A clumsy cart, with its two wheels cross-cut from a single mahogany log, and slowly dragged by a pair of mud covered oxen, crawled across the open space before the settlement that had been left, after the Spanish custom, in crude reminder of a plaza. Under the midday tropic sun the quivering heat-waves boiled up from the baking ground and through them the straggling line of high-peaked, palm-thatched, cane houses shimmered in the glare. Under the torrent of heat the jungle sounds were silenced, and only in the distance, from the river’s edge, came the splashing and clatter of the Tacana woman, with the happy shrieks of the sun-proof, naked babies.
The wooden axles of the cart cried aloud for grease as a ragged Tacana prodded the lumbering oxen; on the raw hides in the cart lay a tiny sack of mail and beside it the tawny mottlings of a fresh stripped jaguar skin. The cart stopped before the cane house of the intendente and that functionary rolled lazily from his hammock and signed a paper; the half-breed roused himself from the corrugated floor of split palm logs, and disappeared in the jungle paths of the scattered settlement to gather his crew, and by that I knew that at last my time for embarking on the muddy, swirling current of the Rio Beni had arrived.
Eight hundred miles back, through cañon and mountain torrent, over the giant passes of the inner Andes, lay the Bolivian capital of La Paz, the last civilization from the Pacific shore. Two thousand miles to the eastward from this little frontier nucleus of Rurrenabaque lay the civilization that groped its way westward from the Atlantic, while between were long reaches of desolate rivers, and primitive jungle.
The few whites—refugee mostly; two, I knew, had a price on their heads on the other side of the Andes—popped out of their cane shacks to see me off. Even in these remote parts, where distance is counted in so many days’ travel, the long river-trail to the Atlantic is reckoned out of the ordinary. My big canoe would take me only to the Falls of the Madeira, and yet it would be three months before the crew would return to Rurrenabaque on their slow trip against the current.
My Rurrenabaque host, a dried-up little Englishman who had packed alone on foot over the high passes to this interior, and whose reckless nerve will pass into ultimate legend, flapped about in half-slippered feet as he supervised the loading of my baggage on the batalon that was sluggishly swinging to its vine moorings in the current. His Cholo wife with her flaring skirts, high-heeled, fancy shoes, and pink stockings, fluttered amiably about, while a green macaw and its inseparable companion, a big, gaudy blue-and-yellow macaw, crawled affectionately over her shoulders. Such idle Tacanas, Mojos, or Leccos who incautiously and curiously approached were pounced upon by my host, whose reckless Spanish was somehow intelligible and efficacious. He impressed a little Tacana man to carry my cartridge-belt.
“Wot ho, chico, ’ere you are, grab ’old! Wot ho, sokker el rifle y los balas, ’urry hup—pronto, de prisa, vamonos!” And the naked little Tacana baby—for he was scarcely more than that—trotted proudly along under the little load. “Abaht t’ leave us, wot ho, yus! Goin’ ’ome—I’m goin’ ’ome myself, next year.”
Next year! Wherever you go, however far off the main traveled trails you may drift even into those unmapped spaces where the law is carried in a holster and buckled on the hip, you will find them, American or English, those who are scattered on the fringe of the world—and always they are going home, and always next year! Home! Their home is where they are; their lives, their affections, and the loyal little interests that intertwine and make the home are all about them. And they realize it only vaguely, when they have finally set a date for departure and it begins to loom in the future like approaching disaster in the multitude of little separations. Like my friend they may be compadre—godfather—to half the river; little disputes are laid away unto the day of their arrival, and their word is righteousness to the simple Indian mind; in the land where there is no law they are ready in emergencies to carry justice in the breech of a rifle; they have earned the trust of the weaker, white or native, and stand forth in the full cubits of their real stature—and always they are looking forward to going home, next year! Born from out of poverty and the slums, with a pathetic loyalty they dream of the land in which they have neither ties nor friends and where a fetid alley in some sweated city is hallowed in their vague desire.
THE TACANA BRIDES ADJUSTED FOR THEMSELVES COMFORTABLE NICHES IN THE CARGO.
Down on the gravel beach the Tacana crew was gathering. Each had his own paddle, a light, short-handled affair, with a round blade scarcely larger than a saucer and crudely decorated with native forest dyes. The paddle, a plate, a spoon, a little kettle, a short machete, bow and arrows, or perhaps a gaily painted trade-gun and a red flask of feeble powder, constituted his entire equipment for the many weeks on the river. Indifferent to the white-hot gravel, they pattered in bare feet and tattered clothes—for unlike the Lecco, his near neighbor, the Tacana is careless in his dress—and dumped a bunch of fresh-cut, green platanos in the bow. The soldered tins of rice, strips of charqui, and the boxes of viscocha—a double baked bread as hard as cement that does not mould in the tropic humidity, had already been stored. Two Tacana girls, still children in years, but brides of two of the boys of the crew, waded out and climbed aboard the canoe; the half-breed threw aboard the little sack of mail; I waded out; the vine moorings were cast off, and with a splashing of paddles and the last clattering farewells, we swung out into the Beni’s muddy current. The lonely little group of aliens on the beach fired their rifles in salute, their diminishing figures quivered and blurred in the heated air that boiled up from the hot gravel shore as I emptied my magazine rifle in response, and then they turned and plodded slowly back to their cane shacks.
