IX. DOWN AN UNKNOWN RIVER INTO THE EQUATORIAL FOREST

The mightiest river in the world is the Amazon. It runs from west to

east, from the sunset to the sunrise, from the Andes to the Atlantic.

The main stream flows almost along the equator, while the basin which

contains its affluents extends many degrees north and south of the

equator. The gigantic equatorial river basin is filled with an immense

forest, the largest in the world, with which no other forest can be

compared save those of western Africa and Malaysia. We were within the

southern boundary of this great equatorial forest, on a river which

was not merely unknown but unguessed at, no geographer having ever

suspected its existence. This river flowed northward toward the

equator, but whither it would go, whether it would turn one way or

another, the length of its course, where it would come out, the

character of the stream itself, and the character of the dwellers

along its banks--all these things were yet to be discovered.

One morning while the canoes were being built Kermit and I walked a

few kilometres down the river and surveyed the next rapids below. The

vast still forest was almost empty of life. We found old Indian signs.

There were very few birds, and these in the tops of the tall trees. We

saw a recent tapir track; and under a cajazeira tree by the bank there

were the tracks of capybaras which had been eating the fallen fruit.

This fruit is delicious and would make a valuable addition to our

orchards. The tree although tropical is hardy, thrives when

domesticated, and propagates rapidly from shoots. The Department of

Agriculture should try whether it would not grow in southern

California and Florida. This was the tree from which the doctor's

family name was taken. His parental grandfather, although of

Portuguese blood, was an intensely patriotic Brazilian. He was a very

young man when the independence of Brazil was declared, and did not

wish to keep the Portuguese family name; so he changed it to that of

the fine Brazilian tree in question. Such change of family names is

common in Brazil. Doctor Vital Brazil, the student of poisonous

serpents, was given his name by his father, whose own family name was

entirely different; and his brother's name was again different.

There were tremendous downpours of rain, lasting for a couple of hours

and accompanied by thunder and lightning. But on the whole it seemed

as if the rains were less heavy and continuous than they had been. We

all of us had to help in building the canoes now and then. Kermit,

accompanied by Antonio the Parecis and Joao, crossed the river and

walked back to the little river that had entered from the east, so as

to bring back a report of it to Colonel Rondon. Lyra took

observations, by the sun and by the stars. We were in about latitude

11 degrees 2 minutes south, and due north of where we had started. The

river had wound so that we had gone two miles for every one we made

northward. Our progress had been very slow; and until we got out of

the region of incessant rapids, with their attendant labor and hazard,

it was not likely that we should go much faster.

On the morning of March 22 we started in our six canoes. We made ten

kilometres. Twenty minutes after starting we came to the first rapids.

Here every one walked except the three best paddlers, who took the

canoes down in succession--an hour's job. Soon after this we struck a

bees' nest in the top of a tree overhanging the river; our steersman

climbed out and robbed it, but, alas! lost the honey on the way back.

We came to a small steep fall which we did not dare run in our over-

laden, clumsy, and cranky dugouts. Fortunately, we were able to follow

a deep canal which led off for a kilometre, returning just below the

falls, fifty yards from where it had started. Then, having been in the

boats and in motion only one hour and a half, we came to a long

stretch of rapids which it took us six hours to descend, and we camped

at the foot. Everything was taken out of the canoes, and they were run

down in succession. At one difficult and perilous place they were let

down by ropes; and even thus we almost lost one.

We went down the right bank. On the opposite bank was an Indian

village, evidently inhabited only during the dry season. The marks on

the stumps of trees showed that these Indians had axes and knives; and

there were old fields in which maize, beans, and cotton had been

grown. The forest dripped and steamed. Rubber-trees were plentiful. At

one point the tops of a group of tall trees were covered with yellow-

white blossoms. Others bore red blossoms. Many of the big trees, of

different kinds, were buttressed at the base with great thin walls of

wood. Others, including both palms and ordinary trees, showed an even

stranger peculiarity. The trunk, near the base, but sometimes six or

eight feet from the ground, was split into a dozen or twenty branches

or small trunks which sloped outward in tent-like shape, each becoming

a root. The larger trees of this type looked as if their trunks were

seated on the tops of the pole frames of Indian tepees. At one point

in the stream, to our great surprise, we saw a flying fish. It skimmed

the water like a swallow for over twenty yards.

Although we made only ten kilometres we worked hard all day. The last

canoes were brought down and moored to the bank at nightfall. Our

tents were pitched in the darkness.

Next day we made thirteen kilometres. We ran, all told, a little over

an hour and three-quarters. Seven hours were spent in getting past a

series of rapids at which the portage, over rocky and difficult

ground, was a kilometre long. The canoes were run down empty--a

hazardous run, in which one of them upset.

Yet while we were actually on the river, paddling and floating

downstream along the reaches of swift, smooth water, it was very

lovely. When we started in the morning the day was overcast and the

air was heavy with vapor. Ahead of us the shrouded river stretched

between dim walls of forest, half seen in the mist. Then the sun

burned up the fog, and loomed through it in a red splendor that

changed first to gold and then to molten white. In the dazzling light,

under the brilliant blue of the sky, every detail of the magnificent

forest was vivid to the eye: the great trees, the network of bush

ropes, the caverns of greenery, where thick-leaved vines covered all

things else. Wherever there was a hidden boulder the surface of the

current was broken by waves. In one place, in midstream, a pyramidal

rock thrust itself six feet above the surface of the river. On the

banks we found fresh Indian sign.

At home in Vermont Cherrie is a farmer, with a farm of six hundred

acres, most of it woodland. As we sat at the foot of the rapids,

watching for the last dugouts with their naked paddlers to swing into

sight round the bend through the white water, we talked of the

northern spring that was just beginning. He sells cream, eggs,

poultry, potatoes, honey, occasionally pork and veal; but at this

season it was the time for the maple sugar crop. He has a sugar

orchard, where he taps twelve hundred trees and hopes soon to tap as

many more in addition. Said Cherrie: "It's a busy time now for Fred

Rice"--Fred Rice is the hired man, and in sugar time the Cherrie boys

help him with enthusiasm, and, moreover, are paid with exact justice

for the work they do. There is much wild life about the farm, although

it is near Brattleboro. One night in early spring a bear left his

tracks near the sugar house; and now and then in summer Cherrie has

had to sleep in the garden to keep the deer away from the beans,

cabbages, and beets.

There was not much bird life in the forest, but Cherrie kept getting

species new to the collection. At this camp he shot an interesting

little ant-thrush. It was the size of a warbler, jet-black, with white

under-surfaces of the wings and tail, white on the tail-feathers, and

a large spot of white on the back, normally almost concealed, the

feathers on the back being long and fluffy. When he shot the bird, a

male, it was showing off before a dull-colored little bird, doubtless

the female; and the chief feature of the display was this white spot

on the back. The white feathers were raised and displayed so that the

spot flashed like the "chrysanthemum" on a prongbuck whose curiosity

has been aroused. In the gloom of the forest the bird was hard to see,

but the flashing of this patch of white feathers revealed it at once,

attracting immediate attention. It was an excellent example of a

coloration mark which served a purely advertising purpose; apparently

it was part of a courtship display. The bird was about thirty feet up

in the branches.

In the morning, just before leaving this camp, a tapir swam across

stream a little way above us; but unfortunately we could not get a

shot at it. An ample supply of tapir beef would have meant much to us.

We had started with fifty days' rations; but this by no means meant

full rations, in the sense of giving every man all he wanted to eat.

We had two meals a day, and were on rather short commons--both our

mess and the camaradas'--except when we got plenty of palm-tops. For

our mess we had the boxes chosen by Fiala, each containing a day's

rations for six men, our number. But we made each box last a day and a

half, or at times two days, and in addition we gave some of the food

to the camaradas. It was only on the rare occasions when we had killed

some monkeys or curassows, or caught some fish, that everybody had

enough. We would have welcomed that tapir. So far the game, fish, and

fruit had been too scarce to be an element of weight in our food

supply. In an exploring trip like ours, through a difficult and

utterly unknown country, especially if densely forested, there is

little time to halt, and game cannot be counted on. It is only in

lands like our own West thirty years ago, like South Africa in the

middle of the last century, like East Africa to-day that game can be

made the chief food supply. On this trip our only substantial food

supply from the country hitherto had been that furnished by the

palmtops. Two men were detailed every day to cut down palms for food.

A kilometre and a half after leaving this camp we came on a stretch of

big rapids. The river here twists in loops, and we had heard the

roaring of these rapids the previous afternoon. Then we passed out of

earshot of them; but Antonio Correa, our best waterman, insisted all

along that the roaring meant rapids worse than any we had encountered

for some days. "I was brought up in the water, and I know it like a

fish, and all its sounds," said he. He was right. We had to carry the

loads nearly a kilometre that afternoon, and the canoes were pulled

out on the bank so that they might be in readiness to be dragged

overland next day. Rondon, Lyra, Kermit, and Antonio Correa explored

both sides of the river. On the opposite or left bank they found the

mouth of a considerable river, bigger than the Rio Kermit, flowing in

from the west and making its entrance in the middle of the rapids.

This river we christened the Taunay, in honor of a distinguished

Brazilian, an explorer, a soldier, a senator, who was also a writer of

note. Kermit had with him two of his novels, and I had read one of his

books dealing with a disastrous retreat during the Paraguayan

war.

Next morning, the 25th, the canoes were brought down. A path was

chopped for them and rollers laid; and half-way down the rapids Lyra

and Kermit, who were overseeing the work as well as doing their share

of the pushing and hauling, got them into a canal of smooth water,

which saved much severe labor. As our food supply lowered we were

constantly more desirous of economizing the strength of the men. One

day more would complete a month since we had embarked on the Duvida as

we had started in February, the lunar and calendar months coincided.

We had used up over half our provisions. We had come only a trifle

over 160 kilometres, thanks to the character and number of the rapids.

