On arriving at St. Johns I at once hunted up Captain James of the Polar Bear and handed him my commission. And such a captain he was! He looked a different race of seafaring men from the captains I had seen in the regular Atlantic service.
His grizzled hair and beard and clear, keen eyes were gray; that part of his face which showed was about two shades lighter than the color of dried walrus meat and with his silence—except when any of the crew failed in his duties—you would have known, even if you’d met him on Broadway, that his home was somewhere inside the Arctic Circle. He turned me over to his first mate who also looked as if he had a heart of oak and would be equal to any duty he might be called on to perform if it was north of latitude 75 degrees, the latitude at St. Johns.
And, oh, the crew! They were cutters of the old school, every one of them. I had no idea that sailors of their kind were to be found anywhere at this time here on earth except in song and story, but there they actually were all about me in the living flesh. There was an air about them that told as plainly as spoken words they had weathered many a polar storm and that now, even at St. Johns, they were way too far south of the bleak, frozen regions to be in their element.
And say, the ship! She was a beaut of the old wooden kind, not a whole lot to look at, but built to stand the strains of furious gales as well as the tremendous pressures of the ice packs. Indeed, she had been one of Commander Peary’s ships which had been farthest north when that explorer sought to find the North Pole some years before.
The wireless apparatus and I were the only objects on the ship that seemed not to belong to her, but when we reached the sealing grounds we found ourselves and helped in the catch, thereby making friends with the Captain and his crew.
The transmitter was formed of a single ten inch induction coil which was energized by a current of the ship’s dynamo. The receiver was of the regular Marconi type with a magnetic detector. The masts of the Polar Bear were only fifty feet apart and an aerial made up of half-a-dozen wires swung between them.
Whoever installed the equipment stopped at the aerial for there was no ground. It was no small job to get a decent ground for the ship, as I have said before, was an old-timer and had a wooden hull. Now where a ship has a steel hull all you’ve got to do to make a ground is to simply connect the ground wire to a water pipe, or any other metal part of the ship, for these lead to the steel hull; as the hull sets in the water the very best kind of a ground is had without any trouble to get it. But what’s to be done when there’s nothing but an old-fashioned wooden hull between your instruments and the water? The way I did it was to run a wire from the instruments down to the engine room; then the assistant engineer fixed a 6 x 6 x 24 inch block of wood parallel with and close to the propeller shaft; this done we screwed a copper brush, that is a strip of stiff sheet copper, to the block so that it pressed flat on and hard against the shaft.
Under the head of one of the screws I looped the free end of my ground wire and screwed it down tight. This made a good enough ground connection through the shaft and the propeller keyed to it which was submerged in the water. With this transmitter, aerial and ground, I could cover 100 miles or so when the conditions were favorable.
Everything was hustle and bustle on board and all around us, for at that time of the year—it was nearing the middle of March—a score or more of ships steam from St. Johns along the great Labrador Coast to the frozen north where the young harp seals are found by the thousands on the ice floes off the coast.
Of all the ships at St. Johns I saw only one other that was fitted with an aerial and when I got my apparatus in order I made my way over to her to see Mackey, her operator.
In days gone by the sealing ships were all schooners and just as these gave way to wooden steamers so the latter will be supplanted by ships with steel hulls, and the Midnight Sun was the first of these fine new steel craft. For size and power she put it all over the Polar Bear, but she lacked the glamor of romance and for this reason I liked my ship the best.
I had met Mackey, her operator, at Liverpool once and we straightway became better acquainted. He told me that the firm who owned the Polar Bear also owned the Midnight Sun and that the Captains of them were to work together. A new experiment was to be tried, he said, and that was to catch seals by wireless, but what the modus operandi of the scheme was he hadn’t the faintest idea and no more had I. I remember when I was a little boy that folks talked about running street cars by electricity and I wondered how it could be done. I had a kind of a vague notion that a chunk of electricity came along, struck the car and pushed it ahead just as a breeze fills the sails of a ship and carries her for’ard.
In after years I learned that the current of electricity flowed along a wire parallel with the tracks and that it passed from this feeder to the trolley of a car, thence down a conductor to a motor which it energized and finally back to the power house through the rails; further that it was the power of the motor thus developed which drove the wheels of the car; and I was disappointed, for it seemed to me to be altogether too round-about a way—too far-fetched—to justify the statement that the “car runs by electricity.”
The same thing holds good when you see signs which read, “hats cleaned by electricity,” “eggs hatched by electricity,” and “diamonds made by electricity,” for the hat is merely rotated by an electric motor, the eggs are hatched in an incubator which is heated by a current flowing through a wire, and the diamonds are made in an electric furnace.
Now catching seals by wireless was to my mind quite a vague, mysterious and altogether a difficult proposition to see into—even as running a car by electricity was when I was a little shaver. Seals are wonderful creatures, as you will admit if you ever saw them do a balancing act in a show, and I have heard that they have a great liking for music. A seal hunter can take a phonograph, put a band record on it, set it up where there is a patch of seals and start it going. The seals will come out of the water to listen to the sweet strains and every time one puts its nose above the surface the hunter, who is lying a little way off, will shoot it with his rifle. This then is what you might call hunting seals with music.