The sun blazed down on the open canoe, and on each side the heavy jungle dropped to the water’s-edge without the ripple of a leaf, and only our progress fanned the air with a thin, hot zephyr. The Tacana brides adjusted themselves to comfortable niches in the cargo, and chattered gaily with the crew. Once in a while there was a tortuous passage choked with snags that required careful work on the part of the helmsman while the crew, perched on the thwart six on a side, hit up a rapid stroke to fifty-five and once to sixty. The half-breed and I swung our feet over the tiny deck aft and broiled.
AT THE TILLER PRESIDED A HUGE TACANA.
The batalon was a huge, heavy canoe, thirty feet in length, with a beam of about ten feet while the bow and stern were blunt, giving the canoe the effect of a pointed scow. At the stern was a rudder with a high rudderpost, and at the tiller presided a huge Tacana upon whose face were the traces of the painted stains from some recent celebration. Every stick in the batalon was heavy, hand-sawed mahogany. The cargo was piled high amidships, with a view to its possible use as a breastwork in the event of an encounter with savages, and it was not lashed in place, for there were no more rapids, and the excitement of shooting them was past.
The first day was short, for to make an actual start was most important, and then on succeeding days the daily work from dawn to sunset flowed easily along. We stopped for the night at Alta Marani, where two Englishmen had a little headquarters of their own. They had a fleet of dugout mahogany canoes with which they shot the river between Mapiri and Rurrenabaque. Four canoes were lashed side by side, the cargo was bolted under the decks, so that in principle, independently invented here and by them, they were diminutive whalebacks like those of the Great Lakes, and the gaskets and cargo tarpaulins were of pure rubber.
The years of frontier life had browned them like Tacanas; they spoke half a dozen native dialects; barefooted and half naked, they could run the river or hunt with any Indian, and their toughened skins were indifferent to sand-fleas and mosquitos. One, a mighty hunter, painted his face in ragged streaks after the manner of the Tacanas when on the hunt. Wild animals, he claimed, seemed to have less fear of him, and in some way he believed it blended the man with the flickering sunlight of the forest. It may be, for I have seen the brilliantly mottled jaguar skin flung on the ground in the forest become merged to practical invisibility fifty feet away.
Half the night they sat naked to the waist in clouds of mosquitos and insects, talking. The single tiny candle flickered in the cane-walled darkness of their shack; the glittering eyes of the Mojo and Tacana retainers gathered in the doorway to listen to the peculiar noises made by white men in conversation. Here and there on the walls was some splintered arrow—the idle souvenir of some little fight, a tapir wallowed through the jungle across the river; and the occasional wail of a wandering jaguar came to us as we talked for hours of Thackeray, Stevenson, Dickens, Scott, Kipling, and “Captain Kettle!”
The last was first in adventure, but least in charm. “That fellow,” they said, “’e certainly did know a ship!” A few tattered books were there, their covers long since gone, for they had been traded about over hundreds of miles of this interior, and among them were Laura Jean Libbey and Bertha Clay. Naïvely they asked me about the latter. “They’re books all right—but there don’t seem to be much to them.” And they were pleased to learn that their prejudice was rather shared by the academic standards of the distant outer world.
The lives, of these men, as they looked at the matter were filled with trivial routine; romance, character, adventure—were the things bound in books. “After the Ball” and “Daisy Bell” still lingered as great popular triumphs of ballad and the Indians shuffled and grinned as these calloused ditties quavered through the darkness. If I would stay, I was promised all kinds of hunting—jaguar, tapir, monkey, wild hog, big snakes, and, as an additional lure, only half a day’s march back from the river a brush with the savages! The palm roof of these men was the last that I was to sleep under for many days.
NEVER WAS SUCH AN EXHIBITION IN THE HISTORY OF FIREARMS.
Before dawn the next morning the little campfires of the crew sprang up along the bank; the Tacanas shivered in the soft, cool morning air as though it were a biting blast, and then, with the first rays of the rising sun, we waded aboard once more and were off. Well into the forenoon the Tacanas suddenly stopped paddling. “Capibarra, patrón!” they whispered excitedly. On the bank, not forty yards away, stood the capibarra, an amphibious, overgrown, long-legged guinea-pig sort of creature, which blinked at us with startled eyes. From the steady platform of the drifting canoe I fired, and missed. The second shot also missed. In brief, I emptied the magazine while the capibarra darted about in a panic, attempting to climb the steep bank. The bullets spurted dirt above, behind, below, and before him.
