On the afternoon of December 9 we left the attractive and picturesque
city of Asuncion to ascend the Paraguay. With generous courtesy the
Paraguayan Government had put at my disposal the gunboat-yacht of the
President himself, a most comfortable river steamer, and so the
opening days of our trip were pleasant in every way. The food was
good, our quarters were clean, we slept well, below or on deck,
usually without our mosquito-nettings, and in daytime the deck was
pleasant under the awnings. It was hot, of course, but we were dressed
suitably in our exploring and hunting clothes and did not mind the
heat. The river was low, for there had been dry weather for some weeks
--judging from the vague and contradictory information I received
there is much elasticity to the terms wet season and dry season at
this part of the Paraguay. Under the brilliant sky we steamed steadily
up the mighty river; the sunset was glorious as we leaned on the port
railing; and after nightfall the moon, nearly full and hanging high in
the heavens, turned the water to shimmering radiance. On the mud-flats
and sandbars, and among the green rushes of the bays and inlets, were
stately water-fowl; crimson flamingoes and rosy spoonbills, dark-
colored ibis and white storks with black wings. Darters, with
snakelike necks and pointed bills, perched in the trees on the brink
of the river. Snowy egrets flapped across the marshes. Caymans were
common, and differed from the crocodiles we had seen in Africa in two
points: they were not alarmed by the report of a rifle when fired at,
and they lay with the head raised instead of stretched along the sand.
For three days, as we steamed northward toward the Tropic of
Capricorn, and then passed it, we were within the Republic of
Paraguay. On our right, to the east, there was a fairly well-settled
country, where bananas and oranges were cultivated and other crops of
hot countries raised. On the banks we passed an occasional small town,
or saw a ranch-house close to the river's brink, or stopped for wood
at some little settlement. Across the river to the west lay the level,
swampy, fertile wastes known as the Chaco, still given over either to
the wild Indians or to cattle-ranching on a gigantic scale. The broad
river ran in curves between mud-banks where terraces marked successive
periods of flood. A belt of forest stood on each bank, but it was only
a couple of hundred yards wide. Back of it was the open country; on
the Chaco side this was a vast plain of grass, dotted with tall,
graceful palms. In places the belt of forest vanished and the palm-
dotted prairie came to the river's edge. The Chaco is an ideal cattle
country, and not really unhealthy. It will be covered with ranches at
a not distant day. But mosquitoes and many other winged insect pests
swarm over it. Cherrie and Miller had spent a week there collecting
mammals and birds prior to my arrival at Asuncion. They were veterans
of the tropics, hardened to the insect plagues of Guiana and the
Orinoco. But they reported that never had they been so tortured as in
the Chaco. The sand-flies crawled through the meshes in the mosquito-
nets, and forbade them to sleep; if in their sleep a knee touched the
net the mosquitoes fell on it so that it looked as if riddled by
birdshot; and the nights were a torment, although they had done well
in their work, collecting some two hundred and fifty specimens of
birds and mammals.
Nevertheless for some as yet inscrutable reason the river served as a
barrier to certain insects which are menaces to the cattlemen. With me
on the gunboat was an old Western friend, Tex Rickard, of the
Panhandle and Alaska and various places in between. He now has a large
tract of land and some thirty-five thousand head of cattle in the
Chaco, opposite Concepcion, at which city he was to stop. He told me
that horses did not do well in the Chaco but that cattle throve, and
that while ticks swarmed on the east bank of the great river, they
would not live on the west bank. Again and again he had crossed herds
of cattle which were covered with the loathsome bloodsuckers; and in a
couple of months every tick would be dead. The worst animal foes of
man, indeed the only dangerous foes, are insects; and this is
especially true in the tropics. Fortunately, exactly as certain
differences too minute for us as yet to explain render some insects
deadly to man or domestic animals, while closely allied forms are
harmless, so, for other reasons, which also we are not as yet able to
fathom, these insects are for the most part strictly limited by
geographical and other considerations. The war against what Sir Harry
Johnston calls the really material devil, the devil of evil wild
nature in the tropics, has been waged with marked success only during
the last two decades. The men, in the United States, in England,
France, Germany, Italy--the men like Doctor Cruz in Rio Janeiro and
Doctor Vital Brazil in Sao Paulo--who work experimentally within and
without the laboratory in their warfare against the disease and death
bearing insects and microbes, are the true leaders in the fight to
make the tropics the home of civilized man.
