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

by Harry Alverson Franck

Indentured East Indians enjoying a Saturday half-holiday before one of their barrack villages

Prisoners at work on a leaking dam in Ciudad Bolívar on the Orinoco

The trackless llanos of Venezuela

Indians of many tribes, negroes wild and tame, Hindus, Madrassees, Javanese, “taki-taki,” French déportés, tropical Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Englishmen, Chinese, Portuguese, and chaotic mixtures of all of these—one could spend a life-time in the three Guianas. Many a Frenchman has in the smallest of them. The Pilgrim Fathers first planned to come to Guiana; it would be interesting to see how different their descendants would be now. The population of this bit of Europe in South America resembles the favorite dish of the British section of it,—the “pepper-pot.” To make a “pepper-pot” one throws into a huge kettle beef, mutton, fish, fowl, and anything else that will cook which turns up during the week, adding from time to time a dash of salt and many native peppers, letting it all stew for days, until it results in an effective but indistinguishable concoction. The time may come when the unadulterated white man will recognize what looks like a dot on the map as a part of his heritage, particularly the great elevated wilderness and savannahs back of the motley-peopled seacoast. My latest letter from Hart talks of cattle by thousands of head, and reports the completion of a cattle trail forty feet wide, though with all large trees left standing, from Melville’s on the Dadanawa to within reach of Georgetown. In such a land it is nip and tuck now as to whether the railroad or the automobile will take first place in a development that is certain to come in the not far distant future.

CHAPTER XXII
THE TRACKLESS LLANOS OF VENEZUELA

Men have been known to make their way directly from British Guiana to Venezuela; but the effects of the World War were widespread and only by taking an ocean liner to Trinidad and transferring to an Orinoco river-steamer could I begin the next and last stage of my South American journey, a tramp across the Land of Bolívar—and Castro. By an extraordinary stroke of luck the Apure of the “Compañia Venezolana Costeira y Fluvial” was returning that very day, after a month of repairs in Port-of-Spain, to her regular run on the upper Orinoco, so that in less time than it takes properly to fulfill the protracted consular formalities required of those entering Venezuela I was on my way as the only passenger across the Bocas in just such a frail, two-story, side-wheel craft as that by which Hays and I had crawled up the Magdalena into South America three years before.

There was little new along the lower Orinoco to one who had seen every large river of the continent. Here and there a canoe paddled by naked Indians nearly as light as a sunburned white man crept along the lower fringe of one or the other mighty forest wall. A few huts, mostly abandoned, on the right-hand bank we almost constantly hugged, with now and then a cornfield chopped out of the forest, were the only other evidences of humanity. Where we stopped for firewood, groups of Indian men and women, some of them wearing clothes and all of them showing in their degenerate, vicious faces evidence of having made the acquaintance of what we proudly call civilization, lounged in the edge of the jungle watching our slightest movements. Their huts were only four poles holding up a thatch roof, but every person had his own hammock, covered by a mosquitero reaching to the ground. Gradually hills closed in on us, low, thickly wooded, with great granite outcroppings. Two old yellow forts appeared, the one on the higher hill already a ruin, the other flying the yellow, blue, and red flag of Venezuela, with quite a village of huts below it for the half-Indian soldiers in khaki and their slattern women. These “Castillos de Guayana” were built by the Spaniards to protect the entrance to the Orinoco, and it is mainly pride which causes their feebler descendants to keep up the fiction. For the authority of Caracas is little more than theoretical in that half of Venezuela called Guayana which lay hidden in densest wilderness on our left.