The ninth shot at last laid him out dead. Never was there such an exhibition in the history of firearms. The crew in the meantime had unlimbered their shotguns and arrows, and were also pouring in a heavy fire, and with equally unsuccessful results; it sounded like a fair-sized skirmish. At noon, when we tied up to the bank, the crew quietly departed into the jungle for game while I was busy; they would take no further chances with the larder with me along.
“Why did you not tell me?” I spoke sternly to the crew chief, but he only shuffled uneasily on his huge bare feet; it was later that I learned it was believed that my eye-glasses were the evil influence that made my rifle useless.
As we tied up, the next day, I saw the crew quietly sneaking their bows and arrows and feeble shot-guns out of the batalon. I stopped them, and, buckling on my cartridge-belt, prepared to go along. We all went, though it was a very hopeless party of Tacanas; but my luck had turned. Not a hundred yards from the bank we ran into a troop of six big, black spider-monkeys, and I got the entire troop; only one needed a second shot. It was pure luck, for shooting these monkeys is virtually wing-shooting with a rifle. They dash over their arboreal paths faster than a Tacana can follow them on the ground, and one’s only chance is when they pause to swing from one branch to the next. Never again was I able to approach the record of that morning, but after that the Tacanas always left their own weapons in the batalon when we hunted for the larder.
They could pick up game-signs as they paddled, and read the indications of animal life as though it were writ large in the silent forests. When we went ashore, they would string out in a long, silent line of skirmishers, and presently there would come the grunting coo of a monkey, the scream of a parrot, or some long-drawn animal-call. The big Tacana helmsman, who kept near me, would say, “There are three spider-monkeys over there, patrón,” or perhaps a red roarer monkey, whose bellowing love-song at sunrise and sunset carries through the still air for miles. Always it was as the Tacana said. The line of Tacanas could fairly talk with one another in an animal language that did not alarm the forest and would deceive any but a Tacana ear.
Sometimes there would be a wild hog, sometimes wild turkey, or a big, black bird very much larger and more delicious in flavor; but it was the monkey that was the standard diet for many days. With seventeen able-bodied appetites in the outfit, the hunt was a necessity, and monkey the most accessible game. If there ever seemed to be a trifle too much, the Tacana crew would rouse themselves during the night and have additional feasts, until by dawn the supply was gone. On sand-bars they would forage for turtle-eggs, and every day they usually collected a bushel or two of these. But it was monkey that furnished them with the greatest delicacy and the keenest pleasure in the hunt.
BUT IT WAS MONKEY THAT FURNISHED THEM WITH THE GREATEST DELICACY.
Though monkey-shooting was necessary and there was for the moment, the thrill of skilful shooting, yet the element of pathos dominated. A clean shot stirs no thought, but to wound first, as must happen in many cases, gives a queer little clutch at the heartstrings that can never be shaken off. The little monkey, the frightened, hopeless agony of death stamped on its tiny, grotesque features, dabbles aimlessly with little twigs and leaves, stuffing them at the wound; sometimes it feebly tries to get back among the branches that make his world, and, as you approach, there is never any savage, snarling stand where he meets extinction with the cornered heroism that seems for the moment to balance the scene. Instead, he pleads with failing gestures of forlorn propitiation, and with hoarse, cooing little noises, for the respite that would be far less merciful than the coup de gráce.
Never will I forget one; it was a question of seconds only and as he lay there on the ground he waved the little hands at me as if to motion me back, he turned the little twisted face away with an appealing, deprecating coo from which, in this supreme moment, even terror was subdued. I have watched men on the field of battle with the death sickness upon them and where, even under these surroundings, while a spirit is struggling into the great mystery there comes the inevitable awe that lingers like a vision in the recollection.
That was human. Yet even here, before this sprawling, almost human figure, the feeble gesture, and the soft, caressing coo of final request I felt an emotion rising with a solemn dignity; it was life itself that was passing from the pathetic little body. I held back the Tacana who rushed up and the picture is still vivid of the flickering sunlight in the jungle forest, a few fallen leaves flecked with a mortal red, while a full grown white man and an Indian stood back silently in response to the fading appeal of a little, dying monkey.
For the daily hunt the canoe was moored where the jungle met the river, but every evening at early sunset the camp was made at the edge of some broad, sandy playa as far from the forest as possible. Long before camping the Tacanas had kept a shrewd lookout for recent signs of savages, and after chattering among themselves would indicate a playa that seemed proper and secure. The savages, primitive and nomadic, scarcely more than animals, offered no menace by daylight, but in the darkness lies their opportunity. With instinctive adroitness they can crawl through the jungle without a sound and be in the midst of a camp before it is awakened; but in the open spaces they are timid. They will line up fifty yards away and open with an ineffective volley of screeches and arrows.
OFTEN WE PASSED THE LITTLE SHELTER OF PALM LEAVES.
