In a few minutes we slid out of the Rupununi into the Essequibo, wide as the lower Hudson and six hundred miles long, the principal river of British Guiana, and struck across a veritable lake at the junction, with the waves running so high that we shipped much water to add to that constantly seeping into the old and now badly strained dugout. For a time it looked as if we might sink immediately, instead of doing so after several days of arduous toil. I bailed incessantly, and at last we came under the lee of the wooded shore and plodded along more or less safely, shut in by the long familiar wall of unbroken forest-jungle.
We had no champion paddlers on board. The three boys messed along steadily but not very earnestly; Langrey, the invalid, slapped his lath-like paddle in and out of the water with just exertion enough to pass as a boatman rather than a passenger; and though I got in some long and more powerful strokes, I never succeeded in keeping the bowman’s pace for any length of time and shoveled water mainly to relieve the monotonous drudgery of bailing the boat. This eminently feminine job was the only work expected of the captain’s wife, but most of it fell to my lot because the water gathered deepest about my feet. The lady wore a skirt and some sort of bodice or waist, but these were thin and mainly ornamental, and rather than wet her skirt she would pull it above her knees, disclosing plump brownish legs decorated with a cross-bar and three painted stripes running from ankle to—well, as high as the skirt ever went in our presence. Her face, also, was symbolically painted, and she wore a towel about her plentiful horse-mane hair. Her rôle was strictly passive. She made no advances, never speaking to anyone but her husband, and then in barely audible undertones, not merely because she knew no English, for she was quite as taciturn toward the paddlers of her own race as with Langrey or me. Yet her husband granted her their better umbrella when roaring showers fell, and in general, considering their scale of life, treated her as well as does the average civilized husband of the laboring class. To be sure, he had lain in a hammock while she dug mandioca and made cassava bread, but somewhere I have seen a civilized man lie in a Morris chair while his wife washed dishes and baked pies. They seemed to have as much mutual understanding and to “communicate by a sigh or a gesture” as easily as more fully clothed couples.
We were gradually turning to English; four out of seven of us now spoke it. In the pidgin-English of the Indians, which passed between “Harris” and the now deposed and disrobed “Vincent,” comparatives and superlatives were always formed with “more” and “most,” and the positive rather than the negative adjective served both purposes. The river was “more deep,” “not deep,” “not more deep,” but never shallow; it was “most wide,” “not wide,” or “not most wide,” but never narrow—though both knew the meaning of the other words readily enough. Nothing could induce the Indians to express an opinion of their own, or rather, they never showed any sign of personal volition to a white man if they could possibly avoid it. Ask them, “Is it better to stop at the clearing, or to camp across the river?” and the reply would be, “Yes, sir; all right, sir,” or something similar. One might strive for an hour to find out what they would do if they were alone, and even then succeed only by carefully refraining from suggesting any preference. Like the Indians of the Andes, they preferred to wait for a leading question, so that they could answer what they thought the questioner would be most pleased to hear.
Langrey had his own opinions, but it was long since he had heard any news from the outside world. He did not know that there was a war in Europe, though he did leave off paddling suddenly one day to say, “Ah sure sorry to heard, sir, dat Jack Johnson los’ de champeenship. When he winned, all we black man in Georgetown parade, sir.” He was convinced that the “black man”—under no circumstances did he use the word “negro”—was superior to the white, mentally as well as physically, and spent many a sun-blistering hour citing examples to prove it. One such assertion was that the white authorities had to change and give more examinations in the schools and colleges of the colony, because the blacks were winning everything. Yet he was always obsequious to white men, addressed me unfailingly as “sir,” and was much pained to see me do the slightest manual labor. Yet it may be that he would have treated in the same manner one of his own race having what to him were money and position, as I saw him later act toward wealthy Chinese.
