CHAPTER XX
STRUGGLING DOWN TO GEORGETOWN

Ben Hart lived about forty yards back in British Guiana. Having passed the frontier without sinking, we scrambled up the steep, sandy bank of a river that had changed its name from the Mahú to the Ireng while we were crossing it, strolled through a bit of bone-dry, bunch-grass prairie, and turned in at the first house. We could scarcely have missed it, for there was not another for many miles within the colony. Hart had built it himself, with the help of his “siwashes,” as he called the Indian boys who made up his indefinite retinue,—a temporary structure in the approved style and only available material of the region, the walls of brush and mud, an earth floor, and a thick, top-heavy roof of palm-leaves. Later on he planned to build a real house a few miles up the river. Cow-hides, worth nothing whatever in this region, but which his employees were obliged to turn in to prove that an animal was dead, were used for every imaginable purpose,—as doormats, wind-shields, rugs, even to stand on down at the “old swimming-hole” where we took a dip every night, though pirainhas abounded and an alligator had recently eaten Hart’s best dog.

He lived as everyone does and must in those parts, with certain improvements of American ingenuity. A fire built on the ground was his cook-stove, though he made a kind of bread-cake in an iron pot turned into an oven, the only bread in all that region. We, too, ate farinha, however, either dry or wet down with beef broth. This Brazilian staff of life tastes exactly like sawdust, but swells to several times it original size and is very filling and evidently nourishing. Then his Indian boys cut up dried beef and boiled it; now and then Hart let go a gun at a chicken, and occasionally a steer was killed, when everyone—neighbors, servants, Indians, dogs, chickens, and buzzards—gorged themselves for a day on fresh meat, after which the rest was cut into strips, salted, and sun-dried. The dessert common to all that region was “coalhado,” milk turned sour and thick as pudding and eaten with sugar. Then there were plenty of eggs, and milk without limit was to be had for the milking, since Hart already had hundreds of cattle, as well as many horses, few of which he saw once a month. Hammocks hung under the long protruding roof, as well as inside the house, and a cool breeze was always blowing across the savannahs, as the British call what the rest of South America knows as campo or pampa, in this region between three and four hundred feet above sea-level.

Hart’s closest companions were a pair of hounds, now with a litter of pups. As the cur dogs of the Indians make a great hullabaloo at sight of a white man, so breed dogs are at once friendly with an Englishman or an American, but will not let an unknown Indian approach the house while the master is away and never make friends with the aborigines. About the hut hovered three dog-like Macuxy Indian boys, who did all the odds and ends of work and lived on the odds and ends of beef and farinha, neither getting nor expecting any wages, except a place they might call home. They hung their hammocks under a thatched roof on legs some distance away and now and then received a few yards of cotton cloth which they turned into clothing, for it is surprising how these children of the wilds can make even a tolerably fitting jacket. These Indian boys were never hired, but were unconsciously acquired. One of them would turn up and go to work without a word, cooking, washing, milking, and doing the other tasks, all of which took perhaps four hours a day, and it would not be until they had remained longer than is customary for visitors that Hart realized they were permanent employees. Brazilians in this region may during the course of a year give a cowboy or an Indian servant a cast-off cotton suit; hence word of the greater generosity of the American had quickly spread and the difficulty was not how to get help, but how to keep rid of too much of it. There were also fourteen vaqueiros, who lived with the cattle and were rarely seen at the house, and to these Hart furnished farinha and paid two milreis a day, not in money but in cloth and other goods, for though the milreis serves as a basis of computation, there is no fixed medium of exchange and barter is still almost universal. The little actual money with which he had arrived Hart had laid away months before and never seen since, and he had no fear of its being stolen, though he kept well-locked the back room in which he stored his piles of cloth. Indeed, when he set out with me on a trip that might have lasted two or three weeks, it never occurred to him to take money with him. The vaqueiros, of course, killed a steer whenever they wanted meat, turning in the hide to show that they had not sold the animal over the border. Neither Hart nor his “siwashes” spoke any Portuguese worth mentioning, so that their conversation consisted chiefly of grunts and brief gestures, with now and then an American or Portuguese word which happened to be familiar to both sides. The Indian boys had found that certain sounds represented certain actions, so that when they were told to “build fire” they knew what was wanted, though the separate words meant nothing to them. They had learned a few expressions so well that they even ventured to pronounce them, and each evening after the dishes had been washed and the fire put out, they filed solemnly past us, each emitting a dubious “Goot neety” on the way to their barracão. Their general attitude was about like that of a cat. They drifted in from nowhere and stayed unasked, quiet and unaggressive, yet in a way independent and in no way affectionate. They knew that some day Hart would give them a hat or a few yards of cloth, and even without that reward they were quite pleased to have the prestige of living with so “rich” a man.