Secure in this custom, the Tacanas set no watch, and we all slept peacefully depending on any savages that might come to furnish the alarm for their own attack. Though signs of them were all about, we were never molested. Often we passed a shelter of palm-leaves by the shore that had been used by some party that had come down to the river to fish; for only in the interior and on the smaller and absolutely virgin rivers and tributaries did they have their headquarters. Sometimes there would be a tiny dugout against the bank, and their camp-fire would send up a thin, blue column of smoke against the purple jungle shadows. The Tacana helmsman would throw the canoe beyond arrow-range, while the crew would cease paddling and call “Ai-i! ai-i!” across the river, the recognized call of amity. Sometimes there would be the glimpse of a timid, naked figure darting from one shadow to the next, a head peeping from behind a tree, and perhaps a wailing “Ai-i! ai-i!” in response, but rarely more.
Once we came upon a little party working their way in a dugout against the current under the bank. The Tacanas looked to their arrows and put fresh percussion-caps on their shot-guns, but the instant the savages spied us they scuttled up the bank and remained in its shadows till we drifted past.
Day after day passed in the slow monotony of routine. The low, flat country never varied; the hot, brazen glare of the Beni’s muddy current rambled in a twisted aimless course ever to the eastward. Always at the dawn the viscocha, or hard biscuit, was soaked to edibility in hot tea, and then we started in the soft, cool stirring of early sunrise. Slowly the cool breeze disappeared, the chatter of the parrots died away, the water fowl aligned themselves in motionless, drying groups, incurious and fearless as we paddled past their sand-bars and, like the opening door of a furnace, there came the fierce heat of the tropic day. The muddy river gave no hint of its depth or channel, and sometimes the canoe would run aground and the Tacanas would tumble overboard, laughing and splashing, to ease her off and then line out, with wide intervals, as skirmishers, to locate a channel that would pass us through the maze of submerged sand-bars. Not a thought was given to the alligators that infested the river, and the Tacana who located the channel would swim carelessly about with huge enjoyment. Again would come the steady splashing of paddles and the double line of rhythmic, swaying Tacana backs; then at noon the daily hunt and the drowsy resting in the forest shade while the Tacana girls busied themselves with the breakfast where a pig, a capibarra or a row of monkeys were slowly roasting on the hot coals.
A Night Camp on the Rio Beni on the Way Out
Rapidly the afternoon wears away until cooler, more mellow glow announces the approaching sunset and then the chatter among the Tacanas as they discuss the signs for the night’s camp. The little tolditas, the mosquito nettings, would sway from their poles in the gentle breeze, a quick supper would evolve from the remains of the noon breakfast and be followed by the issue of the cane-sugar alcohol. Sometimes after dark the Tacanas would paint their faces in streaks with the berries foraged at noon, and grimace and hop about the glowing embers of the fire with shrieks of joy. Any odd grimace or ridiculous streaking caused a riotous outburst, for their minds were as simple as infants’. Once—and it gave them delirious pleasure for a whole night—they set fire to an island of charo, the cane from which the walls of their shacks are made, and all through the darkness it crackled and burst in little explosions, as though a nervous picket-line were protecting our flank.
IT WAS ONLY THE SHACK OF A LONELY RUBBER PICKER.
Slowly the days passed, and it was with the most cheerful emotions that we at last picked up the first signs of the frontier toward which we were working. It was only the shack of a lonely rubber-picker, and the poorly made hut was bare to the verge of destitution. Its whole outfit was scarcely more than that of one of the Tacana crew; there was a cheap shot-gun, some powder and ball, yet the bow and arrows were his hunting mainstay to save the expensive use of the other. Near by there was an uncultivated patch of rice, corn, a few yuccas, bananas, and some tobacco-plants. Under the cane bunk was a pair of primitive rubber shoes, made of the pure rubber mixed with a little gunpowder, and smoked on a block of wood roughly hewn to the shape of a foot. I often saw these curious rubber shoes, which apparently can serve no purpose with their callous-footed wearers except that of stylish ornament. In one corner were a few, brown bolachos of rubber, which would be valued at twelve or fifteen hundred dollars in the market, but for which the picker would receive from his patrón not enough to free him from debt for his past and future supplies meager as they are.
As we tied up to the bank, he and a boy helper had just gathered the rubber sap and were busy smoking it. A huge tin basin, a giant counterpart of the tin basin that sits on the wash bench outside every American farm-house, was half full of a white fluid that looked for all the world like a rather chalky milk; before it, in a little pit, was a tin arrangement something like a milk can with an open top out of which poured a thin, blue, hot smoke; and above the pit was a frame on which rested a round stick that held a globular mass of yellowish rubber previously smoked and cured. The round stick was rolled over the basin, a cupful of the new rubber was ladled over the mass as it was rolled back into the smoke, and there held and manipulated until the whole surface was thoroughly smoked. In the thin, blue smoke it at once turned a pale yellow.
Layer by layer the bolacho is built up with each day’s gathering of sap, and months after, when it is cut open and graded, the history may be read in the successive layers; this day’s sap was gathered in the rain, the paler, sourer color showing that water had trickled down the bark and into the little cups; the dirt and tiny chips show that this day was windy; and there in the darker oxidization of the layer, is revealed the fact of a Sunday, a fiesta or drunken rest before the succeeding layer was added.
