On the morning of May 20, however, I was still sleeping soundly when the barefoot Portuguese carregador I had subsidized—at nothing a day—to look after my traveling interests put his head in at the door and said that the boat I awaited was leaving not on May 25, but at once—and would I please kindly, senhor, give him or his brother, and not some common fellow, the pleasure of carrying my baggage down to it. I knew, of course, that the tropical sun had addled the poor fellow’s wits, for though it is a common thing in Brazil for boats scheduled to sail on May 25 to leave on May 30, or next month, or next year, no one had ever heard of such a one going out on May 20. However, I could not throw anything at a man whom I had not even paid a retaining fee, so I went over to the Armazen Rosas to inquire. It was as I had suspected; the sun had been too much for the poor fellow. On the board before the warehouse, and in all the morning papers of Manaos, the Macuxy was still advertised to leave on May 25. I was about to return to my bed in disgust when I recalled that I was in Brazil, and entered the armazen to verify the chalked figures. Não, senhor, the launch would leave that very evening. The owner had just arrived in town and had decided to sail at once. The fact that several people who had been waiting for weeks might be slightly discommoded if the craft sneaked away without them, with no other for a month or two, did not trouble him in the least. If they happened to find out about the change in plans by looking at the stars and refusing to believe the chalked board and the newspapers, well and good; but the launch was going primarily to bring down beefsteaks on the hoof for Manaos, and passengers were merely endured as a necessary evil.

It was seven o’clock of a dark tropical night when I ate my last Brazilian “ice-cream,” and two hours later that we began to crawl away from the wharf—good-by for no one knew how long not only to ice-cream and ice-cold beer, but to electric lights and street cars, to paved streets and to reading by night. The announcement had read that the “Launch Macuxy leaves for the Rio Branco,” which was true enough, but I quickly discovered that passengers left rather on the batelão hitched beside it, a huge, unwieldy, three-story cattle-barge or scow, with no motive-power of its own. In the hold and on the lower deck were piled wood for the launch’s boiler, freight, baggage, cattle, pigs, chickens, rancho, or an unspeakable native kitchen, the third-class passengers, who paid half-fare, and whatever else chanced to be on board. The wide-open, roofed, upper deck was reserved, first of all, for the captain and the owner in a commodious cabin, then for the first-class passengers with their two “staterooms” back of this. These had nothing in them but chains, cans, iron-castings, and all the other odds and ends of ship’s junk, on top of which we put our baggage and changed our clothes. Everything else took place on the open deck, three fourths of which consisted of a long row of hammock-hooks on either side of a beam down the center, under which were a long, narrow dining-table, a cupboard, a crude water-filter and one glass, neither of which was usually available for use, and one dirty tin wash-bowl. Much baggage was piled along the open sides of the craft, far aft were two tiny partitioned-off places, one a kitchen and the other divided into two places of convenience, of which one had been turned into a shower-bath by letting a pipe in through the ceiling above and boring a hole in the lowest corner of the floor as an exit for the river-water. The shower was “not working yet, because this was the first trip of the year, but it would amanhã.” Meanwhile I dipped up pailfuls of the Rio Negro and threw them over me, then tossed most of the night in my hammock, as is generally the case when one takes to such a bed after a long respite.

We were by no means crowded,—one non-Brazilian besides myself, a dozen men, and some women and children—but I left the complete inventory to the long unoccupied days ahead. All swung their hammocks diagonally across the batelão from the central beam to the outer roof-rail, and spent their nights and most of their days in them. Close against our side of the boat—so close that it was constantly spitting sparks and cinders into our hammocks—was the little launch-tug Macuxy, constantly puffing and snorting like a Decauville engine up a stiff grade and furnishing our only motive power. The two craft were so balanced that the launch seemed to steer easily with the heavy batelão alongside, as is the custom everywhere on the upper Amazon, where a barge is often put on either side of the launch, but where no boat is ever towed. May is the usual time for a flock of these craft to set out from Manaos through all the river network of upper Amazonia, taking freight to the settlements that cannot be reached in the dry season and bringing down rubber, “chestnuts,” and, in our case only, cattle.

All the first day we plowed the black waters of the Rio Negro without seeing a human being or any sign of human existence. There was a constantly unbroken line of dense-green forest, with trees of all sizes from small to gigantic, half-hidden by lianas and orchids, and all so deep in the water that they seemed to be drinking it with the ends of their branches. The trees were often completely covered with plants from which bloomed myriads of pinkish flowers like the morning-glory, retreating toward noon from the ardent tropical sun. There was no visible sign of bird or animal life, though there must have been much of both farther inland. In general the country was low and level, but with an occasional hill or low bluff masked in dense forest. Now and then there were small islands, also thickly wooded down into the very water, though we saw none of the floating bits of jungle that were so numerous in the Amazon proper.

There are places in Amazonia where steamers have to stop and cut their own wood. Luckily we were not reduced to that extremity, for there were rare inhabitants along this route to gather and pile it at the water’s edge. At that, it took four or five hours to load enough for a day’s run, the Indian and caboclo crew tossing it stick by stick from one to another along the gangplank, the last man, being more nearly white and therefore the most intelligent, counting them in a loud voice, the captain setting down each fifty in a book. For wood is sold as well as loaded by the stick along the Amazon, sticks a meter long, but ranging in size from cordwood to that of a baseball bat, and costing here from 35$ to 60$ a thousand.