Late on the evening of the second day of our trip, just before
midnight, we reached Concepcion. On this day, when we stopped for wood
or to get provisions--at picturesque places, where the women from
rough mud and thatched cabins were washing clothes in the river, or
where ragged horsemen stood gazing at us from the bank, or where dark,
well-dressed ranchmen stood in front of red-roofed houses--we caught
many fish. They belonged to one of the most formidable genera of fish
in the world, the piranha or cannibal fish, the fish that eats men
when it can get the chance. Farther north there are species of small
piranha that go in schools. At this point on the Paraguay the piranha
do not seem to go in regular schools, but they swarm in all the waters
and attain a length of eighteen inches or over. They are the most
ferocious fish in the world. Even the most formidable fish, the sharks
or the barracudas, usually attack things smaller than themselves. But
the piranhas habitually attack things much larger than themselves.
They will snap a finger off a hand incautiously trailed in the water;
they mutilate swimmers--in every river town in Paraguay there are men
who have been thus mutilated; they will rend and devour alive any
wounded man or beast; for blood in the water excites them to madness.
They will tear wounded wild fowl to pieces; and bite off the tails of
big fish as they grow exhausted when fighting after being hooked.
Miller, before I reached Asuncion, had been badly bitten by one. Those
that we caught sometimes bit through the hooks, or the double strands
of copper wire that served as leaders, and got away. Those that we
hauled on deck lived for many minutes. Most predatory fish are long
and slim, like the alligator-gar and pickerel. But the piranha is a
short, deep-bodied fish, with a blunt face and a heavily undershot or
projecting lower jaw which gapes widely. The razor-edged teeth are
wedge-shaped like a shark's, and the jaw muscles possess great power.
The rabid, furious snaps drive the teeth through flesh and bone. The
head with its short muzzle, staring malignant eyes, and gaping,
cruelly armed jaws, is the embodiment of evil ferocity; and the
actions of the fish exactly match its looks. I never witnessed an
exhibition of such impotent, savage fury as was shown by the piranhas
as they flapped on deck. When fresh from the water and thrown on the
boards they uttered an extraordinary squealing sound. As they flapped
about they bit with vicious eagerness at whatever presented itself.
One of them flapped into a cloth and seized it with a bulldog grip.
Another grasped one of its fellows; another snapped at a piece of
wood, and left the teeth-marks deep therein. They are the pests of the
waters, and it is necessary to be exceedingly cautious about either
swimming or wading where they are found. If cattle are driven into, or
of their own accord enter, the water, they are commonly not molested;
but if by chance some unusually big or ferocious specimen of these
fearsome fishes does bite an animal--taking off part of an ear, or
perhaps of a teat from the udder of a cow--the blood brings up every
member of the ravenous throng which is anywhere near, and unless the
attacked animal can immediately make its escape from the water it is
devoured alive. Here on the Paraguay the natives hold them in much
respect, whereas the caymans are not feared at all. The only redeeming
feature about them is that they are themselves fairly good to eat,
although with too many bones.
At daybreak of the third day, finding we were still moored off
Concepcion, we were rowed ashore and strolled off through the streets
of the quaint, picturesque old town; a town which, like Asuncion, was
founded by the conquistadores three-quarters of a century before our
own English and Dutch forefathers landed in what is now the United
States. The Jesuits then took practically complete possession of what
is now Paraguay, controlling and Christianizing the Indians, and
raising their flourishing missions to a pitch of prosperity they never
elsewhere achieved. They were expelled by the civil authorities
(backed by the other representatives of ecclesiastical authority) some
fifty years before Spanish South America became independent. But they
had already made the language of the Indians, Guarany, a culture-
tongue, reducing it to writing, and printing religious books in it.