IN THE THIN BLUE SMOKE IT AT ONCE TURNED A PALE YELLOW.
Sometimes as the batalon of the patrón makes its regular trip for collection, nothing will be found but a gummy residue of burned rubber, a rectangle of black ashes where the hut had been, and near by broken and mutilated remains of the picker; for the feeble trade-gun is only one degree better than the enemies with which the rubber-picker has to contend. In such an event the patrón curses the savages and, when these losses become too frequent, may return on a punitive expedition; for labor is scarce in these remote districts, and the loss is economic, not sentimental.
JUSTICE IS ADMINISTERED ACCORDING TO THE STANDARDS OF HIS SUBMISSIVE DOMAIN.
Farther down the river is the barraca of the patrón, a large clearing in the forest back from the bank of the river. Here survives feudalism, and justice is administered according to the rough standards of his submissive domain. Somewhere you will find the stocks, with the rows of leg-holes meeting in a pair of great mahogany beams. A pile of chain-and-bar leg-irons lie in a near-by corner, and a twisted bull-hide whip hanging from the thatch above. In an open, unguarded shed beyond was piled thirty thousand dollars’ worth of rubber,—it is only a fraction of the crop,—awaiting shipment, and in the early moonlight we sat with the patrón himself, a bare-footed, cotton-dressed overlord who was scarcely distinguishable from his own debt-slaves. And he, in his turn, was in almost hopeless debt to the commission-houses, who hold him by their yearly advances in trade.
Rarely now did the tolditas swing from their poles in a night camp on a playa; on down the river it became a series of visits—sometimes the daily voyage was longer in the darkness—but vigilance was now no longer needed in choosing a camp, and every night the Tacanas carried our outfit up the bank, where we slept serenely in a rubber-shed. Coffee reappeared, and the Indian wife of the picker or patrón served it at once on our arrival, and then rolled cigarettes from home-grown tobacco. Rubber was the talk—rubber and savages. There was no outside world, and I was a curiosity. The Brazilian boundary was yet a month’s journey with the current to the east, and Rurrenabaque, against the stream, was six weeks of hard travel to the westward. To them La Paz was a vague name, the metropolis of the world, perhaps, if their primitive existence has ever stirred to the idea of a metropolis.
Rubber and savages made their universe! Were the savages bad coming down? Well—they are bad this year down the river farther—a picker was killed last week only a half day’s march from the river. One of his men shot another the other day among the cattle, but two more got away! What will be the price of rubber? The last known price is already three months old in the quotations in Manaos. Money, real money, it was useless. Never had a gold coin looked so feeble and futile as on this river, where merchandise was needed. I bought a big rubber sheet and a rubber bag, and I paid a box of cartridges, a package of pencils, and a fountain-pen such as are peddled on the streets of New York; I was supposed to have the worst of the bargain!
One night we made no camp at sunset, but steadily paddled in the darkness; for the journey was nearly over for the Tacanas, and their paddles dipped in happy, eager rhythm. Then the canoe was beached under what, in the dim starlight, appeared to be a cliff; the crew carried the cargo up the high bank, and there, in scattered groups of twinkling lights, spread the settlement of Riba Alta. It is purely a trading-center where the big rubber houses have their headquarters in widely scattered, high-fenced compounds. There was a church of mud, with a tiny bell; a small detail of Bolivian soldiers and their officer, who, wonderful to relate, spoke English; there were enormous warehouses stacked with goods at startling prices, with French, German, and English clerks who could chatter with the natives in half a score of primitive dialects, and then, in the cool evenings, sip huge gin cocktails from high tumblers and indulge in local slanders. In the room of each was a huge pile of accumulated newspapers from home that they carefully read, one each day, following the successive dates—and the latest was three months old! It was as isolated as a Hudson Bay post of a century ago.
I presented my letters and had a room, a hammock, a shower bath, and filtered water to drink in place of the coffee colored river, and I was disappointed, for the clear, crystal fluid was insipid and tasteless after the long weeks on the Beni. The Tacanas were to rest there a few days and then begin their long slow return to Rurrenabaque and, during that time, I arranged for the last stage of this interior journey on down over the Falls of the Madeira where a river steamer was to be met and the actual frontier had its beginning, or ending. From Riba Alta the Beni becomes the Madeira River, by the addition of the Madre de Dios, the Orton, the Mamoré and the Abuna. And a day’s journey beyond Riba Alta are the first of the Falls of the Madeira. There are fourteen of them scattered along the river for two or three hundred miles, and ordinarily only two can be run, the others being weary portages, and fourteen portages with a heavy mahogany canoe is no light, frivolous trip.
The last canoe that had come up over the falls reported that a steamer from Manaos would arrive and leave the village of San Antonio, at the foot of the last falls, in less than a fortnight, and every effort must be strained in order to make it. If I missed that, there would be six long weeks in that unkempt Brazilian village before the next transport from civilization would arrive. A railroad has now been built around the falls, starting from near San Antonio, and steamers are a little more frequent. Now that road is completed it opens up one of the greatest virgin territories of rubber in the world.
