Across Unknown South America

by Arnold Henry Savage Landor

When I recovered consciousness, Pedro Nunes said I had been unconscious for a long time. They all thought I was dead. I felt almost unbearable pain in my inside, and a lassitude as if life were about to be extinguished altogether.

It was evidently the reaction, after eating too quickly—and I should like to meet the healthy man who would not eat quickly under those circumstances—and also the relaxation from the inconceivable strain of so many weeks of mental worry.

I well remember how Pedro Nunes and his men, when standing around us just as we began eating that first solid meal, had tears streaming down their cheeks while watching us in our dreadful plight. Once more Pedro Nunes—one of the most kindly men I have ever met—sobbed bitterly when he asked me to take off my clothes and change them for the newer ones he had given me. I removed from my pocket the contents: my chronometer, a notebook, and a number of caju seeds which I had collected, and which, caustic or not caustic, would have been our only food until we should have certainly perished.

We heard from Pedro Nunes that it would have taken us at least six or seven days' steady walking before we could get to the first house of rubber collectors. In our exhausted condition we could have never got there. As for the damaged raft, it could not have floated more than a few hours longer—perhaps not so long.

From the spot where I met Pedro Nunes—quite close to the junction of the Canuma River with the Madeira River—going down by river it would have been possible to reach Manaos in two or three days. Dom Pedro Nunes, however, with his expedition, could not return, nor sell me a boat, nor lend me men; so that I thought my best plan was to go back with him up the River Canuma and then the Secundury River, especially when I heard from the trader that the latter river came from the south-east—which made me think that perhaps I might find a spot at its most south-easterly point where the distance would not be great to travel once more across the forest, back to my men whom I had left near the Tapajoz.

Pedro Nunes declined to receive payment for the clothes he had given me and my men, so I presented him with the Mauser I possessed, which he greatly appreciated; while I gave the crew which had rescued us a present of £20 sterling in Brazilian money.

It was most touching to see how some of the rubber collectors employed by Pedro Nunes deprived themselves of tins of jam to present them to us, and also of other articles which were useful to them in order to make us a little more comfortable.

I purchased from Pedro Nunes a quantity of provisions—all of an inferior kind, but they were the best I could get. Among them were six tins of condensed milk, all he possessed, for which I paid at the rate of ten shillings each—the regular price in that neighbourhood. Those tins of milk were a great joy to Benedicto, Filippe and myself.

Although the pain was violent when we ate anything, the craving for food was now quite insatiable, and we could not resist the temptation of eating whatever came under our hands.

Late in the afternoon of that same day we started up the river with Pedro Nunes and his fleet of boats. In the evening, when we camped, the kindness of the trader and his men towards us was most pathetic. Drenching rain fell during the night.