It looked to me as if we might be told to send out a line of wireless waves to a patch of seals, bend up the ends of a few dashes and when the seals had swallowed them the sailors would heave ho and pull them aboard. But no, catching seals by wireless was not done in quite so direct a fashion, as you will presently see.
We only made one stop after we left St. Johns and that was at Cartwright, near the mouth of the Hamilton River, on the bleak coast of Labrador. And wireless, let me say right here, has been a big factor in changing life, such as it is, in this wild, forbidding country.
Labrador, you know, is a narrow strip of coastland along the edge of the province of Quebec. It is from 10 to 50 miles wide, but a thousand miles long, reaching from Belle Isle Strait which separates the lower end of it from Newfoundland to Hudson Strait which lies within the Arctic Circle.
The inhabitants live only on the coast and these are made up chiefly of Eskimos in the north and Indians in the south, and all along and in between are trappers, fishermen and live yeres. The trappers push into the interior a little way to run their lines of traps and in the spring of the year thousands of fishermen come up from Newfoundland to take the cod-fish, which abound off the coast at this season of the year. If you ask one of the poor, ignorant white inhabitants about himself he will say that he lives yere, hence the nick-name of this fixed part of the population. The condition of all these poor, simple folk has been much improved by wireless.
For many years the mail-boat was the only steamer that made calls at all the ports along the coast and she did this about every six months. If any one wanted to get something from St. Johns he had to know it a long way ahead of time and even when he was thoughtful enough to order it the chances are that by the time it reached him he had forgotten he had ordered it or had gotten over wanting it.
On the mail-boat there was a doctor and the inhabitants had to wait to get sick until he came, or perhaps, it would be stating the case a little more accurately to say that however ill they might be they had to wait until he came before they could be treated. Anything might and often did happen to his patients between calls. But all this has been changed by wireless which now links up the towns along the coast with Battle Harbor where the Royal Deep Sea Mission has its hospital for fishermen, and not only may supplies be ordered but, what is of far greater importance, the sick may have their diseases diagnosed and medicine prescribed though they are as far away as Maine, by the doctor in charge and all in the twinkling of an electric wave.
As we steamed up the coast the ice fields began to loom up and as far as the eye could reach they glittered and sparkled like gigantic jewels under the glare of the Arctic sun. When night came on and the stars came out they shone a hundred fold brighter than in the temperate zone and the pale blue moon illuminated the scene with a kind of a supernatural light that seemed not to belong to earth.
But all the days and nights were by no means fine ones, for howling gales and fierce snow storms continually sprang up and I often wondered how a ship built and sailed by the hands of men, could weather them out. It was a man’s work! On such occasions I stuck to my wireless room which I found mighty comfortable and trusted to the Captain and his mates to see the ship safely through.
As we got farther and farther north the Aurora borealis, or northern lights as it is called, grew brighter and brighter every night until the whole heavens in the region of the North Pole were scintillating with streamers that spread out like a great fan, reaching over our heads and far to the south. The first mate said that it was as brilliant an aurora as he had ever seen and his explanation of it was that the spots on the sun had been unusually large and numerous.
Not only did the sun’s activity show itself in the aurora, but it set up a violent magnetic storm on earth and this made the compass needles oscillate to and fro as much as 1½ degrees on each side of their normal positions. Now magnetic storms always interfere very seriously with the operation of both overland telegraph lines and cable systems where the circuit is completed through the earth.
I had heard some one say, or had read somewhere, that a magnetic storm would interfere in the same way with wireless messages and I was fearful for some time that it would put our signals out of commission. But all through the magnetic storm Mackey and I sent our messages without the slightest trouble—indeed if we had not been told that a magnetic storm was on we should never have guessed it. Evidently wireless had scored another point over the wire systems and another pet theory was put on the ice to cool.
We sailed up the coast keeping pretty close to it while the Midnight Sun steamed up and out from it until we were fifty or more miles apart. Now here is where wireless came in, in catching seals. Over the constantly broadening gap between our ships Mackey and I kept their Captains right in touch with each other.
The Captain of his ship wirelessed that there were any number of old seals about him and this showed, the first mate told me, that there were patches of white coats, as the young harp-seals are called, somewhere in the neighborhood.
Our ship immediately headed in his direction and a night’s steaming brought us within a few miles of the Midnight Sun, but we did not see any white coats either. But after we scouted around for five or six hours we sighted a patch of hundreds upon hundreds of little seal babies basking on the ice floes in the sun. My Captain ordered me to signal the good news of our find to the Captain of the Midnight Sun; he in turn steamed at once for our ship and when she came up the killing began.
These seals are called harp-seals because they have brownish yellow bodies and on the back of each one is a big black mark like a harp. The old harp-seals start from way up north of Melville Sound in the early part of the winter and by March they are off the Labrador coast. There tens of thousands of them herd together on the drifting ice when the little white-coats, as the baby seals are called because their fur is so white, are born and, curiously enough, nearly all of them are born on the same day.
It was a great sight to see these fat roly-poly baby seals lying on their backs on the drifting ice and using their flippers to fan themselves with to keep cool.
