The rubber headquarters of Brazil, 1,000 miles from the Atlantic coast S Tracking Up the Rio Negro BY CASPAR WHITNEY ANTA ISABEL, six hundred miles beyond Manaos, is the jumping-off place on the Rio Negro River; speaking more formally, it is head of navigation on this section of the flowing road, and likely to remain so for many years. Some folks may not call casual steamers navigation thus to argue themselves untraveled in South America; but however my choice of word may be disputed, the fact remains that sooner or later the hard-working stern-wheeler boarded at Manaos puts you down at Isabel, the end of its journey. If you are lucky enough to begin your travels in June, when the river is high, your arrival will be "sooner," but should you happen to set out upon your adventures in February, it will be "later." For it is one of the surprising phenomena of this amazing, riverful country that in the early stages of the rainy season even three feet of draught ascends the Rio Negro's broad, shallow course shiftingly and intermittently only through help of the gifted native pilot (practico), whose familiarity with the whims of the changeful flood is so impressive as to seem a species of second sight. In the height of the dry season the boat does not even make the attempt. VOL. CXXIII.-No. 737.-95 With its fifty thousand people, Manaos is the most considerable inland port of Brazil, and, contrary to popular misconception regarding Para, the rubber clearing-house of South America; it is, I should add, nine miles above where the black water of the Rio Negro joins the yellowish Amazon, one thousand miles from the gaping mouth of this wonderful waterway. Here, from New York or Liverpool, you may come by the steamer which goes on to Iquitos, its final port in Peru, more than thirteen hundred miles farther up the Amazon. And what a mighty river is this Amazon, with its source on the other side of South America in the very foothills of the Andes, three thousand miles to the west. Yet not its length or its depth makes it so notable among the world's great rivers as the volume of water discharged through its one-hundredand-eighty-mile opening upon the Atlantic-a volume so enormous as to color the ocean nearly two hundred miles offshore! Reaching forth over an area of two thousand miles east and west by seventeen hundred north and south, its tributaries drain the upper one-third of all South America-a basin two-thirds the size of Europe; which statement may give, more clearly than maps, some idea of the resources of this mother of rivers, over whose connections you can, with comparatively short portages, make your way from the Caribbean Puerto Cabello, at the top of the continent, to Buenos Aires, at the mouth of the Rio de la Plata in the far south-a flowing road indeed! be scarcity of water along such a river system, but I was delayed at Manaos ten days while the anchored Inca, drawing three feet, awaited the rise of the Rio Negro; and, when finally we were under way, it required seven days of running from daylight until dark and the utmost skill of the practico to reach Santa Isabel. Nor was there a day of the seven when we were free of strong wind and driving rain and lowering clouds, to churn the shoal water and darken the sky, so adding to the difficulty of keeping the channel. Still, the practico never faltered, nor once did we touch bottom. Just in front of the unhoused wheel on the forward deck, signaling the steersman, sometimes himself seizing the spokes, but never speaking except now and again to the diligent lead-man (with whom twelve feet was the deepest recorded), so stood the pilot. Through the storms and even into the dark of the early night he guided, finding the tortuous channel without mistake; twisting and turning, at times making hardly a half a mile dead ahead; while on every side, reaching to the horizon, the dense You would hardly believe there could forest, unrelieved by the individual lofty With all this supply, the current of the Amazon for half of the year is little more or less than four miles an hour, except at Obidos, five hundred miles up, where only a mile separates the two banks through which the river crowds itself at a depth of one hundred and twenty fathoms-the one point along the first one thousand miles where both banks of the Amazon can be seen at the same time. Elsewhere, though variously reckoned at from six to fifteen miles, its width is difficult to estimate, but always, on either side, is the flanking of a deadlevel country, accentuated by the cleantrunked, high-standing, and heavily buttressed ceibas, which lift their great bushy tops on high as though to escape the smother of forest blanket. trees of the Amazon, rimmed the water like a great hedge trimmed to evenness by some giant hand. Occasionally a strip of bright sandy beach, framed in vivid green, supplied needed contrast and emphasized the darkness of the enveloping woodland. Of the Amazon's great feeders, each over a thousand miles in length, the Rio Negro, if not first in size, is certainly second, with two large contributing rivers of its own, the Branco on the northextending six hundred miles up to the mountain barrier guarding southeast Venezuela-and the Uaupes on the west, that comes from the far Amazonian forests lining the base of the Cordilleras. Just above Manaos the Rio Negro is from six to ten miles wide; beyond, for several hundred miles, it becomes an island-filled, heliotrope sea, with banks ranging from ten to twenty-five miles apart; all the islands heavily wooded, and one as much as thirty miles in length. Approaching Santa Isabel, itself an island, the river narrows to about five miles, and the first indication of the upriver rock outcroppings is seen in the prevalence of granite beaches. Whenever the Inca came to a high bank, always once and sometimes twice a day, we found a settlement of onestory, crudely built houses, usually to the number of two or three and never more than half a dozen, except at Barcellos, the oldest town on the river, which boasts forty of better structure. At such halts the boat left provisions, for, although they can raise anything, the truth is these people practically raise nothing, and are dependent almost entirely on the infrequent comings and goings of the one small steamboat. From the interior they get a little caucho, as the second-grade rubber is called, just enough to tempt existence in these open spots hewn from the surrounding forest. Such is the condition all along the river above Manaos. Eight houses, a score of long-legged pigs, and children to the number of men, women, houses, and pigs, comprised the colony at this head of navigation as I beheld it first. But as I lingered at its boulder-strewn gates the population increased with the opening of the wet season