In a little while a man left a house, striding down over the debris to the foreshore, and some half-breeds brought him in a canoe to the “Capella.” He was a tall youngster, an American, and his slow body itself was but a thin sallow drawl; only his eyes were alert, and they darted at ours in quick scrutiny. His solemn occupying assurance and accent precipitated reality. He was a doctor and he ordered us to be mustered on the after deck for inspection for yellow fever. We were passed; and then this doctor went below to the saloon, distributing his long limbs and body over several chairs and part of the table, and began with lazy words and gestures to give us a place in the scene. We learned we should stay as we were till the pier was finished and that the railway was actually in being for a short distance. He said something about Porto Velho being hell.
He left us. We sat about on deck furniture, and waited on the unknown gods of the land to see what they would send us. All day in the clearing figures moved about on some mysterious business, but seldom looked at us. We had nothing to do but to watch the raft of timber and flotsam expand about our hawsers, a matter of some concern to us, for the current ran at six knots. Our brief sense of contact got from the medical inspection had gone by night. Reality contracted, closing in upon the “Capella” with rapidly diminishing radii as the light went, till we had lost everything but our steamer.
Into the saloon, where some of us sat listening in sympathy to the Skipper’s growls that night, burst our cook, disrespectful and tousled, saying he had seen a canoe, which bore a light, overturn in the river. There was a stampede. We each seized a lantern and leaned overside with it, with that fatuous eagerness to help which makes a man strike matches when looking for one who is lost on a moor. Ghostly logs came floating noiselessly out of darkness into the brief domain of our lanterns, and faded into night again. From somewhere in the collection of driftwood beyond our bows we thought we heard an occasional cry, though that might have been the noise of water sucking through the rubbish, or the creaking of timbers. Our chief mate got out a small boat, and vanished; and we were already growing anxious for him when his luminous grin appeared below in the range of my lantern, and with him came the ponderous figure of a man. The latter, deft and agile, came up the rope ladder, and stepped aboard with innocent inconsequence, shocking my sense of the gravity of the affair; for this streaming object, lifted from the grip of the boney one just in time, was chuckling. “Say,” said this big ruddy man to our gaping crowd, “I met a nigger ashore with a letter for the captain of this packet. Said he didn’t know how to get. So I brought it, but a tree overturned the canoe. I came up under the timber jam all right, all right, but it took me quite a piece to get my head through.” In the saloon, with a pool of water spreading round him, while we got him some dry clothes, he produced this pulpy letter. “Dear Captain” (it ran), “I’m as dry as hell, have you brought drinks in the ship?”
The bland indifference of Porto Velho to the “Capella,” which had done so much to get there; the locomotive which ran screaming out of those woods where, till then, was the same unbroken front which from Para inwards had surrendered nothing; the inconsequential doctor who carefully examined us for what we had not got; the ruddy man who rose to us streaming out of the deeps, as though that were his usual approach, bearing another stranger’s unreasonable letter complaining of thirst, were most puzzling. I even felt some anxiety and suspicion. What, then, were all the other incidents of our difficult six thousand mile voyage? What was this place to which we had come on urgent business long and carefully deliberated, where men merely looked at the whites of our eyes, or changed wet clothes in the saloon, or lightly referred to hell—they all did that—as if hell were an unremarkable feature of their day? Were all these unrelated shadows and movements but part of a long and witless jest? The point of it I could not see. Was there any point to it or did casual episodes appear at unexpected places till they came, just as unexpectedly, to an empty end? The man the mate had rescued sat at the saloon table opposite me, leaning a yard wide chest, which was almost bare, on the red baize, his bulging arms resting before him, and his hairy paws easily clasped. I thought that perhaps this imperturbable being, who could come with easy assurance, his bright friendly eyes merely amused, his large firm mouth merely mocking, and his face heated, from a desperate affair in which his life nearly went, to announce to strangers, “Boys, I’m old man Jim,” must have had the point of the joke revealed to him long since, and so now had no respect for its setting, and could have no care and understanding of my anxious innocence. He sat there for hours in quiet discourse. I listened to him with my ears only, his words jostling my thoughts, as one would puzzle over and listen to a superior being which had unbent to be intimate, but was outside our experience. I heard he had been at this place since 1907. He began the work here. Porto Velho did not then exist. Off where we were anchored, the jungle rose. He had his young son with him, a cousin, and two negroes, and he began the railway. Inside the trees, he said, they could not see three yards, but down it all had to come. There is a small stingless bee here, which “old man Jim” called the sweat bee. It alights in swarms on the face and hands, and prefers death to being dislodged from its enjoyment. The heat, these bees, the ants, the pium flies, the mosquitoes, made the existence of Jim and his mates a misery. Jim merely drawled about in a comic way. Fever came, and mistrust of natives compelled him to dress a dummy, put that in his hammock at night, while he slept in a corner of the hut, one eye open, nursing a gun. I could not see “old man Jim” ever having faith that trains would run, or needed to run, where Indians lurked in the bush, and jaguars nosed round the hut at night. Why these sufferings then? But we learned the line now penetrated into the forest for sixty miles, and that beyond it there were camps, where surveyors were seeing that further way was made, and beyond them again, among the trees of the interior, the surveyors were still, planning the way the line should run when it had got so far.