A German rubber-trader in Riba Alta was fortunately leaving for Europe, and we were to join forces. He hunted up a little canoe, about fifteen feet long, but with a disproportionately wide beam that made it look like a coracle. It was as heavy as a scow, and we stowed a block and tackle to drag it over the portages. We needed four paddles and a pilot, for speed and safety cannot be secured without a pilot. His wages were equal to those of our whole crew, a bonus of the cargo space for the return trip, a rifle, and cartridges and also the amount of alcohol necessary to get him into this amiable frame of mind. He knew the cataracts and their condition in the varying stages of high and low water like a book, he could take advantage of the speed of the current and then swing into the portage at the last moment; he shot the possible passages and chose the right bank for a portage; to miss the latter and then work slowly up stream far enough to make a crossing and not get caught in the falls is slow work; while an error of skill in choosing the cataract that may be run may fairly be considered as fatal.
The crew had to be rationed for a six weeks’ trip, down and back, while the persistent rumors of savages made a rifle and cartridges a necessity for their return. The traders in the settlement regarded it as hazardous for us to attempt the trip over the falls with so small a party, but my German friend felt that in the speed with which we could pass each cataract with a light boat there was security, and the crew were indifferent, or confident in the presence of white patróns, and so we started.
In Riba Alta there were two young savages that had been captured in a recent raid far up one of the tributary rivers. One was an Araona and the other was a Maropa. Reared in the dim twilight of the jungles, their eyes were unaccustomed to the brilliant tropic light of the open, and since their capture they would hide in the houses by day and venture forth only in the evening. Their skins were rough and calloused from the jungle growths, and clothing was a delightful novelty, though only a toy. They would array themselves in any garments they could for short play-spells, and then discard them and step blissfully forth in their comfortable nothing.
The tribes of this part of South America are among the most primitive in the world. Though they had no knotted muscular development, each of these savage children already possessed the strength of a man, and in their aimless play could shift boulders that would tax the strength of a Lecco or Tacana. They could scale any one of the branchless trees in the compound like a monkey, and with as little apparent effort. Sometimes when they were not watched too closely, they would use bow and arrow with native skill; like a flash the arrow would be loosed and a lizard would be split as it ran, or a fleeing chicken skewered. I was told that after a savage child is captured, the greatest care must at first be used in feeding it, as it is totally unaccustomed to salt, and even the slight amount used in bread has a poisonous effect upon it. The Maropa had ulcers that were attributed to this fact. The food, platanos, is rubbed in ashes to slowly accustom them, and after about six months there is no further difficulty.
The night before we left Riba Alta an Indian was brought around to tell me an experience. He was a rubber scout who hunted up possible new areas of rubber trees; he corresponded to a “timber cruiser” in our own Northwest. Somewhere, about a couple of hundred miles back in the interior from this settlement, he had come across the trail of an animal unfamiliar to him—and from his savage infancy such forest lore had been his sole academic curriculum; it was a trail “like a snake—but not a snake.” It was approximately three feet in width judged by his gesture of measurement, and there were feet marks on either side of the trail like a turtle’s flippers—but only two. He had not followed it for he was afraid. About a week later in the shallow lagoon of one of the great lakes that are known to exist in that part, although no white man has yet penetrated to them, he saw a long neck raise itself out of the water—a long neck! And it had a head on it. A snake’s neck, he was asked. No, he insisted it was not a snake, he knew snakes, it was a neck with a head on it, something new. Then he fired at it, and it disappeared—and that was all.
He had described, in the combined circumstances, a possible plesiosaur. What he saw I do not know, but when an Indian wants to romance, his animals have the regulation iridescent eyes and spout flames. No combination of two overlapping trails could deceive him, he was adept on animal trails, nor would such a common place incident as an overlapped trail stir his imagination. He had never seen a circus poster, or an illustrated treatise on paleontology, but he indicated the existence of some animal closer, at least, to the plesiosaur than any known and distant descendant.
The crew had been gathered that same night and slept on the beach beside the monteria so that we were able to start with the dawn. Our first day was unlucky. The heavy canoe, with scarce eight inches of freeboard, was swept on a snag that started one of the planks. The inner bark of a tree that is used for calking, and which is always carried for such emergencies, could not keep the water down, and we were forced to beach the canoe for repairs. This delay, with the constant vision of a lost steamer below the falls, kept the German and myself toiling in the blazing sun by the side of the crew emptying cargo, patching and then reloading. The canoe still made water, but we hoped farther down the river to exchange it. That night we had to camp on a sand-bar, and it was not until the next day that we made the first of the falls,—or cachuelas, the Falls of Esperanza.