A bit after mid-afternoon we came to several arms of the river where it split between densely wooded banks, with immense reddish-brown rocks protruding here and there from the water and the sound of rapids beginning to worry us. But the river at this point was so high, broad, and swift that we had no difficulty in running what Langrey called a “scataract,” though in other seasons it had often proved a time-consuming obstacle. The sun had sunk behind one of the walls of trees when we swung in to clutch the swiftly passing bank just above another rapids, where the men soon cut saplings and pitched camp. First they set up a frame and stretched my tarpaulin tent-wise over it, putting my netted hammock and baggage under it and forming what Langrey called the “chief’s place.” He was so much higher in the Guianese social scale that, though “Harris” was supreme in the matter of steering and boatmanship, the negro assumed the place of first lieutenant under me the instant we set foot on shore. He swung his own hammock at a respectful distance from my own luxurious quarters, yet far enough from the Indians to emphasize the difference in rank; while the Indians themselves split carefully into two parties, even building separate fires, “Harris” and his wife close together under the same net and the three boys in a group a little removed from all the others. Thus the caste system was religiously and Britishly preserved even in the wilderness a thousand miles from nowhere. Langrey pestered me to death with his servitude. If I tried to cook anything myself, he dropped whatever he was doing and ran to insist on doing it for me. When it was cooked and I told him to have some himself, he stood stiffly at attention and refused—by actions, rather than by words—to touch a mouthful or even to assume the position of “at ease” until I had finished. If I dared to wash my plate or cup, he bounded forward with the air of an English butler, exclaiming, “Now, now, sir; you must always call me when you want anything done.” Sometimes I could have kicked him; but I always recalled in time that it was not his fault, that this was part of that British civilization I had come overland from Manaos to study, and that, being a mere visitor in this foreign realm, I must not, even inadvertently, Americanize British subjects. Theirs was a manner quite different from the Brazilian or the Iberian, even of men of Langrey’s color, with which I had grown so familiar that the Anglo-Saxon style struck me as stranger and more foreign. The same race which incessantly shook hands and kowtowed to one another on every provocation over in Brazil, here had adopted that staid, caste-bound demeanor of the Briton, keeping up the acknowledged rules of society in the wilderness just as the lone Englishman will put on evening clothes to dine with himself in a log cabin. Yet for all the superficial super-politeness of the Brazilian mulatto or cabra and the Englishness of these Guianese negroes, they were the same man underneath; in both cases their manners were only borrowed garments put on to make them look like other people and help them get along in the world with the least possible friction.
Indians working for white men must eat expensive supplies from town, though they much prefer their native food; but negroes can be fed anything, though here they have been accustomed for generations to the fare of civilization. Complete as were our legal rations, the Indians did not like them, so that they fell chiefly to Langrey and me. The fifty-pound can of flour for which I had paid $8.75 proved to be so moldy that no one would touch it; the sugar was the coarsest grade of brown, and the rest was poor in proportion. The ration law, like many another isolated British ordinance, had plainly been made by a man who had never set foot in the wilds. Our farinha had run out, more’s the pity, for though it tasted like sawdust, it was swelling and filling; and now in its place we had far less palatable cassava bread made of the same poisonous tuber. We all ate cassava, and the flour might to great advantage have been thrown overboard, but law is law.
Swift places in the river were numerous the next day, and finally, at a “scataract” among countless massive brown-red boulders, we had to get out and let the boat down by ropes. Dense jungle crowded close to the shore wherever there were no boulders and often made it impossible to do likewise in worse spots, where we had to run the risk of shooting the rapids, shipping water perilously. Twice a day we stopped to cook, the second time to camp as well. Sometimes, during the noonday halt, I strolled a little way into the majestic forest, the leafy roof upheld by mighty trees averaging a hundred feet in height, with buttressed roots, as if they had been designed as pillars to support the sky, and with room for a whole Brazilian family to sit down in the space between any two buttresses. Other trees were incredibly slender for their height, some barely six inches through, yet climbing straight up to the sunlight far above. On the river long-tailed parrots flew by in couples at frequent intervals, screaming like a quarreling Irish pair; but here in the woods not a bird sang, rarely, indeed, was one seen. From the hour when the night voices of the jungle-forest ceased in the great silence of dawn, as if nature stood mute at her own magnificence, there was a cathedral stillness in these woods. Yet at times the ears were filled with an indefinable, almost intangible sound, a curious humming, mysterious as the sensual smell of the forest. Parasites seemed trying to suffocate the trees with their passionate embrace, yet I got little sensation of that “death everywhere exuding” reported by so many Amazonian travelers; rather did one feel an agreeable impression of isolation and of well-being under that impenetrable roof of vegetation, in a world such as Adam might have seen on the first day of his life.
