Working North from Patagonia / Being the Narrative of a Journey, Earned on the Way, Through Southern and Eastern South America

by Harry Alverson Franck

Finally, on the afternoon of May 22, two hundred and ten miles above Manaos, we turned from the Rio Negro, which goes on northwestward to Ecuador and Colombia, into the Rio Branco, stretching almost due north. This seemed a more sluggish river, gray in color with a slight brownish tinge, much like the lower Amazon, though quite enough unlike the Negro to warrant its name of “White River.” Born near the junction of Brazil, Venezuela, and British Guiana, it is some 420 miles long from the mouth to where two forks split it apart. In this land of water it was astonishing that there was not always water enough to float even these slight-draft river-boats. The name Guyana is said to mean flooded-country, and includes all that region between the Amazon and the Orinoco, so that there are not simply three Guianas, belonging to European powers, but five, including those of Brazil and Venezuela.

It is estimated that the immense State of Amazonas, largest in America, has only 150,000 inhabitants, of whom half are wild Indians. It was not until late that afternoon that we came upon a hut on stilts, made entirely of woven grass, yet with the exotic touch of a sheet-iron door in one end, reached only by a crude ladder of two rungs. The inhabitants had grubbed an acre out of the dense jungle on a little nose of land where another small river flowed in, the ground being then about six feet above water. They were almost entirely of Indian blood, but the men wore trousers, jacket, and straw hat, and the women a loose single gown. As in most of Amazonia, they were a curious mixture of shy, naïve backwoodsmen and crafty traders. We left two letters and sent the crew ashore to dig six enormous turtles out of a captive mud-hole, each man carrying one upside-down on his back across the narrow sagging plank, eyes, ears, nose and his entire body smeared with the soft yellow mud that oozed from every crevice of the cumbersome animals. They were to furnish us food on the way up the river; meanwhile the crew laid them helpless on their backs on the lower deck. These mammoth Amazon turtles will live thus for days without food or drink; or even for weeks if left upright and wet now and then with fresh water.

About the hut was a small forest of mandioca stalks and banana plants, and under it some “freeman” rubber, the usual large brown balls with a hole through the center, resembling a bowling-ball, but which had been gathered and smoked as the spirit moved them by semi-wild Indians, in distinction to the “slaves” of the regular rubber plantations. The cabra, or Indian-negro, owner sent this, too, on board, sold us bananas and chickens, and took coffee, sugar, and soap in payment. There are two trees that furnish rubber. The better kind, called borracha, is procured by tapping the glossy-smooth rubber-tree, and the other, a much coarser and cheaper stuff called caucho, as full of holes as Gruyère cheese, is obtained by cutting down another kind of tree. All dry lands of moderate altitude along the Amazon produce the caucho tree, of which a full sized one yields fifty liters of milk or twenty kilograms of caucho, inferior, but commanding a good market. When your rubber quickly loses its stretch, the chances are that in some of the many links from producer to consumer the borracha has been replaced by caucho.

There were said to be rubber trees of both varieties in considerable abundance in the forests on either side of the Rio Branco, but in most of the region the bugres, or wild Indians, made regular exploitation difficult. On the night of May 23 I slept north of the equator for the first time since walking across it in Ecuador, thirty-two months before. The sun laid off most of that day, and it grew so cold that I had to put on double clothing and wrap myself in my hammock. The trees no longer stood ankle-deep in the water, sipping it with their branches, for the bluff banks were from six to ten feet high, with a reddish soil. Since leaving Manaos we had passed two other craft, smaller launch-barges, and perhaps half a dozen canoes creeping along the lower face of the forest. Otherwise there was no evidence of human life along the way, except two or three huts in tiny clearings every twenty-four hours. The first white men to enter the Rio Branco were the Carmelite missionaries who, in 1728, founded towns and began catechising the Indians. Seventy years later an insurrection destroyed most of their settlements, and though half a century ago some villages along the Rio Branco were reported to have as many as “320 souls and 40 fires,” to-day a hut or two at most represents most places marked on the map.

But if there was little human interest along the shores, there was no lack of it on board. First and foremost among my fellow-passengers was Dr. R—— of Sweden, a professional bug-chaser past middle life, whose mild blue eyes blinked harmless innocence, and whose graying hair stood up in pompadour mainly because it was never combed. He had spent so many months pursuing bugs along the Amazon that he had become acclimated to the pajamas and sockless slippers of all male travelers in the region, and was just such a patient, plodding fellow as men of his profession must be, carrying their own enthusiasm with them, and was ferocious only in the pursuit of insects and an ostrich-like appetite. He spoke English with difficulty and Portuguese scarcely at all, so that we soon took to conversing in German, and I became unwittingly his unofficial interpreter. Never have I known a man more splendidly fitted for his calling. Bugs of every species and description had such an affinity for him that he did not need to seek them; they sought him, and if there was a single insect in the region, from a lone mosquito to the rarest species known to entomology, it was certain to apply to the doctor for a passage to Sweden, even though it was forced to crawl inside his pajamas to make sure of the trip. With rare exceptions the touching request was always granted, for the doctor was never without a large pill-bottle filled with some sort of poisonous gas, and never a meal did we eat that he did not jump up from table a dozen times to snatch out the cork of his inseparable companion and slap the open mouth over some intruder on some part of the ship’s, or his own, anatomy.

