 Chapter 4, Part 3 of Through the Brazilian Wilderness. The junction of the Sao Lorenzo and the Paraguay is a day's journey above Carumba. From Carumba there is a regular service by shallow steamers to Cayaaba at the head of one fork, and to Sao Luis de Casares at the head of the other. The steamers are not powerful, and the voyage to each little city takes a week. There are other forks that are navigable. Above Cayaaba and Casares, launches go upstream for several days' journey, except during the driest parts of the season. North of this marshy plain lies the highland, the Plan Alto, where the nights are cool and the climate healthy. But I wish emphatically to record my view that these marshy plains, although hot, are also healthy, and moreover, the mosquitoes in most places are not insufficient numbers to be a serious pest, although, of course, there must be nets for protection against them at night. The country is excellently suited for settlement, and offers a remarkable field for cattle growing. Moreover it is a paradise for water birds, and for many other kinds of birds, and for many mammals. It is literally an ideal place in which a field naturalist could spend six months or a year. It is readily accessible, it offers an almost virgin field for work, and the life would be healthy as well as delightfully attractive. The man should have a steam launch. In it he could, with comfort, cover all parts of the country, from south of Karumba to north of Kayaba and Casaras. There would have to be a good deal of collecting, although nothing in the nature of butchery should be tolerated. For the region has only been superficially worked, especially as regards mammals. But if the man were only a collector he would leave undone the part of the work best worth doing. The region offers extraordinary opportunities for the study of the life histories of birds, which because of their size, their beauty, or their habits are of exceptional interest. All kinds of problems would be worked out. For example on the morning of the third, as we were ascending the Paraguay, we again and again saw in the trees on the bank big nests of sticks into and out of which parakeets were flying by the dozen. Some of them had straws or twigs in their bills. In some of the big globular nests we could make out several holes of exit or entrance. Apparently these parakeets were building or remodeling communal nests, but whether they had themselves built these nests or had taken old nests and added to or modified them, we could not tell. There was so much of interest all along the banks that we were continually longing to stop and spend days where we were. Just flocks of scores of cormorants and darters covered certain trees, both at sunset and after sunrise. Although there was no deep forest, merely belts or fringes of trees along the river, or in patches back of it, we frequently saw monkeys in this riverine tree fringe, active common monkeys and black howlers of more leisurely gait. We saw caimans and capybaras sitting socially near one another on the sandbanks. That night we heard the calling of large flights of tree-ducks. They were now the most common of all the ducks, although there were many muskaby ducks also. The evenings were pleasant and not hot, as we sat on the forward deck there was a waxing moon. The screamers were among the most noticeable birds. They were noisy. They perched in the very tops of the trees, not down among the branches, and they were not shy. They should be carefully protected by law, for they readily become tame, and then come familiarly round the houses. From the steamer we now and then saw beautiful orchids in the trees on the riverbank. One afternoon we stopped at the home buildings or headquarters of one of the great outlying ranches of the Brazil Land and Cattle Company, the Farquhar Syndicate, under the management of Murdo Mackenzie, then whom we have in the United States no better citizen or more competent cattleman. On this ranch there are some seventy thousand head of stock. We were warmly greeted by McLean, the head of the ranch, and his assistant Ramsey, an old Texan friend. Among the other assistants, all equally cordial, were several Belgians and Frenchmen. The hands were Paraguayans and Brazilians and a few Indians, a hard bit set. Each of whom always goes armed and knows how to use his arms, for there are constant collisions with cattle thieves from across the Bolivian border, and the ranch has to protect itself. These cowhands, vaqueros, were of the type with which we were now familiar, dark skinned, lean, hard-faced men, in slouch hats, worn shirts, trousers, and fringed leather aprons with heavy spurs on their bare feet. There are wonderful riders and ropers, and fear neither man nor beast. I noticed one Indian vaquero standing in exactly the attitude of a shelluck of the white Nile, with the sole of one foot against the other leg above the knee. This is a region with extraordinary possibilities of cattle-raising. At this ranch there was a tannery, a slaughterhouse, a cannery, a church, buildings of various kinds and all degrees of comfort for the thirty or forty families who made the place their headquarters, and the handsome white two-story big house, standing among lemon trees and flamboyance on the river brink. There were all kinds of pets around the house. The most fascinating was a wee spotted fawn which loved being petted. Half a dozen curacao's of different species strolled through the rooms. There were also parrots of several different species, and immediately outside the house, four or five herons with unclipped wings, which would let us come within a few feet and then fly gracefully off, shortly afterward returning to the same spot. They included big and little white egrets, and also the mauve and pearl-colored heron, with a partially black head and many-colored bill, which flies with quick, repeated wing flappings instead of the usual slow, heron wing beats. In the warehouse were scores of skins of jaguar, puma, ocelot, and jaguarendi, and one skin of the big, small-toothed red wolf. These were all brought in by the cowhands and by friendly Indians, a price being put on each as they destroyed the stock. The jaguars occasionally killed horses and full-grown cows, but not bulls. The pumas killed the calves. The others killed an occasional very young calf, but ordinarily only sheep, little pigs, and chickens. There was one black jaguar skin. Melanism is much more common among jaguars than pumas, although once Miller saw a black puma that had been killed by Indians. The patterns of the jaguar skins and even more of the ocelot skins showed wide variation, no two being alike. The pumas were, for the most part, bright red, but some were reddish gray. They're being much the same dichromatism that I found among their Colorado kinsfolk. The jaguarundis were dark brownish gray. All these animals, the spotted jaguars and ocelots, the monochrome black jaguars, red pumas and dark gray jaguarundis, were killed in the same locality with the same environment. A glance at the skins and a moment's serious thought would have been enough to show any sincere thinker that in these cats the coloration pattern, whether concealing or revealing, is of no consequence one way or the other as a survival factor. The spotted patterns conferred no benefit as compared with the nearly or quite monochrome blacks, reds, and dark grays. The bodily condition of the various beasts was equally good, showing that their success in life, that is their ability to catch their prey, was unaffected by their several color schemes. Except white, there is no color so conspicuously advertising as black. Yet the black jaguar had been a fine, well-fed, powerful beast. The spotted patterns in the forests, and perhaps even in the marshes, which the jaguar so frequently traversed, are probably a shade less conspicuous than the monochrome red and gray, but the pumas and jaguarundri are just as hard to see and evidently find it just as easy to catch prey as the jaguar and ocelot. The little fawn which we saw was spotted, the grown deer, had lost the spots. If the spots do really help to conceal the wearer, it is evident that the deer has found the original concealing coloration of so little value that it has actually been lost in the course of the development of the species. When these big cats and the deer are considered together with the dogs, tapers, pequeries, capybaras, and big anteaters, which live in the same environment, and when we also consider the difference between the young and the adult deer and tapers, both of which when adult have substituted a complete or partial monochrome for the ancestral spots and streaks, it is evident that in the present life and in the ancestral development of the big mammals of South America, coloration is not and has not been a survival factor. Any pattern and any color may accompany the persistence and development of the qualities and attributes which are survival factors. Indeed it seems hard to believe that in their ordinary environment such color schemes as the bright red of the marsh deer, the black of the black jaguar, and the black with white stripes of the great tamandua are not positive detriments to the wearers, yet such is evidently not the case. Evidently the other factors in species survival are of such overwhelming importance that the coloration becomes negligible from this standpoint, whether it be concealing or revealing. The cats mold themselves to the ground as they crouch or crawl. They take advantage of the tiny scrap of cover. They move with extraordinary stealth and patience. The other animals which try to sneak off in such manner as to escape observation approach more or less closely to the ideal which the cats most nearly realize. Bairiness, sharp senses, the habit of being rigidly motionless when there is the least suspicion of danger, and ability to take advantage of cover all count. On the bare open treeless plain, whether marsh, meadow, or upland, anything above the level of the grass is seen at once. A marsh deer out in the open makes no effort to avoid observation. Its concern