A few days later the ships were so close to each other that Mackey and I visited back and forth across the ice while the crews were busy taking the seals. When we headed for St. Johns we had on board our ship more than twenty-five thousand sealskins, which was as big a load as we could carry, while the Midnight Sun had nearly fifty thousand and together we broke all previous records.
This being the case these hardened Arctic Captains were as tickled as a couple of sea-urchins and both agreed that wireless was the greatest sealing scheme introduced since steamers took the place of schooners.
Before we bore up for St. Johns there were great doings on board both ships. Rockets were fired in lieu of regular fireworks and Mackey, having the most powerful set, sent a message to old Boreas and old Arcticus who are pioneers in the refrigerating business, and if the North Pole has an aerial suspended from it and the latter has a receiver attached to it, I doubt not but that they listened-in to the first wireless signals ever sent within the polar circle; if so, they heard some mighty fine things said about themselves and the glorious, though, withal frigid, country they rule over.
I wouldn’t have missed that experience for a million dollars—what’s that?—well, not for a hundred dollars in real money anyway.
CHAPTER V—MY ADVENTURES IN THE TROPICS
When Bert Mackey and I got back to New York we were both in the same boat—to wit, we were without jobs. On the way down, though, Bert unfolded a very alluring scheme by which we could, he allowed, make oodles of money and at the same time stand a chance of meeting with something that looked like real adventure.
“Do you know, Jack,” Bert said confidentially, “that I went into the wireless game simply because it appeared to me to offer the best chance of meeting Miss Adventure. I’ve been at it for five years now and I’ve never even had the pleasure of getting a look at her face.
“Wherever I go she is always on the other side of the street and although I tip my hat to her she never looks up, much less gives me a tumble. I took that sealing job because I certainly thought I’d meet Miss Adventure somewhere among the ice floes and blizzards of the Arctic North. But no! all I did was to sit in my cabin and send what my Captain wanted to tell your Captain and receive what your Captain had to say to my Captain. And to what purpose? So that a few rich men could get richer by enabling vain women to run around the streets of New York and a few other big burgs bedecked out in the skins of baby seals that had been clubbed to death. Now that’s big business for men and women to be in, isn’t it?
“I wish I could get a job on a pirate ship or start a revolution in some punk Central American country. And it’s funny,” he went on complainingly, “how a fellow like you, who has only been in the service a couple of years, could meet with a big adventure like the sinking of the Andalusian, I’d have given a year of my life to have been in your place.
“Now down along the Amazon River there are great rubber plantations, savage tribes of Indians, tigers, monkeys, boa-constrictors and all the garnishings that go to make up a first class tropical jungle. I know a man in New York that does business with a rubber concern in Para, Brazil and he told me, just before we sailed north, that the Compagnie Francaise de Telegraphie sans Fil had a contract to put up half a dozen wireless stations along the river.
“It strikes me, Jack, that it would be a good scheme if you and I took a trip down there and looked over the ground. What do you say?”
Having a few dollars in my pocket and nothing else to do at that particular moment I said O K and agreed to join him provided we could get free transportation on some liner going down there. Bert assured me that he could fix it and he was as good as his word.
So it was we sailed in due time on the Ceara of the Holliday Line. It was an old tub that stood every chance of having on board Miss Adventure and I didn’t doubt in the least but that Bert would have ample opportunity to strike up an acquaintance with her and to swim back, if he got back at all, for the Ceara had no wireless equipment—such was her regard for the laws of the U.S.
As luck would have it we had fine weather and she beat her way down just as she had for the last quarter of a century if she was as old as she looked. We enjoyed the trip, at that, for there were not many passengers aboard and all of them, especially the South Americans, were very pleasant people. Having learned that we had never been in South America we were told that it was a great country full of possibilities for young men with some capital but that if we were unacquainted there it would be better for us to about face at Para and go home.
Bert and I had other thoughts on the subject but as we were nearing the Equator I kind of wondered why I had not stayed at home selling crude-oil engines or taking the post on the new Cunarder that Sammis said he’d get for me, or doing something else that was nice and cool.
In a little less than a month’s time we landed at Para, as it is popularly called, or Belem, as it is more properly called, or to give it its full name Santa Maria de Del Belem do Para. Just as New Orleans is built back from the Gulf of Mexico, on the Mississippi River so Para is situated a hundred miles inland from the Atlantic on the Amazon River. So this is Para from which Para rubber comes, thought I as I looked about, and indeed I should have known it had I sailed into port with my eyes shut for the smell of rubber everywhere permeated the air.
But don’t think for a moment that it is made up of a lot of adobe houses as so many Mexican towns are. Far from it, for in architecture it is a miniature reproduction of Rio de Janeiro, which city in turn looks more like Paris than any other in either North or South America. Nor is Para a small burg, for it has a population of a hundred thousand now and some day, if the Amazon valley is ever developed, it may be larger than Rio de Janeiro, aye, even than New York itself.