Rough living in Amazonia is at least mitigated by the outwardly gentle, pleasant, and obliging manners of the inhabitants. It is the religion of the region never to complain of hardships or lack of comfort, for growling at all these things would make them and those suffering them unendurable. Hence there was never any outward evidence of anything but contentment and satisfaction, even in the face of the most primitive selfishness on the part of the two masters of the ship. Captain Santos was a spare but rather good-hearted Portuguese long resident in Amazonia, who frankly considered his passengers an unavoidable nuisance. Colonel Bento Brazil, the owner, was a “legitimate son of the Rio Branco,” that is, born in the region, though pure white and much traveled. Dressed in the thinnest of white pajamas night and day, he looked the picture of hardiness even at fifty, which commonly means old age in North Brazil. At times he was curiously swollen with his own importance, seeming to feel the deepest scorn for such simple persons as the Swede and myself; at others he displayed boyish curiosity about the simplest things. He was careful in the exact degree of greeting he gave those we met along the river, running all the gamut from an affectionate embrace of a fellow estate-owner to a motionless word in answer to the hat-off greeting of some caboclo far below his own caste. All the best things on board he considered his own; he hung his hammock in the choicest place and kept the good shower-bath locked, leaving the one with a spout in the roof to the passengers—though the captain always loaned me the key to the better one—at every meal he had six eggs, special fruit, and many extras, while the passengers beside him could get nothing but the regular rough-and-tumble fare. His constant selfishness was probably unconscious, for it is every dog for himself on the Amazon; nature is too primitive and cruel to allow much else, and like the backwoods estate-owners of Peru and Bolivia, these kings of the jungle grow unwittingly autocratic and self-centered by living constantly among dependents.

There were two typical Amazonian women of the well-to-do class on board, one about fifty and the other nearing thirty. They corresponded in rank to the half dozen Brazilian men on our upper deck, fairly well-educated fazendeiros of some means and of that peculiar mixture of world-wisdom and rusticity common to the region; but, of course, being of the less important sex, they were treated as a lower type of creation, as is the Amazonian custom, and had the modest, almost apologetic, reserve of the aboriginal women. One of the two bare little cabins that might have been staterooms had been cleared out for them, and here they preferred to eat seated on the bare floor, rather than come to table with strange men. They never spoke to any male on board, except an occasional unavoidable monosyllable, and their every look suggested densest ignorance, superstition, and slavery to custom, a composite of the woman-beast-of-burden of the American Indian and the Arabian seclusion brought to Portugal by the Moors. One might pity them, but any advance, even to make the trip a bit more pleasant for them, would certainly have been misunderstood as something reprehensible. At night, like everyone else, they swung their hammocks on deck, taking the off-side, and separated from the men only by distance, but at daylight they quickly crawled again into their little room and rolled about the bare floor the rest of the day, never making the slightest physical exertion they could avoid. In the morning they crowded together into the miserable little “bathroom” aft and held the place two, and even three, hours, after which, their greasy tresses dripping, they raced back to their room. Evidently they squatted on the floor and poured water over each other from the tin can the younger one carried. The most noticeable part of the whole performance was that, in common with all the women of Amazonia, as far as my experience carries, the longer they bathed the less washed they looked. Whether it is due to the mixture of Indian and Portuguese-peasant blood, with long generations without soap behind them, or to the greasy Brazilian food oozing through their pores, every native woman I met along the Amazon gave me an instinctive desire to avoid the slightest personal contact with her. Yet men of the same class, and largely the same customs, did not awaken this feeling.

The near-Indian servant girl of the pair aroused the same sensation, though she, too, spent hours in the “bathroom”; even the little daughter of the younger woman had this general repulsiveness of her sex. She was a cunning little thing of four, with wavy locks and penetrating black eyes; yet somehow one would have hesitated far longer to touch her than her twin brother. Both were bathed together by the Indian girl every morning, and for the next hour or two they scampered about the deck in the costume of Eve before she came across the fig-tree, after which they were each dressed in a short, thin chemise. Yet though they were companions in many things, the boy by comparison was “spoiled,” mean, selfish, quarrelsome, screaming whenever he was crossed, bawling for everything he wanted until he got it, pounding, biting, and scratching the Indian girl with total impunity, while if the little girl committed the slightest fault, she was pounced upon by all three of her guardians. This Brazilian custom of petting and spoiling the boys, while bringing the girls up sternly as somewhat inferior beings, accounts for many of the chief faults of the male character. In perhaps no other country on earth does one more often meet men who need nothing so much as a good man-sized trouncing, or where a plain frank word is so certain to arouse childish, irresponsible resentment, if not actual attack.

That was all there were on our upper deck, except a white Brazilian steward who seemed to be chronically suffering from the recent death of his grandmother and the obsequiousness of his low caste, and the three Indian boy waiters, with minds as ingrown as their generations of grime, who did not even own hammocks, but curled up through the cold nights on a wooden bench or the bare deck in the same two ancient blue-jean garments they wore by day. On the lower deck were a few third-class passengers, indistinguishable from the deck-hands, who ranged from burly negroes to muscular Portuguese with almost as simian features, living as best they might on the bare spots and barer food left over from the upper world.

The river was often mirror-clear, incessantly reflecting flat, wooded tongues of land jutting out into it as far as we could see, ever more blue with distance. At rare intervals there was the splash of a big fish springing out of the water; otherwise the almost unbroken silence of primeval nature. Early in the afternoon of the fourth day we stopped at a typical hut and clearing on the bank to unload bags of rice from Maranhão, sacks of sugar, salt, and coffee from farther off, an American sewing-machine and varied merchandise from New York, by way of which had come also a box of Swiss milk. Among the things imported from abroad into this land of unlimited timber were complete doors of matched American lumber, threshold, lintel, lock and all. Unwashed and uncombed half-Indians of jungle dress and manner watched us at close range, a weather-beaten female keeping modestly in the background. The Dipper, which for several years I had lost below the northern horizon, was now well above it. The cool, moonlighted trees and river still slipped slowly but incessantly by us into the south, but the river was getting so low that it began to look as if we would soon run out of water.