CHAPTER II
“IN THE LAND O’ MAZARUNI”
EAGERLY I scanned the waters and either shore, determined that nothing should escape me, that I should see everything and enjoy all that there was to be enjoyed.
The captain sat, complacently smoking, at the stern of the boat, the great steering paddle, tied to the stern with thongs, in his hands. He looked as bored as if crossing the street to buy an evening paper. How could he, when there was such glorious adventure, I wondered. But afterwards I realized that twenty years of navigating the river had somewhat dulled the novelty of it for him. With him it was work, and nothing more.
To a boy used to paddling our own style of light canoes, the paddling methods of those black men seemed the most awkward in the world. Yet they “got there,” and I doubt if any crew of white men, without years of practice, could have propelled the heavy craft as easily as they. Their method was to bend forward, holding the paddle horizontally and sliding it along the gunwale with a loud scraping noise, then suddenly lean over sidewise and dig the paddle viciously into the water, giving a sturdy backward tug with it, still scraping the paddle against the gunwales. At the end of this stroke they returned the paddle to the horizontal position with a loud thumping noise, sat up straight, then leaned forward and repeated the stroke.
They kept perfect time. No varsity crew boys ever worked in unison at the oars any better, and they were forever singing. It didn’t matter whether they were paddling twenty feet across a narrow inlet or making an all day pull upstream, they always had music with their paddling.
They were crude songs, partly English that was scarcely understandable, partly native dialect and partly something else that may have been handed down to them from their ancestors who were captured in Africa so many generations ago and brought over by the early Dutch and English slave traders.
If the water was smooth and open, with no current, our twenty paddle men would sing as softly as the whispering of a summer breeze. But if there was a current they would sing louder. And the more difficult the paddling, the louder they would sing. In boiling rapids where it took every ounce of their strength and they had to take quick, short strokes to keep going, their voices arose to an almost howling crescendo.
Soon Bartica was lost to view around a point of land. For nearly six months we were to see no more civilization than Indian villages here and there, hidden far back from the river bank. As we swung up into the broad river where the current became strong enough to cause the paddlers to use a little extra “elbow grease” they broke into a queer song which I heard so many times after that, that it still rings in my ears. I cannot translate it. I do not know what it means, but imagine that it is some sort of love song to some dusky “Lena.” This is the way it sounds:
“San, Lena, chile, I do love yo’;