Though we could not get ashore, there was enough to watch, if it were only the men leisurely driving palm boles into the river, making a pier for us. While at breakfast to-day a canoe of half-breeds came flying towards us in pursuit of an object which kept a little ahead of them in the river. It passed close under our stern, and we saw it was a peccary. The canoe ran level with it then, and a man leaned over, catching the wild pig by a hind leg, keeping its snout under water while another secured its feet with rope. It was brought aboard in bonds as a present for the Skipper, who begged the natives to convey it below to the bunkers and there release it. He said he would tame it. I saw the eye of the beast as it lay on the deck champing its tusks viciously, and guessed we should have some interesting moments while kindness tried to reduce that light in its eye. The peccary disappeared for a few days.
There being nothing to do this fine morning, we watched the cattle put ashore. This was not so difficult a business as shipping them, for the beasts now submitted quietly to the noose which was put on their horns. The steam tackle hoisted them, they were pushed overside, and dropped into the river. Some natives in a canoe cleared the horns, and the brute, swimming desperately in the strong current, was guided to the bank. Some of the beasts being already near death they were merely jettisoned. The current bore them down stream, making feeble efforts to swim—food for the alligators. We waited for the turn of the black heifer. She was one of the last. She was not led to the ship’s side. The tackle was attached to her horns, and made taut before her head was loosed. She made a furious lunge at the men when her nose was free, but the winch rattled, and she was brought up on her hind legs, blaring at us all. In that ugly manner she was walked on two legs across the deck, a heroine in shameful guise, while the men laughed. She was hoisted, and lowered into the river. She fought at the waiting canoe with her feet, but at last the men released her horns from the tackle. With only her face above water she heaved herself, open mouthed, at the canoe, trying to bite it, and then made some almost successful efforts to climb into it. The canoe men were so panic-stricken that they did nothing but muddle one another’s efforts. The canoe rocked dangerously. This wicked animal had no care for its own safety like other cattle. It surprised its tormentors because it showed its only wish was to kill them. Just in time the men paddled off for their lives, the cow after them. Seeing she could not catch them, she swam ashore, climbed the bank, looking round then for a sight of the enemy—but they were all in hiding—and then began browsing in the scrub.
As leisurely as though life were without end, the work on the pier proceeded; and we on the “Capella,” who could not get ashore, with each of our days a week long, looked round upon this remote place of the American tropics till it seemed we had never looked upon anything else. The days were candent and vaporous, the heat by breakfast-time being such as we know at home in an early afternoon of the dog-days. The forest across the river, about three hundred yards away, from sunrise till eight o’clock, often was veiled in a white fog. There would be a clear river, and a sky that was full day, but not the least suspicion of a forest. We saw what seemed a limitless expanse of bright water, which merged into the opalescent sky walls. Such an invisible fog melted from below, and then the revelation of the dark base of the forest, in mid-distance, was as if our eyes were playing tricks. The forest appeared in the way one magic-lantern picture grows through another. The last of the vapour would roll upwards from the tree-tops for some time, and you could believe the woods were smouldering heavily. Thenceforward the quiet day would be uninterrupted, except for the plunge of a heavy fish, the passing of a canoe, a visit from an adventurous visitor from the shore, or the growing of a cloud in the sky. We tried fishing, though never got anything but some grey scaleless creatures with feelers hanging about their gills. It was not till the evening when the visitors usually came that the day began really to move. The new voices gave our saloon and cabins vivacity, and the stories we heard carried us far and swiftly towards the next breakfast-time. They were strange characters, those visitors, usually Americans, but sometimes we got an Englishman or a Frenchman. They took possession of the ship.