Our meals were tolerable, for the region, built up about the ubiquitous pirarucú and farinha d’agoa, with wine and condensed milk for those who cared to pay for them. The greatest drawback was the service. Three or four of the most disreputable urchins that could be picked up in Manaos put everything on the table at once, then wandered about for some time looking for the bell. Even when that had been rung, courtesy required us to wait for the captain and the owner, by which time everything was stone-cold. As in all Brazil, the diet was suited to hearty men in the prime of life engaged in constant manual labor, rather than to a sedentary life of forced inactivity that made us envy the crew their wood-tossing at which caste did not permit us to help. I know no country whose national cuisine seems less to fit the character of the people and the climate than Brazil.

Toward dark we sighted the first bare spot of the trip, a tiny clearing of four or five acres called Conceição, with a big tree here and there and—what was more surprising—big granite rocks, the first native stone I had seen since my journey into the interior of Ceará. There was a thatched house, but no one showed up, so we set out the freight we had for the place,—a huge piece of machinery something like a locomotive piston, hoisting it with a derrick and standing it upright on a rock protruding from the water, and sailed away. Next day, or the next, or some time later the people who lived there could find the thing and know what it was for, though it was hard to guess how they would transport it to wherever it was needed. Later, in the dimly moonlighted night and the densest wilderness of endless forest and water, we slowed down to a snail’s pace and began whistling ear-splittingly, evidently calling for someone in the untracked forest sea. For a long time there was no answer. Then, far off through the ankle-deep trees, appeared a light. By and by we could make out that it was moving toward us, and at length a canoe paddled by an Indian, with a near-white man sitting in caste-rule inactivity in the stern, slipped noiselessly out of the weird night, the man boarded us, and we were off again.

Finally, on the afternoon of May 22, two hundred and ten miles above Manaos, we turned from the Rio Negro, which goes on northwestward to Ecuador and Colombia, into the Rio Branco, stretching almost due north. This seemed a more sluggish river, gray in color with a slight brownish tinge, much like the lower Amazon, though quite enough unlike the Negro to warrant its name of “White River.” Born near the junction of Brazil, Venezuela, and British Guiana, it is some 420 miles long from the mouth to where two forks split it apart. In this land of water it was astonishing that there was not always water enough to float even these slight-draft river-boats. The name Guyana is said to mean flooded-country, and includes all that region between the Amazon and the Orinoco, so that there are not simply three Guianas, belonging to European powers, but five, including those of Brazil and Venezuela.

It is estimated that the immense State of Amazonas, largest in America, has only 150,000 inhabitants, of whom half are wild Indians. It was not until late that afternoon that we came upon a hut on stilts, made entirely of woven grass, yet with the exotic touch of a sheet-iron door in one end, reached only by a crude ladder of two rungs. The inhabitants had grubbed an acre out of the dense jungle on a little nose of land where another small river flowed in, the ground being then about six feet above water. They were almost entirely of Indian blood, but the men wore trousers, jacket, and straw hat, and the women a loose single gown. As in most of Amazonia, they were a curious mixture of shy, naïve backwoodsmen and crafty traders. We left two letters and sent the crew ashore to dig six enormous turtles out of a captive mud-hole, each man carrying one upside-down on his back across the narrow sagging plank, eyes, ears, nose and his entire body smeared with the soft yellow mud that oozed from every crevice of the cumbersome animals. They were to furnish us food on the way up the river; meanwhile the crew laid them helpless on their backs on the lower deck. These mammoth Amazon turtles will live thus for days without food or drink; or even for weeks if left upright and wet now and then with fresh water.

About the hut was a small forest of mandioca stalks and banana plants, and under it some “freeman” rubber, the usual large brown balls with a hole through the center, resembling a bowling-ball, but which had been gathered and smoked as the spirit moved them by semi-wild Indians, in distinction to the “slaves” of the regular rubber plantations. The cabra, or Indian-negro, owner sent this, too, on board, sold us bananas and chickens, and took coffee, sugar, and soap in payment. There are two trees that furnish rubber. The better kind, called borracha, is procured by tapping the glossy-smooth rubber-tree, and the other, a much coarser and cheaper stuff called caucho, as full of holes as Gruyère cheese, is obtained by cutting down another kind of tree. All dry lands of moderate altitude along the Amazon produce the caucho tree, of which a full sized one yields fifty liters of milk or twenty kilograms of caucho, inferior, but commanding a good market. When your rubber quickly loses its stretch, the chances are that in some of the many links from producer to consumer the borracha has been replaced by caucho.

There were said to be rubber trees of both varieties in considerable abundance in the forests on either side of the Rio Branco, but in most of the region the bugres, or wild Indians, made regular exploitation difficult. On the night of May 23 I slept north of the equator for the first time since walking across it in Ecuador, thirty-two months before. The sun laid off most of that day, and it grew so cold that I had to put on double clothing and wrap myself in my hammock. The trees no longer stood ankle-deep in the water, sipping it with their branches, for the bluff banks were from six to ten feet high, with a reddish soil. Since leaving Manaos we had passed two other craft, smaller launch-barges, and perhaps half a dozen canoes creeping along the lower face of the forest. Otherwise there was no evidence of human life along the way, except two or three huts in tiny clearings every twenty-four hours. The first white men to enter the Rio Branco were the Carmelite missionaries who, in 1728, founded towns and began catechising the Indians. Seventy years later an insurrection destroyed most of their settlements, and though half a century ago some villages along the Rio Branco were reported to have as many as “320 souls and 40 fires,” to-day a hut or two at most represents most places marked on the map.