is purely to see its foes in time to leave a dangerous neighborhood. The deer of the neighboring forest skulk and hide and lie still in dense cover to avoid being seen. The white-lipped peccaries make no effort to escape observation by being either noiseless or motionless. They trust for defense to their gregariousness and truculence. The collared peccary also trusts to its truculence, but seeks refuge in a hole where it can face any opponent with its formidable biting apparatus. As for the giant tamindua in spite of its fighting prowess, I am wholly unable to understand how such a slow and clumsy beast has been able, through the ages, to exist and thrive surrounded by jaguars and pumas. Speaking generally, the animals that seek to escape observation trust primarily to smell to discover their foes or their prey, and see whatever moves, and do not see whatever is motionless. By the morning of January 5th we had left the marsh region. There were low hills here and there, and the land was covered with dense forest. From time to time we passed little clearings with palm-fatched houses. We were approaching caesars, where the easiest part of our trip would end. We had lived in much comfort on the little steamer. The food was plentiful and the cooking good. At night we slept on deck in cots or hammocks. The mosquitoes were rarely troublesome, although in the daytime we were sometimes bothered by numbers of biting horse-flies. The bird-life was wonderful. One of the characteristic sights we were always seeing was that of a number of heads and necks of cormorants and snake-birds, without any bodies, projecting above water, and disappearing as the steamer approached. Skimmers and thick-billed turn were plentiful here, right in the heart of the continent. In addition to the spurred lapwing, characteristic and most interesting resident of most of South America, we found tiny red-legged plover, which also breed and are at home in the tropics. The contrasts in habits between closely allied species are wonderful. Among the plovers and bay snipe there are species that live all the year round in almost the same places, in tropical and subtropical lands, and other related forms which wander over the whole earth and spend nearly all their time, now in the arctic and cold temperate regions of the far north, now in the cold temperate regions of the south. These latter wide-wandering birds of the seashore and the riverbank pass most of their lives in regions of almost perpetual sunlight. They spend the breeding season, the northern summer, in the land of the midnight sun during the long arctic day. They then fly for endless distances down across the north temperate zone, across the equator, through the lands where the days and nights are always of equal length, into another hemisphere, and spend another summer of long days and long twilight in the far south where the Antarctic winds cool them while their nesting home, at the other end of the world, is shrouded beneath the iron desolation of the polar night. In the late afternoon of the fifth we reached the quaint old-fashioned little town of Saluiz de Caceres, on the outermost fringe of the settled region of the state of Madogrosso, the last town we should see before reaching the villages of the Amazon. As we approached, we passed half-clad black washer-women on the river's edge. The men with the local band were gathered at the steeply sloping foot of the main street where the steamer came to her moorings. Groups of women and girls, white and brown, watched us from the low bluff. Their skirts and bodices were red, blue, green, of all colors. Sig had gone ahead with much of the baggage. He met us in an improvised motorboat consisting of a dugout to the side of which he had clamped our ebb and rude motor. He was giving several of the local citizens of prominence a ride to their huge enjoyment. The streets of the little town were unpaved, with narrow brick sidewalks. The one-story houses were white or blue, with roofs of red tiles and window shutters of lattice woodwork, come down from colonial days and tracing back through Christian and Moorish Portugal to a remote Arab ancestry. Pretty faces, some dark, some light, looked out from these windows. Their mother's mothers for generations past must have thus looked out of similar windows in the vanished colonial days. But now, even here in Caceres, the spirit of the new Brazil is moving. A fine new government school has been started, and we met its principal, an earnest man doing excellent work. One of the many teachers, who during the last few years have been brought to Mato Grosso from São Paulo, a center of the new educational movement which will do so much for Brazil. Father Zom went to spend the night with some French Franciscan friars, capital fellows. I spent the night at the comfortable house of Lieutenant Lyra, a hot weather house with thick walls, big doors, and an open patio bordered by a gallery. Lieutenant Lyra was to accompany us. He was an old companion of Colonel Rondon's explorations. We visited one or two of the stores to make some final purchases, and in the evening strolled through the dusky streets and under the trees of the plaza. The women and girls sat in groups in the doorways or at the windows, and here and there a stringed instrument tinkled in the darkness. From Caceras onward we were entering the scene of Colonel Rondon's explorations. For some eighteen years he was occupied in exploring and in opening telegraph lines through the eastern or north middle part of the Great Forest State, the wilderness state of the Mato Grosso, the Great Wilderness, or as Australians would call it, the Bush. Then in 1907 he began to penetrate the unknown region lying to the north and west. He was the head of the exploring expeditions sent out by the Brazilian government to traverse for the first time this unknown land, to map for the first time the courses of the rivers, which from the same divide run into the upper portions of the Tapajos and the Madeira, two of the mighty affluence of the Amazon, and to build telegraph lines across to the Madeira where a line of Brazilian settlements connected by steamboat lines and a railroad again occurs. Three times he penetrated into this absolutely unknown Indian haunted wilderness being absent for a year or two at a time and suffering every imaginable hardship before he made his way through to the Madeira and completed the telegraph line across. The officers and men of the Brazilian Army and the civilian scientists who followed him shared the toil and the credit of the task. Some of his men died of berry-berry, some were killed or wounded by the Indians. He himself almost died of fever. Again and again his whole party was reduced almost to the last extremity by starvation, disease, hardship, and the overexhaustion due to wearing fatigues. In dealing with the wild naked savages he showed a combination of fearlessness, good judgment, and resolute patience and kindness. The result was that they ultimately became his firm friends, guarded the telegraph lines, and helped the few soldiers left at the isolated, widely separated little posts. He and his assistants explored and mapped for the first time the Girovina and the Giparana, two important affluence of the Tapajos and the Madeira respectively. The Tapajos and the Madeira, like the Orinoco and Rio Negro, have been highways of travel for a couple of centuries. The Madeira, as later the Tapajos, was the chief means of ingress a century and a half ago to the little Portuguese settlements of this far interior region of Brazil. One of these little towns named Matagrosso, being the original capital of the province, it has long been abandoned by the government and practically so by its inhabitants, the ruins of palace, fortress, and church now rising amid the rank, tropical exurience of the wild forest. The mouths of the main affluence of these highway rivers were as a rule well known, but in many cases nothing but the mouth was known. The river itself was not known and it was placed on the map by guesswork. Colonel Rondon found, for example, that the course of the Giparana was put down on the map two degrees out of its proper place. He, with his party, was the first to find out its sources, the first to traverse its upper course, the first to map its length. He and his assistants performed a similar service for the Geroena, discovering the sources, discovering and descending some of the branches, and for the first time making a trustworthy map of the main river itself until its junction with the Tapajos. Near the watershed between the Geroena and the Giparana, he established his farthest station to the westward, named José Bonifacio, after one of the chief republican patriots of Brazil. A couple of days marched northwestward from this station, he in 1909 came across a part of the stream of a river running northward between the Giparana and the Geroena. He could only guess where it debouched, believing it to be into the Madeira, although it was possible that it entered the Giparana or the Tapajos. The region through which it flows was unknown, no civilized man having ever penetrated it, and as all conjecture as to what the river was, as to its length, as to its place of entering into some highway river was mere guesswork. He had entered it on his sketch maps as the Rio da Duvida, the river of doubt. Among the officers of the Brazilian army and the scientific civilians who have accompanied him there have been not only expert cartographers, photographers, and telegraphists, but astronomers, geologists, botanists, and zoologists. Their reports, published in excellent shape by the Brazilian government, make an invaluable series of volumes, reflecting the highest credit on the explorers and on the government itself. Colonel Rondon's own accounts of his explorations, of the Indian tribes he has visited, and of the beautiful and wonderful things he has seen, possess a peculiar interest. End of Chapter 4 of Through the Brazilian Wilderness by Theodore Roosevelt Recording by Joelle Peebles Chapter 5 Part 1 of Through the Brazilian Wilderness