There was an elderly man, Neil O’Brien, who was often with us. At first I thought he was a very exceptional character. He was one of the first to visit our ship. I even felt a little timidity when alone with him, for he had a habit of sitting limply, looking at nothing in particular, and dumb, and plainly he was a man whose thoughts ran in ways I could not even surmise. His pale blue eyes would turn upon me with that searching openness which may mean childish innocence or madness, and I could not forget the whispers I had heard of his dangerously inflammable nature. I could not find common footing with him for some time. My trouble was that I had come out direct from a country where few men are free, and so most of us live in doubt of what would happen to us if we were to act as though we were free men. Where, if a self-reliant man contemptuously dares to a bleak and perilous extremity, he makes all his lawful fellows in-draw their timid breaths; that land where even a reward has been instituted, as for merit, for uncomplaining endurance under life-long hardships, and called an old-age pension. You cannot live much of your life with natural servants, the judicious and impartial, the light shy, and those who look twice carefully, but never leap, without betraying some reflected pallor of their anæmia. O’Brien, the quiet master of his own time, with his eyes I could not read, and his gun, betrayed obliquely in our casual talks together such an ingenuous indifference to accepted things and authority, that I had nothing to work with when gauging him. He was his own standard of conduct. I judged his bearing towards the authority of officials would be tolerant, and even tender, as men use with wilful children. He was not a rebel, as we understand it, one who at last grows impatient and angry, and so votes for the other party. I suppose he was not opposed to authority, unless it were opposed to him. He was outside any authority but his own. He lived without State aid. He himself carried the gun, always the symbol of authority, whether of a man or of a State, and if any man had attempted to rob him of his substance, certainly O’Brien would have shot that man according to his own law and his own prophecy, and would then have cooked his supper. He surprised me for a day or two. I puzzled much over this phenomenon of a free man, who took his freedom so quietly and naturally that he never even discussed the subject, as we do, with enthusiasm, in England. What else? It was long since he was separated from his mother. Soon I found he was but a type. I met others like him in this country. Their innocence of the limitations of a careful man like myself was disconcerting. Once O’Brien casually proposed that I should “beat it,” cut the ship, and make a traverse of that wild place to distant Colombia, to some unknown spot by the approximate source of a certain Amazon tributary, where he knew there was gold. First I laughed, and then found, from his glance of resentful candour, that he was quite serious. He generously meant this honour for me; and I think it was an honour for an elderly, quiet, and seasoned privateer like O’Brien, to invite me to be his only companion in a region where you must travel with alert courage and wide experience, or perish. I have learned since he has gone to that far place alone. But what a time he will have. He will have all of it to himself. Well—I was thinking, when I refused him, of my old age pension. I should like to get it.
Men like O’Brien are called here, quite respectfully, “bad men,” and “land sailors.” The lawless lands of the South American republics—lawless in this sense, that their laws need be little reckoned by the daring, the strong, and the unscrupulous—seem particularly attractive to men of the O’Brien type. I got to like them. I found them, when once used to their feral minds, always entertaining, and often instructive, for their naïve opinions cut our conventions across the middle, showing the surprising insides. They dwell without bounds. As I have read somewhere, we do not think of the buffalo, which treats a continent as pasturage, as we do of the cow which kicks over the pail at milking time and jumps the yard fence. These men regard priest, magistrate and soldier with an indifference which is not even contemptible indifference. They are merely callous to the calculated effect of uniforms. When in luck, they are to be found in the cities, shy and a little miserable, having a good time. Their money gone, they set out on lonely journeys across this continent which show our fuss over authentic explorers to be a little overdone. O’Brien was such a man. He told me he had not slept under a roof for years. He had no home, he confessed to me once. Any place on the map was the same to him. He had spent his life drifting alone between Patagonia and Canada, looking for what he never found, if he knew what he was looking for. His travels were insignificant to him. He might have been a tramp talking of English highways. As he droned on one evening I began to doubt he was unaware that his was an extraordinary narrative. I guessed his unconcern must be an air. It would have been, in my case. I looked straight over at him, and he hesitated nervously, and stopped. Was he wasting my time, he asked? Prospecting for his illusion, his last journey was over the Peruvian Andes into Colombia. He broke an arm in a fall on the mountains, set it himself, and continued. On the Rio Japura an Indian shot an arrow through his leg, and O’Brien dropped in the long grass, breaking the arrow short each side of the limb, and in an ensuing long watchful duel presently shot the Indian through the throat. And then, coming out on the Amazon, his canoe overturned, and the pickle jar full of gold dust was lost. He put no emphasis on any particular, not even on the loss of his gold.