“What’s the big idea?” I asked. “Are we to open a five and ten cent store for the native Indians up there?”
“Not exactly,” laughed Lewis, “but we must have something to trade with. What use is a silver or gold coin to a native back hundreds of miles in the jungle? He’d rather have a twenty-five cent kitchen knife than a fifty dollar gold piece.”
The “lead guns” are not lead, as I learned, but the very cheapest sort of cheap guns, manufactured in England solely for trading with semi-civilized and uncivilized people. No live American boy would take one as a gift, but I found that the natives treasured them above everything else they possessed.
We were fortunate in finding a Dutch captain, a man who has navigated the turbulent waters of the Mazaruni for twenty years. And he picked out a skilled “bowman,” a native who stands at the bow of your boat, with an immense paddle, and fends it off rocks, gives steering directions and acts generally as a sort of life preserver for the boat.
Then there was “Jimmy.” He was a negro, rather undersized and as black as the inside of a lump of coal. He appointed himself our special guardian, a sort of valet, overseer and servant. He looked after our personal belongings, cooked our food, made our tea and devoted himself exclusively to us.
Twenty paddlemen were also engaged. Sixteen of them were quite as black as our Jimmy, and four of them were in varying shades from tobacco brown to light molasses candy tint. These latter were of mixed Dutch and Negro blood.
“They are ‘Bovianders,’” said the captain.
“Queer tribal name,” I commented.
The captain laughed. “Not exactly a tribal name,” he explained. “They live up the river quite a distance and so it is said that they come from ‘above yonder.’ They have twisted that into ‘Boviander,’ so that the word always means people who live up the river.”