This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Tom Clifton Through the Brazilian Wilderness by Theodore Roosevelt Chapter 5 Up the River of Tapers Part 1 After leaving Casares we went up the Sceptituba, which in the local Indian dialect means River of Tapers. This river is only navigable for boats of size when the water is high. It is a swift, fairly clear stream rushing down from the Plain Alto, the high uplands, through the tropical lowland forest. On the right hand, or western bank, and here and there on the left bank, the forest is broken by natural pastures and meadows, and at one of these places, known as Porto Campo, sixty or seventy miles above the mouth, there is a good-sized cattle ranch. Here we halted because the launch and the two branches, native trading boats, with houses on their decks, which it towed, carry our entire party and outfit. Accordingly, most of the baggage and some of the party were sent ahead to where we were to meet our pack-train at Taperupon. Meanwhile, the rest of us made our first camp under tents at Porto Campo to wait for the return of the boats. The tents were placed on a line with the tent of Colonel Rondon and the tent in which Kermit and I slept in the middle, the side one and the other. In front of these two, on tall poles, stood the Brazilian and American flags, and at sunrise and sunset, the flags were hoisted and hauled down while the trumpet sounded, and all of us stood at attention. Camp was pitched beside the ranch buildings, and the trees near the tents grew wonderful violet orchids. Many birds were around us. I saw some of them, and sherry and miller many, many more. They ranged from party-colored macaws, green parrots, and big gregarious cuckoos down to a brilliant green and chestnut kingfisher, five and a quarter inches long, and a tiny orange and green mannequin, smaller than any bird I have ever seen except a Hummer. We also saw a bird that really was protectively colored, a kind of whipper-wheel which even the sharp-eyed naturalist could only make out because it moved its head. We saw orange-bellied squirrels with showy orange tails. Lizards were common. We killed our first poisonous snake the second we had seen, an evil lands-headed jara-cara that was swimming the river. We also saw a black and orange-harmless snake nearly eight feet long, which, we are told, was akin to the Musa Marama and various other snakes. One day, while paddling in a canoe on the river, hoping that the dogs might drive a taper to us, they drove into the water a couple of small brush-deer instead. There was no point in shooting them. We caught them with ropes thrown over their heads, for the naturalist needed them as specimens, and all of us needed the meat. One of the men was stung by a single big red marabundi wasp. For twenty-four hours he was in great pain and incapacitated for work. In a lagoon two of the dogs had the tips of the tails bitten off by piranhas as they swam, and the ranch hands told us that in this lagoon one of their hounds had been torn to pieces and completely devoured by the ravenous fish. It was a further illustration of the uncertainty of temper and behavior of these ferocious little monsters. In other lagoons they had again and again left us and our dogs unmolested. They varied locally in aggressiveness, just as sharks and crocodiles in different seas and rivers vary. On the morning of January 9th we started out for a taper hunt. Tapers are hunted with canoes as they dwell in thick jungle and take to the water when hounds follow them. In this region there were extensive papyrus swamps and big lagoons back from the river, and often the tapers fled to these for refuge throwing off the hounds. In these places it was exceedingly difficult to get them. Our best chance was to keep to the river and canoes and paddle towards a spot in the direction of which the hounds, by the noise, seemed to be heading. We started in four canoes. Three of them were Indian dugouts very low in the water. The fourth was our Canadian canoe, a beauty, light, safe, roomy, made of thin slats of wood and cement-covered canvas. Colonel Rondon, Fiala with his camera and I went in this canoe together with two paddlers. The paddlers were natives of the poorer class. They were good men. The bozemen was of nearly pure white blood, the steersmen was of nearly pure negro blood, and was evidently the stronger character and the better men of the two. The two other canoes carried a couple of fazenderos, ranchmen, who came up from Caseras with their dogs. These dugouts were manned by Indian and half-caste paddlers, and the fazenderos who were nearly pure white blood also at times paddled vigorously. All were dressed in substantially similar clothes, the difference being that those of the camaradas, the poorer men or laborers were in tatters. In the canoes, no man or anything save a shirt, trousers, and hat, the feet being bare. Back they were long leather leggings, which were really simple high, rather flexible boots with the soles off. Their spurs were on the tough bare feet. There was every gradation between and among the nearly pure whites, negroes, and Indians. On the whole there was the most white blood in the upper ranks, and the most Indian and negro blood among the camaradas. But there were exceptions in both classes, and there was no discrimination on account of color. All alike were courteous and friendly. The hounds were first carried into the dugouts, and then let loose on the banks. We went upstream for a couple of hours against the swift current. The paddlers making good headway with their pointed paddles. The broad blade of each paddle was tipped with a long point so that it could be thrust into the mud to keep the low dugout against the bank. The tropical forest came down almost like a wall. The tall trees laced together with vines, and the spaces between their trunks filled with a low, dense jungle. In most places it could only be penetrated by a man with a machete. With few exceptions the trees were unknown to me, and their native names told me nothing. On most of them the foliage was thick, among the exceptions were the sycropias, growing by preference on the new-formed alluvial soil bare of other trees whose rather scanty leaf bunches were, as I was informed, the favorite food of sloths. We saw one or two squirrels among the trees and a family of monkeys. There were few sandbanks in the river, and no waterfowl save an occasional cormorant. But as we pushed along near the shore where the branches overhung and dipped in the swirling water we continually roused little flocks of bats. They were hanging from the boughs right over the river, and when our approach roused them they zigzag rapidly in front of us for a few rods, and then again dove in among the branches. At last we landed at a point of ground where there was little jungle and where the forest was composed of palms and was fairly open. It was a lovely bit of forest. The kernels strolled off in one direction returning an hour later with a squirrel for the naturalists. Meanwhile, Fial and I went through the palm wood to a papyrus swamp. Many trails led through the woods and especially along the borders of the swamp, and although the principal makers had evidently been cattle, yet there were in them footprints of both taper and deer. The taper makes a footprint much like that of a small rhinoceros being one of the odd-toed ungulates. We could hear the dogs now and then evidently scattered and running on various trails. They were a worthless lot of curhounds. They would chase taper or deer or anything else that ran away from them as long as the trail was easy to follow, but they were not staunch even after animals had fled and they would have nothing whatever to do with animals that were formidable. While standing by the marsh we heard something coming along one of the game paths. In a moment a buck of the bigger species of the bush deer appeared, a very pretty and graceful creature. It stopped and darted back as soon as it saw us, giving us no chance for a shot. But in another moment we caught glimpses of it running by at full speed back among the palms. I covered an opening between two tree trunks. By good luck the buck appeared in the right place giving me just time to hold well ahead of him and fire. At the report he went down in a heap. The umbrella pointed bullet going in at one shoulder and ranging forward breaking the neck. The leaden portion of the bullet in the proper mushroom or umbrella shape stopped under the neck skin on the farthest side. It is a very effective bullet. Miller particularly wished specimens of the various species of bush deer because their mutual relationships have not yet been satisfactorily worked out. This was an old buck. The antlers were single spikes five or six inches long. They were old and white and soon would have been shed. In the stomach were the remains of both leaves and grasses but especially the former. The buck was both a browser and a grazer. There were also seeds but no berries this species which is abundant in this neighborhood is solitary in its habits not going in herds. At this time the rut was past the bucks no longer sought the does the fawns had not been born and the yearlings had left their mothers so that each animal usually went by itself. When chased they were very apt to take to the water. This instinct of taking to the water by the way is quite explicable as it regards both deer and taper for affords them refuge against their present day natural foes. But it is a little puzzling to see the jaguar readily climbing trees to escape dogs. For ages have passed since there were in this habitat any natural foes from which it needed to seek safety in the trees. But it is possible that the habit has been kept alive by seeking refuge in them on occasion from the big peccaries which are among the beast on which we hung the buck in a tree. The colonel returned and not long afterward one of the paddlers who had been watching the river called out to us that there was a taper in the water a good distance upstream and that two of the other boats were after it. We jumped into the canoe and the