Jack Heaton, wireless operator

by A. Frederick Collins

“Wherever I go she is always on the other side of the street and although I tip my hat to her she never looks up, much less gives me a tumble. I took that sealing job because I certainly thought I’d meet Miss Adventure somewhere among the ice floes and blizzards of the Arctic North. But no! all I did was to sit in my cabin and send what my Captain wanted to tell your Captain and receive what your Captain had to say to my Captain. And to what purpose? So that a few rich men could get richer by enabling vain women to run around the streets of New York and a few other big burgs bedecked out in the skins of baby seals that had been clubbed to death. Now that’s big business for men and women to be in, isn’t it?

“I wish I could get a job on a pirate ship or start a revolution in some punk Central American country. And it’s funny,” he went on complainingly, “how a fellow like you, who has only been in the service a couple of years, could meet with a big adventure like the sinking of the Andalusian, I’d have given a year of my life to have been in your place.

“Now down along the Amazon River there are great rubber plantations, savage tribes of Indians, tigers, monkeys, boa-constrictors and all the garnishings that go to make up a first class tropical jungle. I know a man in New York that does business with a rubber concern in Para, Brazil and he told me, just before we sailed north, that the Compagnie Francaise de Telegraphie sans Fil had a contract to put up half a dozen wireless stations along the river.

“It strikes me, Jack, that it would be a good scheme if you and I took a trip down there and looked over the ground. What do you say?”

Having a few dollars in my pocket and nothing else to do at that particular moment I said O K and agreed to join him provided we could get free transportation on some liner going down there. Bert assured me that he could fix it and he was as good as his word.

So it was we sailed in due time on the Ceara of the Holliday Line. It was an old tub that stood every chance of having on board Miss Adventure and I didn’t doubt in the least but that Bert would have ample opportunity to strike up an acquaintance with her and to swim back, if he got back at all, for the Ceara had no wireless equipment—such was her regard for the laws of the U.S.

As luck would have it we had fine weather and she beat her way down just as she had for the last quarter of a century if she was as old as she looked. We enjoyed the trip, at that, for there were not many passengers aboard and all of them, especially the South Americans, were very pleasant people. Having learned that we had never been in South America we were told that it was a great country full of possibilities for young men with some capital but that if we were unacquainted there it would be better for us to about face at Para and go home.

Bert and I had other thoughts on the subject but as we were nearing the Equator I kind of wondered why I had not stayed at home selling crude-oil engines or taking the post on the new Cunarder that Sammis said he’d get for me, or doing something else that was nice and cool.

In a little less than a month’s time we landed at Para, as it is popularly called, or Belem, as it is more properly called, or to give it its full name Santa Maria de Del Belem do Para. Just as New Orleans is built back from the Gulf of Mexico, on the Mississippi River so Para is situated a hundred miles inland from the Atlantic on the Amazon River. So this is Para from which Para rubber comes, thought I as I looked about, and indeed I should have known it had I sailed into port with my eyes shut for the smell of rubber everywhere permeated the air.

But don’t think for a moment that it is made up of a lot of adobe houses as so many Mexican towns are. Far from it, for in architecture it is a miniature reproduction of Rio de Janeiro, which city in turn looks more like Paris than any other in either North or South America. Nor is Para a small burg, for it has a population of a hundred thousand now and some day, if the Amazon valley is ever developed, it may be larger than Rio de Janeiro, aye, even than New York itself.