It began to rain the instant we set off, but this time I could crawl under the edge of the tarpaulin, though huddled and cramped as I had not been since I hoboed under the hinged platform over Pullman steps. The Indians, of course, got wet, but having stripped to their red breech-clouts as soon as they were out of sight of the mission, this seemed to trouble them little. Notwithstanding their rounded stomachs, full to capacity of that miserable hunger antidote made of the mandioca, they showed some energy. It is a fallacy, however, that wilderness people are necessarily robust because they lead simple lives. They are patient and enduring, but exposure and alternate stuffing and fasting are not conducive to robust health. Sunshine and showers alternated throughout the day. Here and there were patches of savannah, but most of the time we were surrounded by endless forest walls and utter solitude. When I felt it must be near noon, I gave orders to land at the next opportunity and start a fire. We were doing so when I heard curious mutterings and stealthy movements among the Indians and to my question “Vincent” replied in a low voice, “Black men.” The story of the “Ocean Shark” still fresh in memory, I at once buckled on my revolver and took the direction indicated, only to find a group of negroes of the West Indian type, who rose to their feet as I approached and addressed me as “sir.” They were part of the crew of Melville’s long expected boat, which had left Georgetown three weeks before, and they were waiting for the black policeman in charge, who had gone up an estuary with twelve paddlers to arrest a native. We boiled some beef, which my boys ate with dry farinha, refusing beef-broth, and pushed on.

During the day we thoroughly boxed the compass, running to every point of it with the winding river. It was broader and more placid down here, though still swift and reaching to the tops of many good-sized trees. Hour after hour the steady, rhythmic thump of the paddles against the boat continued with the glinting lift of the gleaming blades as the two boys in the bow shoveled water behind them. Their idea of good paddling appeared to be to throw as much water into the air with each stroke as possible, and this sort of “grandstand play” and the constant monotonous scrape of the paddles on the edge of the boat seemed much wasted effort. Yet we bowled along much faster than the swift current. I paddled considerably myself, but though I was visibly much stronger than the Indian youths, and gave much more powerful strokes, I could not hold their pace. They were remarkably constant in keeping it up, going faster and faster until the bowman gave a signal by throwing water higher than usual, whereupon they started anew with a deeper and more measured stroke, which in a few minutes became fast and forceless again. They did very little talking, though they were natural and unembarrassed enough. “Soldiering,” such as letting go the paddle to feel of a toe or caress a scratch, never brought protest from the others, as it would under like circumstances from civilized workmen. Clothing was still largely ornamental and a fad with them, and their wrecks of shirts and trousers were more often discarded than worn, except in the case of “Vincent,” with whom they seemed to be a sign of his higher social standing. But under the useless garments forced upon them by the missionaries each wore a bright-red loin-cloth always kept carefully in place by a stout white cord about the waist. Like most savages, though they were indifferent to the lack of other clothes, they were far more careful not to show complete nakedness than are most civilized men.

I had planned to camp at dark, but to my surprise the Indians preferred to go on, saying that the mosquitoes and gnats were too thick to make sleep possible. Near sunset, therefore, we stopped to cook, and were off again at dark. The deadly stillness of night at times was not broken even by the faintest sound from the floating boat, but only by the occasional howling of some animal, evidently a “tiger,” off somewhere in the jungle. It was too cold to sleep; besides, my back ached with much sitting and there was not room to stretch out. Hour after hour the boys went on, sometimes paddling, sometimes floating and talking. Then the clear sky grew overcast, distant lightning flashed, and the rain began again. I crawled under cover, though too cramped to sleep. It must have been at least midnight when I heard the Indians snatching at bushes while it still rained, and peered out to find them on land looking for a place to sling my tarpaulin. They got it up after a fashion in the dense darkness and constant drizzle, though with barely room under it for my hammock and net. Then they swung their own hammocks outside and dug good clothes and blankets from their bags; but though they had made their own hammocks, insect pests did not seem to trouble them enough to induce them to make themselves nets.

I was aroused by the bashful, girl-of-twelve voice of “Vincent,” whose English was probably similar to the soft language the Indians use to one another in their own tongue, in which there never seems to be a harsh word, telling me that it would soon be daylight. We bailed out the boat and reloaded it, all in wet weeds, sore feet, and constant drizzle, and were off in the phantom of false morning. The soft, velvety tropical dawn came quickly, as if fleeing before the mammoth red ball that pursued it up over the horizon. Pairs and trios of parrots flew by in the fresh morning, chattering cheerily to one another. Chirruping black birds with long queenly tails were the most conspicuous of many little singing birds; a big white or gray, ponderously moving bird, like a heron, was the largest of many species. Trees and bushes of innumerable kinds were interwoven into solid walls along either bank, “monkey ropes” galore swinging down the face of it, but they were peopled with none of the playful creatures of our school geographies. I gave the boys a big dinner, which was unwise, for feast or famine is their natural way of life and, like hunting dogs, they were of little use when gorged. The river was lower and had turned far more sluggish for lack of fall, and our speed depended mainly on paddling. I ached from head to foot from sitting cramped for four days, particularly from the “jiggers” that had burrowed into my bare feet on the tramp to Melville’s, a tiny insect which lays its eggs under the skin and especially under the edges of the nails, where they begin to swell and produce acute pain until they are cut open and squeezed out. No one had any notion where we were or whether we would get anywhere that day; but it was evident that we could not make the mouth of the Rupununi, and at dusk we pitched camp in a site cleared by other travelers in the edge of the sloping woods, where the mosquitoes and gnats were so numerous that I took refuge under my net while supper was cooking.

