Across Unknown South America

by Arnold Henry Savage Landor

As I have stated elsewhere, the mentality of Brazilians was somewhat difficult to understand by people of any other nation. They did everything the wrong way, according to our notions. I had been worried a great deal, the reader may remember, at the most unpractical way in which my men loaded the animals when I had my caravan of mules and horses. I had been more than amazed at Brazilian ideas of architecture, sculpture, painting and music. I had on many occasions been dumbfounded at their ideas of honour and truthfulness. Now once more I was sickly amused—I had by then ceased to be amazed or dumbfounded or angry—at the way my men daily packed the baggage in the canoe. The baggage was naturally taken out of the canoe every night when we made our camp, for the canoe leaked so badly that when we arrived anywhere and halted we had to beach her, or else, where this was not possible, we found her in the morning almost entirely submerged. Naturally we invariably selected shallow places where we could bale the water out and float her again.

Returning to the baggage: the men every morning insisted on loading the canoe in front, where the four men were situated paddling, and the three dogs of the expedition were also accommodated. I sat in the centre of the canoe, and Alcides at the helm naturally stood in the stern. The man whose incessant daily occupation it was to bale out the water of course had to be with the group of four men in the bow, since, the canoe being so heavily weighted at that end, the water found its way down there.

Now, loading the canoe in such a fashion, at the bow, had the double drawback of causing a greater resistance against the water, and therefore nearly doubling the work of the men in paddling. Then again, when we ran aground or struck a rock, the impact was more severe on the canoe—not to speak of the difficulty of getting her off again. The steering, too, was also much more difficult with the stern of the canoe so far out of the water.

I pointed out the mistake to my men, but it was no use arguing, and they refused to follow my advice. Like all ignorant people, they thought they knew everything better than anybody else, and as, in a way, they were the chief sufferers for their own conceit, I thought I would avoid unpleasantness and let them do things their own way as long as we kept going forward on our journey.

Alcides, too, who by now had become imbued with the idea that he was as good a navigator as Christopher Columbus or Vasco da Gama, had the strangest notions of navigation. He never avoided grounding the canoe on every bank he saw; he never avoided dashing the canoe into every rock which stood or did not stand in our way. I never could understand exactly why he did that, except for the mischievous pleasure he derived from giving the men who were sitting at the other end of the canoe a violent bump, which often rolled them over altogether.

When we left Goyaz my men insisted on purchasing life-belts in case we should be travelling by water. As only one of the Goyaz men could swim, I had gladly given them the money to purchase those articles. On our first day of navigation the men amused me very much, as they all appeared garbed in their life-belts, as if we had been going to the rescue of a stranded ship in a tempest. I laughed heartily at the sight. The intense heat of the sun made the heavy cork belts so uncomfortable for them, that they discarded them when they saw that the canoe would actually float on the water, and packed them away inside a wooden box, which they then screwed down tight. The belts remained in that box most of the time, except one day when a man put one on, as I had given him instructions to go some way off in the centre of the stream where the current was rather swift. By misadventure he lost his footing, and had we not been quick in going to his rescue he certainly would have been drowned.

We tested the life-belts, and I found that not only would they not float after they had been a minute or two in the water, but they became so heavy when soaked with moisture that they would have dragged to the bottom even a fair swimmer. They were evidently old discarded ship belts. The cork, enclosed in a canvas cover, had got decomposed and pulverized, and therefore rendered useless.

As we are referring to the strange ways of looking at things by different nations, I might as well include the endless arguments I had with my men in selecting our camps. I naturally always selected the cleanest spots with a flat ground, so that the tents could be pitched satisfactorily without extra trouble, where there was little vegetation, and where the water was good. My men always quarrelled over this, and insisted on stopping in the filthiest places, either where some trees, rotted away, had fallen down, where the vegetation on the edge of the river needed cutting, and where the ground had to be levelled before I could pitch my camp bed. They always preferred sleeping under the stifling vegetation to where there was an open space and we had the clear sky over us.

They all slept in hammocks—the favourite resting arrangement of the Brazilian—to my mind the most uncomfortable and absurd fashion of resting, especially in tropical regions. First of all, it is almost an impossibility to assume a perfectly horizontal position for your entire body, except—if you are an expert—diagonally; then there is always a certain amount of swing and you are likely to tumble over at any moment; you can never keep the blankets in position, and you expose your entire body to the stings of the mosquitoes, flies and other insects, and of the ants which crawl into your hammock by hundreds from the trees in which they swarm. It was not uncommon when we camped to hear during the night a crash, followed immediately after by oaths. The tree to which one of the hammocks had been fastened had suddenly broken and let the man down with a bump. Then again, the mischievous ants took the greatest delight during the night in cutting the strings of the hammocks, and on several occasions my followers had nasty falls. Yet the Brazilians swear by hammocks.

Another stream 2 m. wide, coming from the north, entered the Arinos on the right bank. A number of ariranhas, attracted by the vivid red of the British flag which was flying at the stern of the canoe, followed us for some time and came courageously to the attack, showing their teeth fiercely at us and snarling frantically. Entire families of those delightful little creatures were seen, and they invariably gave us a similar hearty greeting. They followed us sometimes for hundreds and hundreds of metres, and became most excited when I took the flag and waved it at them, and sometimes placed it near the water in order to drive them frantic.