Different from the equatorial city I expected to find, where every one had nothing to do but to lie under a palm tree, look at the blue sky, smoke cigarettes and agitate the air with a fan, there was much to do, for there rubber is King, and the white, yellow and black folks were doing it with a good deal of vim too. The demand for rubber, we learned, was greater than it had ever been before and consequently the people were prosperous and happy.
After a deal of searching we located the offices of the Compagnie Francaise de Telegraphie sans Fil and Bert explained to Señor Benoit, the manager, that we were a couple of wireless operators from the United States. The manager acted as though he was dazed and Bert handed him our credentials to set him right.
In a moment, though, he recovered and I wish you could have seen the way he greeted us! You’d have thought he’d found two long lost brothers for he hugged us in turn and almost wept on our necks. I thought the heat and the smell of the rubber had made him nutty where as it was only his great good luck. Believe me, he knew exactly what it was all about.
He had come on from France six months before to put up a chain of wireless stations beginning at Para and on up the river for 2500 miles to Equitos, at intervals of about 500 miles. Before the wireless men got to Jurutty they had been taken down with the fever and were even then on their way to Para, and so the job was open and ready for us to tackle. He agreed to pay us a million reis, including all our expenses and a million reis for every month we remained as operators in his company’s service. It didn’t take half-an-eye to see that if we could stick it out for a few months we’d be regular millionaires.
“I want to make our wireless system a success to show the Brazilian capitalists its superiority over the wire system. They have an overhead line stretched along the banks of the river but it gives very poor service for any one of a number of reasons, chief among them being that it is hard to keep iron wires from rusting away owing to the great amount of rain, and when copper wire is used the Indians have a great liking for it and cut out a length here and there whenever they want it.
“With wireless it is different and if I can only get the stations set up and working I will show the advantages of it over the wire system very quickly. Wireless will be safer and surer for the rains can’t affect it and I am quite sure the Indians will not steal the ether.”
We took passage on the Asuncion, one of the Amazon Steamship Company’s fleet of small steamers and sailed up the Rio Amazonia, or as we call it the Amazon River, the mightiest of all flowing waters. On either side of it for hundreds of miles lay a tangled mass of tropical vegetation—the jungle in very truth. The villages were far between but occasionally we saw the rude huts of a few settlers who had come forth from the civilized quarters of the world to sap out their energies and make their fortunes in rubber.
We were told that a mighty small area of the jungle had been explored though a few expeditions had made their devious ways through some parts of it either for scientific purposes, such as studying the vegetation and living things, or for commercial reasons as getting plants for medicines and more frequently rubber.
And rain! I can’t remember a day down there when it didn’t rain. The reason it rains so much is this: the warm winds that blow up the river from the Atlantic carry a lot of moisture with them and the winds that blow down the river from the Andes are cold and when they come together, the moisture condenses and it rains.
The scenery looked about the same all the way along—just one mass of tropical trees of all kinds for the warp and these were woven together with vines of every description for the woof. I could see our finish before we started in to “look over the ground” as Bert had suggested when we were in dear old New York. Yes, dear little old New York—how I wished I were back there again.
As for rubber plantations they were there, the savage tribes of Indians were there too—I didn’t see them on the trip up stream but they were there all right just as Bert had said. There were no tigers as Bert guessed but we saw the onca, or jaguar (pronounced ja-gwar), a buff feline beast covered with black spots that is a second cousin to the tiger in both size and ferociousness.
The whole blooming tribe of monkeys with faces on them that ought to make a fellow ashamed to look at himself in a glass, and make you know that Darwin was right; boa-constrictors and seven million, more or less of other kinds of snakes were there—in fact equatorial America was all that Bert, or I, or any one else, ever dreamed it was and then multiply it by about a hundred and you will get a faint impression of it. Yes, beasts, birds, fishes, snakes and insects end without number, and each a marvel of its kind, were there and so was the Indian princess.
There was the tapir, a sort of a cross between a horse and a rhinocerous having a short proboscis as though its snout was made of rubber and some one had stretched it for him; it is a shy and harmless beastie that moves about chiefly at night. The sloth, a greenish-brown animal whose chief business it is to hang back downward from the branch of a tree and to sleep away its life.
The ant-eater who picks up a living by eating ants and other insects. All hail to the ant-eater! I’ve seen a dozen other animals down there that have no business outside of a jungle, or a zoo or a menagerie. Lizards are there in great variety from those that change their colors while you wait to those the natives serve up for you to eat.
And talking about colors, no coal tar dye was ever discovered that could begin to equal the plumage of the birds down there. Large parrots called macaws, parakeets, which are little parrots with long tails, cockatoos and love birds, which belong to the parrot family, and others on down to humming birds that are scarcely larger than wasps, are as thick as microbes in sour milk.
But the jungle is the paradise of the insects; there is every conceivable kind and then as many more that are beyond human belief: gigantic, gorgeous butterflies, beetles that looked as if they had been stencilled with the rainbow colors of the sun, and flies as numerous per square unit of space as grains of powder in the charge of an 8 gauge shell.
The ants, though, have all the other insects faded and everything else in the jungle that lives on the ground. Next to William Hohenzollern’s armies that devastated Belgium and Flanders rank the Amazon armies of ants that march out to seek what and whom they can devour. Everything from a jaguar on down that gets in their way becomes meat and drink for them.