Monotonously the wide river, now placid and mirror-like, with very little current, slipped slowly along into the vista of endless forest walls. The sun poured down like molten iron. In mid-morning we passed the only boat we had thus far met on the trip, carrying an Indian family, the woman steering, two full-grown girls with no visible clothes, and several men paddling, a cur dog gazing over the gunwale. They, too, tossed water high in the air with every stroke. I alternated between paddling, bailing the boat, soaking salt meat for the meal ahead, reading, writing, and sitting stooped forward or leaning back to ease the cramp of my position. At least one did not need to go hungry on such a trip, as does frequently the traveler on foot through the wild places of the earth. Not half an hour below where we stopped to cook dinner beneath a majestic tree in the cathedral woods we passed the first human habitation I had sighted from the river since leaving Melville’s, though I had expected to see scores. It was an Indian hut, or rather shelter, for it had no walls; and close beyond were two or three more, one of two stories, though consisting merely of thatched roofs on poles. The women were naked as the men, except for bead bracelets and anklets, and sometimes an old skirt, though more often they had only a beaded apron a foot or more square in lieu of the fig-leaf. Little girls wore the same ornaments, including a smaller apron, as they began to approach puberty. Formerly all the native women confined themselves to this costume, but the advent of missionaries and ranchers, with their “civilizing” influence and the payment of everything in cloth, has begun to breed an unnatural prudery.

It was perhaps two o’clock in the afternoon when the Chinese wall of forest was broken, or rather spotted, by a large, rough wooden building with a sheet-iron roof, a cluster of smaller ones about it. This was “The Stores,” headquarters of three rival “balata” companies, and the only place, except Boa Vista, on the journey from Manaos where goods are professionally for sale or buildings are made of imported material. We halted at the third and last among many canoes and “perlite” negroes, just before the Rupununi flows into the Essequibo.

The manager of “Bugles Store,” to whom Melville had given me a letter, was a burly, bearded man nearing forty, born in the colony of Scotch and Irish parents and speaking with a peculiar accent gathered from all three sources. He had a large comfortable house and a long hut for the stores and his negro henchmen, all surrounded by a pineapple plantation. I had my belongings brought up to the house at once and, lest my Indians should disappear before I knew how the land lay, the paddles also. The place was shut in at a crook of the river, behind a forest wall that utterly smothered the breeze for which the region is noted and made it hotter than I had ever known it in British Guiana. We sat down to a supper of rice, canned meat, boiled pawpaw, and insects, the last in such numbers that lights were taboo. Then the Scotch-Irish Guianese closed every window with a fussy manner and some remark about the dangerous night air and we began to undress in the darkness. When breathing became difficult, I noticed that an air-proof tarpaulin had been drawn over the place where the ceiling had wisely been left out by the builders, and that another had been spread over the floor to shut out any air that might have seeped through its narrow cracks! A house in British Guiana should consist of roof only, as the Indians know; this one, having tight walls, still held the heat of the day, as an oven retains its warmth after the baking is over. Thus does atavism cause even a civilized white man to cling to old customs when they should be thrown away. Outdoors, in the breeziest spot, would have been none too comfortable sleeping-quarters; yet here was I in a hermetically sealed room and down in the depths of a thick Ceará hammock with a tight gnat-proof net over me! Within ten minutes I could almost swim in it, the perspiration making my many insect bites and skin abrasions itch beyond endurance. Though he had lighted a lamp as soon as we were ready for bed, the prudish colonial was still fussing with his garments, as if fearing I might catch sight of his ankles, when I looked out again to suggest mildly that perhaps it would be less inconvenient for him if I moved my hammock out into the hall. He agreed; but to my increasing astonishment I found the veranda, too, which had been pleasantly wide open by day, likewise hermetically sealed with tarpaulin curtains! After I had hung my hammock, my incomprehensible host spent half an hour looking for another lamp, which he evidently expected me to keep blazing all night, and finally retired to his sealed quarters, leaving me to listen to the ticking and striking of the dozen or more trumpet-voiced clocks scattered about the house. He plainly had a hobby for clocks, perhaps to keep time from running away from him here in the wilderness. I noiselessly opened a couple of curtains and blew out the light, and actually slept a bit before a heathenish hullabaloo broke out long before daylight. I found my host tramping moodily back and forth across the hollow wooden floor in his heavy boots, waking everyone and everything within gunshot, though there was no earthly necessity for anyone being up for hours yet. This, I learned, was one of his invariable customs and innumerable idiosyncrasies. He could not get or keep Indian employees, not only because he was too harsh with them, but because he insisted on everyone going to bed about seven and aroused them all with his infernal alarm-clocks at four, keeping even the neighboring camps awake from then on by stamping back and forth on the resounding floor. Truly, a man living alone in the jungle develops his own individuality.