We believed we had three or four times the distance yet to go before

coming to a part of the river where we might hope to meet assistance,

either from rubber-gatherers, or from Pyrineus, if he were really

coming up the river which we were going down. If the rapids continued

to be as they had been it could not be much more than three weeks

before we were in straits for food, aside from the ever-present danger

of accident in the rapids; and if our progress were no faster than it

had been--and we were straining to do our best--we would in such event

still have several hundreds of kilometres of unknown river before us.

We could not even hazard a guess at what was in front. The river was

now a really big river, and it seemed impossible that it could flow

either into the Gy-Parana or the Tapajos. It was possible that it went

into the Canuma, a big affluent of the Madeira low down, and next to

the Tapajos. It was more probable that it was the headwaters of the

Aripuanan, a river which, as I have said, was not even named on the

excellent English map of Brazil I carried. Nothing but the mouth had

been known to any geographer; but the lower course had long been known

to rubber-gatherers, and recently a commission from the government of

Amazonas had partway ascended one branch of it--not as far as the

rubber-gatherers had gone, and, as it turned out, not the branch we

came down.

Two of our men were down with fever. Another man, Julio, a fellow of

powerful frame, was utterly worthless, being an inborn, lazy shirk

with the heart of a ferocious cur in the body of a bullock. The others

were good men, some of them very good indeed. They were under the

immediate supervision of Pedrinho Craveiro, who was first-class in

every way.

This camp was very lovely. It was on the edge of a bay, into which the

river broadened immediately below the rapids. There was a beach of

white sand, where we bathed and washed our clothes. All around us, and

across the bay, and on both sides of the long water-street made by the

river, rose the splendid forest. There were flocks of parakeets

colored green, blue, and red. Big toucans called overhead, lustrous

green-black in color, with white throats, red gorgets, red-and-yellow

tail coverts, and huge black-and-yellow bills. Here the soil was

fertile; it will be a fine site for a coffee-plantation when this

region is open to settlement. Surely such a rich and fertile land

cannot be permitted to remain idle, to lie as a tenantless wilderness,

while there are such teeming swarms of human beings in the

overcrowded, over-peopled countries of the Old World. The very rapids

and waterfalls which now make the navigation of the river so difficult

and dangerous would drive electric trolleys up and down its whole

length and far out on either side, and run mills and factories, and

lighten the labor on farms. With the incoming of settlement and with

the steady growth of knowledge how to fight and control tropical

diseases, fear of danger to health would vanish. A land like this is a

hard land for the first explorers, and perhaps for their immediate

followers, but not for the people who come after them.

In mid-afternoon we were once more in the canoes; but we had paddled

with the current only a few minutes, we had gone only a kilometre,

when the roar of rapids in front again forced us to haul up to the

bank. As usual, Rondon, Lyra, and Kermit, with Antonio Correa,

explored both sides while camp was being pitched. The rapids were

longer and of steeper descent than the last, but on the opposite or

western side there was a passage down which we thought we could get

the empty dugouts at the cost of dragging them only a few yards at one

spot. The loads were to be carried down the hither bank, for a

kilometre, to the smooth water. The river foamed between great rounded

masses of rock, and at one point there was a sheer fall of six or

eight feet. We found and ate wild pineapples. Wild beans were in

flower. At dinner we had a toucan and a couple of parrots, which were

very good.

All next day was spent by Lyra in superintending our three best

watermen as they took the canoes down the west side of the rapids, to

the foot, at the spot to which the camp had meantime been shifted. In

the forest some of the huge sipas, or rope vines, which were as big as

cables, bore clusters of fragrant flowers. The men found several

honey-trees, and fruits of various kinds, and small cocoanuts; they

chopped down an ample number of palms, for the palm-cabbage; and, most

important of all, they gathered a quantity of big Brazil-nuts, which

when roasted tasted like the best of chestnuts and are nutritious; and

they caught a number of big piranhas, which were good eating. So we

all had a feast, and everybody had enough to eat and was happy.

By these rapids, at the fall, Cherrie found some strange carvings on a

bare mass of rock. They were evidently made by men a long time ago. As

far as is known, the Indians thereabouts make no such figures now.

They were in two groups, one on the surface of the rock facing the

land, the other on that facing the water. The latter were nearly

obliterated. The former were in good preservation, the figures sharply

cut into the rock. They consisted, upon the upper flat part of the

rock, of four multiple circles with a dot in the middle (O), very

accurately made and about a foot and a half in diameter; and below

them, on the side of the rock, four multiple m's or inverted w's (M).

What these curious symbols represented, or who made them, we could

not, of course, form the slightest idea. It may be that in a very

remote past some Indian tribes of comparatively advanced culture had

penetrated to this lovely river, just as we had now come to it. Before

white men came to South America there had already existed therein

various semi-civilizations, some rude, others fairly advanced, which

rose, flourished, and persisted through immemorial ages, and then

vanished. The vicissitudes in the history of humanity during its stay

on this southern continent have been as strange, varied, and

inexplicable as paleontology shows to have been the case, on the same

continent, in the history of the higher forms of animal life during

the age of mammals. Colonel Rondon stated that such figures as these

are not found anywhere else in Matto Grosso where he has been, and

therefore it was all the more strange to find them in this one place

on the unknown river, never before visited by white men, which we were

descending.

Next morning we went about three kilometers before coming to some

steep hills, beautiful to look upon, clad as they were in dense, tall,

tropical forest, but ominous of new rapids. Sure enough, at their foot

we had to haul up and prepare for a long portage. The canoes we ran

down empty. Even so, we were within an ace of losing two, the lashed

couple in which I ordinarily journeyed. In a sharp bend of the rapids,

between two big curls, they were swept among the boulders and under

the matted branches which stretched out from the bank. They filled,

and the racing current pinned them where they were, one partly on the

other. All of us had to help get them clear. Their fastenings were

chopped asunder with axes. Kermit and half a dozen of the men,

stripped to the skin, made their way to a small rock island in the

little falls just above the canoes, and let down a rope which we tied

to the outermost canoe. The rest of us, up to our armpits and barely

able to keep our footing as we slipped and stumbled among the boulders

in the swift current, lifted and shoved while Kermit and his men

pulled the rope and fastened the slack to a half-submerged tree. Each

canoe in succession was hauled up the little rock island, baled, and

then taken down in safety by two paddlers. It was nearly four o'clock

before we were again ready to start, having been delayed by a rain-

storm so heavy that we could not see across the river. Ten minutes'

run took us to the head of another series of rapids; the exploring

party returned with the news that we had an all day's job ahead of us;

and we made camp in the rain, which did not matter much, as we were

already drenched through. It was impossible, with the wet wood, to

make a fire sufficiently hot to dry all our soggy things, for the rain

was still falling. A tapir was seen from our boat, but, as at the

moment we were being whisked round in a complete circle by a

whirlpool, I did not myself see it in time to shoot.

Next morning we went down a kilometre, and then landed on the other

side of the river. The canoes were run down, and the loads carried to

the other side of a little river coming in from the west, which

Colonel Rondon christened Cherrie River. Across this we went on a

bridge consisting of a huge tree felled by Macario, one of our best

men. Here we camped, while Rondon, Lyra, Kermit, and Antonio Correa

explored what was ahead. They were absent until mid-afternoon. Then

they returned with the news that we were among ranges of low

mountains, utterly different in formation from the high plateau region

to which the first rapids, those we had come to on the 2nd of March,

belonged. Through the first range of these mountains the river ran in

a gorge, some three kilometres long, immediately ahead of us. The

ground was so rough and steep that it would be impossible to drag the

canoes over it and difficult enough to carry the loads; and the rapids

were so bad, containing several falls, one of at least ten metres in

height, that it was doubtful how many of the canoes we could get down

them. Kermit, who was the only man with much experience of rope work,

was the only man who believed we could get the canoes down at all; and

it was, of course, possible that we should have to build new ones at

the foot to supply the place of any that were lost or left behind. In

view of the length and character of the portage, and of all the

unpleasant possibilities that were ahead, and of the need of keeping

every pound of food, it was necessary to reduce weight in every

possible way and to throw away everything except the barest

necessities.

We thought we had reduced our baggage before; but now we cut to the

bone. We kept the fly for all six of us to sleep under. Kermit's shoes

had gone, thanks to the amount of work in the water which he had been

doing; and he took the pair I had been wearing, while I put on my

spare pair. In addition to the clothes I wore, I kept one set of

pajamas, a spare pair of drawers, a spare pair of socks, half a dozen

handkerchiefs, my wash-kit, my pocket medicine-case, and a little bag

containing my spare spectacles, gun-grease, some adhesive plaster,

some needles and thread, the "fly-dope," and my purse and letter of

credit, to be used at Manaos. All of these went into the bag

containing my cot, blanket, and mosquito-net. I also carried a

cartridge-bag containing my cartridges, head-net, and gauntlets.

Kermit cut down even closer; and the others about as close.

The last three days of March we spent in getting to the foot of the

rapids in this gorge. Lyra and Kermit, with four of the best watermen,

handled the empty canoes. The work was not only difficult and

laborious in the extreme, but hazardous; for the walls of the gorge

were so sheer that at the worst places they had to cling to narrow

shelves on the face of the rock, while letting the canoes down with

ropes. Meanwhile Rondon surveyed and cut a trail for the burden-

bearers, and superintended the portage of the loads. The rocky sides

of the gorge were too steep for laden men to attempt to traverse them.

Accordingly the trail had to go over the top of the mountain, both the

ascent and the descent of the rock-strewn, forest-clad slopes being

very steep. It was hard work to carry loads over such a trail. From

the top of the mountain, through an opening in the trees on the edge

of a cliff, there was a beautiful view of the country ahead. All

around and in front of us there were ranges of low mountains about the

height of the lower ridges of the Alleghenies. Their sides were steep

and they were covered with the matted growth of the tropical forest.

Our next camping-place, at the foot of the gorge, was almost beneath

us, and from thence the river ran in a straight line, flecked with

white water, for about a kilometre. Then it disappeared behind and

between mountain ridges, which we supposed meant further rapids. It

was a view well worth seeing; but, beautiful although the country

ahead of us was, its character was such as to promise further

hardships, difficulty, and exhausting labor, and especially further

delay; and delay was a serious matter to men whose food supply was

beginning to run short, whose equipment was reduced to the minimum,

who for a month, with the utmost toil, had made very slow progress,

and who had no idea of either the distance or the difficulties of the

route in front of them.

