Melville was an Englishman born in Jamaica, of good family and well educated. Some thirty years before, in his early manhood, he had come to British Guiana, soon striking out for the then unknown savannah. Here he had lived for fifteen years without a single civilized neighbor, often unable for a year at a time to hold communication with the coast. He spoke the native tongue so well that he was now an authority on it, even among the Indians, with whom he ranked as the “Big Chief.” No white woman had ever yet been in this region, nor, until recently, anyone with authority to perform marriages, so that the exiled Englishman could only seek companionship among the Indians. Of the several mothers of his children, none had ever spoken English, but the children themselves had been sent to school not only in Georgetown, but in England. John, the oldest, was a well-built man in the early twenties, as much Indian as Briton in manners and features, speaking his fluent English with a West Indian or Eurasian twist. All except this young man and a little girl of three were away at school. John gave the impression of being an improvement on the native stock, but his father, who was in a position to know, said it was his experience that there is no essential difference between an Indian and a half-Indian. Melville unconsciously had come to treat his women much as the Indians treat theirs, with a sort of servant-like indifference. The latest one he always referred to as “my cook,” and even then not unnecessarily, leaving her in her place below stairs, never unkind to her, yet never treating her as an equal.
Melville was a remarkable and rare example of a white man who has spent most of his life alone in the tropics without letting himself go to seed. Not only that, but he had made his isolation an opportunity to improve himself, until his mind was as keen, his will as firm, and his interests as wide as the best of his race living in civilization—with an added something of New World initiative which the average Englishman does not develop at home. With a large library on all subjects, considerably traveled in Europe and the United States, and apparently gifted with a remarkable memory, he had a veritable fund of sound, thorough, and ever-ready information about all parts of the earth and all the activities of mankind, and was practiced in everything from photography to astronomy, from medicine to British law. His isolation seemed to have rid him of the common trait of superficiality, and as soon as he found interest in, or reason to know, anything, he went at once to the bottom of it and did not stop until he had every detail at his tongue’s end. He spoke Portuguese as well as Wapushana, and was plainly a man equally at home barefooted among Indians or silk-hatted in London. Naturally, having lived nearly all his life among inferiors, Indians, negroes, and his own half-breed children, he had grown assertive, but his information was so wide, exact, and fluent that his dogmatism was rarely oppressive.
A generation before, he had found the Indians of the interior all “blow-gun men,” every man and boy carrying a long reed tube, a quiver of arrows, and the lower jaw of the fish known as pirainha. The arrows were made of the midrib of the large leaf of the carúa palm, were pointed by drawing them between the razor-like teeth of the fish-jaw, made poisonous with urali, and notched in such a way that the point broke off in the victim and the arrow itself could be repointed and used again. Urali, obtained from a tree up in the Kanuku hills, acts on the nerves governing respiration and kills simply by halting the lung action, without poisoning the flesh of the victim. If respiration can be kept up artificially until the poison has run its course, death does not result. It is rarely fatal to salt-eating white men, and can be cured by rubbing salt on the wound at once. Melville had tried some of the arrow-points as phonograph needles and found them excellent, eliminating all harshness and giving the illusion of distance. Gradually he had broken the Indians of the blow-gun custom, so that now only a few old Indians know how to prepare the poison. He had long been accepted as the chief of all the tribes of the region, who have become so meek under this single-handed British rule that they now obey even a negro. Either Melville or his Scotch assistant and deputy had only to drop in at a village, call some Indian aside, and talk to him a few moments in a confidential tone to have him accepted as chief by all the rest, who thereafter took through him all orders from the government by way of Melville.
The Macuxys and Wapushanas (or “Wapusianas”) are, according to this authority, roughly of the Carib and the Arawak families respectively, with different linguistic roots, the former being cannibals up to a generation or two ago. The two tribes have always been enemies, with little in common, and habitually regard each other with aversion. The Wapushanas, in particular, are fatalists of passive demeanor. As an example our host mentioned the case of an Indian who had recently walked in upon another, lolling in his hammock, and announced in a conversational tone, “I have come to kill you.” “Very well,” said the other, throwing the two sides of the hammock over his face and allowing himself to be killed without making the slightest resistance. The religion of the Indians Melville had found entirely negative. They believe the Good Spirit will never do anything but good, hence give all their attention to placating the evil spirits, swarming everywhere, even in various pools of the rivers, which boats must therefore avoid. They call the rainy season the “Boia-assú,” or “Big Snake,” because the constellation we know as the Scorpion and they as the “large serpent” is then in the ascendancy.
When he planned to leave the region to return to civilization some years before, the government had induced Melville to remain, by certain concessions, including his appointment as commissioner for all the Rupununi district, so that now he was virtually the whole British Empire in the very sparsely inhabited southern half of the colony, being deputy chief of police, deputy customs inspector, deputy judge trying all cases in the back end of the country, and deputy almost anything one could name. A most earnest and efficient government officer he was, too, one of the few who rule well in the wilds without constant supervision and overseeing. He was the only man, also, who owned land in the far interior, another concession wrung from the unwilling government. The latter prefers that the territory remain crown land, so that the College of Keisers or Court of Policy, mainly made up of dark-complexioned natives, cannot interfere with it. His homelike dwellings overlooked what would be broad acres again as soon as the immense lake covering all the surrounding region subsided, with a golf links and half the sweep of the horizon beautified by blue range behind range of hills, the nearest peak four miles away, the others isolated mounds and hillocks scattered across the bushy but splendid grazing plains to far-off Mt. Roraima, highest in the colony. When we arrived the houses were on an island in a vast lake extending in all directions, with here and there the tops of trees appearing above it and the huts of most of the Indians inundated. Next morning more than half the lake had disappeared, and the river, which had been completely lost in the inundation, so that thirty hours before a boat could travel miles beyond it on either side, now showed ten feet of sheer bank. Nowhere have I ever seen water rise and subside with such rapidity.