You have, of course, often watched our little fireflies and wondered what kind of an apparatus was installed in their anatomy which produces the intermittent, phosphorescent light as they flit around. Well, down in Brazil there are fireflies that look like electric lights. They measure nearly 4 inches long, and 1¼ inches wide and carry three light reservoirs—two in the thorax and one in the abdomen—and these give off a bright greenish light.
When the natives want a light they simply catch a few fireflies, put them in a bottle and cork it up. They could read by this light if they could read but they can’t so the chief use to which they put the fire-fly lights is to hunt around in their beds to see what has crawled in with them. This, then, is the cheapest form of light and, according to Sir Oliver Lodge, if man could produce an electric light with as little expenditure of power as the fire-fly then a boy turning the handle of an electric machine could light up a good sized factory.
The things that live in the Amazon River are just as plentiful as those that inhabit the jungle. The manatee, or sea-cow as it is called, is the largest having a length of something like 10 feet. If you were far enough away from it you might mistake it for a seal for it has the same general outline. Turtles grow to be 3 feet long, and oddsfish, there’s enough different kinds to stock the seven seas and then have some left over for the boarding houses.
I could talk to you for a week about the strange living creatures I saw in and along the banks of the Amazon and in the jungle, but the trees and plants are just as wonderful. For instance, there are palms out of which palm-leaf fans are made and palm trees that grow up as high as wireless masts and on their main trucks and pennants are cocoanuts. Trees that when you tap ’em rubber, milk or cold water comes forth depending on the kind of a tree it happens to be. Also a large number of most uncommon fruits are there in great abundance.
At last we arrived at our destination, Jurutty, a village about 500 miles east of Manaos. When we landed my first and only thought was of home and mother. My trip to the Arctic was a delightful little pleasure jaunt as against this one up the Amazon River! Had I been castaway on the moon, aye, even on Mars, I couldn’t have felt more remote from my native land than when I stepped ashore at Jurutty. And yet, would you believe it, now that it is in the past tense I would like to go there once again.
We were met at the dock by Señor Castro, the fezendero, that is the owner of the fezenda, which means the plantation. He was a mixture of Portuguese and Indian but none the less a gentleman for that. A motley crew of negroes, men, women and children with very little clothing on and Indians who hadn’t the remotest idea why any one should wear clothes at all, and mixtures of these races, were also at hand to see the newcomers.
Señor Castro was right glad to see us and after shaking hands with us half-a-dozen times he led the way back through a path in the jungle to his fezenda. We dined in his home as I had never dined before nor have since, drank coffee that threw the surpassing beverage of the same name which is brewed in Child’s and the Waldorf-Astoria in the shade and smoked his long tobacco wrapped cigarettes.
Then we talked wireless. The apparatus, as Señor Benoit had said, was there and Señor Castro assured us that we should have all the help we needed to set it up. He told us that there was an electric generator and a crude-oil engine to furnish the power to run it with—and yet there were hundreds of thousands of horse power to be had from the Amazon—but which had never been tapped. Fortunately I happened to know all about the history, theory and practise of oil engines and how to sell them if the alleged prospects had the slightest idea of buying such power units.
Señor Castro also had a billiard table, a phonograph and other civilized inventions to while away life as pleasantly as possible in the jungle, and taking it all in all Bert and I considered that things were not altogether against us.
After we turned in our bobbinet curtained beds that night all went well until we were awakened in the small hours by the sound of a woman’s voice outside. Thinking it was some female in distress Bert awakened the fezendero only to be told with great courtesy that it was not a woman but an organ bird. Bert returned saying something about forming a Society for the Prevention of Jungle Noises at Night, and we slept again.
In the morning Señor Castro took us out to show us his fezenda. Three small horses were saddled ready for us to ride—though I can ride a wave at sea much better than I can ride a quadruped on land. We rode around his rubber plantation and Señor Castro showed us how the rubber trees are tapped, explained that the fluid which comes from the trees is not the sap of the wood but of the bark and we saw how the natives stick little tin-cups to the trees with bits of clay to catch the fluid.
On returning we rode along the edge of the jungle and Señor Castro cautioned us “never to go into the jungle for you will either get lost, be killed by jaguars, bitten by snakes, or by fever laden insects which are just as bad.”
“To the south of us,” he went on calmly, “are the Caripunas—aboriginal Indians that kill and eat people if they get a chance.”
“Cannibals?” I asked to make sure I had heard aright, and when he said “yes” I could feel an electric oscillation run up and down my spinal column.
“How far away from here are they?” questioned Bert with a peculiar light in his eyes I had noticed whenever he spoke of adventure.
“The village is about 200 kilometers from here,” Señor Castro replied. “It’s strange but they seem to have some kind of a sixth sense by which they can tell the moment strangers arrive—some kind of a wireless telegraph system, I guess,” and he laughed.
Then he went on: “I don’t doubt but that they have been stalking us because you fellows are new to the place. It’s seldom that any of them ever come across this road because I’ve put bullets into a couple of them and they won’t get away with any more of my rubber men on this side of the line.”