There was not much life in the woods, big or little. Small birds were

rare, although Cherrie's unwearied efforts were rewarded from time to

time by a species new to the collection. There were tracks of tapir,

deer, and agouti; and if we had taken two or three days to devote to

nothing else than hunting them we might perchance have killed

something; but the chance was much too uncertain, the work we were

doing was too hard and wearing, and the need of pressing forward

altogether too great to permit us to spend any time in such manner.

The hunting had to come in incidentally. This type of well nigh

impenetrable forest is the one in which it is most difficult to get

even what little game exists therein. A couple of curassows and a big

monkey were killed by the colonel and Kermit. On the day the monkey

was brought in Lyra, Kermit, and their four associates had spent from

sunrise to sunset in severe and at moments dangerous toil among the

rocks and in the swift water, and the fresh meat was appreciated. The

head, feet, tail, skin, and entrails were boiled for the gaunt and

ravenous dogs. The flesh gave each of us a few mouthfuls; and how good

those mouthfuls tasted!

Cherrie, in addition to being out after birds in every spare moment,

helped in all emergencies. He was a veteran in the work of the tropic

wilderness. We talked together often, and of many things, for our

views of life, and of a man's duty to his wife and children, to other

men, and to women, and to the state in peace and war, were in all

essentials the same. His father had served all through the Civil War,

entering an Iowa cavalry regiment as a private and coming out as a

captain; his breast-bone was shattered by a blow from a musket-butt,

in hand-to-hand fighting at Shiloh.

During this portage the weather favored us. We were coming toward the

close of the rainy season. On the last day of the month, when we moved

camp to the foot of the gorge, there was a thunder-storm; but on the

whole we were not bothered by rain until the last night, when it

rained heavily, driving under the fly so as to wet my cot and bedding.

However, I slept comfortably enough, rolled in the damp blanket.

Without the blanket I should have been uncomfortable; a blanket is a

necessity for health. On the third day Lyra and Kermit, with their

daring and hard-working watermen, after wearing labor, succeeded in

getting five canoes through the worst of the rapids to the chief fall.

The sixth, which was frail and weak, had its bottom beaten out on the

jagged rocks of the broken water. On this night, although I thought I

had put my clothes out of reach, both the termites and the

carregadores ants got at them, ate holes in one boot, ate one leg of

my drawers, and riddled my handkerchief; and I now had nothing to

replace anything that was destroyed.

Next day Lyra, Kermit, and their camaradas brought the five canoes

that were left down to camp. They had in four days accomplished a work

of incredible labor and of the utmost importance; for at the first

glance it had seemed an absolute impossibility to avoid abandoning the

canoes when we found that the river sank into a cataract broken

torrent at the bottom of a canyon-like gorge between steep mountains.

On April 2 we once more started, wondering how soon we should strike

other rapids in the mountains ahead, and whether in any reasonable

time we should, as the aneroid indicated, be so low down that we

should necessarily be in a plain where we could make a journey of at

least a few days without rapids. We had been exactly a month going

through an uninterrupted succession of rapids. During that month we

had come only about 110 kilometres, and had descended nearly 150

metres--the figures are approximate but fairly accurate. We had lost

four of the canoes with which we started, and one other, which we had

built, and the life of one man; and the life of a dog which by its

death had in all probability saved the life of Colonel Rondon. In a

straight line northward, toward our supposed destination, we had not

made more than a mile and a quarter a day; at the cost of bitter toil

for most of the party, of much risk for some of the party, and of some

risk and some hardship for all the party. Most of the camaradas were

downhearted, naturally enough, and occasionally asked one of us if we

really believed that we should ever get out alive; and we had to cheer

them up as best we could.

There was no change in our work for the time being. We made but three

kilometres that day. Most of the party walked all the time; but the

dugouts carried the luggage until we struck the head of the series of

rapids which were to take up the next two or three days. The river

rushed through a wild gorge, a chasm or canyon, between two mountains.

Its sides were very steep, mere rock walls, although in most places so

covered with the luxuriant growth of the trees and bushes that clung

in the crevices, and with green moss, that the naked rock was hardly

seen. Rondon, Lyra, and Kermit, who were in front, found a small level

spot, with a beach of sand, and sent back word to camp there, while

they spent several hours in exploring the country ahead. The canoes

were run down empty, and the loads carried painfully along the face of

the cliffs; so bad was the trail that I found it rather hard to

follow, although carrying nothing but my rifle and cartridge bag. The

explorers returned with the information that the mountains stretched

ahead of us, and that there were rapids as far as they had gone. We

could only hope that the aneroid was not hopelessly out of kilter, and

that we should, therefore, fairly soon find ourselves in comparatively

level country. The severe toil, on a rather limited food supply, was

telling on the strength as well as on the spirits of the men; Lyra and

Kermit, in addition to their other work, performed as much actual

physical labor as any of them.

Next day, the 3rd of April, we began the descent of these sinister

rapids of the chasm. Colonel Rondon had gone to the summit of the

mountain in order to find a better trail for the burden-bearers, but

it was hopeless, and they had to go along the face of the cliffs. Such

an exploring expedition as that in which we were engaged of necessity

involves hard and dangerous labor, and perils of many kinds. To follow

down-stream an unknown river, broken by innumerable cataracts and

rapids, rushing through mountains of which the existence has never

been even guessed, bears no resemblance whatever to following even a

fairly dangerous river which has been thoroughly explored and has

become in some sort a highway, so that experienced pilots can be

secured as guides, while the portages have been pioneered and trails

chopped out, and every dangerous feature of the rapids is known

beforehand. In this case no one could foretell that the river would

cleave its way through steep mountain chains, cutting narrow clefts in

which the cliff walls rose almost sheer on either hand. When a rushing

river thus "canyons," as we used to say out West, and the mountains

are very steep, it becomes almost impossible to bring the canoes down

the river itself and utterly impossible to portage them along the

cliff sides, while even to bring the loads over the mountain is a task

of extraordinary labor and difficulty. Moreover, no one can tell how

many times the task will have to be repeated, or when it will end, or

whether the food will hold out; every hour of work in the rapids is

fraught with the possibility of the gravest disaster, and yet it is

imperatively necessary to attempt it; and all this is done in an

uninhabited wilderness, or else a wilderness tenanted only by

unfriendly savages, where failure to get through means death by

disease and starvation. Wholesale disasters to South American

exploring parties have been frequent. The first recent effort to

descend one of the unknown rivers to the Amazon from the Brazilian

highlands resulted in such a disaster. It was undertaken in 1889 by a

party about as large as ours under a Brazilian engineer officer,

Colonel Telles Peres. In descending some rapids they lost everything--

canoes, food, medicine, implements--everything. Fever smote them, and

then starvation. All of them died except one officer and two men, who

were rescued months later. Recently, in Guiana, a wilderness veteran,

Andre, lost two-thirds of his party by starvation. Genuine wilderness

exploration is as dangerous as warfare. The conquest of wild nature

demands the utmost vigor, hardihood, and daring, and takes from the

conquerors a heavy toll of life and health.

Lyra, Kermit, and Cherrie, with four of the men, worked the canoes

half-way down the canyon. Again and again it was touch and go whether

they could get by a given point. At one spot the channel of the

furious torrent was only fifteen yards across. One canoe was lost, so

that of the seven with which we had started only two were left.

Cherrie labored with the other men at times, and also stood as guard

over them, for, while actually working, of course no one could carry a

rifle. Kermit's experience in bridge building was invaluable in

enabling him to do the rope work by which alone it was possible to get

the canoes down the canyon. He and Lyra had now been in the water for

days. Their clothes were never dry. Their shoes were rotten. The

bruises on their feet and legs had become sores. On their bodies some

of the insect bites had become festering wounds, as indeed was the

case with all of us. Poisonous ants, biting flies, ticks, wasps, bees

were a perpetual torment. However, no one had yet been bitten by a

venomous serpent, a scorpion, or a centipede, although we had killed

all of the three within camp limits.

Under such conditions whatever is evil in men's natures comes to the

front. On this day a strange and terrible tragedy occurred. One of the

camaradas, a man of pure European blood, was the man named Julio, of

whom I have already spoken. He was a very powerful fellow and had been

importunately eager to come on the expedition; and he had the

reputation of being a good worker. But, like so many men of higher

standing, he had had no idea of what such an expedition really meant,

and under the strain of toil, hardship, and danger his nature showed

its true depths of selfishness, cowardice, and ferocity. He shirked

all work. He shammed sickness. Nothing could make him do his share;

and yet unlike his self-respecting fellows he was always shamelessly

begging for favors. Kermit was the only one of our party who smoked;

and he was continually giving a little tobacco to some of the

camaradas, who worked especially well under him. The good men did not

ask for it; but Julio, who shirked every labor, was always, and always

in vain, demanding it. Colonel Rondon, Lyra, and Kermit each tried to

get work out of him, and in order to do anything with him had to

threaten to leave him in the wilderness. He threw all his tasks on his

comrades; and, moreover, he stole their food as well as ours. On such

an expedition the theft of food comes next to murder as a crime, and

should by rights be punished as such. We could not trust him to cut

down palms or gather nuts, because he would stay out and eat what

ought to have gone into the common store. Finally, the men on several

occasions themselves detected him stealing their food. Alone of the

whole party, and thanks to the stolen food, he had kept in full flesh

and bodily vigor.

One of our best men was a huge negro named Paixao Paishon--a corporal

and acting sergeant in the engineer corps. He had, by the way,

literally torn his trousers to pieces, so that he wore only the

tatters of a pair of old drawers until I gave him my spare trousers

when we lightened loads. He was a stern disciplinarian. One evening he

detected Julio stealing food and smashed him in the mouth. Julio came

crying to us, his face working with fear and malignant hatred; but

after investigation he was told that he had gotten off uncommonly

lightly. The men had three or four carbines, which were sometimes

carried by those who were not their owners.