But if there was little human interest along the shores, there was no lack of it on board. First and foremost among my fellow-passengers was Dr. R—— of Sweden, a professional bug-chaser past middle life, whose mild blue eyes blinked harmless innocence, and whose graying hair stood up in pompadour mainly because it was never combed. He had spent so many months pursuing bugs along the Amazon that he had become acclimated to the pajamas and sockless slippers of all male travelers in the region, and was just such a patient, plodding fellow as men of his profession must be, carrying their own enthusiasm with them, and was ferocious only in the pursuit of insects and an ostrich-like appetite. He spoke English with difficulty and Portuguese scarcely at all, so that we soon took to conversing in German, and I became unwittingly his unofficial interpreter. Never have I known a man more splendidly fitted for his calling. Bugs of every species and description had such an affinity for him that he did not need to seek them; they sought him, and if there was a single insect in the region, from a lone mosquito to the rarest species known to entomology, it was certain to apply to the doctor for a passage to Sweden, even though it was forced to crawl inside his pajamas to make sure of the trip. With rare exceptions the touching request was always granted, for the doctor was never without a large pill-bottle filled with some sort of poisonous gas, and never a meal did we eat that he did not jump up from table a dozen times to snatch out the cork of his inseparable companion and slap the open mouth over some intruder on some part of the ship’s, or his own, anatomy.

Rough living in Amazonia is at least mitigated by the outwardly gentle, pleasant, and obliging manners of the inhabitants. It is the religion of the region never to complain of hardships or lack of comfort, for growling at all these things would make them and those suffering them unendurable. Hence there was never any outward evidence of anything but contentment and satisfaction, even in the face of the most primitive selfishness on the part of the two masters of the ship. Captain Santos was a spare but rather good-hearted Portuguese long resident in Amazonia, who frankly considered his passengers an unavoidable nuisance. Colonel Bento Brazil, the owner, was a “legitimate son of the Rio Branco,” that is, born in the region, though pure white and much traveled. Dressed in the thinnest of white pajamas night and day, he looked the picture of hardiness even at fifty, which commonly means old age in North Brazil. At times he was curiously swollen with his own importance, seeming to feel the deepest scorn for such simple persons as the Swede and myself; at others he displayed boyish curiosity about the simplest things. He was careful in the exact degree of greeting he gave those we met along the river, running all the gamut from an affectionate embrace of a fellow estate-owner to a motionless word in answer to the hat-off greeting of some caboclo far below his own caste. All the best things on board he considered his own; he hung his hammock in the choicest place and kept the good shower-bath locked, leaving the one with a spout in the roof to the passengers—though the captain always loaned me the key to the better one—at every meal he had six eggs, special fruit, and many extras, while the passengers beside him could get nothing but the regular rough-and-tumble fare. His constant selfishness was probably unconscious, for it is every dog for himself on the Amazon; nature is too primitive and cruel to allow much else, and like the backwoods estate-owners of Peru and Bolivia, these kings of the jungle grow unwittingly autocratic and self-centered by living constantly among dependents.

There were two typical Amazonian women of the well-to-do class on board, one about fifty and the other nearing thirty. They corresponded in rank to the half dozen Brazilian men on our upper deck, fairly well-educated fazendeiros of some means and of that peculiar mixture of world-wisdom and rusticity common to the region; but, of course, being of the less important sex, they were treated as a lower type of creation, as is the Amazonian custom, and had the modest, almost apologetic, reserve of the aboriginal women. One of the two bare little cabins that might have been staterooms had been cleared out for them, and here they preferred to eat seated on the bare floor, rather than come to table with strange men. They never spoke to any male on board, except an occasional unavoidable monosyllable, and their every look suggested densest ignorance, superstition, and slavery to custom, a composite of the woman-beast-of-burden of the American Indian and the Arabian seclusion brought to Portugal by the Moors. One might pity them, but any advance, even to make the trip a bit more pleasant for them, would certainly have been misunderstood as something reprehensible. At night, like everyone else, they swung their hammocks on deck, taking the off-side, and separated from the men only by distance, but at daylight they quickly crawled again into their little room and rolled about the bare floor the rest of the day, never making the slightest physical exertion they could avoid. In the morning they crowded together into the miserable little “bathroom” aft and held the place two, and even three, hours, after which, their greasy tresses dripping, they raced back to their room. Evidently they squatted on the floor and poured water over each other from the tin can the younger one carried. The most noticeable part of the whole performance was that, in common with all the women of Amazonia, as far as my experience carries, the longer they bathed the less washed they looked. Whether it is due to the mixture of Indian and Portuguese-peasant blood, with long generations without soap behind them, or to the greasy Brazilian food oozing through their pores, every native woman I met along the Amazon gave me an instinctive desire to avoid the slightest personal contact with her. Yet men of the same class, and largely the same customs, did not awaken this feeling.