I asked him if they had captured many of his men.
“Every time my men tread the jungle outside of the fezenda they are taken unless they have an Indian guide with them.”
“Oh, I see, they are Union savages,” said Bert and he added, “I know I’m going to like this place, Señor Castro.”
In the days that followed we got right down to business for we wanted that million reis as soon as we could get it. We unpacked the materials for the aerial first and every move we made was watched with great interest by the villagers. The phosphor-bronze wire for the aerial seemed to have an especial attraction for them, for they would pick it up, look critically at it and examine it as carefully as though they were looking for flaws in it.
There were two palm trees at least 100 feet high and about 250 feet apart, and Bert and I decided to use these for the masts. When we had the aerial assembled with the leading-in wire soldered to it I asked if any one there could climb the palm tree and every man, woman and child said that they could. I gave one of the half-breeds a coil of quarter-inch hemp rope to hoist the aerial with and showed him how I wanted the end of the aerial made fast to the tree top and then told him to go aloft.
I wish you could have seen that fellow climb the tree! I used to think our old time sailors were about as clever as they made ’em when it comes to climbing but there’s no use talking they’re too civilized—too far removed from the monkey family to know how to climb anything but a rope ladder.
The half-breed grasped the back of the tree with the open palms of his hands and placing the bare soles of his feet in front like a jack-knife he just naturally walked up it. These same fellows can travel for miles through the jungle by swinging themselves from vine to vine and going as fast as you or I can walk. So you see there are some things an ignorant Amazonian can do that an educated New Yorker can’t do. And thus does Nature’s law of compensation work out.
After we got the aerial swung between the palms we set the engine and dynamo in place on their foundations and with some tinkering we got them to running pretty smoothly. To Señor Castro’s delight we had enough current not only to work the wireless set but for lighting up his house as well. Last of all came the transmitter and receiver and although these were of French make we had no difficulty in either installing or operating them and it was a cinch to get either Manaos on the west or Almeirir on the east.
It seemed that the operators at both stations could get us a deal better than we could get them though all of the transmitters were fitted with one kilowatt transformers. But never mind, we had established communication, thus fulfilling our part of the agreement, and Señor Castro, by all the arts of a true gentleman, showed us how deeply he appreciated our work. Nothing was too good for us. The only flaw in the whole system was the operator at Manaos. He was like the sloth in that he was just as liable to go to sleep as he was to stay awake.
I believe that every message I ever sent had something in it about rubber, whether the body of it related to the doctor, medicines, or what not, for along the Amazon River they live and die by that commodity.
After we had been at Jurutty a few weeks Bert and I got so we knew the fezenda about as well as its owner did and we walked or rode about the place either alone or with Señor Castro for we made it a point for one or the other to be on duty all the time and so make a reputation for ourselves and for future United States operators who might happen that way.
I often thought, in my rambles, that I could feel the presence of some human being back of a tree, or see a human shadow come and go before I could really make it out, but as this happened very often I came to believe it was merely a case of nerves. I talked with Bert about it and he said he frequently heard and saw things too but that there was nothing more to it than a snake or an animal moving about.
“Señor Castro,” he said, “has told us this little yarn about cannibals so that we would keep inside the fezenda. There used to be tribes of cannibals in the interior but all that sort of thing has been wiped out by the Jesuit missionaries long ago.”
I was out for a walk one morning not long after and I heard a monkey crying as though he was in great pain. I located him a dozen or twenty paces in the jungle and went after him. He seemed to have gotten tangled up in some vines and the harder he tried to get away the tighter they held him.
Just as I reached up and released him a piece of wood was slipped into my mouth by some one from behind making it impossible for me to utter a sound and before I could take my revolver from its holster my hands were pinioned back of me and my feet were bound so that I couldn’t kick, much less run. Although I kept my eyes open I couldn’t see a man-jack of my captors nor did they make the slightest noise.
They lifted me up bodily and after a few manœuvers in penetrating the jungle we finally reached a pretty well trodden trail and then they set me down and took the gag out of my mouth. Four strapping big, copper colored bucks with splashes of red paint on their stark naked bodies were the imps of Satan who had so unceremoniously abducted me. I would have given just $7.00 in American gold to have gotten each one of them to hold on to the spark-gap of a 10-inch induction coil for just one second.
They were a quartet of jim-dandies and all they needed was a stove-pipe hat apiece to complete their outfits.
Again they boosted me into the air and with a savage at each corner of me they started off on a dog-trot, whither I knew not but what I did know was that I was a goner. After a march, or a trot, of two days and nights we came to an Indian village. There were several hundred men, women and children savages about but they were dressed better than the hunters who had brought me in for each one wore a string around his or her waist and a rattle-box on her or his ankle.
If any one thinks that cannibalism has been wiped out in the Amazon jungles he has another think coming for I saw with these—my own eyes—the whole horrible ceremony gone through with of eating human flesh.
After I had been there a few days a couple of savages, one with brown hair and beard and the other with red hair and beard, began talking to me in Spanish after trying Portuguese on me. I was quite surprised when they told me they were rubber men from Señor Castro’s fezenda whom the cannibals had captured nearly a year before.