We were still in the Land of Uncertainty. Melville expected any day a cargo-boat he had sent down to Georgetown months before, bringing him orders to go down a few days later; but though it might arrive to-morrow, it might also not be here in a month. It would have been a great advantage to continue my journey in a covered, well stocked government boat, with the greatest authority in southern British Guiana. When several days had passed without any news of the expected craft, however, I decided to push on alone, and Melville loaned me the only boat available—a fairly large but very ancient, worm-eaten dugout, with the usual submerged gunwales protected by boards nailed along the sides, through which water seeped constantly. With this he let me have a tarpaulin to cover the baggage by day and serve as a tent by night, a lantern, and necessary eating utensils, all of which, with the boat, I was to leave at the mouth of the Rupununi for his men to bring back with them. In his combined capacity as the government of the southern end of the colony, the commissioner required me to fulfill all legal formalities, writing out a detailed account of my arrival in the colony and an explanation of why I carried a revolver and how many cartridges I had. The onus for this I put on the Brazilians, rather than imply that they might be needed in so modelly governed a country as British Guiana, and formally asked permission to “carry them through the colony.” In reply, the one-man government examined my belongings, gave me an official letter saying I had reported to the constituted authorities, had been found harmless and in proper form, and need not be waylaid and examined by officials along the way, issued me a license to carry a revolver, gave me an unofficial sealed letter to the governor, which no doubt contained private opinions as to the reasons for my existence, and finally, inasmuch as I was “going down to town” anyway, intrusted to me several letters on official business, so that I was raised to the dignity of being “On His Majesty’s Service.”
All this took time, and even then I could not go without supplies, but must wait until they rounded up and killed a steer, sixty pounds of which was cut into large slices and packed in a drygoods box, with salt between, while every living carnivorous creature in the vicinity gorged himself on the rest of the carcass. A half-bushel basket of farinha, a can of matches, and two novels completed my outfit. All this was piled on saplings laid across the bottom in the center of the boat and covered with the tarpaulin. Our two Indians had not the slightest desire in the world to be transformed from carriers into paddlers, but preferred to go directly home as fast as their now restored legs could carry them. But a judicious mixture of moral suasion and enlarging upon the danger of being “blown on” if they traveled alone finally caused them to agree to go as far as the Protestant mission on the Yupucari, which was really nearer their own and from which Hart would return with them.
Several days after our arrival, therefore, we were off down a much swollen and hence swift river that carried us, without seeing them, over what most of the year were rapids with laborious portages and waterfalls, that were now only ripples and small whirlpools through which we raced at express speed. Hart and I, and a negro boy loaned us as guide through the first nine miles of rapids, sat in the stern, and our metamorphosed carriers steadily plied their paddles in the bow. There was a strip of forest along the bank, but sometimes only the tips of the trees were visible above the flooded savannah. At ten o’clock we stopped to cook beef and to exchange the negro boy, who was to walk home, for “Solomon,” an Indian chief and henchman of Melville’s, and the first aboriginal South American I ever met who spoke any considerable amount of English. We dropped him a few miles farther down, past what in the dry season would have been half a day of portaging. Travel and commerce in this region, I reflected, are about what they were in all the world before the age of money; it was not only like going back to nature, but back to the Stone Age. There was a good breeze, though not enough to drive off the clouds of puims or jejenes, here simply called “gnats,” which seemed a weak term for those almost invisible pests with a bite that leaves a torturing red itch for a week afterward. Some name with a wide blue border would have been more appropriate.
We skirted close to the densely wooded Kanuku Mountains, now and then glimpsing a small monkey and a few birds, but otherwise finding nothing except insects and primeval solitude. About four o’clock we began to look for a place to land, cook supper, and camp, but this was by no means so easy as it sounds. The banks consisted of unbroken forest with little more than the tops of the trees above water and with no signs of land, the swift current making a halt doubly difficult. We did, however, finally drag ourselves up to a bit of elevated ground, where the jungle was so thick there was barely room for all of us to stand, to say nothing of lying down. Moreover, it seemed a pity to lose the swift, rapid-defying current that might be gone by morning, so after building a fire of green wood with great difficulty and roasting a few slabs of beef, we decided to travel until an hour or two after dark. We probably never will again. The plan would have been all right had there been landing-places; but surrounded on both sides by an absolutely unbroken forest-jungle without a foot of land above water, except far back among the flooded tree-tops where we could not penetrate, we soon found ourselves in a precarious situation. The stars were out, but there was no moon and a suggestion of mist, so that the darkness seemed a solid wall on either side of us. Only with the greatest difficulty could we see the river ahead or tell the shadows from the trees, and we were constantly on the point of smashing full-tilt into some snag or submerged tree-trunk that might easily have sunk the boat and all it contained, leaving us floundering in the trackless forest-sea.
Toward midnight we decided we must get a bit of rest somehow, and in the black darkness, increased by gathering storm clouds, we shot for the bank and grasped wildly at the endless, impenetrable forest-jungle as the river tore us past it at boat-smashing speed. The stupidity and fear of our Indians made the task doubly difficult. Several times we clutched at the slashing branches and tried to drag ourselves far enough into the flooded forest to get out of the current, for there was no hope of getting land under our feet; but each time we had to give up and tear on down the river, to risk all our possessions, if not life itself, by trying again. It was like attempting to catch an express train on the fly. In one such effort we smashed into a great tangle of immense branches through which the water tore and dragged us until we were certain the boat would be knocked to pieces, or at least that some refugee snake would drop upon us. Somehow we got through this, only to strike instantly a whirlpool that sent us spinning into the tops of several more trees out in what seemed to be the middle of the stream.