5. There remains one means of escape—by an overland march. It would appear that he adopted this method, but only without any idea of permanent relief, in desperate search of temporary assistance. The line of the Kahuinari was the obvious route for a rescue party. Robuchon, however, was starving, and the native track promised a path to a native house and food.
I presume he was located by a band of visiting Indians, captured, and either murdered or carried away in captivity to their haunts on the north bank of the Japura. I suggest the probability of the Indians coming from the north bank up the Japura, because, so far as I could learn, it was not the custom of the Pama Boro to journey to the mouth of the Kahuinari, since they could obtain all they needed from the river at points more easily and more speedily accessible to them. There were no Indians resident in the vicinity, but Indians from across the Japura made excursions at low river in search of game or of turtles and their eggs.[4]
It is upon one of those chance bands that reluctantly I am forced to lay the responsibility for the death of Eugene Robuchon in March or April 1906.
This was little enough to add to the ascertained fact of Robuchon’s end, but such as it was it brushed aside some of the mystery, and proved of interest to the members of the French Geographical Society and to the relatives of the lost explorer.[5]
After concluding my investigations among the Boro in the vicinity of the Pama River, I again crossed the Japura River near the Boro settlement on the north of that river, and proceeded eastward into the country of the Menimehe. This country appears more sparsely populated than the Kahuinari districts, and the manners and customs of these people vary considerably from the tribes inhabiting the country to the south.
From the most easterly point I decided to proceed in a north-westerly direction with a view to striking the upper waters of the Uaupes River eventually. It was in this neighbourhood that I developed beriberi; and, owing to the swelling of my legs, which were covered with wounds and sores, I was only able to walk with difficulty, although I had no pain. My brain was numbed as well as my legs. I slept at every opportunity, did not want to eat, and seemed to be under the effect of some delusive narcotic. Yet I never failed to take all necessary precautions—it was mechanical, a mere habit. Stores were running short, owing to their bad condition, and my boys and carriers were becoming mutinous. Game was scarce, and the few native houses we encountered were for the most part deserted; what Indians we came across were surly and sullen, and appeared latently hostile.
I decided to return, overcome by the argument of Brown that if I did not do so the boys would go, so we turned back to the east and south of the original line, and proceeded overland by way of the Kuhuinari River to the Igara Parana, and thence to the Kara Parana by river. Arriving at the latter river at the end of February, and finding that the steamer for Iquitos would not start for some time, I made a short trip among the tribes of this river.
By reference to the sketch-map it will be seen that from the time I left Encanto on my arrival from Iquitos to my arrival at the same place, bound for Iquitos, was approximately seven months.
The difficulties in the way of obtaining information are such that it is only those who sink for the nonce all inherited and acquired ideas of superiority, manners, and customs who can be successful. As a consequence, the stranger will have to journey with savages, eat with savages, sleep with savages, from the moment he seeks to penetrate their land. Watchfulness night and day must be the price of any desire to understand the native in his home. The field-worker must subordinate every previous and personal conception. Native justice must be his justice. Almost necessarily native ethics must be his ethics. He is no missionary seeking to convert those he meets to ideas of his own; rather is he a learner, an inquirer, eager to understand the thoughts that inspire them, to analyse the beliefs they themselves have gathered. Then there is no common medium of language. Sometimes a native speaking a tongue with which the traveller has a passing acquaintance can make himself understood in another tribal language whereof the white man is blankly ignorant, and then some approximation of the truth sought to be conveyed is arrived at tortuously. For example, I had a Witoto Indian who understood a little Andoke, and by way of Brown the Barbadian carried to me much information of these little-known Indians. John Brown was here invaluable as he knew Witoto well and Boro to some purpose. But much of the appended vocabularies had to be gathered by the crude method of pointing to an object. Having noted the word phonetically, one had to get it confirmed by trial.
Travelling in the bush is a dreary monotony of discomfort and ever-present danger. There are weary stretches of inundated country, sweating swamp. You pass with an unexpected plunge from ankle-deep mire to unbottomed main stream. The eternal sludge, sludge of travel without a stone or honest yard of solid ground makes one long for the lesser strain of more definite dangers or of more obtrusive horrors. The horror of Amazonian travel is the horror of the unseen. It is not the presence of unfriendly natives that wears one down, it is the absence of all sign of human life. One happens upon an Indian house or settlement, but it is deserted, empty, in ruins. The natives have vanished, and it is only the silent message of a poisoned arrow or a leaf-roofed pitfall that tells of their existence somewhere in the tangled undergrowth of the neighbourhood.