We planned escape by the hour, though one of them said that was just what these man eaters wanted us to do and that when a fellow tried to escape they would recapture him, bring him back, put him in the proverbial pot and let him stew in his own juice. We were of a mind that it would be better to be live men turned savages than to be cooked men eaten by cannibals.
His most high worshipful King Oopla relieved me of my revolver, and came nearly shooting up the village,—which I heartily wished he had done,—also my watch, knife, compass and other trinkets which four former articles he generously kept for himself and the latter he gave to a wench whom I afterwards learned was his daughter, the Princess Jaci—which is as near as I could come to pronouncing her name. I called her Princess Mabel, the latter name being that of a shine kitchen-mechanic we once had.
Her face was thin and small and was topped by an enormous mass of frizzled hair while her eyes set at a slight angle so that you couldn’t just tell whether she was looking at you to the leeward or a rubber tree to the windward.
Although her eyes were thus slightly out of alignment and her mouth was cut on much too large a scale, which gave her a hard look, she was always smiling good naturedly.
The first thing I knew Princess Mabel began to hang around me and to eat and drink out of my cocoa-nut shell. She was an artistic creation in olive drab, small, and lithe, but withal a very amiable and charming maiden as cannibal maidens go.
She hadn’t been spoiled by working in high-toned families in Montclair yet. I fought shy of her for some time for I thought they wanted to put up a job on me and that the moment I gave her a pleasant look I’d be on my way to the stew pot; this belief was further fixed in my mind by occasionally finding a skull, a rib, ulna, fibula, and other parts of the human skeleton lying around loose.
The rubber men, who could speak the Indian tongue a little, assured me, however, that the King had taken a great fancy to me—I suppose because I looked so young and tender—and that the Princess herself thought very well of me. The King’s idea, they informed me, was to have me marry the princess so as to improve the royal strain just as his own savage self had been improved in the slave days of South America when the niggers would run away from their masters and seek decent society among the cannibals.
“For heaven’s sake, boy,” one of the rubber men said to me, “make up your mind to marry her or we’ll all be served up a la chop suey in the grill room.”
Henceforth I treated her with all the courtesy and dignity I could command and she reciprocated by showing me where her papa kept my pistol, my watch and my compass—things I was glad to know, and she gave me these stones too, which I am told by dealers in gems in Maiden Lane to be diamonds. How much are they worth? No one knows until I have them cut.
Everything went fine for the next couple of months but I was getting pretty sick of the life and kept scheming to get away. This tribe of savages used powerful bows and arrows barbed with bone and tipped with feathers. It was all I could do to bend them but the King had one made for me that was more to my strength and I learned to use it with precision and great effect.
Every day I would go hunting and I always had the company of a couple of pleasant secret service savages. Whatever I bagged I gave King Oopla and Princess Mabel the very choicest of it and I always tried to get game that was to their liking. We became great friends and I wouldn’t leave these good simple minded people—no not for anything in the world unless I got a good chance.
But I went a little farther every day and often lost myself from my savage guides, but, never fear, I always came back like a dutiful prospective son-in-law should. On returning one day from a hunting trip that had lasted longer than-any of the others I had ever made, I found they had killed one of the rubber men and were cooking him en casserole.
That evening at sundown the ceremonies began and when it had grown dark great bonfires were lit and the cannibals, with hideous painted faces and bodies were dancing as if their very lives depended on it to the bombastic beating of tom-toms, Old King Oopla had on his dress suit which consisted of a pair of long horns projecting from either side of his head, a red undershirt, and a celluloid cuff on each ankle. Her royal highness, Princess Mabel, was bedecked out in a wonderful head-gear and a fluffy ballet skirt built up of macaw and other brilliant feathers. A few strings of human teeth around her neck completed her bridal costume. She looked awful nice.
The King, Mabel, and myself were squatting on a kind of throne built up in the center of the ring of dancers but so enthusiastic did these royal personages become that the King and the Princess must needs have a fling at it too.
After keeping the dance going into the small hours of the morning they stopped and gorged themselves with human flesh until they fell down in their tracks, actually drunk with the gruesome orgy. It was a preliminary feast to my marriage with Princess Mabel. When at last the coast was clear I recovered not only my revolver but another one from the hole in the tree where the King hid his treasures and giving it to Señor Paes, the surviving rubber man, we stole forth determined on gaining our freedom or else going to our deaths.
At the end of every mile we covered I put my ear to the ground and listened in, but there were no sounds of our being followed. After ten hours’ travel over trails that I knew I figured that we were nearer Jurutty than to the cannibal village. We kept right on and after another five hours my ground telegraph told me that human footsteps were coming and I knew it was a question of only a little time until the savages would overtake us.
When they were within arrow shot of us we each stood back of a tree on either side of the trail and as a squad of them came up unsuspectingly we blazed away at them with our revolvers and there were eight cannibal carcasses ready for the buzzards to pick.
When we reached the fezenda Bert came near to giving the buzzards still more pickings, for he mistook my companion and myself, with our long, unkempt hair and bare bodies, as brown as those of Indians, for a precious pair of cannibals and he took a couple of pot-shots at us.