by twenty or more rubber-laden canoes and batelaos-for Santa Isabel is the rubber headquarters of the alto (upper) Rio Negro. Here the Indian caucheros in their dugouts and the Brazilian traders in their cargo boats bring the small amount of rubber gathered along this river and its many branches; and here, by the Inca from Manaos, come supplies and the agents who bargain for the season's catch. Those prone to class all South-Americans as indolent should peruse the workaday life-story of the average cauchero, who, with food necessarily scant and unnourishing because of the conditions of travel and climate, penetrates far into the most unhealthful sections where rubber is to be found at its best, and for months at a time searches the tropical hotbed, returning with the raw fruits of his labor once a year for a brief respite at the source of supplies. Of all pioneering, I know of none where life is so drear or the work more exhausting or beset by such discomfort. As this was the real beginning of my canoe journey to the Orinoco River, I had brought provisions to carry us the five or six hundred miles to San Carlos, frontier post of Venezuela, where, I was assured, I could replenish them; but as experience has taught me how little dependence may usually be placed on the information of the interior offered at frontier towns, I was not surprised to find my gun and fish-line necessary on the road, and no provisions at San Carlos. I never cease to marvel at the improvidence of these wilderness people whose negligence costs them so dear. In the far North, where dogs and sledges constitute the only means of winter transportation, I found it most difficult to secure an additional train; while on the Rio Negro, where the flowing road is the only road, extra canoes and especially men for hire are as exceptional as sunshine in the rainy season. And none was to be had at Isabel, notwithstanding they told me at Manaos I should be able to engage one or more. Since, however, Santa Isabel is the point of communica At tion between the outside world and all that vast interior reaching far to the west and north-even to the gateway of fabled El Dorado-I could not believe in the scarcity until I had spent several fruitless days of urgent searching. the last I was fortunate in meeting and interesting in my behalf a young Brazilian, Netto, whose English was about on a par with my Portuguese; but even with his kindly help it was impossible to secure a canoe, though I finally did engage passage on a trading freightbateláo, which undertook to carry me to San Gabriel, at the great rapids, sometimes called the Falls of the Rio Negro. Pending its start, I went two days up-river with Netto, to a commanding and beautifully situated point, where with his wife-an alluring young native whose beauty was rather enhanced by informal skirt and stockingless feet-and her mother, he lived in a long, low adobe, which the dogs and the goats and the ducks shared on easy terms with the family. Netto's people were representative of the better country class, simple in their habits of living perhaps, but kind to their dependents and courteous beyond need to the voyaging stranger. My few days at their house were happily and instructively occupied, and, though impatient to be off, it was with a genuine regret I bade them adieu when the canoe from my bateláo signaled at sundown on the third day of my visit. Throughout the length of the flowing road canoes are of few types but of many names. The batelao, varying from twenty-five to forty feet in length, with crews from four to a dozen, is the long-journey cargo boat, corresponding in some of its phases to the lancha of Venezuela. In both countries it has a deep cockpit. covered, sometimes for half its length, sometimes wholly, with a thatched, barrelshaped house, locally known as a tolda, and is built of planks around a crude but strong framework, so as to stand that hardest of usage, navigating among the rocks of the rapids. Except high up on the Guainia, where a species of crude bark craft obtains, the canoe of the Indian is always a dugout, called uba in Brazil and canao or bongo in Venezuela, varying in width from eighteen inches to four feet, and A "CAMPO " AND CHARACTERISTIC BIT OF FOREST ALONG THE AMAZON from a dozen or fifteen feet to as much as thirty or forty feet in length. One I measured at Santa Isabel was fifty-two feet long, fashioned out of a single tree. Far inland the uba, fitted with tolda, is also the long-journey boat, but on the lower reaches of the Rio Negro and the Amazon and the Orinoco, one, two, or three board ribs are added to the gunwale, and it becomes montareia with the Portuguese, and falca among the Spaniards. Paddles are much of a piece, with short, heart-shaped to roundish heads, and handles varying in length according to size of dugout, except on the lower Orinoco and Rio de la Plata, where the rough water requires always a longer handle as well as a larger blade. The batelao is propelled by oars from atop the tolda, or from the deck, and by tracking and poling, according to the character of the river and whether you are going up or down stream. utaries coming in from the north, to which bank we clung, I found the days none too long. Nothing, however, shortened the nights. The rain, which we did not so much mind in the day, because it clouded the otherwise blistering sun, even if it failed to cool the atmosphere, made sleeping a luxurious series of catnaps, with alternate bailing and wringing. Rain or shine, however, we were off always at daylight, and, though we kept going until an hour or so after dark, according to conditions, we never at our fastest made over twenty miles a day, and I doubt if our average exceeded fifteen. My crew of nine Indians were all from above San Gabriel, but of several types; one negroid, another Semitic, and others of the broad-faced and the lank which seem to predominate in this section. Alleo, the patron or captain of the crew, was a wizened little man about sixty years of age, scarcely five feet five It was twenty-four days after I became inches in height or one hundred and the supercargo of the batelao (March twenty-five pounds in weight, with the 9th) that we reached San Gabriel; and top section of his left ear missing, and the journey was full of interesting ad- two or three tufts of hair decorating ventures. At first the very slow pace his upper lip. He sported a felt hat was, I confess, maddening, despite the jammed over a straw one, and a rather novel method of propulsion; but later, frisky shirt cut off midway to the loinwhen an acquired small uba provided cloth he wore when it rained, but remeans for exploring the many canos placed at other times by the cotton made by the rising river and the trib- jumper-shirts and trousers with which |