Strictly speaking, “The Stores” were not public, but furnished supplies to the “bleeders” of the three companies in the “balata” forests, who gather a cheap rubber similar to the caucho of Brazil. “Balata” boats had been in the habit of leaving for the coast every few days, and no one had so much as suggested the possibility of my having any difficulty in getting down to Georgetown, once I had reached the mouth of the Rupununi. But I quickly discovered that instead of the worst being over, as I was congratulating myself, the crisis of the trip was still ahead of me. The Essequibo from the Rupununi to Potaro mouth, whence there is a daily launch, is, under favorable conditions, only a short week’s trip; but there are many dangerous falls, to be passed only in certain seasons, obstacles which have often held up travelers for months. My host implied that such was to be my fate. Because of the drop in the price of rubber, not a “balata” boat had gone down the river in weeks; and though a messenger was dispatched even to the rival camps, word came back that none would have a boat leaving before September or October! It was then the middle of June. My remark that I would much prefer going over the falls and be done with it seemed lost upon my egregious host.

Not only common sense, however, but the law forbade my attempting the trip without reasonable preparations. Entire boatloads of passengers as well as goods had more than once been completely lost; once a group of American missionaries who had insisted on going down alone had been drowned, according to the exiled Scotch-Irishman, and while he did not seem to feel that a personal loss, it required him, in his capacity as the only British official in the region, to compel me to comply with the law. First of all, I must have a certified pilot and bowman, of whom there were not a dozen on the river. Moreover, my host was a justice of the peace, as well as a man of harsh and eccentric ways, so that the Indians who had not been hired on long contract and forced to stick to it gave the place a wide berth, particularly as this was their “off” year, when they wished to stay at home to burn off and plant their gardens, or because they properly prefer loafing in the wilderness to working for a song for cantankerous white men. To comply fully with legal requirements, I should evidently have to build, buy, or hire a larger new boat and assemble a whole expedition, at a cost of several hundred dollars. My only other hope was to find a certified captain who would be willing to risk his life with me in the rotten old dugout in which I had arrived; and the only possible candidate for that romantic position lived way back at the Indian huts we had passed the day before.

We set out for them at seven in the morning, my three unwilling boys augmented by a half-sick negro named Langrey, who wished to get down to Georgetown. It was quite a different task from traveling downstream. All five of us paddled the whole morning without a let-up, yet the great forest wall along the edge of which we struggled seemed barely to move, and I had a vivid sample of the hardships of weeks and even months of rowing up-river in Amazonia, where the loss of a single stroke to catch the breath leaves that much of the toilsome task to be done over again. We finally landed at the slight clearing and found a strong, good-looking young Indian, his forehead and cheeks painted some tribal color, lying in loin-cloth contentment in his hammock under a roof on legs. This was “Harris”—the missions have overdone themselves in giving the Indians clothing, wedding-rings, and English names which they cannot pronounce—or, as he called himself, “Hăllish,” certified captain of the interned gasoline launch of one of the stores, but who was “not working this year.” He spoke a considerable amount of a kind of pidgin-English, which added to his enigmatical air and somewhat almond eyes to suggest remote Chinese ancestry. Langrey opened fire at once, and there followed a long argument, or almost a pleading on our part, with little but silence from the other. The first inclination of primitive people is wary attention, one of questioning suspicion, with a tendency toward antipathy. Finally “Harris” deigned to remark, raising himself on an elbow in the hammock and glancing toward it, that our canoe was too old and small for such a trip. Perhaps we could borrow the new one of his next-door neighbor a few miles down the river, he added some time later, lending him “mine” until his own was returned. For some reason “Harris” wished to “go down to town” himself, or no argument I could have put forward would have shaken his aboriginal indifference. I told him to name his own price. He asked ten pounds! Stranded as I was, I balked at that, but Langrey butted in, and it turned out that “Harris” did not know the difference between pounds and dollars, so that ten dollars would be just as agreeable. Then he must wait for his wife, to see if she wished to go! Yet there are men who assert that Indian women are downtrodden. She appeared by and by from the woods, where she had been digging mandioca-roots, carrying a big load of those poisonous tubers on her back in a peculiar open-work basket held by a thong across her forehead and wearing nothing but a scanty skirt from waist to thighs. Though she had already been seen by all, so that any modesty she might have possessed should have recovered, she went to a nearby roof on poles and put on a long skirt and a crumpled waist, though the latter scarcely concealed her charms and the former she unconsciously pulled up far above her knees when she sat down on a log to peel the mandioca. The missionaries who had given her and her husband their wedding-rings and their names had taught them what to wear in the presence of white men, but she knew only an academic reason for doing so.