Guarany is one of the most wide-spread of the Indian tongues, being
originally found in various closely allied forms not only in Paraguay
but in Uruguay and over the major part of Brazil. It remains here and
there, as a lingua general at least, and doubtless in cases as an
original tongue, among the wild tribes. In most of Brazil, as around
Para and around Sao Paulo, it has left its traces in place-names, but
has been completely superseded as a language by Portuguese. In
Paraguay it still exists side by side with Spanish as the common
language of the lower people and as a familiar tongue among the upper
classes. The blood of the people is mixed, their language dual; the
lower classes are chiefly of Indian blood but with a white admixture;
while the upper classes are predominantly white, with a strong
infusion of Indian. There is no other case quite parallel to this in
the annals of European colonization, although the Goanese in India
have a native tongue and a Portuguese creed, while in several of the
Spanish-American states the Indian blood is dominant and the majority
of the population speak an Indian tongue, perhaps itself, as with the
Quichuas, once a culture-tongue of the archaic type. Whether in
Paraguay one tongue will ultimately drive out the other, and, if so,
which will be the victor, it is yet too early to prophesy. The English
missionaries and the Bible Society have recently published parts of
the Scriptures in Guarany and in Asuncion a daily paper is published
with the text in parallel columns, Spanish and Guarany--just as in
Oklahoma there is a similar paper published in English and in the
tongue which the extraordinary Cherokee chief Sequoia, a veritable
Cadmus, made a literary language.
The Guarany-speaking Paraguayan is a Christian, and as much an
inheritor of our common culture as most of the peasant populations of
Europe. He has no kinship with the wild Indian, who hates and fears
him. The Indian of the Chaco, a pure savage, a bow-bearing savage,
will never come east of the Paraguay, and the Paraguayan is only
beginning to venture into the western interior, away from the banks of
the river--under the lead of pioneer settlers like Rickard, whom, by
the way, the wild Indians thoroughly trust, and for whom they work
eagerly and faithfully. There is a great development ahead for
Paraguay, as soon as they can definitely shake off the revolutionary
habit and establish an orderly permanence of government. The people
are a fine people; the strains of blood--white and Indian--are good.
We walked up the streets of Concepcion, and interestedly looked at
everything of interest: at the one-story houses, their windows covered
with gratings of fretted ironwork, and their occasional open doors
giving us glimpses into cool inner courtyards, with trees and flowers;
at the two-wheel carts, drawn by mules or oxen; at an occasional
rider, with spurs on his bare feet, and his big toes thrust into the
small stirrup-rings; at the little stores, and the warehouses for
matte and hides. Then we came to a pleasant little inn, kept by a
Frenchman and his wife, of old Spanish style, with its patio, or inner
court, but as neat as an inn in Normandy or Brittany. We were sitting
at coffee, around a little table, when in came the colonel of the
garrison--for Concepcion is the second city in Paraguay. He told me
that they had prepared a reception for me! I was in my rough hunting-
clothes, but there was nothing to do but to accompany my kind hosts
and trust to their good nature to pardon my shortcomings in the matter
of dress. The colonel drove me about in a smart open carriage, with
two good horses and a liveried driver. It was a much more fashionable
turnout than would be seen in any of our cities save the largest, and
even in them probably not in the service of a public official. In all
the South American countries there is more pomp and ceremony in
connection with public functions than with us, and at these functions
the liveried servants, often with knee-breeches and powdered hair, are
like those seen at similar European functions; there is not the
democratic simplicity which better suits our own habits of life and
ways of thought. But the South Americans often surpass us, not merely
in pomp and ceremony but in what is of real importance, courtesy; in
civility and courtesy we can well afford to take lessons from them.
We first visited the barracks, saw the troops in the setting-up
exercises, and inspected the arms, the artillery, the equipment. There
was a German lieutenant with the Paraguayan officers; one of several
German officers who are now engaged in helping the Paraguayans with
their army. The equipments and arms were in good condition; the
enlisted men evidently offered fine material; and the officers were
doing hard work. It is worth while for anti-militarists to ponder the
fact that in every South American country where a really efficient
army is developed, the increase in military efficiency goes hand in
hand with a decrease in lawlessness and disorder, and a growing
reluctance to settle internal disagreements by violence. They are
introducing universal military service in Paraguay; the officers, many
of whom have studied abroad, are growing to feel an increased esprit
de corps, an increased pride in the army, and therefore a desire to
see the army made the servant of the nation as a whole and not the
tool of any faction or individual. If these feelings grow strong
enough they will be powerful factors in giving Paraguay what she most
needs, freedom from revolutionary disturbance and therefore the chance
to achieve the material prosperity without which as a basis there can
be no advance in other and even more important matters.