two paddlers dug their blades in the water as they drove her against the strong current edging over for the opposite bank. The taper was coming downstream at a great rate only its queer head above water while dugouts were closing rapidly on it. The paddlers uttering loud cries. As the taper turned slightly to one side or the other that long slightly up turned snout and the strongly pronounced arch of the crest along the head and upper neck gave it a marked and unusual aspect. I could not shoot for it was directly in the line with one of the pursuing dugouts. Suddenly it dived. The snout being slightly curved downward as it did so there was no trace of it. We gazed eagerly in all directions. The dugout in front came alongside our canoe and the paddlers rested through paddles ready. Then we made out the taper clambering up the bank. It had dived at right angles to the course it was following and swum under the water to the very edge of the shore. Rising under the overhanging tree branches at a point where a drinking trail for game led down a break in the bank. The branches partially hit it and it was in deep shadow so that did not offer a very good shot. My bullet went into its body too far back and the taper disappeared in the forest at a gallop as if unhurt. Although the bullet really secured it by making it unwilling to trust to its speed and leave the neighborhood of the water. Three or four the hounds were by this time swimming the river leaving the others yelling on the opposite side and as soon as the swimmers reached the shore they were put on the taper's trail and galloped after it giving tongue. In a couple of minutes we saw the taper take to the water far upstream and after it we went as fast as the paddlers could urges through the water. We were not in time to head it but fortunately some of the dogs had come down to the river's edge at the very point where the taper was about to land and turned it back. Two or three of the dogs were swimming. We were more than half the breadth of the river away from the taper and somewhat down the stream when it dived. It made an astonishingly long swim beneath the water this time almost as if it had been a hippopotamus for it passed completely under our canoe and rose between us and the hither bank. I shot it, the bullet going into its brain while it was thirty or forty yards from shore. It sank at once. There was now nothing to do but wait until the body floated. I feared that this strong current would roll it downstream over the riverbed but my companions assured me that this was not so and that the body would remain where it was until it rose which would be in about an hour or two. They were right except as to the time for over a couple of hours we paddled or anchored ourselves by clutching branches close to the spot or else drifted down a mile and paddled up again near the shore to see if the body had caught anywhere. Then we crossed the river and had lunch at the lovely natural picnic ground where the big buck was hung up. We had barely nearly given up on the taper and nearly floated only a few rods from where it had sunk. With no little difficulty the big round black body was hoisted into the canoe and we all turned our prowls downstream. The skies had been lowering for some time and now, too late to interfere with the hunt or cause any annoyance a heavy downpour of rain came on and beat upon us. Little we cared as the canoe raced forward with the taper and the buck lying in the bottom of the comfortable camp ahead of us. When we reached camp and Father Zahm saw the taper he reminded me of something I had completely forgotten. When, some six years previously he had spoken to me in the White House about taking this South American trip I had answered that I could not as I intended to go to Africa but added that I hoped someday to go to South America and that if I did I should try to shoot both a jaguar and a taper characteristic big game animals of the country. Well, said Father Zahm now you shot them both. The storm continued heavy until after sunset then the rain stopped and the full moon broke through the cloud wreck. Father Zahm and I walked up and down in the moonlight talking of many things from Dante and her own plans for the future to the deeds and the wanderings of the old time Spanish conquistadors in their search for the gilded king and of the Portuguese adventures who then divided with them the mastery of the oceans and of the unknown continents beyond. This was an attractive and interesting camp in more ways than one. The vaqueros with their wives and families were housed on the two sides of the field in which our tents were pitched. On one side was a big whitewashed tile-roofed house in which the foreman dwelt, an olive-skinned slightly built wiry man with an olive-skinned wife and eight pretty, fair-haired children as one could wish to see. He usually went barefoot in his manners were not merely good but distinguished. Corrals and outbuildings were near this big house. On the opposite side of the field stood the row of steep, roofed palm-thatched huts in which the ordinary cowhands lived with their dusky helpmates and children. Each night from these palm-thatched quarters we heard the faint sounds of a music that went far back of civilization on the street nearby in point of time and otherwise immeasurably remote. For through the still hot air under the brilliant moonlight we heard the monotonous throbbing of a tom-tom drum and the twanging of some old stringed instrument. The small black turkey-buzzards here always called crows were as tame as chickens near the big house walking on the ground or perched in the trees beside the corral waiting for the oafle of slaughtered cattle. Two palm trees near our tent were crowded with a long hanging nest of one of the cacique orioles. We lived well with plenty of taper-beef which was good and venison of the bush-deer which was excellent and as much ordinary beef as we wished and fresh milk too, a rarity in this country. There were very few mosquitoes and everything was as comfortable as possible. The taper I killed was a big one. I did not wish to kill another unless of course it became advisable to do so for food whereas I did wish to get some specimens of the big white-lipped peccary the caixota which is pronounced caixota of the Brazilians which would make our collection of the big mammals of the Brazilian forest almost complete. The remaining members of the party killed two or three more tapers. One was a bull, bull-grown but very much smaller than the animal I had killed. The hunters said that this was a distinct kind. The skull and skin were sent back with the other specimens to the American Museum where after due examination and comparison its specific identity will be established. Tapers are solitary beasts. Two are rarely found together except in the case of a cow and it's spotted and streaked calf. They live in dense cover usually lying down in the daytime and at night coming out to feed and going to the river or some lagoon to bathe and swim. From this camp, SIG took Lieutenant Lira back to Caceres. This was something that had been overlooked. They went in a rowboat to which the motor had been attached and at night on the way back almost ran over a taper that was swimming but in unfrequented places tapers both feed and bathe during the day. The stomach of the one I shot contained big palm nuts. They had been swallowed without enough mastication to break the kernel the outer pulp being with the taper prized. Tapers gallop well and their tough hide and wedge shape enable them to go at speed through very dense cover. They try to stamp on and even to bite a foe but are only clumsy fighters. The taper is a very archaic type of ungulate not unlike the non-specialized beast of the oglysine. From some such ancestral type the highly specialized one-toed modern horse has evolved while during the uncounted ages that saw the horse thus develop the taper has continued substantially unchanged. Originally the tapers dwelt in the northern hemisphere but there they gradually died out the more specialized horse and even for long ages the rhinoceros persisting after they had vanished and nowadays the surviving tapers are found in Malaysia and South America far from the original home. The relations of the horse and taper in the paleontological history of South America are very curious. Both were geologically speaking comparatively recent immigrants and if they came at different dates it is almost certain that the horse came later. The horse for an age or two certainly for many hundreds of thousands of years drove greatly and developed not only several different species but even different genera. It was much the most highly specialized of the two and in other continental regions where both were found the horse outlasted the taper. But in South America the taper outlasted the horse. For many reasons the various genera and species of horses died out while the taper has persisted. The highly specialized highly developed beasts which represented such a full evolution and development died out while they are less specialized remote kinsfolk which had not developed clung to life and throve and this although the direct reverse was occurring in North America and in the old world it is one of the innumerable ways of life on our planet. End of Chapter 5 Part 1 Chapter 5 Part 2 of Through the Brazilian Wilderness This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Tom Clifton Through the Brazilian Wilderness by Theodore Roosevelt Chapter 5 Up the River of Tapers Part 2 I spent a couple of days of hard work in getting the big white-lipped peccaries white-lipped being rather a misnomer as the entire under jaw and lower cheek are white. They were said to be found on the other side of and some distance back from the river. Colonel Rondon had set out one of our attendants an old follower of his a full-blooded preceus Indian to look for treks. This was an excellent man who dressed and behaved just like the other good men we had and was called Antonio Parisus. He found the treks of a herd of 30 or 40 Cachadas. And the following morning