Our errand was not allowed to interfere with household duties, so while “Harris” lolled in his hammock and the rest of us squatted on stumps and stones in the shade of his roof, the woman peeled the mandioca-roots, washed them, grated them on a native implement, and ran the mash into the open end of a snake-like matapi, or press made of woven flat fibers. This she hung by the upper loop from a beam-end and attached a weight to the lower end, thus squeezing out a yellowish juice that is deadly poison. This is carefully guarded from children and dogs, but, being volatile, is easily eliminated by boiling. The residue is then dried, sifted through basket sieves, and finally baked into cassava bread, the most horrible imitation of food extant, great pancake-like sheets of which were even then spread about the thatch roofs. Though similar in origin, cassava is far more trying to the civilized stomach than the bran-like farinha of Brazil.

Negotiations were opened again in due season. I agreed to the princely price of ten dollars, food down and back for the whole party, even including the wife, and promised of my own free will a premium of a dollar for each day gained over the usual time for the trip. But here we struck another snag. The only paddlers available were the three I had brought with me; and they absolutely refused to go. They insisted that the Reverend White had told them to come straight back from “The Stores,” and that he was a man to be obeyed. I knew it; yet I was not going to be held a prisoner in the jungle for months to suit the convenience of three Indians, even with a parson thrown in. I put it to them strongly. If they would go down to Potaro mouth with me, I would pay them good wages and give them good food for both the down and the up trip and write a letter of explanation for them to carry back to the missionary. If they did not go, they could sit here twirling their thumbs without food, for I would not let them have the dugout until I was done with it. They had a gun and bows and arrows with them, and no doubt other Indians would not let them starve and might even lend them a boat; yet I felt that if I made my bluff strong enough, the pressure of the white man’s will would win in the end, barring some untoward incident. So I assured “Harris” that I could get plenty of paddlers, if these wished to starve, assuming great indifference, though fearing all the time that I might not be able to coerce them, and told him that it would save me paying what I owed them, though of course I should have given them what I had agreed upon with the parson. Leaving that bug in their ears, we finally ended our long and leisurely diplomatic conference, “Harris” agreeing to come down to “The Stores” next morning with his neighbor’s new boat, his own wife, and one man, while I was to furnish four paddlers, including Langrey, to provide all supplies, and to advance him five dollars upon his arrival.

All the way back I let the paddlers stew in their own thoughts, purposely saying nothing and reading a novel, as if my mind were at peace. Like all children, whether of the wilderness or merely in age, coaxing, I felt sure, would be far less effective with them than moral pressure. Time, patience, and, above all, propinquity would eventually cause their primitive wills to yield to mine. As we passed one of the huts along the bank, they shouted a conversation in Macuxy at those about it, perhaps getting some promise that a boat would be sent for them. Ignoring this and their former vociferous refusal, however, I called “Vincent” aside when we landed and said, in the tone one might use to a pouting child, “You talk it over with the other boys, and when you have made up your minds, come and tell me and I will get you food to cook.” As they had not eaten at all that day and were, if my own appetite was any gauge, half-starved, I depended on hunger as my most important ally.

The Scotch-Irish native, who addressed his negroes as “Mister,” and was chary of running foul of the official “Protector of the Indians,” as well as having the Englishman’s fear, several times multiplied, of the unprecedented, could not for a long time be talked over. Finally he agreed mildly to lend his aid, and sitting down on his doorstep, like a justice holding court, he called the three boys before him and addressed them in laborious pidgin-English. “Now can’t leave gentleman here, you see. Me going supply provisions. You paddle he down ...” and so on; after all of which they mumbled and went back to the bank of the river. But my most powerful ally eventually got in its work, and about sunset, having meanwhile visibly wept, they came to me and said they had decided to go—whereupon I gave them a meal that left “Vincent’s” little paunch protruding like a chicken’s crop. Then they came again, in a far more cheerful mood, and wanted a pair of trousers, a shirt, and a belt respectively, whether to gloat over them or merely to see the color of my coin I do not know. These things I gave them on account from the storehouse, and they were soon beaming and gay as happy children.

But I was not yet done. The law required a certified bowman and more paddlers. “Had you not been recommended to me by Melville, I could not let you go on without a permit from the Protector of the Indians,”—who never stirs out of Georgetown—added my charming host, much impressed with himself as an officer of the law, like all wooden-headed authorities. We debated another hour or more before he agreed, with the air of doing my whole nation an extraordinary favor, to consider me one of the paddlers and my best boy an experienced bowman. Then, out of the kindness of his heart, he permitted me to buy from his store—at prices I found later to be between five and six times those of Georgetown—the rations required by law,—seven days’ supplies for seven people, or forty-nine rations, each of which must include a pound of flour, half a pound of rice, two ounces of pork, ditto of beef, twice that of fish, two ounces of sugar, and so on through about twenty items, not to mention milk and cocoa and many other extras for “the captain, Harris” and myself. The fact that the manager himself gets twenty per cent. on all sales from the store may or may not have made him so insistent on full compliance with the law. When the list was completed he handed me a bill for $22.71, and then growled because I paid him with a five-pound note, instead of in gold.

When I fancied everything settled at last, Langrey came to me with tears struggling over his eyelids and said, “So sorry, sir. I was so interested in this trip. But I can’t go.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because, sir, I have not the passage money from Potaro mouth down to Georgetown.”

“How much will that be?”

“$2.08, second-class, sir.”