Then I was driven to the City Hall, accompanied by the intendente, or
mayor, a German long settled in the country and one of the leading men
of the city. There was a breakfast. When I had to speak I impressed
into my service as interpreter a young Paraguayan who was a graduate
of the University of Pennsylvania. He was able to render into Spanish
my ideas--on such subjects as orderly liberty and the far-reaching
mischief done by the revolutionary habit--with clearness and vigor,
because he thoroughly understood not only how I felt but also the
American way of looking at such things. My hosts were hospitality
itself, and I enjoyed the unexpected greeting.
We steamed on up the river. Now and then we passed another boat--a
steamer, or, to my surprise, perhaps a barkentine or schooner. The
Paraguay is a highway of traffic. Once we passed a big beef-canning
factory. Ranches stood on either bank a few leagues apart, and we
stopped at wood-yards on the west bank. Indians worked around them. At
one such yard the Indians were evidently part of the regular force.
Their squaws were with them, cooking at queer open-air ovens. One
small child had as pets a parrot and a young coati--a kind of long-
nosed raccoon. Loading wood, the Indians stood in a line, tossing the
logs from one to the other. These Indians wore clothes.
On this day we got into the tropics. Even in the heat of the day the
deck was pleasant under the awnings; the sun rose and set in crimson
splendor; and the nights, with the moon at the full, were wonderful.
At night Orion blazed overhead; and the Southern Cross hung in the
star-brilliant heavens behind us. But after the moon rose the
constellations paled; and clear in her light the tree-clad banks stood
on either hand as we steamed steadily against the swirling current of
the great river.
At noon on the twelfth we were at the Brazilian boundary. On this day
we here and there came on low, conical hills close to the river. In
places the palm groves broke through the belts of deciduous trees and
stretched for a mile or so right along the river's bank. At times we
passed cattle on the banks or sand-bars, followed by their herders; or
a handsome ranch-house, under a cluster of shady trees, some bearing a
wealth of red and some a wealth of yellow blossoms; or we saw a horse-
corral among the trees close to the brink, with the horses in it and a
barefooted man in shirt and trousers leaning against the fence; or a
herd of cattle among the palms; or a big tannery or factory or a
little native hamlet came in sight. We stopped at one tannery. The
owner was a Spaniard, the manager an "Oriental," as he called himself,
a Uruguayan, of German parentage. The peons, or workers, who lived in
a long line of wooden cabins back of the main building, were mostly
Paraguayans, with a few Brazilians, and a dozen German and Argentine
foremen. There were also some wild Indians, who were camped in the
usual squalid fashion of Indians who are hangers-on round the white
man but have not yet adopted his ways. Most of the men were at work
cutting wood for the tannery. The women and children were in camp.
Some individuals of both sexes were naked to the waist. One little
girl had a young ostrich as a pet.
Water-fowl were plentiful. We saw large flocks of wild muscovy ducks.
Our tame birds come from this wild species and its absurd misnaming
dates back to the period when the turkey and guinea-pig were misnamed
in similar fashion--our European forefathers taking a large and hazy
view of geography, and including Turkey, Guinea, India, and Muscovy as
places which, in their capacity of being outlandish, could be
comprehensively used as including America. The muscovy ducks were very
good eating. Darters and cormorants swarmed. They waddled on the sand-
bars in big flocks and crowded the trees by the water's edge.
Beautiful snow-white egrets also lit in the trees, often well back
from the river. A full-foliaged tree of vivid green, its round surface
crowded with these birds, as if it had suddenly blossomed with huge
white flowers, is a sight worth seeing. Here and there on the sand-
bars we saw huge jabiru storks, and once a flock of white wood-ibis
among the trees on the bank.