On this morning, at the outset of the portage, Pedrinho discovered

Julio stealing some of the men's dried meat. Shortly afterward Paishon

rebuked him for, as usual, lagging behind. By this time we had reached

the place where the canoes were tied to the bank and then taken down

one at a time. We were sitting down, waiting for the last loads to be

brought along the trail. Pedrinho was still in the camp we had left.

Paishon had just brought in a load, left it on the ground with his

carbine beside it, and returned on the trail for another load. Julio

came in, put down his load, picked up the carbine, and walked back on

the trail, muttering to himself but showing no excitement. We thought

nothing of it, for he was always muttering; and occasionally one of

the men saw a monkey or big bird and tried to shoot it, so it was

never surprising to see a man with a carbine.

In a minute we heard a shot; and in a short time three or four of the

men came up the trail to tell us that Paishon was dead, having been

shot by Julio, who had fled into the woods. Colonel Rondon and Lyra

were ahead; I sent a messenger for them, directed Cherrie and Kermit

to stay where they were and guard the canoes and provisions, and

started down the trail with the doctor--an absolutely cool and plucky

man, with a revolver but no rifle--and a couple of the camaradas. We

soon passed the dead body of poor Paishon. He lay in a huddle, in a

pool of his own blood, where he had fallen, shot through the heart. I

feared that Julio had run amuck, and intended merely to take more

lives before he died, and that he would begin with Pedrinho, who was

alone and unarmed in the camp we had left. Accordingly I pushed on,

followed by my companions, looking sharply right and left; but when we

came to the camp the doctor quietly walked by me, remarking, "My eyes

are better than yours, colonel; if he is in sight I'll point him out

to you, as you have the rifle." However, he was not there, and the

others soon joined us with the welcome news that they had found the

carbine.

The murderer had stood to one side of the path and killed his victim,

when a dozen paces off, with deliberate and malignant purpose. Then

evidently his murderous hatred had at once given way to his innate

cowardice; and, perhaps hearing some one coming along the path, he

fled in panic terror into the wilderness. A tree had knocked the

carbine from his hand. His footsteps showed that after going some rods

he had started to return, doubtless for the carbine, but had fled

again, probably because the body had then been discovered. It was

questionable whether or not he would live to reach the Indian

villages, which were probably his goal. He was not a man to feel

remorse--never a common feeling; but surely that murderer was in a

living hell, as, with fever and famine leering at him from the

shadows, he made his way through the empty desolation of the

wilderness. Franca, the cook, quoted out of the melancholy proverbial

philosophy of the people the proverb: "No man knows the heart of any

one"; and then expressed with deep conviction a weird ghostly belief I

had never encountered before: "Paishon is following Julio now, and

will follow him until he dies; Paishon fell forward on his hands and

knees, and when a murdered man falls like that his ghost will follow

the slayer as long as the slayer lives."

We did not attempt to pursue the murderer. We could not legally put

him to death, although he was a soldier who in cold blood had just

deliberately killed a fellow soldier. If we had been near civilization

we would have done our best to bring him in and turn him over to

justice. But we were in the wilderness, and how many weeks' journey

were ahead of us we could not tell. Our food was running low, sickness

was beginning to appear among the men, and both their courage and

their strength were gradually ebbing. Our first duty was to save the

lives and the health of the men of the expedition who had honestly

been performing, and had still to perform, so much perilous labor. If

we brought the murderer in he would have to be guarded night and day

on an expedition where there were always loaded firearms about, and

where there would continually be opportunity and temptation for him to

make an effort to seize food and a weapon and escape, perhaps

murdering some other good man. He could not be shackled while climbing

along the cliff slopes; he could not be shackled in the canoes, where

there was always chance of upset and drowning; and standing guard

would be an additional and severe penalty on the weary, honest men

already exhausted by overwork. The expedition was in peril, and it was

wise to take every chance possible that would help secure success.

Whether the murderer lived or died in the wilderness was of no moment

compared with the duty of doing everything to secure the safety of the

rest of the party. For the two days following we were always on the

watch against his return, for he could have readily killed some one

else by rolling rocks down on any of the men working on the cliff

sides or in the bottom of the gorge. But we did not see him until the

morning of the third day. We had passed the last of the rapids of the

chasm, and the four boats were going down-stream when he appeared

behind some trees on the bank and called out that he wished to

surrender and be taken aboard; for the murderer was an arrant craven

at heart, a strange mixture of ferocity and cowardice. Colonel

Rondon's boat was far in advance; he did not stop nor answer. I kept

on in similar fashion with the rear boats, for I had no intention of

taking the murderer aboard, to the jeopardy of the other members of

the party, unless Colonel Rondon told me that it would have to be done

in pursuance of his duty as an officer of the army and a servant of

the Government of Brazil. At the first halt Colonel Rondon came up to

me and told me that this was his view of his duty, but that he had not

stopped because he wished first to consult me as the chief of the

expedition. I answered that for the reasons enumerated above I did not

believe that in justice to the good men of the expedition we should

jeopardize their safety by taking the murderer along, and that if the

responsibility were mine I should refuse to take him; but that he,

Colonel Rondon, was the superior officer of both the murderer and of

all the other enlisted men and army officers on the expedition, and in

return was responsible for his actions to his own governmental

superiors and to the laws of Brazil; and that in view of this

responsibility he must act as his sense of duty bade him. Accordingly,

at the next camp he sent back two men, expert woodsmen, to find the

murderer and bring him in. They failed to find him.

NOTE:

The above account of all the circumstances connected with the murder

was read to and approved as correct by all six members of the

expedition.

I have anticipated my narrative because I do not wish to recur to the

horror more than is necessary. I now return to my story. After we

found that Julio had fled, we returned to the scene of the tragedy.

The murdered man lay with a handkerchief thrown over his face. We

buried him beside the place where he fell. With axes and knives the

camaradas dug a shallow grave while we stood by with bared heads. Then

reverently and carefully we lifted the poor body which but half an

hour before had been so full of vigorous life. Colonel Rondon and I

bore the head and shoulders. We laid him in the grave, and heaped a

mound over him, and put a rude cross at his head. We fired a volley

for a brave and loyal soldier who had died doing his duty. Then we

left him forever, under the great trees beside the lonely river.

That day we got only half-way down the rapids. There was no good place

to camp. But at the foot of one steep cliff there was a narrow,

boulder-covered slope where it was possible to sling hammocks and

cook; and a slanting spot was found for my cot, which had sagged until

by this time it looked like a broken-backed centipede. It rained a

little during the night, but not enough to wet us much. Next day Lyra,

Kermit, and Cherrie finished their job, and brought the four remaining

canoes to camp, one leaking badly from the battering on the rocks. We

then went down-stream a few hundred yards, and camped on the opposite

side; it was not a good camping-place, but it was better than the one

we left.

The men were growing constantly weaker under the endless strain of

exhausting labor. Kermit was having an attack of fever, and Lyra and

Cherrie had touches of dysentery, but all three continued to work.

While in the water trying to help with an upset canoe I had by my own

clumsiness bruised my leg against a boulder; and the resulting

inflammation was somewhat bothersome. I now had a sharp attack of

fever, but thanks to the excellent care of the doctor, was over it in

about forty-eight hours; but Kermit's fever grew worse and he too was

unable to work for a day or two. We could walk over the portages,

however. A good doctor is an absolute necessity on an exploring

expedition in such a country as that we were in, under penalty of a

frightful mortality among the members; and the necessary risks and

hazards are so great, the chances of disaster so large, that there is

no warrant for increasing them by the failure to take all feasible

precautions.

The next day we made another long portage round some rapids, and

camped at night still in the hot, wet, sunless atmosphere of the

gorge. The following day, April 6, we portaged past another set of

rapids, which proved to be the last of the rapids of the chasm. For

some kilometres we kept passing hills, and feared lest at any moment

we might again find ourselves fronting another mountain gorge; with,

in such case, further days of grinding and perilous labor ahead of us,

while our men were disheartened, weak, and sick. Most of them had

already begun to have fever. Their condition was inevitable after over

a month's uninterrupted work of the hardest kind in getting through

the long series of rapids we had just passed; and a long further

delay, accompanied by wearing labor, would have almost certainly meant

that the weakest among our party would have begun to die. There were

already two of the camaradas who were too weak to help the others,

their condition being such as to cause us serious concern.

However, the hills gradually sank into a level plain, and the river

carried us through it at a rate that enabled us during the remainder

of the day to reel off thirty-six kilometres, a record that for the

first time held out promise. Twice tapirs swam the river while we

passed, but not near my canoe. However, the previous evening, Cherrie

had killed two monkeys and Kermit one, and we all had a few mouthfuls

of fresh meat; we had already had a good soup made out of a turtle

Kermit had caught. We had to portage by one short set of rapids, the

unloaded canoes being brought down without difficulty. At last, at

four in the afternoon, we came to the mouth of a big river running in

from the right. We thought it was probably the Ananas, but, of course,

could not be certain. It was less in volume than the one we had

descended, but nearly as broad; its breadth at this point being

ninety-five yards as against one hundred and twenty for the larger

river. There were rapids ahead, immediately after the junction, which

took place in latitude 10 degrees 58 minutes south. We had come 216

kilometres all told, and were nearly north of where we had started. We

camped on the point of land between the two rivers. It was

extraordinary to realize that here about the eleventh degree we were

on such a big river, utterly unknown to the cartographers and not

indicated by even a hint on any map. We named this big tributary Rio

Cardozo, after a gallant officer of the commission who had died of

beriberi just as our expedition began. We spent a day at this spot,

determining our exact position by the sun, and afterward by the stars,

and sending on two men to explore the rapids in advance. They returned

with the news that there were big cataracts in them, and that they

would form an obstacle to our progress. They had also caught a huge

iluroid fish, which furnished an excellent meal for everybody in camp.

This evening at sunset the view across the broad river, from our camp

where the two rivers joined, was very lovely; and for the first time

we had an open space in front of and above us, so that after nightfall

the stars, and the great waxing moon, were glorious over-head, and

against the rocks in midstream the broken water gleamed like tossing

silver.