More than 12,000 square miles of this back end of British Guiana is high, open savannah, splendid for cattle; but the government refuses to sell it and merely issues “permissions to graze” on little patches of fifty square miles, or 36,000 acres each, at the exorbitant rental of three pounds a year! Hart was the sixth man to be issued such a permit, one of the others being a German and the rest Englishmen, while in all the immense savannahs of British Guiana only four Brazilian fazendeiros had chosen to remain after the boundary award. Hence, in addition to his legal holding, there were some 200,000 acres more over which his cattle might freely roam. The cattle, too, were obtained by barter. Soon after his arrival, by way of Brazil, Hart had an entire boatload of goods brought up from Georgetown,—dozens of cheap felt hats, belts, soap, particularly many bolts of coarse, strong cotton cloth in gaudy patterns. No one else for many miles roundabout had any such stock on hand; hitherto the Brazilians over the border had been obliged to go to Boa Vista, or even to Manaos, to get such things. Moreover, Hart did not take unfair advantage of them, but charged the same prices as prevailed in Manaos; that is, he asked 3$ or 3$500 for a yard of cloth that cost perhaps six pence in Georgetown, so that they were delighted to do their shopping so near home, and as they rarely had anything but animals to pay with, he had already bought twelve hundred head of cattle and eighty horses without making serious inroads on his boatload of cloth. A Brazilian rancher anxious to give his wife or his own legs a surprise would ride fifty miles or more across country, driving before him a cow and a calf, and sell them to Hart for 60$—that is for twenty yards of cloth which had cost Hart $2.50. The visitor would depart highly satisfied with the exchange, while Hart branded the animals and added them to his stock on “Good Luck Ranch,” known across the river as “Fazenda Americana.” A horse and colt came to about 350$, say a hundred yards of the best cloth, at an original cost of $14; a plump steer might be worth two felt hats and a belt; yet Hart’s prices were considered so reasonable that people flocked in upon him from all directions. Now it might be an Indian of some property, who dined while his wife and child waited out in the rain until he was done and called them in to eat what he had left; or it might be a fellow-rancher who had neglected to keep up his own supplies. Occasionally payment was long delayed, but was almost always sure. Sometimes he was paid beforehand, as when a fazendeiro with whom he might spend the night would tell him to drive such and such animals home with him, promising to come over later and get some cloth. There was nothing of the skinflint about Hart. He followed the time-honored custom of the region, with an American generosity added; and of course there was the high expense and risk of boating the stuff up the rivers, keeping it under lock and key in his back mud room, and the shopkeeping bother of selling it. Once he lost an entire cargo worth $2000, when the Indians who were bringing it to him let the boat go over some falls. But he hoped to have four or five thousand head of cattle in as many years, and to come to the rescue of the world’s scarcity of beef and leather as soon as some means was provided for reaching the markets. Just now the greatest drawback was lack of transportation. The governor of the colony had recently made a trip to the savannahs, and a railroad was planned, but the war had postponed it. American capital would build the line, but only on condition of certain land grants, and the governor was set on having it a government railway.