On the Brazilian boundary we met a shallow river steamer carrying
Colonel Candido Mariano da Silva Rondon and several other Brazilian
members of the expedition. Colonel Rondon immediately showed that he
was all, and more than all, that could be desired. It was evident that
he knew his business thoroughly, and it was equally evident that he
would be a pleasant companion. He was a classmate of Mr. Lauro Muller
at the Brazilian Military Academy. He is of almost pure Indian blood,
and is a Positivist--the Positivists are a really strong body in
Brazil, as they are in France and indeed in Chile. The colonel's seven
children have all been formally made members of the Positivist Church
in Rio Janeiro. Brazil possesses the same complete liberty in matters
religious, spiritual, and intellectual as we, for our great good
fortune, do in the United States, and my Brazilian companions included
Catholics and equally sincere men who described themselves as "libres
penseurs." Colonel Rondon has spent the last twenty-four years in
exploring the western highlands of Brazil, pioneering the way for
telegraph-lines and railroads. During that time he has travelled some
fourteen thousand miles, on territory most of which had not previously
been traversed by civilized man, and has built three thousand miles of
telegraph. He has an exceptional knowledge of the Indian tribes and
has always zealously endeavored to serve them and indeed to serve the
cause of humanity wherever and whenever he was able. Thanks mainly to
his efforts, four of the wild tribes of the region he has explored
have begun to tread the road of civilization. They have taken the
first steps toward becoming Christians. It may seem strange that among
the first-fruits of the efforts of a Positivist should be the
conversion of those he seeks to benefit to Christianity. But in South
America Christianity is at least as much a status as a theology. It
represents the indispensable first step upward from savagery. In the
wilder and poorer districts men are divided into the two great classes
of "Christians" and "Indians." When an Indian becomes a Christian he
is accepted into and becomes wholly absorbed or partly assimilated by
the crude and simple neighboring civilization, and then he moves up or
down like any one else among his fellows.
Among Colonel Rondon's companions were Captain Amilcar de Magalhaes,
Lieutenant Joao Lyra, Lieutenant Joaquin de Mello Filho, and Doctor
Euzebio de Oliveira, a geologist.
The steamers halted; Colonel Rondon and several of his officers, spick
and span in their white uniforms, came aboard; and in the afternoon I
visited him on his steamer to talk over our plans. When these had been
fully discussed and agreed on we took tea. I happened to mention that
one of our naturalists, Miller, had been bitten by a piranha, and the
man-eating fish at once became the subject of conversation. Curiously
enough, one of the Brazilian taxidermists had also just been severely
bitten by a piranha. My new companions had story after story to tell
of them. Only three weeks previously a twelve-year-old boy who had
gone in swimming near Corumba was attacked, and literally devoured
alive by them. Colonel Rondon during his exploring trips had met with
more than one unpleasant experience in connection with them. He had
lost one of his toes by the bite of a piranha. He was about to bathe
and had chosen a shallow pool at the edge of the river, which he
carefully inspected until he was satisfied that none of the man-eating
fish were in it; yet as soon as he put his foot into the water one of
them attacked him and bit off a toe. On another occasion while wading
across a narrow stream one of his party was attacked; the fish bit him
on the thighs and buttocks, and when he put down his hands tore them
also; he was near the bank and by a rush reached it and swung himself
out of the water by means of an overhanging limb of a tree; but he was
terribly injured, and it took him six months before his wounds healed
and he recovered. An extraordinary incident occurred on another trip.
The party were without food and very hungry. On reaching a stream they
dynamited it, and waded in to seize the stunned fish as they floated
on the surface. One man, Lieutenant Pyrineus, having his hands full,
tried to hold one fish by putting its head into his mouth; it was a
piranha and seemingly stunned, but in a moment it recovered and bit a
big section out of his tongue. Such a hemorrhage followed that his
life was saved with the utmost difficulty. On another occasion a
member of the party was off by himself on a mule. The mule came into
camp alone. Following his track back they came to a ford, where in the
water they found the skeleton of the dead man, his clothes uninjured
but every particle of flesh stripped from his bones. Whether he had
drowned, and the fishes had then eaten his body, or whether they had
killed him it was impossible to say. They had not hurt the clothes,
getting in under them, which made it seem likely that there had been
no struggle. These man-eating fish are a veritable scourge in the
waters they frequent. But it must not be understood by this that the
piranhas--or, for the matter of that, the New-World caymans and
crocodiles--ever become such dreaded foes of man as for instance the
man-eating crocodiles of Africa. Accidents occur, and there are
certain places where swimming and bathing are dangerous; but in most
places the people swim freely, although they are usually careful to
find spots they believe safe or else to keep together and make a
splashing in the water.