The huge catfish which the men had caught was over three feet and a

half long, with the usual enormous head, out of all proportions to the

body, and the enormous mouth, out of all proportion to the head. Such

fish, although their teeth are small, swallow very large prey. This

one contained the nearly digested remains of a monkey. Probably the

monkey had been seized while drinking from the end of a branch; and

once engulfed in that yawning cavern there was no escape. We Americans

were astounded at the idea of a catfish making prey of a monkey; but

our Brazilian friends told us that in the lower Madeira and the part

of the Amazon near its mouth there is a still more gigantic catfish

which in similar fashion occasionally makes prey of man. This is a

grayish-white fish over nine feet long, with the usual

disproportionately large head and gaping mouth, with a circle of small

teeth; for the engulfing mouth itself is the danger, not the teeth. It

is called the piraiba--pronounced in four syllables. While stationed

at the small city of Itacoatiara, on the Amazon, at the mouth of the

Madeira, the doctor had seen one of these monsters which had been

killed by the two men it had attacked. They were fishing in a canoe

when it rose from the bottom--for it is a ground fish--and raising

itself half out of the water lunged over the edge of the canoe at

them, with open mouth. They killed it with their falcons, as machetes

are called in Brazil. It was taken round the city in triumph in an

oxcart; the doctor saw it, and said it was three metres long. He said

that swimmers feared it even more than the big cayman, because they

could see the latter, whereas the former lay hid at the bottom of the

water. Colonel Rondon said that in many villages where he had been on

the lower Madeira the people had built stockaded enclosures in the

water in which they bathed, not venturing to swim in the open water

for fear of the piraiba and the big cayman.

Next day, April 8, we made five kilometres only, as there was a

succession of rapids. We had to carry the loads past two of them, but

ran the canoes without difficulty, for on the west side were long

canals of swift water through the forest. The river had been higher,

but was still very high, and the current raced round the many islands

that at this point divided the channel. At four we made camp at the

head of another stretch of rapids, over which the Canadian canoes

would have danced without shipping a teaspoonful of water, but which

our dugouts could only run empty. Cherrie killed three monkeys and

Lyra caught two big piranhas, so that we were again all of us well

provided with dinner and breakfast. When a number of men, doing hard

work, are most of the time on half-rations, they grow to take a lively

interest in any reasonably full meal that does arrive.

On the 10th we repeated the proceedings: a short quick run; a few

hundred metres' portage, occupying, however, at least a couple of

hours; again a few minutes' run; again other rapids. We again made

less than five kilometres; in the two days we had been descending

nearly a metre for every kilometre we made in advance; and it hardly

seemed as if this state of things could last, for the aneroid showed

that we were getting very low down. How I longed for a big Maine

birch-bark, such as that in which I once went down the Mattawamkeag at

high water! It would have slipped down these rapids as a girl trips

through a country dance. But our loaded dugouts would have shoved

their noses under every curl. The country was lovely. The wide river,

now in one channel, now in several channels, wound among hills; the

shower-freshened forest glistened in the sunlight; the many kinds of

beautiful palm-fronds and the huge pacova-leaves stamped the peculiar

look of the tropics on the whole landscape--it was like passing by

water through a gigantic botanical garden. In the afternoon we got an

elderly toucan, a piranha, and a reasonably edible side-necked river-

turtle; so we had fresh meat again. We slept as usual in earshot of

rapids. We had been out six weeks, and almost all the time we had been

engaged in wearily working our own way down and past rapid after

rapid. Rapids are by far the most dangerous enemies of explorers and

travellers who journey along these rivers.

Next day was a repetition of the same work. All the morning was spent

in getting the loads to the foot of the rapids at the head of which we

were encamped, down which the canoes were run empty. Then for thirty

or forty minutes we ran down the swift, twisting river, the two lashed

canoes almost coming to grief at one spot where a swirl of the current

threw them against some trees on a small submerged island. Then we

came to another set of rapids, carried the baggage down past them, and

made camp long after dark in the rain--a good exercise in patience for

those of us who were still suffering somewhat from fever. No one was

in really buoyant health. For some weeks we had been sharing part of

the contents of our boxes with the camaradas; but our food was not

very satisfying to them. They needed quantity and the mainstay of each

of their meals was a mass of palmitas; but on this day they had no

time to cut down palms. We finally decided to run these rapids with

the empty canoes, and they came down in safety. On such a trip it is

highly undesirable to take any save necessary risks, for the

consequences of disaster are too serious; and yet if no risks are

taken the progress is so slow that disaster comes anyhow; and it is

necessary perpetually to vary the terms of the perpetual working

compromise between rashness and over-caution. This night we had a very

good fish to eat, a big silvery fellow called a pescada, of a kind we

had not caught before.

One day Trigueiro failed to embark with the rest of us, and we had to

camp where we were next day to find him. Easter Sunday we spent in the

fashion with which we were altogether too familiar. We only ran in a

clear course for ten minutes all told, and spent eight hours in

portaging the loads past rapids down which the canoes were run; the

balsa was almost swamped. This day we caught twenty-eight big fish,

mostly piranhas, and everybody had all he could eat for dinner, and

for breakfast the following morning.

The forenoon of the following day was a repetition of this wearisome

work; but late in the afternoon the river began to run in long quiet

reaches. We made fifteen kilometres, and for the first time in several

weeks camped where we did not hear the rapids. The silence was

soothing and restful. The following day, April 14, we made a good run

of some thirty-two kilometres. We passed a little river which entered

on our left. We ran two or three light rapids, and portaged the loads

by another. The river ran in long and usually tranquil stretches. In

the morning when we started the view was lovely. There was a mist, and

for a couple of miles the great river, broad and quiet, ran between

the high walls of tropical forest, the tops of the giant trees showing

dim through the haze. Different members of the party caught many fish,

and shot a monkey and a couple of jacare-tinga birds kin to a turkey,

but the size of a fowl--so we again had a camp of plenty. The dry

season was approaching, but there were still heavy, drenching rains.

On this day the men found some new nuts of which they liked the taste;

but the nuts proved unwholesome and half of the men were very sick and

unable to work the following day. In the balsa only two were left fit

to do anything, and Kermit plied a paddle all day long.

Accordingly, it was a rather sorry crew that embarked the following

morning, April 15. But it turned out a red-letter day. The day before,

we had come across cuttings, a year old, which were probably but not

certainly made by pioneer rubbermen. But on this day--during which we

made twenty-five kilometres--after running two hours and a half we

found on the left bank a board on a post, with the initials J. A., to

show the farthest up point which a rubberman had reached and claimed

as his own. An hour farther down we came on a newly built house in a

little planted clearing; and we cheered heartily. No one was at home,

but the house, of palm thatch, was clean and cool. A couple of dogs

were on watch, and the belongings showed that a man, a woman, and a

child lived there, and had only just left. Another hour brought us to

a similar house where dwelt an old black man, who showed the innate

courtesy of the Brazilian peasant. We came on these rubbermen and

their houses in about latitude 10 degrees 24 minutes.

In mid-afternoon we stopped at another clean, cool, picturesque house

of palm thatch. The inhabitants all fled at our approach, fearing an

Indian raid; for they were absolutely unprepared to have any one come

from the unknown regions up-stream. They returned and were most

hospitable and communicative; and we spent the night there. Said

Antonio Correa to Kermit: "It seems like a dream to be in a house

again, and hear the voices of men and women, instead of being among

those mountains and rapids." The river was known to them as the

Castanho, and was the main affluent or rather the left or western

branch, of the Aripuanan; the Castanho is a name used by the rubber-

gatherers only; it is unknown to the geographers. We were, according

to our informants, about fifteen days' journey from the confluence of

the two rivers; but there were many rubbermen along the banks, some of

whom had become permanent settlers. We had come over three hundred

kilometres, in forty-eight days, over absolutely unknown ground; we

had seen no human being, although we had twice heard Indians. Six

weeks had been spent in steadily slogging our way down through the

interminable series of rapids. It was astonishing before, when we were

on a river of about the size of the upper Rhine or Elbe, to realize

that no geographer had any idea of its existence. But, after all, no

civilized man of any grade had ever been on it. Here, however, was a

river with people dwelling along the banks, some of whom had lived in

the neighborhood for eight or ten years; and yet on no standard map

was there a hint of the river's existence. We were putting on the map

a river, running through between five and six degrees of latitude--of

between seven and eight if, as should properly be done, the lower

Aripuanan is included as part of it--of which no geographer, in any

map published in Europe, or the United States, or Brazil had even

admitted the possibility of the existence; for the place actually

occupied by it was filled, on the maps, by other--imaginary--streams,

or by mountain ranges. Before we started, the Amazonas Boundary

Commission had come up the lower Aripuanan and then the eastern

branch, or upper Aripuanan, to 8 degrees 48 minutes, following the

course which for a couple of decades had been followed by the

rubbermen, but not going as high. An employee, either of this

commission or of one of the big rubbermen, had been up the Castanho,

which is easy of ascent in its lower course, to about the same

latitude, not going nearly as high as the rubbermen had gone; this we

found out while we ourselves were descending the lower Castanho. The

lower main stream, and the lower portion of its main affluent, the

Castanho, had been commercial highways for rubbermen and settlers for

nearly two decades, and, as we speedily found, were as easy to

traverse as the upper stream, which we had just come down, was

difficult to traverse; but the governmental and scientific

authorities, native and foreign, remained in complete ignorance; and

the rubbermen themselves had not the slightest idea of the headwaters,

which were in country never hitherto traversed by civilized men.

Evidently the Castanho was, in length at least, substantially equal,

and probably superior, to the upper Aripuanan; it now seemed even more

likely that the Ananas was the headwaters of the main stream than of

the Cardozo.