Meanwhile, I soon discovered, it was much easier to come in at the back door of British Guiana than to get from there down to the front portal. Small as it looks on a map of the whole continent, England’s South American colony is more than twice the size of Great Britain. It was 340 miles down to the coast as the crow flies, and vastly more than that to any but winged creatures. With 78,500 square miles of unbroken forest and matted jungle, only the four-hundred-and-sixtieth part of which was even under woodcutter’s license, there is no means of travel back of the fringe of coast except by the rivers, and these are much broken by falls and dependent on the season. Hart’s latest letter from the United States had been five months on the way.

The first leg of a journey to Georgetown was to cross the divide between the Brazilian and Guianese river systems, some fifty miles in its narrowest part, but much more than that to the home of Commissioner Melville on the upper Rupununi, which for several reasons was the logical starting-point of a journey down to the coast. Hart had been planning to go over to Melville’s within the next few weeks, and we compromised on his getting ready as soon as possible, which was to be within ten days. The delay I spent to advantage, for Hart was a pleasant companion and the region full of interest. Now we trotted over several hundred of his acres looking for a troop of mares in charge of a tyrannical stallion; twice we roamed the lightly wooded savannahs checking up on his cowboys and their charges. One day we went back to Brazil to visit Antonino and his family, the only near neighbors and the most nearly educated and civilized people in the vicinity. We brought back with us twenty cows and as many calves, driving them to the river, lassooing and dragging them down the bank, rolling in mud and drenched with perspiration and tropical downpours, and taking each calf across in the leaky dugout, the mother swimming behind. There are no frontier formalities, the ranchers of both sides being their own sovereigns in all matters, and Hart was as free to import cattle as he was to drive them over to the Takutú at the beginning of high water and sell them to the barges from Manaos.

We set out for Melville’s on June 5. Hart said it was a four-hour ride to the St. Ignatius Mission, but I knew how deceiving distances can be in South America, as well as the many unexpected obstacles that often turn up in wilderness travel, and was not too pleased when we put off the start until some time after noon. Hart rode a gray stallion with Texas trappings and led a pack-horse carrying our baggage, as awkward as packs always are and requiring frequent halts for adjustment. My bay horse had plenty of life, but with only the precarious monkey-seat the English call a saddle I was kept busy thwarting his frequent attempts to leave me behind. The first hour across Hart’s broad grazing-lands was fairly dry, though our delay had brought on the rainy season again. Endless stretches of fine prairie-grass, alternating with thin scrub forest, lay beyond. The first house was a ruin in thatch once occupied by a Scotchman and his squaw; the next had belonged to an exiled Brazilian. Every ruined hovel had its story. There was, for instance, the one in which Hart had met and tamed the “Ocean Shark.” A giant negro from the thickly settled coast, charged with two murders and many lesser crimes, had so named himself when he fled to the interior. However good a government may be, it is far away and hard to reach in so sparsely populated a country, where every man must be his own law and protection. When Hart first came, this black outlaw was roaming these upper plains with a band of servile and frightened Indians, bullying even white men, if they would stand for it. An Australian had picked up the Indian woman abandoned by the Scotchman, with her daughter and son, and settled down with her in the hut in question. One day he came home and found the “Ocean Shark” already occupying his hammock.

“You see dat tree over dere?” said the negro. “Well, jes’ yō swing yō hammock out dere. I’se here now.”

The Australian, being a man who valued his skin more than his honor, complied, and the negro acted as his domestic substitute for a week before whim or rumor caused him to move on. He was constantly bullying the smaller ranchers and killing their cattle, and at length he let word drift out that he was going to do the same for Hart. The American, however, well over six feet and weighing 190 pounds without an ounce of fat, was built on “shark”-taming lines. Moreover, his partner had just left for the war and he was feeling very blue and spoiling for a fight when, on his way home to his new ranch, it was his good luck to find that the “Ocean Shark” had camped in the chief hut of a nearby Indian village. With him was his “secretary,” a small yellow negro named Cecil, for the “Sha’k” could not read or write.