we started after them. On the first day we killed nothing. We were rather too large a party for one or two of the visiting Fazenderos came along with their dogs. I doubt whether these men very much wished to overtake our game for the big peccary is a murderous foe of dogs and is sometimes dangerous to men. One of their number frankly refused to come or let his dogs come explaining that the fierce wild swine were very badly brought up a literal translation of his words and that respectable dogs and men ought not to go near them. The other Fazenderos merely feared for their dogs a groundless fear I believe as I do not think that the dogs could by any exertion have been dragged into dangerous proximity with such foes. The ranch foreman Benedetto came with us and two or three other camaradas including Antonio the priestess Indian. The horses were swum across the river each being led beside a dugout. Then we crossed with the dogs our horses were saddled and we started. It was a picturesque cavalcade. The native hunters of every shade from white to dark copper all were leather leggings that left the soles of the feet bare and on their bare heels were spurs with wheels four inches across. The dogs in single file for no other mode of travel was possible and the two or three leading men kept their machetes out and had to cut every yard of our way while we were in the forest. The hunters rode little stallions and their hounds were gilded. Most of the time we were in forest or swampy jungle. Part of the time we crossed or skirted marshy plains. In one of them a herd of half wild cattle was feeding. The hibises were in these marshes and we saw one flock of lovely rosy spoonbills. In one grove the fig trees were killing the palms. Just as in Africa they killed the sandalwood trees. In the gloom of this grove there were no flowers, no bushes. The air was heavy, the ground was brown with moldering leaves. Almost every palm was serving as a prop for a fig tree. The fig trees were in every stage and we ran up the palms as vines. In the next stage the vine had thickened and was sending out shoots wrapping the palm stem in a deadly hold. Some of the shoots were thrown round the stem like the tentacles of an immense cuttlefish. Others looked like claws that were hooked into every crevice and round every projection. In the stage beyond this the palm had been killed and its dead carcass appeared between the big winding vine trunks and later the palm had disappeared from the tree. Water stood in black pools at the foot of the murdered trees and of the trees that had murdered them. There was something sinister and evil in the dark stillness of the grove. It seemed as if sentient beings had ride themselves round and were strangling other sentient beings. We passed through wonderfully beautiful woods of tall palms the Wawasa Palm as it should be spelled in English. The trunks rose and the fronds were branches 20 or 30 feet long with the many long, narrow green blades starting out from the mid-rib at right angles and pairs. Round the ponds stood stately burity palms rising like huge columns with great branches that looked like fans as long, stiff blades radiated from the end of the mid-rib. One tree was gorgeous with the brilliant hues of a flock of party-colored macaws green parrots flew shrieking overhead. Now and then we were bitten and stung by the venomous fire ants and ticks crawled upon us. Once we were assailed by more serious foes in the shape of a nest of marabundi wasps not the biggest kind but about the size of our hornets. We were at the time passing through dense jungle under tall trees in a spot where the downed timber, holes, tangled creepers and thorns made the going difficult. The leading men were not assailed although they were now and then cutting the trail. Colonel Rhondon and I were in the middle of the column and the swarm attacked us. Both of us were badly stung on the face, neck and hands. The Colonel even more severely than I was. He wheeled and rode to the rear and eye to the front or horses were stung too and we went at a rate that a moment previously I would have deemed impossible over such ground. At the close of the day when we were almost back at the river the dogs killed a jaguar kitten. In the face of the mother some accident must have befallen her and the kitten was trying to shift for herself. She was very emaciated in her stomach were the remains of a pigeon and some tendons from the skeleton or dried carcass of some big animal. The loathsome bernie flies which deposit eggs in living beings cattle, dogs, monkeys, rodent, men had been at it. There were seven huge white grubs making big abscess like swellings over its eyes. In 1909 on Colonel Rondon's hardest trip every man of the party had from one to five grubs deposited in him. The fly acting with great speed and driving it over positor through clothing. The grubs caused torture but a couple of cross cuts with a lancet permit the loathsome creatures to be squeezed out. In these forests the multitude of insects that bite, sting, devour and prey upon other creatures with accompaniments of atrocious suffering passes belief. The very pathetic myth of beneficial nature could not deceive even the least wise being if he once saw for himself the iron cruelty of life in the tropics. Of course nature in common parlance a wholly inaccurate term by the way especially when used as if to express a single entity is entirely ruthless. No less so as regards types than as regards individuals and entirely indifferent to good or evil and works out her ends or no ends with other disregard of pain and woe. The following morning at sunrise we started again. This time only Colonel Rondon and I went with Benedetto and Antonio the Indian. We brought along four dogs which it was fondly hoped might chase the Kishadas. Two of them disappeared on the track of a taper and we saw them no more. One of the others promptly fled to the tracks of our game and would not even venture after them in our company. The remaining one did not actually run away and occasionally gave tongue but could not be persuaded to advance unless there was a man ahead of him. However Colonel Rondon, Benedetto and Antonio formed a trio of hunters who could do fairly well without dogs. After four hours of riding Benedetto who was in the lead suddenly stopped and pointed downward. We were riding along a grassy interval in the forest and he had found the fresh track of a herd of big peccaries crossing from left to right. There were apparently 30 or 40 in the herd. The small peccaries go singly or in small parties and when chase take refuge in holes or hollow logs where they show valiant fight but the big peccaries go in herds of considerable size and are so truculent that they are reluctant to run and prefer either to move slowly off chattering their tusks and grunting or else actually to charge. The survivors gradually grow more willing to run but their instinct is not to run but to trust to their truculence and their mass action for safety. They inflict a fearful bite and frequently kill dogs. They often charge the hunters and I have heard of men being badly wounded by them while almost every man who hunts them often is occasionally forced to scramble up a tree to avoid a charge but I have never heard of a man being killed by them. They sometimes surround a tree in their refuge and keep him up it. Cherie on one occasion in Costa Rica was thus kept up a tree for several hours by a great herd of three or four hundred of these peccaries and this although he killed several of them. Ordinarily however after making their charge they do not turn but pass out of sight. Their great foe is a jaguar but unless he exercises much caution they will turn the tables on him. Cherie also in Costa Rica came upon the body of a jaguar which had evidently been killed by a herd of peccaries some twenty four hours previously. The ground was crampled up by their hooves and the carcass was rent and slit into pieces. Benedetto as soon as we discovered the tracks slipped off his horse, changed his leggings for sandals, threw his rifle over his arm and took the trail of the herd followed by the only dog which would accompany him. The peccaries had gone into a broad belt of forest with a marsh on the farthest side. At first Antonio led the Colonel and me, all of us on horseback at a canter round this belt to the marsh side thinking the peccaries had gone almost through it. But we could hear nothing. The dog only occasionally barked and then not loudly. Finally we heard a shot. Benedetto had found the herd which showed no fear of him. He had backed out and fired a signal shot. We all three went into the forest on foot towards where the shot had been fired. It was dense jungle and stiflingly hot. We could not see clearly for more than a few feet or move easily without free use of the machetes. Soon we heard the ominous groaning of the herd in front of us and almost on each side. Then Benedetto joined us and the dog appeared in the rear. We moved slowly forward toward the sound of the fierce moaning grunts which were varied at times by a cast net chattering of the tusks. Then we dimly made out the dark forms of the peccaries moving very slowly to the left. Each chose a tree to climb up at need and pointed one out for me. I fired at the half-seen form of a hog through the vines, leaves and branches. The kernel fired. I fired three more shots at other hogs and the indian also fired. The peccaries did not charge walking and trotting with bristles erect, groaning and clacking their tusks they disappeared into the jungle. We could not see one of them clearly and not one was left dead but a few paces on we came across one of my wounded ones standing at bay by a palm trunk and I killed it forthright. The dog would not even trail the wounded ones but here Antonio came to the front with eyes almost as quick and sure as those of a wild beast he had watched after every shot and was able to tell the results in each case. He said that in addition to the one I had just killed I had wounded two others so seriously that he did not think they would go far and