For the first time this great river, the greatest affluent of the

Madiera, was to be put on the map; and the understanding of its real

position and real relationship, and the clearing up of the complex

problem of the sources of all these lower right-hand affluents of the

Madiera, was rendered possible by the seven weeks of hard and

dangerous labor we had spent in going down an absolutely unknown

river, through an absolutely unknown wilderness. At this stage of the

growth of world geography I esteemed it a great piece of good fortune

to be able to take part in such a feat--a feat which represented the

capping of the pyramid which during the previous seven years had been

built by the labor of the Brazilian Telegraphic Commission.

We had passed the period when there was a chance of peril, of

disaster, to the whole expedition. There might be risk ahead to

individuals, and some difficulties and annoyances for all of us; but

there was no longer the least likelihood of any disaster to the

expedition as a whole. We now no longer had to face continual anxiety,

the need of constant economy with food, the duty of labor with no end

in sight, and bitter uncertainty as to the future.

It was time to get out. The wearing work, under very unhealthy

conditions, was beginning to tell on every one. Half of the camaradas

had been down with fever and were much weakened; only a few of them

retained their original physical and moral strength. Cherrie and

Kermit had recovered; but both Kermit and Lyra still had bad sores on

their legs, from the bruises received in the water work. I was in

worse shape. The after effects of the fever still hung on; and the leg

which had been hurt while working in the rapids with the sunken canoe

had taken a turn for the bad and developed an abscess. The good

doctor, to whose unwearied care and kindness I owe much, had cut it

open and inserted a drainage tube; an added charm being given the

operation, and the subsequent dressings, by the enthusiasm with which

the piums and boroshudas took part therein. I could hardly hobble, and

was pretty well laid up. But "there aren't no 'stop, conductor,' while

a battery's changing ground." No man has any business to go on such a

trip as ours unless he will refuse to jeopardize the welfare of his

associates by any delay caused by a weakness or ailment of his. It is

his duty to go forward, if necessary on all fours, until he drops.

Fortunately, I was put to no such test. I remained in good shape until

we had passed the last of the rapids of the chasms. When my serious

trouble came we had only canoe-riding ahead of us. It is not ideal for

a sick man to spend the hottest hours of the day stretched on the

boxes in the bottom of a small open dugout, under the well-nigh

intolerable heat of the torrid sun of the mid-tropics, varied by

blinding, drenching downpours of rain; but I could not be sufficiently

grateful for the chance. Kermit and Cherrie took care of me as if they

had been trained nurses; and Colonel Rondon and Lyra were no less

thoughtful.

The north was calling strongly to the three men of the north--Rocky

Dell Farm to Cherrie, Sagamore Hill to me; and to Kermit the call was

stronger still. After nightfall we could now see the Dipper well above

the horizon--upside down, with the two pointers pointing to a north

star below the world's rim; but the Dipper, with all its stars. In our

home country spring had now come, the wonderful northern spring of

long glorious days, of brooding twilights, of cool delightful nights.

Robin and bluebird, meadow-lark and song sparrow, were singing in the

mornings at home; the maple-buds were red; windflowers and bloodroot

were blooming while the last patches of snow still lingered; the

rapture of the hermithrush in Vermont, the serene golden melody of the

woodthrush on Long Island, would be heard before we were there to

listen. Each man to his home, and to his true love! Each was longing

for the homely things that were so dear to him, for the home people

who were dearer still, and for the one who was dearest of all.

X. TO THE AMAZON AND HOME; ZOOLOGICAL

AND GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS OF THE EXPEDITION

Our adventures and our troubles were alike over. We now experienced

the incalculable contrast between descending a known and travelled

river, and one that is utterly unknown. After four days we hired a

rubberman to go with us as guide. We knew exactly what channels were

passable when we came to the rapids, when the canoes had to unload,

and where the carry-trails were. It was all child's play compared to

what we had gone through. We made long days' journeys, for at night we

stopped at some palm-thatched house, inhabited or abandoned, and

therefore the men were spared the labor of making camp; and we bought

ample food for them, so there was no further need of fishing and

chopping down palms for the palmtops. The heat of the sun was blazing;

but it looked as if we had come back into the rainy season, for there

were many heavy rains, usually in the afternoon, but sometimes in the

morning or at night. The mosquitoes were sometimes rather troublesome

at night. In the daytime the piums swarmed, and often bothered us even

when we were in midstream.

For four days there were no rapids we could not run without unloading.

Then, on the 19th, we got a canoe from Senhor Barboso. He was a most

kind and hospitable man, who also gave us a duck and a chicken and

some mandioc and six pounds of rice, and would take no payment; he

lived in a roomy house with his dusky, cigar-smoking wife and his many

children. The new canoe was light and roomy, and we were able to rig

up a low shelter under which I could lie; I was still sick. At noon we

passed the mouth of a big river, the Rio Branco, coming in from the

left; this was about in latitude 9 degrees 38 minutes. Soon afterward

we came to the first serious rapids, the Panela. We carried the boats

past, ran down the empty canoes, and camped at the foot in a roomy

house. The doctor bought a handsome trumpeter bird, very friendly and

confiding, which was thenceforth my canoe companion.

We had already passed many inhabited--and a still larger number of

uninhabited--houses. The dwellers were rubbermen, but generally they

were permanent settlers also, homemakers, with their wives and

children. Some, both of the men and women, were apparently of pure

negro blood, or of pure Indian or south European blood; but in the

great majority all three strains were mixed in varying degrees. They

were most friendly, courteous, and hospitable. Often they refused

payment for what they could afford, out of their little, to give us.

When they did charge, the prices were very high, as was but just, for

they live back of the beyond, and everything costs them fabulously,

save what they raise themselves. The cool, bare houses of poles and

palm thatch contained little except hammocks and a few simple cooking

utensils; and often a clock or sewing machine, or Winchester rifle,

from our own country. They often had flowers planted, including

fragrant roses. Their only live stock, except the dogs, were a few

chickens and ducks. They planted patches of mandioc, maize, sugarcane,

rice, beans, squashes, pineapples, bananas, lemons, oranges, melons,

peppers; and various purely native fruits and vegetables, such as the

kniabo--a vegetable-fruit growing on the branches of a high bush--

which is cooked with meat. They get some game from the forest, and

more fish from the river. There is no representative of the government

among them--indeed, even now their very existence is barely known to

the governmental authorities; and the church has ignored them as

completely as the state. When they wish to get married they have to

spend several months getting down to and back from Manaos or some

smaller city; and usually the first christening and the marriage

ceremony are held at the same time. They have merely squatter's right

to the land, and are always in danger of being ousted by unscrupulous

big men who come in late, but with a title technically straight. The

land laws should be shaped so as to give each of these pioneer

settlers the land he actually takes up and cultivates, and upon which

he makes his home. The small homemaker, who owns the land which he

tills with his own hands, is the greatest element of strength in any

country.

These are real pioneer settlers. They are the true wilderness-winners.

No continent is ever really conquered, or thoroughly explored, by a

few leaders, or exceptional men, although such men can render great

service. The real conquest, the thorough exploration and settlement,

is made by a nameless multitude of small men of whom the most

important are, of course, the home-makers. Each treads most of the

time in the footsteps of his predecessors, but for some few miles, at

some time or other, he breaks new ground; and his house is built where

no house has ever stood before. Such a man, the real pioneer, must

have no strong desire for social life and no need, probably no

knowledge, of any luxury, or of any comfort save of the most

elementary kind. The pioneer who is always longing for the comfort and

luxury of civilization, and especially of great cities, is no real

pioneer at all. These settlers whom we met were contented to live in

the wilderness. They had found the climate healthy and the soil

fruitful; a visit to a city was a very rare event, nor was there any

overwhelming desire for it.

In short, these men, and those like them everywhere on the frontier

between civilization and savagery in Brazil, are now playing the part

played by our backwoodsmen when over a century and a quarter ago they

began the conquest of the great basin of the Mississippi; the part

played by the Boer farmers for over a century in South Africa, and by

the Canadians when less than half a century ago they began to take

possession of their Northwest. Every now and then some one says that

the "last frontier" is now to be found in Canada or Africa, and that

it has almost vanished. On a far larger scale this frontier is to be

found in Brazil--a country as big as Europe or the United States--and

decades will pass before it vanishes. The first settlers came to

Brazil a century before the first settlers came to the United States

and Canada. For three hundred years progress was very slow--Portuguese

colonial government at that time was almost as bad as Spanish. For the

last half-century and over there has been a steady increase in the

rapidity of the rate of development; and this increase bids fair to be

constantly more rapid in the future.

The Paolistas, hunting for lands, slaves, and mines, were the first

native Brazilians who, a hundred years ago, played a great part in

opening to settlement vast stretches of wilderness. The rubber hunters

have played a similar part during the last few decades. Rubber dazzled

them, as gold and diamonds have dazzled other men and driven them

forth to wander through the wide waste spaces of the world. Searching

for rubber they made highways of rivers the very existence of which

was unknown to the governmental authorities, or to any map-makers.

Whether they succeeded or failed, they everywhere left behind them

settlers, who toiled, married, and brought up children. Settlement

began; the conquest of the wilderness entered on its first stage.

On the 20th we stopped at the first store, where we bought, of course

at a high price, sugar and tobacco for the camaradas. In this land of

plenty the camaradas over-ate, and sickness was as rife among them as

ever. In Cherrie's boat he himself and the steersman were the only men

who paddled strongly and continuously. The storekeeper's stock of

goods was very low, only what he still had left from that brought in

nearly a year before; for the big boats, or batelaos-batelons--had not

yet worked as far up-stream. We expected to meet them somewhere below

the next rapids, the Inferno. The trader or rubberman brings up his

year's supply of goods in a batelao, starting in February and reaching

the upper course of the river early in May, when the rainy season is

over. The parties of rubber-explorers are then equipped and

provisioned; and the settlers purchase certain necessities, and

certain things that strike them as luxuries. This year the Brazil-nut

crop on the river had failed, a serious thing for all explorers and

wilderness wanderers.

On the 20th we made the longest run we had made, fifty-two kilometres.

Lyra took observations where we camped; we were in latitude 8 degrees

49 minutes. At this camping-place the great, beautiful river was a

little over three hundred metres wide. We were in an empty house. The

marks showed that in the high water, a couple of months back, the

river had risen until the lower part of the house was flooded. The

difference between the level of the river during the floods and in the

dry season is extraordinary.