During his trips Colonel Rondon had met with various experiences with
wild creatures. The Paraguayan caymans are not ordinarily dangerous to
man; but they do sometimes become man-eaters and should be destroyed
whenever the opportunity offers. The huge caymans and crocodiles of
the Amazon are far more dangerous, and the colonel knew of repeated
instances where men, women and children had become their victims. Once
while dynamiting a stream for fish for his starving party he partially
stunned a giant anaconda, which he killed as it crept slowly off. He
said that it was of a size that no other anaconda he had ever seen
even approached, and that in his opinion such a brute if hungry would
readily attack a full-grown man. Twice smaller anacondas had attacked
his dogs; one was carried under water--for the anaconda is a water-
loving serpent--but he rescued it. One of his men was bitten by a
jararaca; he killed the venomous snake, but was not discovered and
brought back to camp until it was too late to save his life. The puma
Colonel Rondon had found to be as cowardly as I have always found it,
but the jaguar was a formidable beast, which occasionally turned man-
eater, and often charged savagely when brought to bay. He had known a
hunter to be killed by a jaguar he was following in thick grass cover.
All such enemies, however, he regarded as utterly trivial compared to
the real dangers of the wilderness--the torment and menace of attacks
by the swarming insects, by mosquitoes and the even more intolerable
tiny gnats, by the ticks, and by the vicious poisonous ants which
occasionally cause villages and even whole districts to be deserted by
human beings. These insects, and the fevers they cause, and dysentery
and starvation and wearing hardship and accidents in rapids are what
the pioneer explorers have to fear. The conversation was to me most
interesting. The colonel spoke French about to the extent I did; but
of course he and the others preferred Portuguese; and then Kermit was
the interpreter.
In the evening, soon after moonrise, we stopped for wood at the little
Brazilian town of Porto Martinho. There are about twelve hundred
inhabitants. Some of the buildings were of stone; a large private
house with a castellated tower was of stone; there were shops, and a
post-office, stores, a restaurant and billiard-hall, and warehouses
for matte, of which much is grown in the region roundabout. Most of
the houses were low, with overhanging, sloping caves; and there were
gardens with high walls, inside of which trees rose, many of them
fragrant. We wandered through the wide, dusty streets, and along the
narrow sidewalks. It was a hot, still evening; the smell of the
tropics was on the heavy December air. Through the open doors and
windows we caught dim glimpses of the half-clad inmates of the poorer
houses; women and young girls sat outside their thresholds in the
moonlight. All whom we met were most friendly: the captain of the
little Brazilian garrison; the intendente, a local trader; another
trader and ranchman, a Uruguayan, who had just received his newspaper
containing my speech in Montevideo, and who, as I gathered from what I
understood of his rather voluble Spanish, was much impressed by my
views on democracy, honesty, liberty, and order (rather well-worn
topics); and a Catalan who spoke French, and who was accompanied by
his pretty daughter, a dear little girl of eight or ten, who said with
much pride that she spoke three languages--Brazilian, Spanish, and
Catalan! Her father expressed strongly his desire for a church and for
a school in the little city.
When at last the wood was aboard we resumed our journey. The river was
like glass. In the white moonlight the palms on the edge of the banks
stood mirrored in the still water. We sat forward and as we rounded
the curves the long silver reaches of the great stream stretched ahead
of us, and the ghostly outlines of hills rose in the distance. Here
and there prairie fires burned, and the red glow warred with the
moon's radiance.