“But surely, after working nearly four months for this company you have earned that much?”

“No, sir. I took an advance, and the food costs so much.”

“Well, as you were injured working for them, surely they will help you to that extent to get back home?”

“No, sir, them don’t help we none,” replied Langrey, slipping back into his more habitual speech.

This statement having been confirmed by my host, I gave him a hint of what I thought of the company he represented and promised the invalid negro his fare to Georgetown. By this time the visible cost of the perhaps four days’ trip to Potaro mouth exceeded fifty dollars.

These “balata” companies exploit not only the natural resources, but the natives, with a system almost as near slavery as that in the rubber-fields of Amazonia, against which England had recently made a loud uproar. Langrey’s case was typical of many. He had worked seven years for this company. Each spring he applied at headquarters in Georgetown and got $10 advance and a $10 order on the company store. Leaving the latter with his family (and no doubt gambling away the former), he joined many other negroes who had signed similar contracts and helped row a company freight-boat up the river. On this wages were 48 cents a day and an allowance of $2.08 a week for food; but as they must buy all provisions at the company stores, at breath-taking prices, because they are forbidden to bring anything with them from Georgetown and there is nothing for sale elsewhere up the river, it is easy to see that the “bleeders” cannot but make a decided inroad on their future wages before they set off into the woods to hunt the “bullet-tree.” This is a very large member of the sapote family, the bark of which the “bleeder” gashes in zigzag form from the ground to a height of perhaps thirty-five feet, using a ladder and a rope—spurs are illegal—and cutting with a machete. It requires long practice to cut deep enough, yet not too deep; wherefore the average “bleeder” makes little or nothing during the first year or two. Incisions in the bark must run into and not cross one another, and must not be more than one and a half inches long. No “bullet-tree” can be cut down, except when necessary in making a trail; the law forbids a tree being bled in more than half its circumference at a time, the tapping of any tree of less than thirty-six inches diameter, the “bleeding” of the branches, or cutting clear through the bark. Once it has been tapped, the tree must stand five years before the other side can be bled. Companies with “balata” concessions are allowed to take nothing else from the crown lands that are leased to them for that purpose, and if the workmen were half as well protected as the trees, the “balata”-fields would border on Utopia.

Every “bleeder” must be registered with the department of forests and mines, and pay a government license fee of one shilling. The negroes build rude huts in the forest, but are not allowed to bring their women with them. Each tree yields about a gallon of “milk,” which the sap resembles both in looks and taste, and which is gathered every afternoon and poured into an immense wooden tray protected from the direct rays of the sun. Here it coagulates, forming a kind of cream on top. This hardens into an immense sheet of celluloid color that is peeled off and folded like an ox-hide for shipment. Day after day “milk” is added and the “cream” peeled off, each gallon of “milk” giving about five pounds of “balata.” In December the “bleeder” carries his traps back to the river and down to camp, usually averaging a bit under a thousand pounds of “balata” for the season, for which he was then getting $170. Advances, food, and high priced provisions subtracted, he is lucky if he has anything left to gamble away when he gets back to town. If a man is sick or cannot work for any other reason, such as heavy rain, he gets no wages, but he must pay 40 cents a day for his rations, as well as for his medicines. Of course the company has to guard against malingering by lazy negroes; yet if Langrey was a fair example, they are moderately earnest, responsible workers. He had not lost a day in his seven years, he asserted, until he had injured his back falling from a tree a short time before; yet the company would give him no assistance to return to town. If a negro runs away from his contract, he gets from four months to a year in prison and is made to pay back his advance; if he lives out his contract, he goes down the river again by rowing a company boat at two shillings a day. But down on the coast a negro gets only 32 cents a day—the minimum wage in British Guiana—or perhaps two shillings for loading ships, at which “he not easy to find job,” so that the more enterprising of the race come up-river annually to “bleed” the “bullet-tree.”

In the morning “Harris” turned up, accompanied by his wife, a parrot, many sheets of newly baked cassava bread, and his “canister,” a small tin box for personal possessions such as most workmen in this region carry. He bore no tribal marks now, and his wife was fully dressed from neck to ankles. But he came in a miserable little old dugout of his own, saying he could neither get the extra man nor borrow his neighbor’s new boat. My plans seemed again about to topple over. But, to my astonishment, “Harris” agreed to try to make the trip in Melville’s decrepit craft, evidently being very anxious to get down to town. This might have served as a last resort, in spite of the much greater fury of the Essequibo than the Rupununi, had we been allowed to go on short rations, or even with the amount we would probably need. Legally, the wife would serve as the extra paddler, but we were compelled by law to load the poor old derelict to the gunwales—nay, far above them. I protested that such a load would almost certainly swamp the boat. My delightful host said that did not matter in the least; the law required that those who hired Indians must have one pound of flour, and so on, each day to feed them, but it did not specify that they should not be drowned before the end of the trip. So I was compelled to pile the fifty-pound sealed can of flour on top of all the rest of our load, though even the exiled Scotch-Irishman admitted, in his non-official capacity, that Indians do not eat flour, except under compulsion, and that we had more than they could eat without it; and thereby our already excellent chances of bringing up at the bottom of the Essequibo were considerably increased.