that Colonel Rondon and he himself had each badly wounded one and moreover he showed the trails each wounded animal had taken. The event justified him. In a few minutes we found my second one dead then we found Antonio's then we found my third one alive and at bay and I killed it with another bullet. Finally we found the kernels. I told him I should ask the authorities of the American Museum to mount his and one or two of mine in a group to commemorate our hunting together. If we had not used crippling rifles the pequeries might have gotten away. For in the dark jungle with the masses of intervening leaves and branches it was impossible to be sure of placing each bullet properly in the half-sane moving beast. We found where the herd had wallowed in the mud the stomachs of the pequeries we killed contained wild figs, palm nuts and bundles of root fibers. The dead beasts were covered with ticks. They were at least twice the weight of the smaller pequeries. On the ride home we found four species of bush deer not half the size of the kind I had already shot. It was only a patch of red in the bush, a good distance off, but I was lucky enough to hit it. In spite of its small size it was a full grown male of a species we had not yet obtained. The antlers had recently been shed and the new antler growth had just begun. A great job, Brewstork let us ride by him 150 yards off without thinking it worthwhile to take flight. This day we saw many of the beautiful violet orchids and endoswamps were multitudes of flowers red, yellow, lilac of which I did not know the names. I looted above to the queer custom these people in the interior of Brazil have of gelding their hunting dogs. This absurd habit is doubtless a chief reason why there are so few hounds worth their salt in the more serious kinds of hunting where the quarry is a jaguar or big peckery. Thus far we have seen but one dog as good as the ordinary cougar hound or bear hound in such packs as those with which I have hunted in the Rockies and in the Cane Breaks of the Lower Mississippi. It can hardly be otherwise when every dog that shows himself worth of anything is promptly put out of that category of breeders. The theory apparently being that the dog will then last longer. All the breeding is from worthless dogs and no dog of proved worth leaves descendants. The country along this river is a fine natural cattle country and some day it will surely see a great development. It was opened to the development by Colonel Rondon only five or six years ago. Already an occasional cattle ranch is to be found along the banks. When railroads are built into these interior portions of metro grosso the whole region will grow and thrive amazingly and so will the railroads. The growth will not be merely material. An immense amount will be done in education. Using the word education in its broadest and most accurate sense as applying to both mind and spirit to both the child and the man. Colonel Rondon is not merely an explorer. He has been and is now a leader in the movement for the vital betterment of his people the people of metro grosso the poorer people of the back country everywhere suffer because of the harsh and improper laws of debt. In practice these laws have resulted in establishing a system of peonage such as has grown up here and there in our own nation a radical change is needed in this matter and the colonel is fighting for the change. In school matters the colonel has precisely the ideas of our wisest and most advanced men and women in the United States. Cherie who is not only an exceedingly efficient naturalist and explorer in the tropics but is also a thoroughly good citizen at home is the chairman of the school board in the town of New Fane in Vermont. He and the colonel and Kermit and I talked over school matters at length and were in hearty accord as to the vital educational needs of both Brazil and the United States. The need of combining industrial with purely mental training and the need for having the widespread popular education which is and must be supported and paid for by the government made a purely governmental and absolutely non-secretarian function administered by the state alone without interference with nor furtherance of the beliefs the colonel is also head of the Indian service of Brazil being what corresponds roughly with our commissioner of Indian affairs here he is also taking the exact view that is taken in the United States by the staunchest and wisest friends of the Indians the Indians must be treated with intelligence and sympathetic understanding no less than with justice and firmness and until they become citizens absorbed into the general body politic they must be the wards of the nation and not any private association lay or clerical no matter how well meaning the sepa tuba river was scientifically explored and mapped for the first time by colonel rondin in 1908 as head of the Brazilian telegraphic commission this was during the second year of his exploration and opening of the unknown northwest wilderness of metal grosso most of this wilderness had never previously been trodden by the foot of a civilized man not only were careful maps made and much other scientific work accomplished but posts were established and telegraph lines constructed when colonel rondin began the work he was a major he was given two promotions to lieutenant colonel and colonel while absent in the wilderness his longest and most important exploring trip and the one fraught with most danger and hardship was begun by him in 1909 on may 3rd the anniversary of the discovery of brazil he left tipira poan on that day and he reached the madura river on christmas december 25th of the same year having descended the guy piranha the mouth of this river had long been known but its upper course for half its length was absolutely unknown when rondin descended it among those who took part under him in this piece of exploration were the present captain amlacar and lieutenant lyre and two better or more efficient men for such wilderness work it would be impossible to find they acted as his two chief assistants on our trip in 1909 the party exhausted all their food including even the salt by august for the last four months they lived exclusively on the game they killed on fruits and on wild honey their equipage was what the men could carry on their backs by the time the party reached the madera they were worn out by fatigue exposure and semi starvation and their enfeebled bodies were wracked by fever the work of exploration accomplished by colonel rondin and his associates during these years was as remarkable as and in its results even more important than any similar work undertaken elsewhere on the globe or at about the same time its value was recognized in brazil it received no recognition by the geographical societies of europe or the united states the work done by the original explorers of such a wilderness necessitates the undergoing of untold hardship and danger their successors, even their immediate successors have a relatively easy time soon the road becomes so well beaten that it can be traversed without hardship by any man who does not venture from it although if he goes off into the wilderness for even a day hunting or collecting he will have a slight taste of what his predecessors endured the wilderness explored by colonel rondin is not yet wholly subdued and still holds menace to human life at caseras he received notice of the death of one of his gallant subordinates captain cardozo he died from berry berry far out in the wilderness along our proposed line of march colonel rondin also received news that a boat descending the guy piranha took care of provisions to meet those of our party who were to descend that stream had been upset the provisions lost and three men drowned ship are such that the ordinary men the camaradas do not like to go into the wilderness the men who go with the telegraphic commission on the rougher and wilder work are paid seven times as much as they earn in civilization on this trip of ours colonel rondin met with much difficulty in securing someone who could cook he asked the cook on the little steamer nyak to go with us but the cook with unaffected horror responded senor i have never done anything to deserve punishment end of chapter five part two chapter five part three of through the brazilian wilderness this is a libervox recording all libervox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit libervox.org recording by tom clifton through the brazilian wilderness by theodore roosevelt chapter five up the river of tapers part three five days after leaving us the launch with one of the native trading boats lashed alongside returned on the thirteenth we broke camp load ourselves and all our belongings on the launch in the houseboat and started upstream for topiripoan all told there were about 30 men with five dogs and tents bedding and provisions fresh beef growing rapidly less fresh skins everything jammed together it rained most of the first day and part of the first night after that the weather was generally overcast and pleasant for traveling but sometimes rain and torrid sunshine alternated the cooking, and it was good cooking was done at a funny little open-air fireplace with two or three cooking pots placed at the stern of the houseboat the fireplace was a platform of earth taken from anthills and heaped and spread on the boards of the boat around it the dusky cook worked with philosophic solemnity in rain and shine our attendants friendly souls with skins of every shade and hue slept most of the time curled up among boxes bundles and slabs of beef and an enormous land turtle was tethered towards the bow of the houseboat when the men slept too near it it made futile efforts to scramble over them and in return now and then one of them gravely used it for a seat slowly the throbbing engine drove the launch in its unwieldy side partner against the swift current the river had risen we made about a mile and a half an hour ahead of us the brown water stretched in curves between endless walls of dense tropical forest it was like passing through