After we had taken our baths and put on some honest-to-goodness clothes we had a long talk-fest. Señor Castro, he said, believed that I had been devoured by jaguars, but he had somehow felt that I had been captured by the cannibals. He had searched into the depths of the jungle for some trace of me until he was taken down with the fever where he lay nigh unto death for a month. When he got well he concluded he’d go north for in the meantime Señor Castro had gotten another operator.
“I’m certainly an unlucky dog, Jack,” Bert bemoaned his fate; “I can’t understand why I couldn’t have had even a look-in on that cannibal business. Here I’ve been down with the fever while you’ve had as fine an adventure as ever befell a man. Back to Broadway for mine where the only cannibal princesses I shall ever see are those that trip the light fantastic in the chorus.”
“Truly, I’m sorry, old man,” I consoled him, “but it wasn’t my fault though it was your misfortune. You’ll get yours yet, so cheer up.”
A week later we were ready to sail down the Amazon to Para, there to take ship for New York. Señor Castro paid us the full amount agreed upon by the manager of the Compagnie Francaise de Telegraphie sans Fil and we had in all a total of about 4,000,000 reis between us—in fact we were, as we had anticipated, bloated millionaires. I had a satchel full of bills of big denomination—there is neither gold nor silver money down there.
When we got to Para, though, and we began to spend our money we were astonished and disgusted to find that a meal cost about 6000 reis, the street-car fare was 400 reis and the postage on a letter home was 300 reis. In other words, 1,000,000 reis was just about equivalent to 325 dollars in our money. Well, we were millionaires while we thought we were anyhow.
What about the diamonds I have? I don’t know but if they are the real thing I think I’ll organize a company, go down there with a machine gun, wipe out the cannibals and open up a diamond field.
CHAPTER VI—WORKING WITH MARCONI
I must tell you about a fine experience I had with Mr. Marconi when he received the first signals across the Atlantic, but before I do so I want to say a few words concerning the great inventor and his wireless telegraph.
Quite a number of people seem to be imbued with the idea that no one ever thought of sending messages by wireless before Mr. Marconi—in fact that he just put together a few old electrical instruments and forthwith sent and received messages over space without any connecting wires.
Of course the basis for these erroneous impressions is that Mr. Marconi is said to be, and rightly, the inventor of the wireless telegraph. Now I want to put those young fellows who are reading this account straight on the matter. Many men may work on a device and none of them hit upon the thing that is needed to make it practical; then some fine day a genius will happen along and see just what the device lacks and add it to the general collection, or he will put something to it, perhaps accidentally, that does the business, and this last touch which enables it to be used gives the man who does it the right to be called its inventor.
Now, dozens of men, including Morse, Edison and Tesla in this country, and Hughes, Pierce and Lodge in England, worked on the scheme of sending messages without wires; but they either experimented along the wrong line, or the few who worked on the right line did not push far enough ahead to get anywhere. The result was that by the time Mr. Marconi tackled it all the instruments that were needed for telegraphing without wires were at hand but no one had quite caught on how to use them.
Nearly every one thinks, too, that it is far more wonderful to send wireless messages than it is to send messages over a wire; but this is not the case at all, though both, I trow, are wonderful enough. When we say a message is sent by wireless we do not mean, by a long shot, that it goes from the place where it is sent to the place where it is received without anything between them to carry it. Nor again do we mean that it goes to a single receiver and nowhere else.
For instance, when you talk to a person ordinarily you convey to him your message without wires, but it is the air between your mouth and his ear that carries the message, that is, waves are set up in the air and these are called sound waves. Naturally since the air is everywhere on the surface of the earth the sounds you make travel in every direction.
A better example of wireless is a lighted lamp and your eye, for in this case the lighted lamp acts as a transmitter and sets up very short waves in the ether, which are called light waves and these likewise travel in every direction. The ether is a substance that is 15 trillion times lighter than the air and it fills the whole universe, and when the electric waves set up by a light in it strike your eye the optic nerve carries the sensation of them to your brain and you see the light.
The next thing to know is that light waves and wireless waves are exactly the same kind of waves, that is, both are caused by electric stresses and magnetic whirls in the ether, but while light waves are in the neighborhood of the ten-millionth of an inch in length, wireless waves are so long they make no impression at all on the eye.
That light is electric waves in the ether has been known for the last couple of hundred years and later on scientific sharks believed there were other and longer electric waves but they didn’t know how to produce them or to receive them until 1888.
In that year Heinrich Hertz, a young German college professor, discovered that when an electric spark was made by any kind of an apparatus the positive and negative electric charges in uniting together would not only break down the air to make the spark, but would form an oscillating current, that is, a current which surges to and fro hundreds of thousands of times a second, and that this high frequency current, as it is called, sets up waves in the ether just as the vibrations of a bell set up waves in the air.
Hertz made an apparatus by which he could produce electric waves of different lengths and this he called an oscillator. It consisted of a couple of wires fixed to the balls of the spark-gap of an induction coil, on the other and free end of which were soldered a couple of sheets of copper. (See the accompanying picture.)