My host maintained his reputation to the very moment of our departure. The company having abandoned Langrey half-sick from injuries sustained in their employ, and I having agreed to take him all the way home, one would have supposed that a slight parting kindness would not have bankrupted the corporation. As we were on the point of leaving, I said, “By the way, that man of yours we are taking down with us has no paddle, unless you can lend him one.”

“He’s no mon of ours!” hastily and half-angrily answered the provincial Scotch-Irishman. “If I lind a paddle, it will be to you personally, and I will hold you responsible for getting it back to me!”

Thereupon he got a miserable old cracked and mended paddle about the size of a lath and tossed it out to us. I promised to send it back by special messenger.

So at last, on June 18, we were off at eleven in the morning. My three now tanned and tamed paddlers were in front, the rather useless Langrey and “Harris’” paddle-less wife and her parrot on the seat back of the tarpaulin-covered baggage and supplies, while I was cramped in between them and the certified “captain-and-pilot” squatting on the stern. It seemed foolish to take pictures or keep notes of the trip, so slight were the chances of ever getting them back to civilization. I took the laces out of my heavy shoes, however, so that I could kick them off and at least have a fighting chance to save my own hide.

In a few minutes we slid out of the Rupununi into the Essequibo, wide as the lower Hudson and six hundred miles long, the principal river of British Guiana, and struck across a veritable lake at the junction, with the waves running so high that we shipped much water to add to that constantly seeping into the old and now badly strained dugout. For a time it looked as if we might sink immediately, instead of doing so after several days of arduous toil. I bailed incessantly, and at last we came under the lee of the wooded shore and plodded along more or less safely, shut in by the long familiar wall of unbroken forest-jungle.

We had no champion paddlers on board. The three boys messed along steadily but not very earnestly; Langrey, the invalid, slapped his lath-like paddle in and out of the water with just exertion enough to pass as a boatman rather than a passenger; and though I got in some long and more powerful strokes, I never succeeded in keeping the bowman’s pace for any length of time and shoveled water mainly to relieve the monotonous drudgery of bailing the boat. This eminently feminine job was the only work expected of the captain’s wife, but most of it fell to my lot because the water gathered deepest about my feet. The lady wore a skirt and some sort of bodice or waist, but these were thin and mainly ornamental, and rather than wet her skirt she would pull it above her knees, disclosing plump brownish legs decorated with a cross-bar and three painted stripes running from ankle to—well, as high as the skirt ever went in our presence. Her face, also, was symbolically painted, and she wore a towel about her plentiful horse-mane hair. Her rôle was strictly passive. She made no advances, never speaking to anyone but her husband, and then in barely audible undertones, not merely because she knew no English, for she was quite as taciturn toward the paddlers of her own race as with Langrey or me. Yet her husband granted her their better umbrella when roaring showers fell, and in general, considering their scale of life, treated her as well as does the average civilized husband of the laboring class. To be sure, he had lain in a hammock while she dug mandioca and made cassava bread, but somewhere I have seen a civilized man lie in a Morris chair while his wife washed dishes and baked pies. They seemed to have as much mutual understanding and to “communicate by a sigh or a gesture” as easily as more fully clothed couples.

We were gradually turning to English; four out of seven of us now spoke it. In the pidgin-English of the Indians, which passed between “Harris” and the now deposed and disrobed “Vincent,” comparatives and superlatives were always formed with “more” and “most,” and the positive rather than the negative adjective served both purposes. The river was “more deep,” “not deep,” “not more deep,” but never shallow; it was “most wide,” “not wide,” or “not most wide,” but never narrow—though both knew the meaning of the other words readily enough. Nothing could induce the Indians to express an opinion of their own, or rather, they never showed any sign of personal volition to a white man if they could possibly avoid it. Ask them, “Is it better to stop at the clearing, or to camp across the river?” and the reply would be, “Yes, sir; all right, sir,” or something similar. One might strive for an hour to find out what they would do if they were alone, and even then succeed only by carefully refraining from suggesting any preference. Like the Indians of the Andes, they preferred to wait for a leading question, so that they could answer what they thought the questioner would be most pleased to hear.

Langrey had his own opinions, but it was long since he had heard any news from the outside world. He did not know that there was a war in Europe, though he did leave off paddling suddenly one day to say, “Ah sure sorry to heard, sir, dat Jack Johnson los’ de champeenship. When he winned, all we black man in Georgetown parade, sir.” He was convinced that the “black man”—under no circumstances did he use the word “negro”—was superior to the white, mentally as well as physically, and spent many a sun-blistering hour citing examples to prove it. One such assertion was that the white authorities had to change and give more examinations in the schools and colleges of the colony, because the blacks were winning everything. Yet he was always obsequious to white men, addressed me unfailingly as “sir,” and was much pained to see me do the slightest manual labor. Yet it may be that he would have treated in the same manner one of his own race having what to him were money and position, as I saw him later act toward wealthy Chinese.