a gigantic greenhouse owasa and buriti palms sucropias, huge figs feathery bamboos strange yellowed dim trees low trees with enormous leaves tall trees with foliage as delicate as lace trees with buttress trunks trees with bowls rising smooth and straight to lofty heights all woven together by a tangle of vines crowded down to the edge of the river their drooping branches hung down to the water forming a screen through which it was impossible to see the bank and exceedingly difficult to penetrate to the bank rarely one of them showed flowers large white blossoms tall red or yellow blossoms more often the lilac flowers the begonia vine made large patches of color innumerable effigytes covered the limbs and even grow on the roughened trunks we saw little bird life a darter now and then and king fishes flitting from perch to perch at long intervals we passed a ranch at one the large red-tiled whitewashed house stood on a grassy slope behind mango trees the wooden shutters were thrown back from the unglazed windows and the big rooms were utterly bare not a book, not an ornament a palm loaded with scores of the pendulous nest of the troupiles stood near the door behind were orange trees and coffee plants and nearby fields of bananas rice and tobacco the sallow foreman was courteous inhospitable his dark-skinned womenfolk kept in the furative background like most of the ranches it was owned by a company with geckiseries the trip was pleasant and interesting although there was not much to do on the boat it was too crowded to move around save with a definite purpose we enjoyed the scenery we talked in English, Portuguese bad French and broken German some of us wrote Fiala made sketches of improved tents, hammocks and other field equipment suggested by what he had already seen some of us read books Fr. Rondon, Nate Trem Alert and, soldierly, studied a standard work on applied geographical astronomy Fr. Zahm read a novel by Fugizarro Kermit read Kimoans and a couple of Brazilian novels O'Garani and Innocentia my own reading varied from Quentin Duart and Gibbon to the Shenone de Rowland Millard took out his little pet Al Moses from the basket in which Moses dwelt and gave him food and water Moses crooned and chuckled gratefully when he was stroked and tickled late the first evening we moored to the bank by a little Fizanda of the poorer type the houses were of palm leaves even the walls were made of the huge fronds or leafy branches of the Wawasa Palm stuck upright in the ground and the blades plated together some of us went ashore some stayed on the boats there were no mosquitoes the weather was not oppressively hot by five o'clock next morning we had each drunk a cup of delicious Brazilian coffee and the boats were underway all day we steamed slowly upstream we passed two or three Fizandas at one where we halted to get milk the trees were overgrown with pretty little yellow orchids at dark we moored at a spot where there were no branches to prevent or placing boats directly alongside the bank there were hardly any mosquitoes most of the party took their hammocks ashore and the camp was pitched amid singularly beautiful surroundings the trees were Wawasa Palms some with the fronds cresting very tall trunks some with the fronds seemingly longer rising almost from the ground the fronds were of great length some could not have been less than fifty feet long bushes and tall grass due drenched and glittering with the green of emeralds drew in the open spaces between we left at sunrise the following morning one of the sailors had strayed inland he got turned round and could not find the river and we started before discovering his absence we stopped at once and with much difficulty he forced his way through the vine-laced and thorn-guarded jungle toward the sound of the launches engines and of the bugle which was blown in this dense jungle when the sun is behind clouds a man without a compass who strays a hundred yards from the river may readily become hopelessly lost as we ascended the river the Wawasa Palms became constantly more numerous at this point for many miles they gave their own character to the forest on the river banks everywhere their long curving fronds rose up among other trees and in places their lofty trunks made them hold their heads higher than the other trees but they were never as tall as the giants among the ordinary trees on one towering palm we noticed a mass of beautiful violet orchids growing from the side of the trunk halfway to the top on another big tree, not a palm which stood in a little opening that hung well over a hundred trupil's nests besides two or three small ranches we this day passed a large ranch the various houses and sheds all palm-thatched stood by the river in a big space of cleared ground dotted with Wawasa Palms a native houseboat was moored by the bank to look from the unglazed windows of the houses men stood in front of them the biggest house was enclosed by a stockade of palm logs thrust and on into the ground cows and oxengraze round about and the carts with solid wheels each wheel made of a single disc of wood were tilted on their poles we made our noonday halt on an island where very tall trees grow bearing fruits that were pleasant to the taste other trees on the island covered with rich red and yellow blossoms and masses of delicate blue flowers and of star-shaped white flowers grew underfoot hither and tither across the surface of the river flew swallows with so much white on their plumage that as they flashed in the sun they seemed to have snow-white bodies born by dark wings the current of the river grew swifter there were stretches of broken water that were almost rapids the laboring engines strained and sobbed it urged forward the launch in a clumsy consort at nightfall we moored beside the bank where the forest was open enough to permit a comfortable camp that night the ants ate large holes in Miller's mosquito netting and almost devoured his socks and shoelaces at sunrise we again started there were occasional stretches of swift broken water almost rapids in the river everywhere the current was swift and our progress was slow the branch was towed at the end of a hauser and her crew polled even thus we only just made the riffle in more than one case two or three times cormorants and snake-birds perched on snags in the river or on trees alongside it permitted the boat to come within a few yards in one piece of high forest we saw a party of two cons conspicuous even among the treetops because of their huge bills and the leisurely externess with which they crawled climbed and hopped among the branches we went by several fazendas shortly before noon January 16 we reached Tepira Poin the headquarters of the telegraphic commission it was an attractive place on the riverfront and it was gaily bedecked with flags not only those of Brazil and the United States but all of the other American republics in our honor there was a large green square with trees standing in the middle of it on one side of this square were the buildings of the telegraphic commission on the other those of a big ranch of which this is the headquarters in addition there were stables, sheds outhouses and corrals and there were cultivated fields nearby milk cows, beef cattle oxen and mules wandered almost at will there were two or three wagons and carts an attraction automobile used in the construction of the telegraph line but not available in the rainy season at any time of our trip here we were to begin our trip overland on pack mules and pack oxen scores of which have been gathered to meet us several days were needed to apportion the loads and arrange for the several divisions in which it was necessary that so large a party should attempt the long wilderness march through a country where there was not much food for man or beast and where it was always possible to run into a district in which fatal cattle or horse diseases were prevalent Fiala with its usual efficiency took charge of handling the outfit of the American portion of the expedition with SIG as an active and useful assistant Harper who like others worked with wholehearted zeal and surefulness also helped him except when he was engaged in helping the naturalists the two ladder Cherie and Miller had so far done the hardest and the best work of the expedition they had collected about a thousand birds and two hundred and fifty mammals not probable that they would do so well as during the remainder of our trip for we intended thenceforth to halt as little and march as steadily as the country the weather and the condition of our means of transportation permitted I kept continually wishing that they had more time in which to study the absorbingly interesting life histories of the beautiful and wonderful beast and birds we were all the time seeing every first rate museum must still employ competent collectors but I think that a museum could now confer a most lasting benefit and could do work of most permanent good by sending out into the immense wilderness where wild nature is at her best trained observers with the gift of recording what they have observed such men should be collectors for collecting is still necessary but they should also and indeed primarily be able themselves to see and to set vividly before the eyes of others the full life histories of the creatures that dwell in the waste spaces of the world at this point both Cherie and Miller collected a number of mammals and birds which they had not previously obtained whether anywhere new to science could only be determined after the specimens reached the American museum while making the round of a small mammal traps one morning Miller encountered an army of the formidable foraging ants the species was a large black one moving with a well extended front these ants sometimes called army ants like the ants of Africa move in big bodies and destroy or make prey of every living thing that is unable earn willing to get out of their path in time they run fast and everything runs away from their advance insects form their chief prey and the most dangerous and aggressive lower life creatures make