At this cataract is the headquarters of the largest single rubber {baron} in South America. His batalones and even tiny river steamers ply from Esperanza throughout the enormous watershed gathering the rubber and sending it out over the falls in large expeditions. Here he has little machine shops, a fair sized village of employees all under his control, while off in one corner by the edge of the jungle is a marble shaft surrounded by a little rusted iron railing that he has erected to the memory of his wife. The shaft and its pedestal have been slowly dragged around the portages in a labor that lasted months, and, as it stands, the tender tribute represents somewhere near its weight in silver bullion. A little tramway of his runs around this cataract and by its use we saved many hours of portage; even the monteria was hoisted with borrowed labor on the tiny car and hauled around.
At this Cachuela Esperanza I observed that it was not a falls such as we picture in connection with the word, a veritable Niagara or Victoria where the water drops sheer in a mass of foaming thunder; it is a gorge or a series of little cañons channeled through mountains of buried rock lying at right angles to the course of the river. The series of the Falls of Madeira seem to be all of this character—parallel mountain-chains of rock at irregular distances from one another, which come near enough to the surface to act as dams until the ages of insistent current have worn their narrow channels. In high water the rock is often entirely covered, and nothing shows but the shift and coil of great eddies and whirlpools to mark the choked gorges beneath. Each main cataract is guarded by a smaller one above and a second one below, often quite as dangerous, and making an average of twenty portages necessary.
In three days we reached Villa Bella, a tiny settlement on the peninsula formed by the Mamoré River joining the Madeira. In this little wilderness town, a sort of half-way between Riba Alta and San Antonia, the few streets were already laid out with rectangular primness, each house was compelled to keep a light burning outside until the late hour of 9 P. M., and there was a street-cleaning department of one, whose duty included keeping the weeds out of the streets. There were also rudimentary sidewalks.
The night of our arrival there was a dance given in the cane-walled house that combined the functions of club, café, billiard-room, and hotel. The sole music was by an accordion, and stately, shuffling, swaying dancers simpered and coquetted and performed all the polite maneuvers to its jerky rhythm, while the dust rose from the corrugated floor of split palm-logs, and the smoking kerosene lamps and tallow candles battled and triumphed over the soft evening atmosphere. Every chink and crevice and window held its glittering, enraptured Indian eye, and even the élite caught their breath at the reckless pop of warm imitation champagne at ten dollars a bottle. Truly it was a grand affair. Ice for the champagne had been hoped for, and the gentleman who owned an ice-machine, as he fondly believed, showed it to me and asked my assistance in operating it. Naïvely he had bought an ice-cream freezer, but so far it had proved obdurate to his labor, and had brought forth no ice.
We exchanged our leaking canoe for a sound one, a trifle larger, and pushed on. A few hours below over the Falls of the Madeira proper—a minor one of the series guarding the little rapids at the head we ran, while a short portage brought us into the clear river again. Three batalones were running their cargo of rubber through the gorges at the side of the cataract. The bolachas of rubber were threaded on long ropes, like a string of beads; one of the crew would take the end of the rope in his teeth, and, swimming or wading, guide it through the eddies near shore. Often he would have to let go, and with a rush it would be sucked into the cataract like a long, knotted, water-snake, while others of the crew would swim out and recover it below.
THE BOLACHAS OF RUBBER ARE THREADED ON LONG ROPES.
At this cataract the lightened batalones themselves could be run through, and the whole of three crews would be concentrated in one for the passage. Out into the eddies it would sweep with thirty paddles straining over the high freeboard, giving it, in the distance, the appearance of some huge and absurd water-bug. Six weeks it would be before they would land in San Antonio, and then two, perhaps three months more with their cargo of merchandise working back against the river. With the killing work in the blazing sun, swimming or portaging from the crack of dawn until dark, and a palm mat thrown on the sand-bar at night, it is small wonder that rarely a crew comes back from a trip with its full roster. Even their rugged animal physique is not proof against the continuous exposure and hardship. In addition, there are the savages. One expedition is still talked of where out of three batalones that started with their crews, only three men returned.
Slowly cataract after cataract was passed Madeira, Misericordia, Riberon—with three long portages that consumed a day and a half—Araras, Tres Hermanos, Perdonera, Paredon, Calderon de Infierno (“Kettle of Hell”), which was a series of cool, shaded channels among a multitude of islands, and finally resulted in but a single portage around a tiny cascade, although in high water the Calderon de Infierno lived well up to its name; then came Geraos and Teotonio, two cataracts that challenged comparison with the rapids below Niagara, though shorter.
DRAGGING A “BATALON” AROUND A PORTAGE OF THE MADEIRA FALLS.
Between two of the cataracts from up a little tributary river there had been reports of newly discovered rubber forests; the frontier had blazed as though over a bonanza gold field; tremendous tales of the daily pick were told, thirty, forty pounds of pure rubber a day! Expeditions outfitted for a long stay were following one another to claim territory and we knew at the mouth of that river was a rough headquarters where there would be company in the night’s camp and the pleasant interchange of rumor. So we made no camp at sunset, though the crew murmured. It was pitch black, the overcast sky shrouded even the faint starlight. We literally felt our way close by the high bank, while the paddles slipped through the water with scarcely an audible drip. The little animals of the night scuttled on the bank, and out of the darkness would gleam tiny, scared eyes.