The near-Indian servant girl of the pair aroused the same sensation, though she, too, spent hours in the “bathroom”; even the little daughter of the younger woman had this general repulsiveness of her sex. She was a cunning little thing of four, with wavy locks and penetrating black eyes; yet somehow one would have hesitated far longer to touch her than her twin brother. Both were bathed together by the Indian girl every morning, and for the next hour or two they scampered about the deck in the costume of Eve before she came across the fig-tree, after which they were each dressed in a short, thin chemise. Yet though they were companions in many things, the boy by comparison was “spoiled,” mean, selfish, quarrelsome, screaming whenever he was crossed, bawling for everything he wanted until he got it, pounding, biting, and scratching the Indian girl with total impunity, while if the little girl committed the slightest fault, she was pounced upon by all three of her guardians. This Brazilian custom of petting and spoiling the boys, while bringing the girls up sternly as somewhat inferior beings, accounts for many of the chief faults of the male character. In perhaps no other country on earth does one more often meet men who need nothing so much as a good man-sized trouncing, or where a plain frank word is so certain to arouse childish, irresponsible resentment, if not actual attack.

That was all there were on our upper deck, except a white Brazilian steward who seemed to be chronically suffering from the recent death of his grandmother and the obsequiousness of his low caste, and the three Indian boy waiters, with minds as ingrown as their generations of grime, who did not even own hammocks, but curled up through the cold nights on a wooden bench or the bare deck in the same two ancient blue-jean garments they wore by day. On the lower deck were a few third-class passengers, indistinguishable from the deck-hands, who ranged from burly negroes to muscular Portuguese with almost as simian features, living as best they might on the bare spots and barer food left over from the upper world.

The river was often mirror-clear, incessantly reflecting flat, wooded tongues of land jutting out into it as far as we could see, ever more blue with distance. At rare intervals there was the splash of a big fish springing out of the water; otherwise the almost unbroken silence of primeval nature. Early in the afternoon of the fourth day we stopped at a typical hut and clearing on the bank to unload bags of rice from Maranhão, sacks of sugar, salt, and coffee from farther off, an American sewing-machine and varied merchandise from New York, by way of which had come also a box of Swiss milk. Among the things imported from abroad into this land of unlimited timber were complete doors of matched American lumber, threshold, lintel, lock and all. Unwashed and uncombed half-Indians of jungle dress and manner watched us at close range, a weather-beaten female keeping modestly in the background. The Dipper, which for several years I had lost below the northern horizon, was now well above it. The cool, moonlighted trees and river still slipped slowly but incessantly by us into the south, but the river was getting so low that it began to look as if we would soon run out of water.

At dawn of May 25 we found ourselves anchored at Caracarahy, four hundred and sixty miles above Manaos, with the first open camp I had seen in Amazonia, its tufts of bunch-grass quite green, and the joyful sight of a serra, or range of hills, dimly visible to the north. Yet the campo broke easily into dense woods in any direction. There were a few scattered barracões, or thatched warehouses, and three or four huts of natives. The place exists merely because there are falls above, this being the beginning of rising and rocky country, around which all goods must be transshipped. Here were twenty-four kilometers of cachoeiras, or rock rapids, which may be passed in three ways,—in high water by the Furo de Cojubím, a paraná or natural canal flanking the falls, but which in the dry season is a mere succession of mud-holes; secondly, in certain seasons by dragging freight in small boats up over the rock falls; lastly, by a picada, or trail cut through the dense forest. I went ashore with the bug-catcher while the captain investigated. On the boat we had rarely felt a mosquito or any other form of insect pest, but the moment we landed we were in swarms of them, especially annoying tiny flies. Later we were to find that the grassy campo was alive with mucuims, an all but invisible red bug especially active in dew-wet grass, which conceals itself in the pores of the legs and sets them to itching fiercely a few hours afterward, keeping it up for days.

We returned on board, to hear the bad news that the early rains had slackened and that it would be impossible now for the smaller boat that was following us to pass through the canal and carry us on up the river. The water must be six feet higher, and as Colonel Bento Brazil put it laconically, “We may have to wait a month or two, or it may fill up from one day to another.” There were big cattle pens here, and cowboys who tended the cattle in shipment as they grazed on the campo before being jerked aboard the batelões and carried off to Manaos, which is reached in high water on the down-trip in forty-eight hours. Late that evening the captain began filling our barge with the maltreated brutes, which, after a hard drive across the country, were swung by a winch cable about their horns from the shore corral to the boat, often breaking a rib as they struck it and now and then a leg as they were lowered into the hold. No wonder Amazon beefsteaks are tough! Cattle for the Manaos slaughter-house are almost the only down traffic from this Rio Branco region, which produces little else, being high open campo and almost the only place in the entire State of Amazonas that can do so to advantage. Here they sold for from 60$ to 100$ a head, and in the rainy season can be transported to Manaos for about 60$. In the middle of the seventeenth century the Portuguese established cattle-breeding stations here, so that even to-day the great territory drained by the Rio Branco is known as the “Fazenda National” and is federal property.

Even here there was no definite information as to whether one could cut across through British Guiana. All I learned was that, if I could reach Boa Vista, there were two or three ways of making toward the estate of an Englishman over the boundary, but even he seemed to be more closely in touch with Brazil and Manaos than with Georgetown. In the morning there appeared on board a lively little man native to the region, whom everyone called “Antonino.” He was dressed in slippers and the modified pajamas all males find most convenient in Amazonia, had not shaved for two or three weeks, and had the general appearance of a backwoodsman with a little plot and a few cattle of his own, who might be able to write his name with difficulty. In reality, he was the owner of a large fazenda far up the river on the edge of British Guiana, the boundary being a stream at his front door. Beneath his lack of shave he knew Europe well, though little of Brazil, and had an astonishing knowledge on a wide variety of subjects. What was still more important, he was going to walk or wade the twenty-four kilometers around the cachoeira next morning to his own barge-launch waiting above the falls to take him back to his ranch. I bequeathed my steamer-chair to Captain Santos, packed my valise to the screaming point, with even my private papers and twenty pounds in gold, and handed it over to a pair of Antonino’s Indian employees in a canoe half-roofed with thatch, who rowed away into the evening toward the falls.