Next morning was overcast. Occasionally we passed a wood-yard, or
factory, or cabin, now on the eastern, the Brazilian, now on the
western, the Paraguayan, bank. The Paraguay was known to men of
European birth, bore soldiers and priests and merchants as they sailed
and rowed up and down the current of its stream, and beheld little
towns and forts rise on its banks, long before the Mississippi had
become the white man's highway. Now, along its upper course, the
settlements are much like those on the Mississippi at the end of the
first quarter of the last century; and in the not distant future it
will witness a burst of growth and prosperity much like that which the
Mississippi saw when the old men of today were very young.
In the early forenoon we stopped at a little Paraguayan hamlet,
nestling in the green growth under a group of low hills by the river-
brink. On one of these hills stood a picturesque old stone fort, known
as Fort Bourbon in the Spanish, the colonial, days. Now the Paraguayan
flag floats over it, and it is garrisoned by a handful of Paraguayan
soldiers. Here Father Zahm baptized two children, the youngest of a
large family of fair-skinned, light-haired small people, whose father
was a Paraguayan and the mother an "Oriental," or Uruguayan. No priest
had visited the village for three years, and the children were
respectively one and two years of age. The sponsors included the local
commandante and a married couple from Austria. In answer to what was
supposed to be the perfunctory question whether they were Catholics,
the parents returned the unexpected answer that they were not. Further
questioning elicited the fact that the father called himself a "free-
thinking Catholic," and the mother said she was a "Protestant
Catholic," her mother having been a Protestant, the daughter of an
immigrant from Normandy. However, it appeared that the older children
had been baptized by the Bishop of Asuncion, so Father Zahm at the
earnest request of the parents proceeded with the ceremony. They were
good people; and, although they wished liberty to think exactly as
they individually pleased, they also wished to be connected and to
have their children connected with some church, by preference the
church of the majority of their people. A very short experience of
communities where there is no church ought to convince the most
heterodox of the absolute need of a church. I earnestly wish that
there could be such an increase in the personnel and equipment of the
Catholic Church in South America as to permit the establishment of one
good and earnest priest in every village or little community in the
far interior. Nor is there any inconsistency between this wish and the
further wish that there could be a marked extension and development of
the native Protestant churches, such as I saw established here and
there in Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina, and of the Y. M. C.
Associations. The bulk of these good people who profess religion will
continue to be Catholics, but the spiritual needs of a more or less
considerable minority will best be met by the establishment of
Protestant churches, or in places even of a Positivist Church or
Ethical Culture Society. Not only is the establishment of such
churches a good thing for the body politic as a whole, but a good
thing for the Catholic Church itself; for their presence is a constant
spur to activity and clean and honorable conduct, and a constant
reflection on sloth and moral laxity. The government in each of these
commonwealths is doing everything possible to further the cause of
education, and the tendency is to treat education as peculiarly a
function of government and to make it, where the government acts, non-
sectarian, obligatory, and free--a cardinal doctrine of our own great
democracy, to which we are committed by every principle of sound
Americanism. There must be absolute religious liberty, for tyranny and
intolerance are as abhorrent in matters intellectual and spiritual as
in matters political and material; and more and more we must all
realize that conduct is of infinitely greater importance than dogma.
But no democracy can afford to overlook the vital importance of the
ethical and spiritual, the truly religious, element in life; and in
practice the average good man grows clearly to understand this, and to
express the need in concrete form by saying that no community can make
much headway if it does not contain both a church and a school.
We took breakfast--the eleven-o'clock Brazilian breakfast--on Colonel
Rondon's boat. Caymans were becoming more plentiful. The ugly brutes
lay on the sand-flats and mud-banks like logs, always with the head
raised, sometimes with the jaws open. They are often dangerous to
domestic animals, and are always destructive to fish, and it is good
to shoot them. I killed half a dozen, and missed nearly as many more--
a throbbing boat does not improve one's aim. We passed forests of
palms that extended for leagues, and vast marshy meadows, where
storks, herons, and ibis were gathered, with flocks of cormorants and
darters on the sand-bars, and stilts, skimmers, and clouds of
beautiful swaying terns in the foreground. About noon we passed the
highest point which the old Spanish conquistadores and explorers,
Irala and Ayolas, had reached in the course of their marvellous
journeys in the first half of the sixteenth century--at a time when
there was not a settlement in what is now the United States, and when
hardly a single English sea captain had ventured so much as to cross
the Atlantic.