Insects were less troublesome along the Essequibo, and for some reason we suffered little from heat, though the sun struck straight down upon the broad river, which threw it back in our faces in scintillations of polished copper that blinded, visibly tanning us all—except Langrey. A cool breeze was rarely lacking, and every little while there came the growing noise of rain, castigating the woods ever more furiously as it drew near, the wind swaying the great tree-tops and now and then turning aside from their course a pair of voyaging parrots. Occasionally we passed the skeleton of a camping-place, a tangle of poles over which tarpaulins had been hung by other and larger parties. The howling of monkeys, like the roar of a far-off riot, like some great but distant crowd furious with anger, often sounded from back in the forest. The river frequently broke up into many diverging branches, almost as large in appearance as the main stream, which disappeared off through the wilderness. In the dry season the Essequibo is a meandering stream that one can almost wade, its broad bed filled with dry sand and stretches of huge rocks which now were racing rapids, showing themselves chiefly as immense whirlpools on the surface of the deep river.
We ran some very heavy rapids, the waves often tossing over our low gunwales; but “Harris” was skilful, and the mere fact that he had his wife along seemed pretty good proof that he hoped to escape shipwreck—or was it? Then one afternoon a mighty booming began ahead and soon filled all the forest with its echoes. I pulled out my map, but Langrey disputed its assertions with an excited, “On de chaht dat’s a scataract, sir; but dat ain’ no scataract; dat’s a falls!” The emphasis on the last word was not misplaced, even though what is a sheer fall of several feet in the dry season was now a long series of rapids which we ran, constantly expecting to be swamped the next moment, and finally coming to a real drop over immense boulders. We eased her down for a long way hand-over-hand, clutching bushes along the shore, struggling to maintain a waist-deep footing on slippery rock, needing the combined exertions of all of us, except the woman, to keep even the lightened boat from submerging and leaving us stranded in the wilderness. But though they did not look as dangerous, the next series of rapids was far more so, for there was nothing to do but run them, and suddenly in the very middle of them two waves all but filled the boat, and I prepared to say good-by to my earthly possessions and take up my abode under a tree in the impenetrable forest—though at the same time I bailed as savagely as the men paddled, so that we saved ourselves by a hair. For more than an hour there was a constant succession of these near-disasters. The river split up into many channels, and the one we entered might look smooth and harmless, only to prove a young Niagara when it was too late to turn back. Dry clothing was unknown among us during those days. It was, of course, mainly fear for my baggage that sent the twinges up my spine; for I could probably have saved myself. But to be left boatless, foodless, and kodak-less here in the heart of the trackless wilderness, with the chances remote of meeting another human being during a life-time, would have been more heroic than interesting. When we came at last into more placid water, Langrey cheered me with the information that there were “more worse scataracts” and falls a couple of days farther on. The rocky streak where the high lands of the savannahs get down to sea-level runs clear across the colony here near its geographic center, yet the dense forest never broke in the descent.
“We’ll meet camp jes’ now,” said Langrey about five o’clock; and sure enough we did “meet” it, coming up river along with the endless procession of forest, a half-open place, with some of the most magnificent trees I had yet seen. It was near here that a boat in which “Harris” had been steersman and Langrey one of the paddlers had buried the last white man who had attempted the overland trip from Manaos to Georgetown. He called himself Frederick Weiland, claiming to be an American born in Texas, but later confessed himself a Hungarian, and therefore subject, as an enemy alien, to internment for the duration of the war. He had left Manaos nine months before and tried to walk across from Boa Vista to Melville’s, but lost himself looking for water, and, having set down his baggage, could not find it again. For three days he wandered at random without food and almost without drink, until half-wild Indians found him and took him on to Melville’s, who was then in Europe. He gave himself out to be a house-painter, and carried many collapsible tubes of paints and pencil-brushes; he claimed to know nothing of soldiering, yet he had a military manner and his talk often unconsciously showed knowledge not common among workingmen. Most of the belongings he had left he gave the Indians to row him down to the mouth of the Rupununi, where the Scotch-Irishman, losing no chance to improve his official importance, sent negroes out to his camp to arrest him as a German spy. His captor kept him for a while, letting him paint or do other work where he could, and finally started down to town with him. The prisoner seemed to worry much as to what might happen to him there, though assured that at worst he would be interned; but he was gay most of the way down, until an up-boat gave them a newspaper that reported serious German losses. From that moment he seemed to lose heart. Some thought he swallowed some of his paints; at any rate, he suddenly “t’row a fit” in the boat one afternoon, and an hour later he was dead.