Next morning I was disappointed to find that Antonino had hired “horses,” as they called the wabbly, starved, and degenerate descendants of those noble beasts that awaited us, eaten by vampire bats and beaten stupid by their unconsciously cruel Indian-Portuguese owners. I should much rather have walked, the cruelty of getting astride such miserable animals aside, for my greatest immediate desire was physical exercise. A broad-faced, independent Indian “guide” set off with us across open, bunch-grass country, everywhere lively with birds, the long scissors-tailed tesoura most conspicuous among them. Mammoth ant-hills stood higher than horsemen above the thin, tufty grass. Soon we entered a wide road cut through a dense forest by the state government, at a cost to taxpayers of 2000 contos! Yet it had never been more than a poor clearing with a barbed wire fence on either side, and now it was half grown up to jungle again. In the mass, an Amazon forest is deadly monotonous; in detail there was an incredible mixture of species, with the same plant rarely half a dozen times in the same spot, and all showing a striking adaptability to environment. The great trees stood always erect, as if striving, like good soldiers, to touch with the crown of the head an imaginary object above them, spreading out at the top like a parasol to catch as many of the sun’s rays as possible, wasting no branches farther down, where the sunshine never penetrates. There were many rivulets and mud-holes, with a jungle not unlike that of tropical Bolivia, except that the growth was thicker and greener, with more beautiful palms. Antonino, who had chosen the best animal, got out of sight ahead, the Indian urging me to hurry; but as I saw no need for that, I spared my wreck of a horse. Suddenly, toward noon, we heard a distant boat-whistle, followed by half a dozen shots from a revolver. The Indian redoubled his urging and I strove in vain to give my miserable steed new life. Then more whistles sounded, and the Indian said dejectedly, “There, the launch is gone.”

“Impossible,” I answered. “As it belongs to Antonino it must wait for him.”

But we soon came upon the horse Antonino had ridden, tied to the rail-fence of a cattle-corral in the woods, and I concluded that my new companion had proved a true Amazonian in thinking of himself alone. After taking down several fences and putting them up again, we came out on a little nose of land above the river—and found Antonino looking hopelessly away up it.

It turned out that Antonino, loving to boast, like most Latin-Americans, really had not the slightest ownership in the boat we had hoped to catch, and here we were apparently stranded at the Bocca da Estrada, with one small, ragged, thatched roof on poles under which to wait for days, if not weeks. Anyway, the baggage we had sent by canoe had not arrived. Antonino professed to think that the launch had stopped just a few miles up the river to overhaul its engines, but this sounded like another bluff to save his face. I quenched my thirst with a dozen gourd-cups of yellow river water, squeezing into it the juice of wild lemons, swung my hammock, and prepared for whatever might be forthcoming. It is fatal to lose one’s temper in Amazonia. A chunk of cow that had been torn off the still palpitating animal that morning had swung unwrapped from the Indian’s saddle during all the sixteen miles. This we washed, spitted, and thrust into a fire. From it we slashed slabs still oozing blood with the Indian’s terçado, as Brazilians call a machete, and these being too tough to bite, we cut off each mouthful below the lips with the huge knife in approved South American cowboy fashion, after dipping them in coarse rock-salt, tossed handfuls of dry farinha d’agoa into our mouths with it, and washed it all down with river-water tempered with the fruit of the wild lemon tree that shaded our ragged roof. Our total resources were not enough for three meals, and how long we might have to wait no man knew. To add to the pleasure of the situation, we had struck a veritable colony of puims, as the Bolivian jejene, or tiny gnat of bulldog bite, is called in Amazonia, which quickly brought back memories of the tattooed skin with which had I emerged upon the Paraguay sixteen months before.

But, strange to say, Antonino had partly told the truth. About three o’clock the canoe arrived with our baggage and two sweat-dripping Indians, and we piled in the rest of our belongings and started on up the stream as if we really believed the tale that the launch was waiting not far above. I wished to add to our speed by paddling, but there were only three pás, and the Indians laughed at the thought of a civilized man doing so. In all Amazonia, with labor so badly needed, the man above the laboring class suffers most of all for physical exercise, and the development of the region is under the tremendous handicap of the ancient Iberian caste system. The Indians surely shoveled water behind them, however, though even so we made little headway against the swift current. If one of us spoke to them, they instantly stopped paddling to listen; hence motionless silence was our only salvation.

Then all at once we rounded a point, and there, sure enough, was the craft we were pursuing, barely a mile ahead. We quickly lost it to view again, and I waited anxiously until another bend disclosed it barely a stone’s throw away and tied to the bank! I should have been less worried had I known that it would not move an inch forward for another twenty-four hours.