A bit after mid-afternoon we came to several arms of the river where it split between densely wooded banks, with immense reddish-brown rocks protruding here and there from the water and the sound of rapids beginning to worry us. But the river at this point was so high, broad, and swift that we had no difficulty in running what Langrey called a “scataract,” though in other seasons it had often proved a time-consuming obstacle. The sun had sunk behind one of the walls of trees when we swung in to clutch the swiftly passing bank just above another rapids, where the men soon cut saplings and pitched camp. First they set up a frame and stretched my tarpaulin tent-wise over it, putting my netted hammock and baggage under it and forming what Langrey called the “chief’s place.” He was so much higher in the Guianese social scale that, though “Harris” was supreme in the matter of steering and boatmanship, the negro assumed the place of first lieutenant under me the instant we set foot on shore. He swung his own hammock at a respectful distance from my own luxurious quarters, yet far enough from the Indians to emphasize the difference in rank; while the Indians themselves split carefully into two parties, even building separate fires, “Harris” and his wife close together under the same net and the three boys in a group a little removed from all the others. Thus the caste system was religiously and Britishly preserved even in the wilderness a thousand miles from nowhere. Langrey pestered me to death with his servitude. If I tried to cook anything myself, he dropped whatever he was doing and ran to insist on doing it for me. When it was cooked and I told him to have some himself, he stood stiffly at attention and refused—by actions, rather than by words—to touch a mouthful or even to assume the position of “at ease” until I had finished. If I dared to wash my plate or cup, he bounded forward with the air of an English butler, exclaiming, “Now, now, sir; you must always call me when you want anything done.” Sometimes I could have kicked him; but I always recalled in time that it was not his fault, that this was part of that British civilization I had come overland from Manaos to study, and that, being a mere visitor in this foreign realm, I must not, even inadvertently, Americanize British subjects. Theirs was a manner quite different from the Brazilian or the Iberian, even of men of Langrey’s color, with which I had grown so familiar that the Anglo-Saxon style struck me as stranger and more foreign. The same race which incessantly shook hands and kowtowed to one another on every provocation over in Brazil, here had adopted that staid, caste-bound demeanor of the Briton, keeping up the acknowledged rules of society in the wilderness just as the lone Englishman will put on evening clothes to dine with himself in a log cabin. Yet for all the superficial super-politeness of the Brazilian mulatto or cabra and the Englishness of these Guianese negroes, they were the same man underneath; in both cases their manners were only borrowed garments put on to make them look like other people and help them get along in the world with the least possible friction.

Indians working for white men must eat expensive supplies from town, though they much prefer their native food; but negroes can be fed anything, though here they have been accustomed for generations to the fare of civilization. Complete as were our legal rations, the Indians did not like them, so that they fell chiefly to Langrey and me. The fifty-pound can of flour for which I had paid $8.75 proved to be so moldy that no one would touch it; the sugar was the coarsest grade of brown, and the rest was poor in proportion. The ration law, like many another isolated British ordinance, had plainly been made by a man who had never set foot in the wilds. Our farinha had run out, more’s the pity, for though it tasted like sawdust, it was swelling and filling; and now in its place we had far less palatable cassava bread made of the same poisonous tuber. We all ate cassava, and the flour might to great advantage have been thrown overboard, but law is law.

Swift places in the river were numerous the next day, and finally, at a “scataract” among countless massive brown-red boulders, we had to get out and let the boat down by ropes. Dense jungle crowded close to the shore wherever there were no boulders and often made it impossible to do likewise in worse spots, where we had to run the risk of shooting the rapids, shipping water perilously. Twice a day we stopped to cook, the second time to camp as well. Sometimes, during the noonday halt, I strolled a little way into the majestic forest, the leafy roof upheld by mighty trees averaging a hundred feet in height, with buttressed roots, as if they had been designed as pillars to support the sky, and with room for a whole Brazilian family to sit down in the space between any two buttresses. Other trees were incredibly slender for their height, some barely six inches through, yet climbing straight up to the sunlight far above. On the river long-tailed parrots flew by in couples at frequent intervals, screaming like a quarreling Irish pair; but here in the woods not a bird sang, rarely, indeed, was one seen. From the hour when the night voices of the jungle-forest ceased in the great silence of dawn, as if nature stood mute at her own magnificence, there was a cathedral stillness in these woods. Yet at times the ears were filled with an indefinable, almost intangible sound, a curious humming, mysterious as the sensual smell of the forest. Parasites seemed trying to suffocate the trees with their passionate embrace, yet I got little sensation of that “death everywhere exuding” reported by so many Amazonian travelers; rather did one feel an agreeable impression of isolation and of well-being under that impenetrable roof of vegetation, in a world such as Adam might have seen on the first day of his life.

Insects were less troublesome along the Essequibo, and for some reason we suffered little from heat, though the sun struck straight down upon the broad river, which threw it back in our faces in scintillations of polished copper that blinded, visibly tanning us all—except Langrey. A cool breeze was rarely lacking, and every little while there came the growing noise of rain, castigating the woods ever more furiously as it drew near, the wind swaying the great tree-tops and now and then turning aside from their course a pair of voyaging parrots. Occasionally we passed the skeleton of a camping-place, a tangle of poles over which tarpaulins had been hung by other and larger parties. The howling of monkeys, like the roar of a far-off riot, like some great but distant crowd furious with anger, often sounded from back in the forest. The river frequently broke up into many diverging branches, almost as large in appearance as the main stream, which disappeared off through the wilderness. In the dry season the Essequibo is a meandering stream that one can almost wade, its broad bed filled with dry sand and stretches of huge rocks which now were racing rapids, showing themselves chiefly as immense whirlpools on the surface of the deep river.