Suddenly from near the bow came the heavy lap of a tongue upon the current not a paddle’s length away. An Indian dashed a paddleful of water at the sound, and with a startled crash against the brush there was a heavy leap to the bank above, and there came the low, rippling snarl of a jaguar and the sound of scattering leaves as its angry tail whipped the undergrowth. With cocked rifles we waited for the gleam of eyeballs—to have fired without that much chance would have made the spring certain—and motionless the crew let the canoe drift past. It seemed an age!
An hour more, and we came to the mouth of the little tributary. A dozen batalones were moored along the narrow beach vaguely outlined in the camp-fires along the bank, and back of them were the rough huts that a Brazilian had already erected at this point. Here and there the feasting crews were gorging themselves on monkey and half-burned strips of tapir, while a tin can of alcohol and a gourd dipper were free to all. A short distance up the river the savages had appeared that morning, and one of their men lay dead back in the jungle, while another was in one of the huts with an arrow-hole through his breast. In the main shack a few rods off was a woman, white, pure Brazilian, who spoke in the low, soft modulations of a far-off civilization, and who, by any of the standards of all the ages, was a beauty. She wore the simple, single gown of the frontier, with an undergarment; her black hair was coiled in a flowing mass that curved low over her forehead, and over one ear was the brilliant blossom of some jungle-flower. She was playing a guitar, swinging with white, slender bare feet in an elaborate hammock against a background of rubber-traders, native adventurers, and half-breeds, where the smoking candles dimly outlined their rifles and belted cartridges. A drunken, half-savage woman, her maid probably, whined a maudlin, gibberish, and over all rose the pungent smell of rubber from the bolachas piled in the farther shadows of the hut. It was like the touch of fantastic fiction.
At the cataract of Geraos a Brazilian rubber-trader was trying to portage his batalon and cargo with a half-mutinous, lazy crew of Brazilian negroes. A couple of the crew would work shiftlessly while the rest dozed in the shade; it was the last hard portage, and we offered the Brazilian our block and tackle if his crew would help us.
“Look at them!” he said hopelessly. “Talk to the head-man. If they will do it, I shall be glad. Two days have they loafed like this, and it will be two days more.” He swore fluently in Portuguese. “If I beat them or shoot one, they will have me put in jail in San Antonio. I am losing money, but it is better than jail.” Obviously we were nearing civilization; up-river no lazy mutiny was possible.
The head-man refused surlily unless we would stop and loan them our crew.
One of the idling crew—it was not a strike; they were just tired and wanted rest—sauntered over to me. He was a powerful negro, with the smooth, supple muscles rippling under a skin of oiled coal. He was a man without a language, although he could be barely intelligible in three.
“Me ’Melican, bahs, tambien.” He thumped his naked bosom like a war-drum, but he was friendly; to his mind we were two fellow Americans greeting in an out-of-the-way place. He pointed to his companion: “Him B’itish, ho, yaas.” Then, like a chieftain chanting, he recounted their voyage on the river: “Ribber him belly bad. Muchas wark—belly ha’d. Me bahs him belly ha’d; go far topside ribber. Me seeck; you got him li’ly rum, cañassa? Wanee catchem li’ly d’ink.” And his British confrère added also a pleading for a “li’ly d’ink.”
He insisted that he was an American, although born in the Guianas, but he admired America so much he had adopted it; and he would translate the heated gibberish of unknown patois with his friends as his noble defence of our superior America and wind up with a plea for a “li’ly d’ink.”
At this same cataract, in a wretched hut, lived some kind of a broken down, human derelict, blear eyed and worthless and nondescript, whose desolate fortunes were shared by a poor, wretched Frenchwoman and their unkempt, pitiful children. Between them they stood off the savages from time to time and in the intervals squabbled drunkenly with each other. Six weeks before a battle between two crews at this portage had been fought around their shack. One of the crew had stolen a woman belonging to an Indian of the other outfit and when the trouble died down twelve men had been shot, together with the woman who was the cause of the friction. A new crew had to be sent down to help out with the batalones.
But the cataract of Geraos is one of the finest of the whole system. The buried mountain system of rock lies open to the sky; it has been channeled in deep cañons, above which the waves are lifted in angry fangs. Their roar carries through the jungle on each side like the steady thunder of a storm; whole trees that have lazily swept down-stream are caught in the clutch of the great cañon, and are tossed high above the cañon walls as though they were only straws caught in a thresher.
At the Falls of Teotonio we paddled up to the very brink of the cataract and beached snugly in a little eddy at the side. Here a broken-down contractor’s railway made the portage an easy matter, even though it was done in one of the hardest tropical rainstorms that I have ever seen. The lightning and the thunder were continuous, and the rain drove in a steady, blinding sheet, like the deluge from a titanic nozzle.