We found her a battered old German launch attached to the most ancient wreck of a barge that I had ever seen afloat. They were anchored to a tree before the only dwelling in the vicinity, the home of a part-Indian family of countless children and innumerable hangers-on, who lived in a clearing with several primitive thatched huts. Among them was a youth who had been blind from birth, yet who went anywhere in the vicinity, through the dense forest or across the river in a dugout log, and did the same work as the rest of the men, even to splitting wood in his bare feet. Even here in the far wilderness the women were Moorish in their attitude. When a little gasoline launch, with two thatched barges on either side all but concealing it, arrived after a twenty-four hour trip around the falls with a crowd of men and women packed like sardines, these all came ashore for a full breath and to straighten out their kinks. Barely once did they speak to us men, yet when they were ready to leave, every woman and girl of the party went entirely around the circle, limply shaking hands with each of us, though we were nearly all total strangers. This courtesy is always expected in the far reaches of Amazonia, and if the traveler chances upon a party of thirty or forty, it takes an hour or more to get away.

Near the house was a fine specimen of the japuim tree, hundreds of oriole-like nests of the japuim-oro-pendula hanging from its branches. They are a noisy bird with a surprising vocabulary, black with white wings having yellow spots, and yellow from the hips down, so to speak, with a black end to the tail, and a long, whitish beak. Their nests are cleverly woven, with the entrance near the top, and every morning the birds clean them out as carefully as any New England housewife. The japuim has a saucy, noisy half-cry, half-whistle with which it keeps up a constant hubbub from daylight until dark. But the most striking of its habits is its love of company. It does not live in single nests, like our northern oriole, but hangs scores and even hundreds of them from the same tree, though there may be countless others without a nest for miles roundabout. They choose trees near houses, perhaps because the human inhabitants and their dogs scare off monkeys, snakes, bats, and other creatures that might do them harm, and like apartment dwellers in our large cities, they live so close together that the arrival or departure of one bird shakes up a dozen or more of his neighbors.

We were to have left early next morning, but this was Brazil and we finally crawled away at four in the afternoon. The batelão was a floating sty. The hold, directly under the rotten-board deck on which we lived and where every step was precarious, sloshed with bilge-water having a strong scent of livestock, and everything made a transatlantic cattle-boat seem incredibly luxurious by comparison. I dipped my water direct from the river, but the crew bailed bilge-water out of the bottom of the barge, and then filled the drinking-water jar with the same bucket without even rinsing it. I had grown faint with hunger before a tiny cup of black coffee came to poison and deceive the stomach, and not a mouthful of food did we get until three in the afternoon. Passengers are not taken on these boats, though the man who presents himself will not be put off; but he has no rights and can make no demands. We ate, standing up at a dirty little workbench on the launch, some beef and farinha cooked and served by an Indian boy with a rotting forefinger that suggested leprosy or something worse, and who had never heard the word “wash.” There were three tin plates on board, which we took turns in using. Bread is considered an extravagance along the Amazon, and I had seen none since the first day out of Manaos. Potatoes are as unknown as cleanliness. I would have given considerable to see a moving-picture of a germ-theorist dropping dead at sight of us.

In such predicaments moderation is the only hope; eat and drink no more than is absolutely necessary, and do not worry. My legs itched and tingled from the mucuims of two days before; indeed, our whole skins were tattooed with all manner of abrasions, but there was nothing to do but play Indian and smile at anything. With perfect weather one enjoyed life, for all its drawbacks, and there was a certain satisfaction in knowing that everyone else on board was as badly off, which is more conducive to contentment than living on cattle-boat fare with the scent of first-cabin mushroom steaks in the air. Still, active rather than passive hardships would have been preferable.

The captain was a full-blooded Indian with filed teeth. Many aborigines and part-breeds along the Amazon, some of them “civilized” and living in the larger towns, file their front teeth to points. A native dentist told me that this was not due to superstition, but because it keeps them from decaying and saves people from one of the curses of wild places—toothache. While I do not recommend the custom, I was frequently assured, both by Amazonian dentists and the natives themselves, that a filed tooth never spoils. An Indian who spoke Portuguese, and who was so familiar with modern progress that he made no objection to my photographing him and his wife with their pointed fangs displayed, said that the work had been done when he was twelve, with a three-cornered file—though the wilder tribes chip them off—that the only hurt was a few days’ dull ache, and that the only purpose of the custom was to save the teeth and at the same time be able to cope with the tough “green” beefsteaks of Amazonia.

The owner of the barge, who sat chupando canna—“sucking” sugar-cane it was, indeed—by the light of a brilliant full moon, tried to force his cabin upon me; but I declined extra favors and swung my hammock with the others on the lower deck over the sloshing cattle-water. In the moonlight the mirror-clear river reflected every hump and turn of the banks far ahead. When I finally fell into a doze in spite of the constant hubbub on launch or barge, someone woke me and told me to take my hammock away while the crew loaded wood, which they did for some hours. Like a magnet, we seemed to pick up everything along the river and drag it with us. When daylight came we were towing the launch of a rival, which appeared to have broken down, our own clumsy old barge with some three feet of odorous water in its hold, two very large boats, roofed, and with tons of cargo, a dead gasoline launch, two large and heavily laden rowboats, two empty rowboats, four canoes, and perhaps seventy-five persons all told, some of whom had waited half a year to get this trip up the river. To say that we made speed against the swift current would be exaggerating.