We ran some very heavy rapids, the waves often tossing over our low gunwales; but “Harris” was skilful, and the mere fact that he had his wife along seemed pretty good proof that he hoped to escape shipwreck—or was it? Then one afternoon a mighty booming began ahead and soon filled all the forest with its echoes. I pulled out my map, but Langrey disputed its assertions with an excited, “On de chaht dat’s a scataract, sir; but dat ain’ no scataract; dat’s a falls!” The emphasis on the last word was not misplaced, even though what is a sheer fall of several feet in the dry season was now a long series of rapids which we ran, constantly expecting to be swamped the next moment, and finally coming to a real drop over immense boulders. We eased her down for a long way hand-over-hand, clutching bushes along the shore, struggling to maintain a waist-deep footing on slippery rock, needing the combined exertions of all of us, except the woman, to keep even the lightened boat from submerging and leaving us stranded in the wilderness. But though they did not look as dangerous, the next series of rapids was far more so, for there was nothing to do but run them, and suddenly in the very middle of them two waves all but filled the boat, and I prepared to say good-by to my earthly possessions and take up my abode under a tree in the impenetrable forest—though at the same time I bailed as savagely as the men paddled, so that we saved ourselves by a hair. For more than an hour there was a constant succession of these near-disasters. The river split up into many channels, and the one we entered might look smooth and harmless, only to prove a young Niagara when it was too late to turn back. Dry clothing was unknown among us during those days. It was, of course, mainly fear for my baggage that sent the twinges up my spine; for I could probably have saved myself. But to be left boatless, foodless, and kodak-less here in the heart of the trackless wilderness, with the chances remote of meeting another human being during a life-time, would have been more heroic than interesting. When we came at last into more placid water, Langrey cheered me with the information that there were “more worse scataracts” and falls a couple of days farther on. The rocky streak where the high lands of the savannahs get down to sea-level runs clear across the colony here near its geographic center, yet the dense forest never broke in the descent.

“We’ll meet camp jes’ now,” said Langrey about five o’clock; and sure enough we did “meet” it, coming up river along with the endless procession of forest, a half-open place, with some of the most magnificent trees I had yet seen. It was near here that a boat in which “Harris” had been steersman and Langrey one of the paddlers had buried the last white man who had attempted the overland trip from Manaos to Georgetown. He called himself Frederick Weiland, claiming to be an American born in Texas, but later confessed himself a Hungarian, and therefore subject, as an enemy alien, to internment for the duration of the war. He had left Manaos nine months before and tried to walk across from Boa Vista to Melville’s, but lost himself looking for water, and, having set down his baggage, could not find it again. For three days he wandered at random without food and almost without drink, until half-wild Indians found him and took him on to Melville’s, who was then in Europe. He gave himself out to be a house-painter, and carried many collapsible tubes of paints and pencil-brushes; he claimed to know nothing of soldiering, yet he had a military manner and his talk often unconsciously showed knowledge not common among workingmen. Most of the belongings he had left he gave the Indians to row him down to the mouth of the Rupununi, where the Scotch-Irishman, losing no chance to improve his official importance, sent negroes out to his camp to arrest him as a German spy. His captor kept him for a while, letting him paint or do other work where he could, and finally started down to town with him. The prisoner seemed to worry much as to what might happen to him there, though assured that at worst he would be interned; but he was gay most of the way down, until an up-boat gave them a newspaper that reported serious German losses. From that moment he seemed to lose heart. Some thought he swallowed some of his paints; at any rate, he suddenly “t’row a fit” in the boat one afternoon, and an hour later he was dead.

“We jes’ take tea,” concluded Langrey; “den we dig a hole an’ put he in, an’ get in de boat an’ gone.”

The twentieth of June was badly named Sunday, for not a glimpse of the sun did we get all day; rather was it a most miserable Rainday, during which a deluge fell incessantly, leaving us cold to the marrow and cramped beyond endurance most of the time, sneaking along streams raging down through the impenetrable wilderness, now stripped and letting the boat down over rocks, now grabbing from branch to trunk along the shore, always in more or less immediate danger of going to destruction. Luckily I had “three fingers” of brandy left to ward off the chill, which I shared with Langrey. The law forbids, under serious penalty, giving “fire-water” to Indians, and though our companions shivered until their teeth rattled, I complied with it, for the “Protector of the Indians” has many ways of detecting violations. At the beginning of what we guessed to be afternoon, we cooked a dismal “breakfast” in the downpour, and were barely off again when to our ears was borne the loudest roar of water we had yet heard. This time it was the Itanamy Falls, about which there is a negro ballad among the popular songs of Georgetown, part of which Langrey chanted as we approached them: