We set off down the Essequibo in the same worm-eaten old dugout
“Harris” and his wife at one of their evening camp fires
Battling with the Essequibo
The manager of “Bugles Store,” to whom Melville had given me a letter, was a burly, bearded man nearing forty, born in the colony of Scotch and Irish parents and speaking with a peculiar accent gathered from all three sources. He had a large comfortable house and a long hut for the stores and his negro henchmen, all surrounded by a pineapple plantation. I had my belongings brought up to the house at once and, lest my Indians should disappear before I knew how the land lay, the paddles also. The place was shut in at a crook of the river, behind a forest wall that utterly smothered the breeze for which the region is noted and made it hotter than I had ever known it in British Guiana. We sat down to a supper of rice, canned meat, boiled pawpaw, and insects, the last in such numbers that lights were taboo. Then the Scotch-Irish Guianese closed every window with a fussy manner and some remark about the dangerous night air and we began to undress in the darkness. When breathing became difficult, I noticed that an air-proof tarpaulin had been drawn over the place where the ceiling had wisely been left out by the builders, and that another had been spread over the floor to shut out any air that might have seeped through its narrow cracks! A house in British Guiana should consist of roof only, as the Indians know; this one, having tight walls, still held the heat of the day, as an oven retains its warmth after the baking is over. Thus does atavism cause even a civilized white man to cling to old customs when they should be thrown away. Outdoors, in the breeziest spot, would have been none too comfortable sleeping-quarters; yet here was I in a hermetically sealed room and down in the depths of a thick Ceará hammock with a tight gnat-proof net over me! Within ten minutes I could almost swim in it, the perspiration making my many insect bites and skin abrasions itch beyond endurance. Though he had lighted a lamp as soon as we were ready for bed, the prudish colonial was still fussing with his garments, as if fearing I might catch sight of his ankles, when I looked out again to suggest mildly that perhaps it would be less inconvenient for him if I moved my hammock out into the hall. He agreed; but to my increasing astonishment I found the veranda, too, which had been pleasantly wide open by day, likewise hermetically sealed with tarpaulin curtains! After I had hung my hammock, my incomprehensible host spent half an hour looking for another lamp, which he evidently expected me to keep blazing all night, and finally retired to his sealed quarters, leaving me to listen to the ticking and striking of the dozen or more trumpet-voiced clocks scattered about the house. He plainly had a hobby for clocks, perhaps to keep time from running away from him here in the wilderness. I noiselessly opened a couple of curtains and blew out the light, and actually slept a bit before a heathenish hullabaloo broke out long before daylight. I found my host tramping moodily back and forth across the hollow wooden floor in his heavy boots, waking everyone and everything within gunshot, though there was no earthly necessity for anyone being up for hours yet. This, I learned, was one of his invariable customs and innumerable idiosyncrasies. He could not get or keep Indian employees, not only because he was too harsh with them, but because he insisted on everyone going to bed about seven and aroused them all with his infernal alarm-clocks at four, keeping even the neighboring camps awake from then on by stamping back and forth on the resounding floor. Truly, a man living alone in the jungle develops his own individuality.
Strictly speaking, “The Stores” were not public, but furnished supplies to the “bleeders” of the three companies in the “balata” forests, who gather a cheap rubber similar to the caucho of Brazil. “Balata” boats had been in the habit of leaving for the coast every few days, and no one had so much as suggested the possibility of my having any difficulty in getting down to Georgetown, once I had reached the mouth of the Rupununi. But I quickly discovered that instead of the worst being over, as I was congratulating myself, the crisis of the trip was still ahead of me. The Essequibo from the Rupununi to Potaro mouth, whence there is a daily launch, is, under favorable conditions, only a short week’s trip; but there are many dangerous falls, to be passed only in certain seasons, obstacles which have often held up travelers for months. My host implied that such was to be my fate. Because of the drop in the price of rubber, not a “balata” boat had gone down the river in weeks; and though a messenger was dispatched even to the rival camps, word came back that none would have a boat leaving before September or October! It was then the middle of June. My remark that I would much prefer going over the falls and be done with it seemed lost upon my egregious host.