We stopped for wood again during the day and I had my first swim in Amazonia, for here the danger of pirainhas was said not to be great. This savage small fish, having double rows of teeth of razor edge with which it tears the flesh even of man, is the horror of the swimmer in nearly all the waters of the Amazon basin. Let the skin show the suggestion of a wound, and whole schools of these bloodthirsty creatures dart forward to the attack with lightning-like rapidity. The river remained wide, but was now very shallow, and much of the year it is almost completely dry. On the morning of May 28 we sighted the first town since leaving Manaos. This was Boa Vista, founded forty years ago on the left-hand bank of the river, where the dense forests begin to die out into open campo. Its red-tiled roofs and other colors gave a striking and welcome contrast after an unbroken week of watching the monotonous unrolling of jungle-forested banks. There were perhaps forty houses and huts, including a church in ruins, three shops, two dentists, one of whom was also the pharmacist, and the self-complacent air of a backwoods metropolis. Boa Vista is the “capital” of the cattle plains of northernmost Brazil, and as such has an importance out of all keeping with its size, like many another insignificant town in a boundless wilderness. Yet it had the profound melancholy, the mournful tranquillity that is the ordinary existence of sertanejo populations, where nearly every individual is true to his relaxed and indolent environment. There was, however, really a “boa vista” for this region, a far-reaching view across the river and the grassy plains to ranges of hills purple-blue with distance.

For some days Antonino had been suffering from some violent throat infection, and he was now speechless. Everyone advised him to stay in Boa Vista, where at least there was a pharmacy and a dentist, if no doctor—and the next boat, I recalled, would probably be at least a month behind. I kept silence, however, rather than let my own convenience tempt me to advise him; but after everyone else had tried their turn at wheedling him to remain, he refused, and having had his throat sprayed, we were off once more. In the brilliant moonlight that night we passed, high up on a low hill, the snow-white chapel of the monks of São Bento, and below it on the river stood Fort São Joaquim. The old fortress was built by the Portuguese in 1775 to keep the Spaniards to the north and west from stealing Portuguese territory. It is now in ruins, but there was still a “garrison” of a dozen men living in thatched huts about it.

This was the junction of the Parima and the Takutú Rivers, which form the Rio Branco. We turned into the latter and struggled on. The last of our tows had dropped off at Boa Vista, and of passengers, there remained only Antonino, his servant, and myself. In the morning we were skirting the broad acres of the Fazenda Nacional. Across it, near the Venezuelan boundary, was the legendary Lago Dourado and Manoa del Dorado, said to have been built by Peruvians before the Conquest, where everything was reputed to be made of pure gold. Even Walter Raleigh took the existence of fabulous Manoa seriously, and planned an expedition to find and conquer it. To this day, however, it has not been discovered. The Manoas were the most numerous and valiant tribe in the Rio Branco region, but they grew weak under missionary civilization and retreated to British territory, though they left descendants in all the Amazon basin. It is the boast of many of the “best families” of the Rio Branco Valley that they are of the true aristocracy because some of their ancestors were Manoas.

If there had been water enough, the launch would have taken us on up the Takutú to Antonino’s door, but we were lucky to be able to push on to the home of the captain before the water ran out. From the shallow Takutú we turned into the narrow Surumú, with barely sufficient water to float us. This the English once claimed as the frontier, but the King of Italy, as arbitrator, set it farther east. The thinly wooded banks grew ever closer together, and in mid-morning we grounded the launch—the old wreck of a batelão, had been left before the estate of its owner near the mouth of the branch—at the captain’s fazenda, “Carnauba.” In the baked-mud house we were welcomed by his good-hearted, if diffident and laconic, part-Indian wife and family. I asked the captain how much I owed him for my passage, at which he showed great surprise and after long reflection remarked that he thought twenty milreis would be generous. This was distinctly reasonable for Brazil, and especially in Amazonia, where the higher you go and the poorer accommodations become, the more exorbitant are apt to be the charges. Money is not the common medium of exchange thus far up-country, where favors are usually returned by some species of barter. Thus Antonino was welcome to ride free because he often shipped cattle by this launch and batelão, and the man who offers money is looked upon somewhat as a “tenderfoot” is on our western plains.

Eager to stretch my legs, I would have pushed on without delay. But Brazil is Brazil, even on its edges, and haste was difficult. First coffee must be served; then came talk enough to settle the terms of a treaty of peace, after which we finally packed all but the most indispensable of our baggage and sent it away by canoe with Antonino’s servant, who must descend again to the Takutú and paddle his way up it. By this time “breakfast” was ready, and we sat down to a heavy Brazilian meal of several kinds of meat, chicken included, and farinha wet in broth, ending with the unescapable black coffee. Then the nearest neighbor, from several miles away, dropped in, and the chatter went on while we lolled in capechanas sipping more black coffee. This was my first acquaintance with the typical seat of the region, a short hammock made of dried cowhides and used not as a bed by night, for which it would lack comfort and size, but as a lounging-place by day. There were six of these capechanas swinging under the veranda. Cowhide is so plentiful in these parts that stiffened ones are often set upright as walls or partitions. There was not a chair in the house, though there were two American sewing-machines and a rusty American phonograph with a hundred records, both so long maltreated that every song sounded like the squawking of the same hen in a slightly different key. The most prized product of the outside world seemed to be kerosene, used in everything from launch-engines to lamps, and always eagerly sought. A ten-gallon box of two cans cost 25$, say seven dollars, and for several months a year it is not obtainable at any price.