On the 21st we made another good run, getting down to the Inferno

rapids, which are in latitude 8 degrees 19 minutes south. Until we

reached the Cardozo we had run almost due north; since then we had

been running a little west of north. Before we reached these rapids we

stopped at a large, pleasant thatch house, and got a fairly big and

roomy as well as light boat, leaving both our two smaller dugouts

behind. Above the rapids a small river, the Madeirainha, entered from

the left. The rapids had a fall of over ten metres, and the water was

very wild and rough. Met with for the first time, it would doubtless

have taken several days to explore a passage and, with danger and

labor, get the boats down. But we were no longer exploring,

pioneering, over unknown country. It is easy to go where other men

have prepared the way. We had a guide; we took our baggage down by a

carry three-quarters of a kilometre long; and the canoes were run

through known channels the following morning. At the foot of the

rapids was a big house and store; and camped at the head were a number

of rubber-workers, waiting for the big boats of the head rubbermen to

work their way up from below. They were a reckless set of brown

daredevils. These men lead hard lives of labor and peril; they

continually face death themselves, and they think little of it in

connection with others. It is small wonder that they sometimes have

difficulties with the tribes of utterly wild Indians with whom they

are brought in contact, although there is a strong Indian strain in

their own blood.

The following morning, after the empty canoes had been run down, we

started, and made a rather short afternoon's journey. We had to take

the baggage by one rapids. We camped in an empty house, in the rain.

Next day we ran nearly fifty kilometres, the river making a long sweep

to the west. We met half a dozen batelaos making their way up-stream,

each with a crew of six or eight men; and two of them with women and

children in addition. The crew were using very long poles, with

crooks, or rather the stubs of cut branches which served as crooks, at

the upper end. With these they hooked into the branches and dragged

themselves up along the bank, in addition to poling where the depth

permitted it. The river was as big as the Paraguay at Corumba; but, in

striking contrast to the Paraguay, there were few water-birds. We ran

some rather stiff rapids, the Infernino, without unloading, in the

morning. In the evening we landed for the night at a large, open,

shed-like house, where there were two or three pigs, the first live

stock we had seen other than poultry and ducks. It was a dirty place,

but we got some eggs.

The following day, the 24th, we ran down some fifty kilometres to the

Carupanan rapids, which by observation Lyra found to be in latitude 7

degrees 47 minutes. We met several batelaos, and the houses on the

bank showed that the settlers were somewhat better off than was the

case farther up. At the rapids was a big store, the property of Senhor

Caripe, the wealthiest rubberman who works on this river; many of the

men we met were in his employ. He has himself risen from the ranks. He

was most kind and hospitable, and gave us another boat to replace the

last of our shovel-nosed dugouts. The large, open house was cool,

clean, and comfortable.

With these began a series of half a dozen sets of rapids, all coming

within the next dozen kilometres, and all offering very real

obstacles. At one we saw the graves of four men who had perished

therein; and many more had died whose bodies were never recovered; the

toll of human life had been heavy. Had we been still on an unknown

river, pioneering our own way, it would doubtless have taken us at

least a fortnight of labor and peril to pass. But it actually took

only a day and a half. All the channels were known, all the trails

cut. Senhor Caripe, a first-class waterman, cool, fearless, and brawny

as a bull, came with us as guide. Half a dozen times the loads were

taken out and carried down. At one cataract the canoes were themselves

dragged overland; elsewhere they were run down empty, shipping a good

deal of water. At the foot of the cataract, where we dragged the

canoes overland, we camped for the night. Here Kermit shot a big

cayman. Our camp was alongside the graves of three men who at this

point had perished in the swift water.

Senhor Caripe told us many strange adventures of rubber-workers he had

met or employed. One of his men, working on the Gy-Parana, got lost

and after twenty-eight days found himself on the Madeirainha, which he

thus discovered. He was in excellent health, for he had means to start

a fire, and he found abundance of Brazil-nuts and big land-tortoises.

Senhor Caripe said that the rubbermen now did not go above the ninth

degree, or thereabouts, on the upper Aripuanan proper, having found

the rubber poor on the reaches above. A year previously five

rubbermen, Mundurucu Indians, were working on the Corumba at about

that level. It is a difficult stream to ascend or descend. They made

excursions into the forest for days at a time after caoutchouc. On one

such trip, after fifteen days they, to their surprise, came out on the

Aripuanan. They returned and told their "patron" of their discovery;

and by his orders took their caoutchouc overland to the Aripuanan,

built a canoe, and ran down with their caoutchouc to Manaos. They had

now returned and were working on the upper Aripuanan. The Mundurucus

and Brazilians are always on the best terms, and the former are even

more inveterate enemies of the wild Indians than are the latter.

By mid-forenoon on April 26 we had passed the last dangerous rapids.

The paddles were plied with hearty good will, Cherrie and Kermit, as

usual, working like the camaradas, and the canoes went dancing down

the broad, rapid river. The equatorial forest crowded on either hand

to the water's edge; and, although the river was falling, it was still

so high that in many places little islands were completely submerged,

and the current raced among the trunks of the green trees. At one

o'clock we came to the mouth of the Castanho proper, and in sight of

the tent of Lieutenant Pyrineus, with the flags of the United States

and Brazil flying before it; and, with rifles firing from the canoes

and the shore, we moored at the landing of the neat, soldierly, well

kept camp. The upper Aripuanan, a river of substantially the same

volume as the Castanho, but broader at this point, and probably of

less length, here joined the Castanho from the east, and the two

together formed what the rubbermen called the lower Aripuanan. The

mouth of this was indicated, and sometimes named, on the maps, but

only as a small and unimportant stream.

We had been two months in the canoes; from the 27th of February to the

26th of April. We had gone over 750 kilometres. The river from its

source, near the thirteenth degree, to where it became navigable and

we entered it, had a course of some 200 kilometres--probably more,

perhaps 300 kilometres. Therefore we had now put on the map a river

nearly 1,000 kilometres in length of which the existence was not

merely unknown but impossible if the standard maps were correct. But

this was not all. It seemed that this river of 1,000 kilometres in

length was really the true upper course of the Aripuanan proper, in

which case the total length was nearly 1,500 kilometres. Pyrineus had

been waiting for us over a month, at the junction of what the

rubbermen called the Castanho and of what they called the upper

Aripuanan. (He had no idea as to which stream we would appear upon, or

whether we would appear upon either.) On March 26 he had measured the

volume of the two, and found that the Castanho, although the narrower,

was the deeper and swifter, and that in volume it surpassed the other

by 84 cubic metres a second. Since then the Castanho had fallen; our

measurements showed it to be slightly smaller than the other; the

volume of the river after the junction was about 4,500 cubic metres a

second. This was in 7 degrees 34 minutes.

We were glad indeed to see Pyrineus and be at his attractive camp. We

were only four hours above the little river hamlet of Sao Joao, a port

of call for rubber-steamers, from which the larger ones go to Manaos

in two days. These steamers mostly belong to Senhor Caripe. From

Pyrineus we learned that Lauriado and Fiala had reached Manaos on

March 26. On the swift water in the gorge of the Papagaio Fiala's boat

had been upset and all his belongings lost, while he himself had

narrowly escaped with his life. I was glad indeed that the fine and

gallant fellow had escaped. The Canadian canoe had done very well. We

were no less rejoiced to learn that Amilcar, the head of the party

that went down the Gy-Parana, was also all right, although his canoe

too had been upset in the rapids, and his instruments and all his

notes lost. He had reached Manaos on April 10. Fiala had gone home.

Miller was collecting near Manaos. He had been doing capital work.

The piranhas were bad here, and no one could bathe. Cherrie, while

standing in the water close to the shore, was attacked and bitten; but

with one bound he was on the bank before any damage could be done.

We spent a last night under canvas, at Pyrineus' encampment. It rained

heavily. Next morning we all gathered at the monument which Colonel

Rondon had erected, and he read the orders of the day. These recited

just what had been accomplished: set forth the fact that we had now by

actual exploration and investigation discovered that the river whose

upper portion had been called the Duvida on the maps of the

Telegraphic Commission and the unknown major part of which we had just

traversed, and the river known to a few rubbermen, but to no one else,

as the Castanho, and the lower part of the river known to the

rubbermen as the Aripuanan (which did not appear on the maps save as

its mouth was sometimes indicated, with no hint of its size) were all

parts of one and the same river; and that by order of the Brazilian

Government this river, the largest affluent of the Madeira, with its

source near the 13th degree and its mouth a little south of the 5th

degree, hitherto utterly unknown to cartographers and in large part

utterly unknown to any save the local tribes of Indians, had been

named the Rio Roosevelt.

We left Rondon, Lyra, and Pyrineus to take observations, and the rest

of us embarked for the last time on the canoes, and, borne swiftly on

the rapid current, we passed over one set of not very important rapids

and ran down to Senhor Caripe's little hamlet of Sao Joao, which we

reached about one o'clock on April 27, just before a heavy afternoon

rain set in. We had run nearly eight hundred kilometres during the

sixty days we had spent in the canoes. Here we found and boarded

Pyrineus's river steamer, which seemed in our eyes extremely

comfortable. In the senhor's pleasant house we were greeted by the

senhora, and they were both more than thoughtful and generous in their

hospitality. Ahead of us lay merely thirty-six hours by steamer to

Manaos. Such a trip as that we had taken tries men as if by fire.

Cherrie had more than stood every test; and in him Kermit and I had

come to recognize a friend with whom our friendship would never falter

or grow less.

Early the following afternoon our whole party, together with Senhor

Caripe, started on the steamer. It took us a little over twelve hours'

swift steaming to run down to the mouth of the river on the upper

course of which our progress had been so slow and painful; from source

to mouth, according to our itinerary and to Lyra's calculations, the

course of the stream down which we had thus come was about 1,500

kilometres in length--about 900 miles, perhaps nearly 1,000 miles--

from its source near the 13th degree in the highlands to its mouth in

the Madeira, near the 5th degree. Next morning we were on the broad

sluggish current of the lower Madeira, a beautiful tropical river.

