Before we started on the serious exploring part of the Brazilian trip, we paid visits to several fazendas or ranches in the state of Matto Grosso, with the purpose of hunting jaguar, as well as the lesser game of the country. One of the fazendas at which we stayed belonged to the governor of the state. When we were wakened before daylight to start off on the hunt we were given, in Brazilian fashion, the small cup of black coffee and piece of bread which constitutes the native Brazilian breakfast. We would then sally forth to return to the ranch not before noon, and sometimes much later, as the hunting luck dictated. We would find an enormous lunch waiting for us at the house. Father, who was accustomed to an American breakfast, remarked regretfully that he wished the lunch were divided, or that at least part of it were used to supplement the black coffee of daybreak. The second morning, as I went down the hall, the dining-room door was ajar, and I caught sight of the table laden with the cold meats and salads that were to serve as part of our elaborate luncheon many dim hours hence. I hurried back to tell father, and we tiptoed cautiously into the dining-room, closing the door noiselessly behind us. While we were engaged in making rapid despatch of a cold chicken, we heard our hosts calling, and the next minute the head of the house popped in the door! As father said afterward, we felt and looked like two small boys caught stealing jam in the pantry.
The Brazilian exploration was not so carefully planned as the African trip, because father had not intended to make much of an expedition. The first time he mentioned the idea was in April, 1913, in reply to a letter I wrote from São Paulo describing a short hunting expedition that I had made. “The forest must be lovely; some time I must get down to see you, and we’ll take a fortnight’s outing, and you shall hunt and I’ll act as what in the North Woods we used to call ‘Wangan man,’ and keep camp!”
Four months later he wrote that he was planning to come down and see me; that he had been asked to make addresses in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, and “I shall take a naturalist with me, if, as I hope, I return via Paraguay and the Amazon.” At the time it did not look as if it would be possible for me to go on the trip. In father’s next letter he said that after he left me, “instead of returning in the ordinary tourist Bryan-Bryce-way, I am going to see if it is possible to work across from the Plata into the valley of the Amazon, and come out through the Brazilian forest. This may not be possible. It won’t be anything like our African trip. There will be no hunting and no adventures, so that I shall not have the pang I otherwise would about not taking you along.” These plans were amplified and extended a certain amount, but in the last letter I received they didn’t include a very serious expedition.
“I shall take the Springfield and the Fox on my trip, but I shall not expect to do any game-shooting. I think it would need the Bwana Merodadi, [My name among the natives in Africa] and not his stout and rheumatic elderly parent to do hunting in the Brazilian forest. I shall have a couple of naturalists with me of the Heller stamp, and I shall hope to get a fair collection for the New York Museum—Fairfield Osborn’s museum.”
It was at Rio that father first heard of the River of Doubt. Colonel Rondon in an exploring expedition had crossed a large river and no one knew where it went to. Father felt that to build dugouts and descend the river offered a chance to accomplish some genuine and interesting exploration. It was more of a trip than he had planned for, but the Brazilian Government arranged for Colonel Rondon to make up an accompanying expedition.
When father went off into the wilds he was apt to be worried until he had done something which would in his mind justify the expedition and relieve it from the danger of being a fiasco. In Africa he wished to get at least one specimen each of the four great prizes—the lion, the elephant, the buffalo, and the rhinoceros. It was the lion for which he was most keen—and which he also felt was the most problematical. Luck was with us, and we had not been hunting many days before father’s ambition was fulfilled. It was something that he had long desired—indeed it is the pinnacle of most hunters’ ambitions—so it was a happy cavalcade that rode back to camp in the wake of the natives that were carrying the lioness slung on a long pole. The blacks were chanting a native song of triumph, and father was singing “Whack-fa-lal for Lannigan’s Ball,” as a sort of “chant pagan.”
Putting the tape on a tusker
Reading from left to right: unknown gun-bearer, Kasitura, Father, Juma Johari, Tarlton, Cuninghame
Father was more fluent than exact in expressing himself in foreign languages. As he himself said of his French, he spoke it “as if it were a non-Aryan tongue, having neither gender nor tense.” He would, however, always manage to make himself understood, and never seemed to experience any difficulty in understanding his interlocutor. In Africa he had a most complicated combination of sign-language and coined words, and though I could rarely make out what he and his gun-bearer were talking about, they never appeared to have any difficulty in understanding each other. Father could read Spanish, and he had not been in Brazil long before he could make out the trend of any conversation in Portuguese. With the Brazilians he always spoke French, or, on rare occasions, German.