First we were to start at ten, then at noon; now we must wait until the sun was lower. A dozen horses were rounded up in the corral, where two were lassooed, and for once it looked as if I were to have a real mount. But the captain insisted on having him tried out first, and after fiercely bucking and rearing for some time, he took the Indian peon on his back for a gallop which he ended suddenly by throwing the rider over his head into a shallow pool, breaking the ancient weather-rotted leather of both saddle and bridle—which was lucky, for otherwise we might never have recovered them. I was quite willing to try my luck, if they would catch him again, but the captain insisted on choosing a substitute, which turned out to be another of those equine rats it seemed always my fate to ride in South America. Notwithstanding his unpromising appearance, however, I was no sooner astride him than he gave a splendid plea for admission to a Wild West show, bucking, jumping up into the air and coming down stiff-legged on all fours, kicking, rearing, and finally taking the cowhide “bit” in his teeth and galloping wildly away across the bushy campo. For a time I was undecided whether to stay on his back or catapult over his head, but decided that the ground was hard and that the honor of my race depended on my performance before those Amazonian gauchos. Somehow, therefore, even with the kodak over my shoulder thumping me in the back at every jump, I kept aboard and returned to the house, which astounded the natives so profoundly as to imply that every other “gringo” of their acquaintance had toppled limply off at the first jump.

Even when I got him quieted down, the animal was so ticklish that if a foot or a bush touched him, he instantly went through the impersonation of a bronco all over again, so that a dozen times that afternoon I had the same sport. Antonino in time caught up with me and we rode on together across a great plain, with scrub trees here and there, many clusters of the burity palm from the fan-like fronds of which all roofs of the region are made, and countless tepecuim, conical ant-hills from six to ten feet high. The range of hills, which I now knew to be the Kanuku Mountains in British Guiana, stood out blue, yet clear, against the far eastern horizon when, about five o’clock, we stopped at the “Fazenda Maravilha” on a bank of the Takutú River. It was a “marvel” only in its own estimation, though the part-Indian owners showed all the hospitality of the region by not only serving the ceremonious black coffee, but by insisting that we remain for the evening meal. Here, also, there were leather hammocks, and a sadly abused phonograph which did its best to entertain us. We were off again at dusk, meaning to take advantage of the full moon; but the clouds were thick, and even after it appeared we saw little of it. Before it rose we stumbled upon what Antonino called a “maloca,” a cluster of huts built and intermittently inhabited by more or less wild Indians. In the darkness between two of the shanties we found a pair of Indian youths, dressed in the remnants of cotton shirts and trousers and lying in their only other possession,—old hammocks swung from posts under the projecting eaves. They belonged to the Macuxy (pronounced “ma-coo-shée”) tribe scattered through the hills of the three countries about the source of the Rio Branco. My companion wanted them to go back to “Maravilha” and help row his canoe and baggage home next day, and the argument he was forced to put up resembled that of a spellbinder seeking votes. In words of one syllable—for they understood little Portuguese—and with such reasoning as one might offer a child of six, he told them at least a dozen times that he would pay them two days’ wages, either in food or money, and that they might be on their way again the following evening. Though they admitted that they had not eaten that day, that they had no water, and asked for tobacco, their unvarying reply was an indifferent monosyllable, and it was only after half an hour of pleading that they gave a grunted promise to roll up their hammocks as soon as the moon was high and be in “Maravilha” in time to start up the river at dawn.

Soon we came to a muddy igarapé that our animals refused for a long time to cross, and finally, toward what was perhaps midnight, the barking of a pack of curs drew our attention to a hut and corral and announced us to their unwashed owner. He invited us to swing our hammocks inside, gave us each a nibble of miserable native cheese, and eventually, a discussion of the news of the day having been exhausted, let us fall asleep. The chief item of interest which Antonino had brought with him was that a youth known to himself and our host had resorted to the plan, still usual in those parts, of stealing a woman, but who this time happened to be a widow. The hut-owner refused to believe it, saying in a surly grunt that “of course Pedro is old enough now to hunt him a woman, but whoever heard of stealing a widow!” The scorn in his tone is inexpressible in words. Long before daylight we saddled again, drank a glass of foaming milk still warm from the corral, and struck out across bushy campo, rather sandy and very dry. An unusual danger on these great savannahs is that wild horses, especially stallions, roaming the plains attack mounted animals, sometimes biting mouthfuls out of them, if not out of the rider. Several pursued us, and one big black brute would not give up his nefarious project until I had fired my revolver over his head. About seven we came upon another hut, where the usual limp handshakes and mutual inquiries as to the health of families—for, of course, Antonino knew everyone in the region—was followed by the exchange of local gossip until coffee had been made and served. An hour later there was a similar halt at a similar hut. Life in Brazil is just one black coffee after another. Here there was a branch of the Takutú, to be crossed in a canoe, swimming our horses and re-saddling them, after which a long and fairly swift trot brought us at last to the home of Antonino.

It was by no means as sumptuous a place as his choice of language had led me to picture, but at least it was more comfortable than the mud hut in which we had spent part of the night. There was a large thatched and once whitewashed adobe house standing forth on a big bare spot at the top of a slight bluff above the Takutú, and three or four smaller huts and a corral, all of which, with several hundred dry and sandy acres about them, Antonino had inherited six years before from his mother-in-law. The site was on the extreme edge of Brazil, where the Takutú makes an almost complete turn and the Mahú flows into it, and it would have been easy to throw a stone from Antonino’s door over onto British territory. I had looked upon my companion as almost a youth, yet his wife, younger than he, was already old and gray, and his daughter of thirteen was in the physical prime of life and visibly longing for a husband. These, a son, and Antonino’s brother, dying of tuberculosis, made up the household, though there was the usual swarm of Indian or half-Indian servants.