There were heavy rainstorms, as usual, although this is supposed to be

the very end of the rainy season. In the afternoon we finally entered

the wonderful Amazon itself, the mighty river which contains one tenth

of all the running water of the globe. It was miles across, where we

entered it; and indeed we could not tell whether the farther bank,

which we saw, was that of the mainland or an island. We went up it

until about midnight, then steamed up the Rio Negro for a short

distance, and at one in the morning of April 30 reached Manaos.

Manaos is a remarkable city. It is only three degrees south of the

equator. Sixty years ago it was a nameless little collection of

hovels, tenanted by a few Indians and a few of the poorest class of

Brazilian peasants. Now it is a big, handsome modern city, with Opera

house, tramways, good hotels, fine squares and public buildings, and

attractive private houses. The brilliant coloring and odd architecture

give the place a very foreign and attractive flavor in northern eyes.

Its rapid growth to prosperity was due to the rubber trade. This is

now far less remunerative than formerly. It will undoubtedly in some

degree recover; and in any event the development of the immensely rich

and fertile Amazonian valley is sure to go on, and it will be

immensely quickened when closer connections are made with the

Brazilian highland country lying south of it.

Here we found Miller, and glad indeed we were to see him. He had made

good collections of mammals and birds on the Gy-Parana, the Madeira,

and in the neighborhood of Manaos; his entire collection of mammals

was really noteworthy. Among them was the only sloth any of us had

seen on the trip. The most interesting of the birds he had seen was

the hoatzin. This is a most curious bird of very archaic type. Its

flight is feeble, and the naked young have spurs on their wings, by

the help of which they crawl actively among the branches before their

feathers grow. They swim no less easily, at the same early age. Miller

got one or two nests, and preserved specimens of the surroundings of

the nests; and he made exhaustive records of the habits of the birds.

Near Megasso a jaguar had killed one of the bullocks that were being

driven along for food. The big cat had not seized the ox with its

claws by the head, but had torn open its throat and neck.

Every one was most courteous at Manaos, especially the governor of the

state and the mayor of the city. Mr. Robiliard, the British consular

representative, and also the representative of the Booth line of

steamers, was particularly kind. He secured for us passages on one of

the cargo boats of the line to Para, and thence on one of the regular

cargo-and-passenger steamers to Barbados and New York. The Booth

people were most courteous to us.

I said good-by to the camaradas with real friendship and regret. The

parting gift I gave to each was in gold sovereigns; and I was rather

touched to learn later that they had agreed among themselves each to

keep one sovereign as a medal of honor and token that the owner had

been on the trip. They were a fine set, brave, patient, obedient, and

enduring. Now they had forgotten their hard times; they were fat from

eating, at leisure, all they wished; they were to see Rio Janeiro,

always an object of ambition with men of their stamp; and they were

very proud of their membership in the expedition.

Later, at Belen, I said good-by to Colonel Rondon, Doctor Cajazeira,

and Lieutenant Lyra. Together with my admiration for their hardihood,

courage, and resolution, I had grown to feel a strong and affectionate

friendship for them. I had become very fond of them; and I was glad to

feel that I had been their companion in the performance of a feat

which possessed a certain lasting importance.

On May 1 we left Manaos for Belen-Para, as until recently it was

called. The trip was interesting. We steamed down through tempest and

sunshine; and the towering forest was dwarfed by the giant river it

fringed. Sunrise and sunset turned the sky to an unearthly flame of

many colors above the vast water. It all seemed the embodiment of

loneliness and wild majesty. Yet everywhere man was conquering the

loneliness and wresting the majesty to his own uses. We passed many

thriving, growing towns; at one we stopped to take on cargo.

Everywhere there was growth and development. The change since the days

when Bates and Wallace came to this then poor and utterly primitive

region is marvellous. One of its accompaniments has been a large

European, chiefly south European, immigration. The blood is everywhere

mixed; there is no color line, as in most English-speaking countries,

and the negro and Indian strains are very strong; but the dominant

blood, the blood already dominant in quantity, and that is steadily

increasing its dominance, is the olive-white.

Only rarely did the river show its full width. Generally we were in

channels or among islands. The surface of the water was dotted with

little islands of floating vegetation. Miller said that much of this

came from the lagoons such as those where he had been hunting, beside

the Solimoens--lagoons filled with the huge and splendid Victoria

lily, and with masses of water hyacinths. Miller, who was very fond of

animals and always took much care of them, had a small collection

which he was bringing back for the Bronx Zoo. An agouti was so bad-

tempered that he had to be kept solitary; but three monkeys, big,

middle-sized, and little, and a young peccary formed a happy family.

The largest monkey cried, shedding real tears, when taken in the arms

and pitied. The middle-sized monkey was stupid and kindly, and all the

rest of the company imposed on it; the little monkey invariably rode

on its back, and the peccary used it as a head pillow when it felt

sleepy.

Belen, the capital of the state of Para, was an admirable illustration

of the genuine and almost startling progress which Brazil has been

making of recent years. It is a beautiful city, nearly under the

equator. But it is not merely beautiful. The docks, the dredging

operations, the warehouses, the stores and shops, all tell of energy

and success in commercial life. It is as clean, healthy, and well

policed a city as any of the size in the north temperate zone. The

public buildings are handsome, the private dwellings attractive; there

are a fine opera-house, an excellent tramway system, and a good museum

and botanical gardens. There are cavalry stables, where lights burn

all night long to protect the horses from the vampire bats. The parks,

the rows of palms and mango-trees, the open-air restaurants, the gay

life under the lights at night, all give the city its own special

quality and charm. Belen and Manaos are very striking examples of what

can be done in the mid-tropics. The governor of Para and his charming

wife were more than kind.

Cherrie and Miller spent the day at the really capital zoological

gardens, with the curator, Miss Snethlage. Miss Snethlage, a German

lady, is a first rate field and closet naturalist, and an explorer of

note, who has gone on foot from the Xingu to the Tapajos. Most wisely

she has confined the Belen zoo to the animals of the lower Amazon

valley, and in consequence I know of no better local zoological

gardens. She has an invaluable collection of birds and mammals of the

region; and it was a privilege to meet her and talk with her.

We also met Professor Farrabee, of the University of Pennsylvania, the

ethnologist. He had just finished a very difficult and important trip,

from Manaos by the Rio Branco to the highlands of Guiana, across them

on foot, and down to the seacoast of British Guiana. He is an

admirable representative of the men who are now opening South America

to scientific knowledge.

On May 7 we bade good-by to our kind Brazilian friends and sailed

northward for Barbados and New York.

Zoologically the trip had been a thorough success. Cherrie and Miller

had collected over twenty-five hundred birds, about five hundred

mammals, and a few reptiles, batrachians, and fishes. Many of them

were new to science; for much of the region traversed had never

previously been worked by any scientific collector.

Of course, the most important work we did was the geographic work, the

exploration of the unknown river, undertaken at the suggestion of the

Brazilian Government, and in conjunction with its representatives. No

piece of work of this kind is ever achieved save as it is based on

long continued previous work. As I have before said, what we did was

to put the cap on the pyramid that had been built by Colonel Rondon

and his associates of the Telegraphic Commission during the six

previous years. It was their scientific exploration of the chapadao,

their mapping the basin of the Juruena, and their descent of the Gy-

Parana that rendered it possible for us to solve the mystery of the

River of Doubt.

The work of the commission, much the greatest work of the kind ever

done in South America, is one of the many, many achievements which the

republican government of Brazil has to its credit. Brazil has been

blessed beyond the average of her Spanish-American sisters because she

won her way to republicanism by evolution rather than revolution. They

plunged into the extremely difficult experiment of democratic, of

popular, self-government, after enduring the atrophy of every quality

of self-control, self-reliance, and initiative throughout three

withering centuries of existence under the worst and most foolish form

of colonial government, both from the civil and the religious

standpoint, that has ever existed. The marvel is not that some of them

failed, but that some of them have eventually succeeded in such

striking fashion. Brazil, on the contrary, when she achieved

independence, first exercised it under the form of an authoritative

empire, then under the form of a liberal empire. When the republic

came, the people were reasonably ripe for it. The great progress of

Brazil--and it has been an astonishing progress--has been made under

the republic. I could give innumerable examples and illustrations of

this. The change that has converted Rio Janeiro from a picturesque

pest-hole into a singularly beautiful, healthy, clean, and efficient

modern great city is one of these. Another is the work of the

Telegraphic Commission.

We put upon the map a river some fifteen hundred kilometres in length,

of which the upper course was not merely utterly unknown to, but

unguessed at by, anybody; while the lower course, although known for

years to a few rubbermen, was utterly unknown to cartographers. It is

the chief affluent of the Madeira, which is itself the chief affluent

of the Amazon.

The source of this river is between the 12th and 13th parallels of

latitude south and the 59th and 60th degrees of longitude west from

Greenwich. We embarked on it at about latitude 12 degrees 1 minute

south, and about longitude 60 degrees 15 minutes west. After that its

entire course lay between the 60th and 61st degrees of longitude,

approaching the latter most closely about latitude 8 degrees 15

minutes. The first rapids we encountered were in latitude 11 degrees

44 minutes, and in uninterrupted succession they continued for about a

degree, without a day's complete journey between any two of them. At

11 degrees 23 minutes the Rio Kermit entered from the left, at 11

degrees 22 minutes the Rio Marciano Avila from the right, at 11

degrees 18 minutes the Taunay from the left, at 10 degrees 58 minutes

the Cardozo from the right. In 10 degrees 24 minutes we encountered

the first rubbermen. The Rio Branco entered from the left at 9 degrees

38 minutes. Our camp at 8 degrees 49 minutes was nearly on the

boundary between Matto Grosso and Amazonas. The confluence with the

Aripuanan, which joined from the right, took place at 7 degrees 34

minutes. The entrance into the Madeira was at about 5 degrees 20

minutes (this point we did not determine by observation, as it is

already on the maps). The stream we had followed down was from the

river's highest sources; we had followed its longest course.