Not only common sense, however, but the law forbade my attempting the trip without reasonable preparations. Entire boatloads of passengers as well as goods had more than once been completely lost; once a group of American missionaries who had insisted on going down alone had been drowned, according to the exiled Scotch-Irishman, and while he did not seem to feel that a personal loss, it required him, in his capacity as the only British official in the region, to compel me to comply with the law. First of all, I must have a certified pilot and bowman, of whom there were not a dozen on the river. Moreover, my host was a justice of the peace, as well as a man of harsh and eccentric ways, so that the Indians who had not been hired on long contract and forced to stick to it gave the place a wide berth, particularly as this was their “off” year, when they wished to stay at home to burn off and plant their gardens, or because they properly prefer loafing in the wilderness to working for a song for cantankerous white men. To comply fully with legal requirements, I should evidently have to build, buy, or hire a larger new boat and assemble a whole expedition, at a cost of several hundred dollars. My only other hope was to find a certified captain who would be willing to risk his life with me in the rotten old dugout in which I had arrived; and the only possible candidate for that romantic position lived way back at the Indian huts we had passed the day before.
We set out for them at seven in the morning, my three unwilling boys augmented by a half-sick negro named Langrey, who wished to get down to Georgetown. It was quite a different task from traveling downstream. All five of us paddled the whole morning without a let-up, yet the great forest wall along the edge of which we struggled seemed barely to move, and I had a vivid sample of the hardships of weeks and even months of rowing up-river in Amazonia, where the loss of a single stroke to catch the breath leaves that much of the toilsome task to be done over again. We finally landed at the slight clearing and found a strong, good-looking young Indian, his forehead and cheeks painted some tribal color, lying in loin-cloth contentment in his hammock under a roof on legs. This was “Harris”—the missions have overdone themselves in giving the Indians clothing, wedding-rings, and English names which they cannot pronounce—or, as he called himself, “Hăllish,” certified captain of the interned gasoline launch of one of the stores, but who was “not working this year.” He spoke a considerable amount of a kind of pidgin-English, which added to his enigmatical air and somewhat almond eyes to suggest remote Chinese ancestry. Langrey opened fire at once, and there followed a long argument, or almost a pleading on our part, with little but silence from the other. The first inclination of primitive people is wary attention, one of questioning suspicion, with a tendency toward antipathy. Finally “Harris” deigned to remark, raising himself on an elbow in the hammock and glancing toward it, that our canoe was too old and small for such a trip. Perhaps we could borrow the new one of his next-door neighbor a few miles down the river, he added some time later, lending him “mine” until his own was returned. For some reason “Harris” wished to “go down to town” himself, or no argument I could have put forward would have shaken his aboriginal indifference. I told him to name his own price. He asked ten pounds! Stranded as I was, I balked at that, but Langrey butted in, and it turned out that “Harris” did not know the difference between pounds and dollars, so that ten dollars would be just as agreeable. Then he must wait for his wife, to see if she wished to go! Yet there are men who assert that Indian women are downtrodden. She appeared by and by from the woods, where she had been digging mandioca-roots, carrying a big load of those poisonous tubers on her back in a peculiar open-work basket held by a thong across her forehead and wearing nothing but a scanty skirt from waist to thighs. Though she had already been seen by all, so that any modesty she might have possessed should have recovered, she went to a nearby roof on poles and put on a long skirt and a crumpled waist, though the latter scarcely concealed her charms and the former she unconsciously pulled up far above her knees when she sat down on a log to peel the mandioca. The missionaries who had given her and her husband their wedding-rings and their names had taught them what to wear in the presence of white men, but she knew only an academic reason for doing so.