By the following day the country on the east bank had become a vast
marshy plain dotted here and there by tree-clad patches of higher
land. The morning was rainy; a contrast to the fine weather we had
hitherto encountered. We passed wood-yards and cattle-ranches. At one
of the latter the owner, an Argentine of Irish parentage, who still
spoke English with the accent of the land of his parents' nativity,
remarked that this was the first time the American flag had been seen
on the upper Paraguay; for our gunboat carried it at the masthead.
Early in the afternoon, having reached the part where both banks of
the river were Brazilian territory, we came to the old colonial
Portuguese fort of Coimbra. It stands where two steep hills rise, one
on either side of the river, and it guards the water-gorge between
them. It was captured by the Paraguayans in the war of nearly half a
century ago. Some modern guns have been mounted, and there is a
garrison of Brazilian troops. The white fort is perched on the
hillside, where it clings and rises, terrace above terrace, with
bastion and parapet and crenellated wall. At the foot of the hill, on
the riverine plain, stretches the old-time village with its roofs of
palm. In the village dwell several hundred souls, almost entirely the
officers and soldiers and their families. There is one long street.
The one-story, daub-and-wattle houses have low eaves and steep sloping
roofs of palm-leaves or of split palm-trunks. Under one or two old but
small trees there are rude benches; and for a part of the length of
the street there is a rough stone sidewalk. A little graveyard, some
of the tombs very old, stands at one end. As we passed down the street
the wives and the swarming children of the garrison were at the doors
and windows; there were women and girls with skins as fair as any in
the northland, and others that were predominantly negro. Most were of
intervening shades. All this was paralleled among the men; and the
fusion of the colors was going on steadily.
Around the village black vultures were gathered. Not long before
reaching it we passed some rounded green trees, their tops covered
with the showy wood-ibis; at the same time we saw behind them, farther
inland, other trees crowded with the more delicate forms of the
shining white egrets.
The river now widened so that in places it looked like a long lake; it
wound in every direction through the endless marshy plain, whose
surface was broken here and there by low mountains. The splendor of
the sunset I never saw surpassed. We were steaming east toward clouds
of storm. The river ran, a broad highway of molten gold, into the
flaming sky; the far-off mountains loomed purple across the marshes;
belts of rich green, the river banks stood out on either side against
the rose-hues of the rippling water; in front, as we forged steadily
onward, hung the tropic night, dim and vast.
On December 15 we reached Corumba. For three or four miles before it
is reached the west bank, on which it stands, becomes high rocky
ground, falling away into cliffs. The country roundabout was evidently
well peopled. We saw gauchos, cattle-herders--the equivalent of our
own cowboys--riding along the bank. Women were washing clothes, and
their naked children bathing, on the shore; we were told that caymans
and piranhas rarely ventured near a place where so much was going on,
and that accidents generally occurred in ponds or lonely stretches of
the river. Several steamers came out to meet us, and accompanied us
for a dozen miles, with bands playing and the passengers cheering,
just as if we were nearing some town on the Hudson.
Corumba is on a steep hillside, with wide, roughly paved streets, some
of them lined with beautiful trees that bear scarlet flowers, and with
well-built houses, most of them of one story, some of two or three
stories. We were greeted with a reception by the municipal council,
and were given a state dinner. The hotel, kept by an Italian, was as
comfortable as possible--stone floors, high ceilings, big windows and
doors, a cool, open courtyard, and a shower-bath. Of course Corumba is
still a frontier town. The vehicles ox-carts and mule-carts; there are
no carriages; and oxen as well as mules are used for riding. The water
comes from a big central well; around it the water-carts gather, and
their contents are then peddled around at the different houses. The
families showed the mixture of races characteristic of Brazil; one
mother, after the children had been photographed in their ordinary
costume, begged that we return and take them in their Sunday clothes,
which was accordingly done. In a year the railway from Rio will reach
Corumba; and then this city, and the country roundabout, will see much
development.
At this point we rejoined the rest of the party, and very glad we were
to see them. Cherrie and Miller had already collected some eight
hundred specimens of mammals and birds.