build a fire and get
something hot down our throats before we froze or shook ourselves to
death. We grasped a piece of overhanging bank, which luckily did not
pull loose and drop us into the racing stream, and dragged ourselves
ashore. There was barely standing-room for the four of us, huddled and
streaming in the pouring rain, the teeth of all chattering audibly. It
was then that Hart and I broached the bottle of Dutch rum from Curaçao.
It would have given us exquisite pleasure to have let a prohibitionist
stand there without his share until he was convinced that “demon rum”
sometimes has its uses. The fiery stuff may not have saved our lives,
but it came very near it. He who has never tried in a raging downpour to
light a fire of wood soaked through and through on ground an inch deep
with water, himself running like a sieve and shaking until he can
scarcely hold a match, has no notion of the high value of profanity. We
fought tooth and nail for almost two hours before we finally got some
hot tea, and more or less roasted four slabs of beef. The Indians had
very little strength, and though it took most of my time to bail out the
river- and rain-water, the rest of it I paddled hard in an effort to
restore my warmth.
All things have an end, however, and at last the sun came out and,
broken by a couple of showers that drenched us again, stayed with us the
rest of the day. In mid-afternoon we sighted the first human beings, a
group of Indians with file-pointed teeth and wearing more or less
clothes, who stood in the edge of the jungle beside two small deer they
had shot with ancient muskets, and which they were now skinning and
preparing to roast or smoke over a fire on the ground. We tried to buy
one of the chunks of venison, of some ten pounds each, that lay about
them, but we had no money except gold and paper. Any coin would do; in
fact, the chief Indian asked “one coin”; but he was a wise old trader of
some experience with civilization, and refused even my pocket-mirror. As
a last resort we offered him two boxes of matches, a very high price;
but he had evidently once been in Brazil and had set his heart on a
milreis. We had none, nor any coin that resembled one, so we tossed the
meat back at them and went on. Though we wore socks against the insects,
shoes would have been a burden in the ever possible necessity of
swimming for our lives, and our feet were constantly in water. We were
now past the Kanuku Range, and one side of the river broke into
savannah, though it was bushy along shore, while on the other side
stretched the unbroken forest wall. Along this little monkeys dropped
from high trees to the branches of others much lower with a crash that
set them swiftly to vibrating. Big noisy toucans now and then flew past
in gorgeous couples, their tails streaming. We heard the howling monkeys
again, but by day their uproar was nothing like so weird and terrifying
as it had sounded high up in the flooded tree-tops of the boundless
forest the night before.
The best time anyone had ever made from Melville’s to the Church of
England Mission at Yupukari, even in high water, was four days. It was a
most agreeable surprise, therefore, when long before sunset on this
second day Hart suddenly recognized some landmark and swung us into a
little back-water in which we soon tied up at a landing in the silent
woods. Here, taking a Sunday afternoon stroll along a trail cut through
the jungle, we met Parson White and his wife, the first Caucasian woman
I had seen since leaving Manaos, followed by their baby and a Hindu
nurse. The parson, being the upholder of civilization in wild regions,
had not succumbed to bare feet, but wore stout shoes and golf stockings,
with “shorts,” or knickerbockers, above them. His knees were bare in
defiance of the swarms of gnats, perhaps as a sort of penance, but in
spite of this and our unexpected appearance, he greeted us like an
Englishman and a parson. He was a very effective man, his methods being
quite the opposite of those of his Jesuit fellow-missionary. He believed
in keeping a curb-bit on the Indians, never allowing them to come into
his house and ruling them with military sternness. When I told him that
I needed three Indians to go on with me as soon as possible, he did not
go out and ask if there were any who wished to go, but answered, “Of
course; you shall have them to-morrow morning.”