astonishingly little resistance to them Miller's attention was first attracted to this army of ants by noticing a big centipede nine or ten inches long trying to flee before them a number of ants were biting it and it writhed at each bite but it did not try to use its long curved jaws against its assailants on other occasions he saw big scorpions and big hairy spiders trying to escape in the same way and showing the same helpless inability to injure the ravenous foes or to defend themselves the ants climbed trees to a great height much higher than most birds nests and at once kill and tear the pieces any fledglings in the nests they reach but they are not as common as some riders seem to imagine days may elapse before their armies are encountered and doubtless most nests are never visited or threatened by them in some instances it seems likely that the birds save themselves and they're young in other ways some nests are inaccessible from others it is probable that the parents remove the young Miller once in Guyana had been watching for some days a nest in the young going tither one morning he found the tree and the nest itself swarming with foraging ants he at first thought that the fledglings had been devoured but he soon saw the parents only about 30 yards off with food in their beaks they were engaged in entering a dense part of the jungle coming out again without food in their beaks and soon reappearing once more with food Miller never found their new nests but their actions most have themselves removed from the old nest these ant wrens hover in front of and over the columns of foraging ants feeding not only on the other insects aroused by the ants but on the ants themselves this fact has been doubted but Miller has shot them with ants in their bills and in their stomachs dragonflies in numbers often hover over the columns darting down at them Miller could not be certain he had seen them actually seizing the ants but this was his belief I myself have seen these ants plunder a nest of the dangerous and highly aggressive wasps while the wasps buzzed around in great excitement but seemed unable effectively to retaliate I have also seen them clear a sapling tenanted by their kinsmen the poisonous red ants or fire ants the fire ants fought and I have no doubt injured or killed some of the swarming and active black foes but the latter quickly did away with them I have only come across black foraging but there are red species they attack human beings precisely as they attack all animals and precipitate flight is the only resort around our camp here butterflies of gorgeous coloring swarmed and there were many fungi as deltically shaped and tinted as flowers the scents in the woods were wonderful there were many whipper-wills or rather Brazilian birds related to them they uttered at intervals throughout the night a succession of notes suggesting both those of her and those of her big chuck-wills widow of the gulf states but not identical with either there were other birds which were nearly akin to familiar birds in the United States a dull colored cat bird a dull colored robin and a sparrow belonging to the same genus as their common song sparrow and a sweetheart sparrow Miller had heard this sparrow singing by day and night 14,000 feet up on the Andes and its song suggested the songs of both our sparrows there were doves and woodpeckers of various species other birds bore no resemblance to any of ours one honey-creeper was a perfect little gem with plumage that was black, purple and turquoise and brilliant scarlet feet two of the birds with Cherie and Miller procured were of extraordinary nesting habits one a nunlet in shape resembles a short-tailed bluebird it is plumbus with a fulvis belly and white-tailed coverts it is a stupid little bird to fly away even when shot at it catches its prey an ordinary axe like a rather dull fly catcher perching on some dead tree swooping on insects and then returning to its perch and never going to the ground to feed or run about but it nest in burrows which it digs itself one bird usually digging while the other bird perches in a bush nearby sometimes these burrows are inside of a sand bank the sand being so loose that it is a marvel it does not cave in sometimes the burrows are in the level plane running down about three feet and then rising at an angle the nest consists of a few leaves and grasses and the eggs are white the other bird called a nun or wax bill is about the size of a thrush grayish in color with a waxy red bill it also burrows in the level soil the burrow being about five feet long and over the mouth of the burrow it heaps a pile of sticks and leaves at this camp the heat was great from 91 to 104 Fahrenheit an air very heavy being saturated with moisture and there were many rainstorms but there were no mosquitoes and we were very comfortable thanks to the neighborhood of the ranch we fared sumptuously with plenty of beef chickens and fresh milk two of the brazilian dishes were delicious cona a thick soup of chicken and rice the best soup a hungry man ever tasted and beef chopped in rather small pieces and served with a well-flavored but simple gravy the mule allotted to me as a riding beast was a powerful animal with easy gates the brazilian government had waiting for me a very handsome silver-mounted saddle and bridle I was much pleased with both however my exceedingly rough and shabby clothing made it in congress contrast at Forte per Poen we broke up our baggage as well as our party we sent forward the canadian canoe which with the motor engine and some kerosene went in a cart drawn by six oxen in a hundred sealed tin cases of provisions each containing rations for a day for six men they had been put up in New York under the special direction of fiala for use when we got where we wished to take a good and varied food in small compass all the skins, skulls and alcoholic specimens and all the baggage not absolutely necessary were sent back down the Paraguay and to New York in charge of Harper separate baggage trains under the charge of Captain Amlakar were organized to go in one detachment the main body of the expedition consisting of the American members and of Colonel Rondon, Lieutenant Lyra and Dr. Cajera with their baggage and provisions formed another detachment End of Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Part 1 of Through the Brazilian Wilderness This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recording are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Ben Wilford Through the Brazilian Wilderness by Theodore Roosevelt Chapter 6 Through the Highland Wilderness of Western Brazil Part 1 We were now in the land of the blood-sucking bats the vampire bats that sucked the blood of living creatures clinging to or hooping against the shoulder cow with a hand or foot of a sleeping man and making a wound from which the blood continues to flow long after the bats' thirst has been satiated At Terrapinone there were milk-cattles and one of the calves turned up one morning weak from loss of blood which was still trickling from a wound forward of the shoulder made by a bat But the bats do little damage in this neighborhood compared to what they do in some other places where not only the mules are cattled but the chickens have to be housed behind bat-proof protection at night whether lies may pay the penalty The chief and habitual offenders are various species of rather small bats but it is said that other kinds of Brazilian bats seem to have become at least sporadically and locally affected by the evil example and occasionally vary their customary diet by droughts of living blood One of the Brazilian members of our party, Hona was a zoologist also He informed me that he had known even the big fruit-eating bats to take the blood-sucking They did not, according to his observations themselves make the original wound but after it had been made by one of the true vampires they would lap the flowing blood and enlarge the wound South America makes up for its lack relatively to Africa and India of large man-eating carnivores by the extraordinary ferocity or blood-thirstiness of certain small creatures of which the kinsfolk elsewhere are harmless It is only here that fish no bigger than trout kill swimmers and bats the size of ordinary footer mice of the northern hemisphere drain the life-blood of big beast and the man himself There was not much large mammalian life in the neighborhood Kermit hunted industriously and brought in an occasional armadillo, koate or agouti for the naturalist Miller trapped rats in a queer possum new to the collection Cherry got many birds Cherry and Miller skinned their species in a little open hut or shed Moses, the small pet owl sat on a crossbar overhead an interested spectator and chuckled whenever he was petted Two wrens who bred just outside the hut were much excited by the presence of Moses and paid him visits of noisy wilderness. The little white-throated sparrows came familiarly about the palm cabins and white-washed houses and trailed on the roof trees It was a simple song with just a hint of our northern white-throat sweet and plaintiff melody and of the opening bars of our song sparrows pleasant, homely lay It brought back dear memories of glorious April mornings on Long Island When through the singing of the robin and the song sparrows comes the piercing catus of the middle-art The far northland woods in June fragrant with the breath of pine and balsam fir, where a sweetheart sparrows sing from wet spruce thickets and rapid brooks rush under the drenched and swaying alder boughs From Terrapinone, our course lay northward up to and across the plan-auto, the Highland Wilderness of Brazil From the edges of this Highland country which is geologically very ancient the fluids of the Amazon to the north and of the plate in the south flow with immense and devious loops and windings Two days before we ourselves started with our mule train a train of pack oxen left loaded with provisions, tools and other things which we would not need until after a month or six weeks We began our descent into the valley of the Amazon There were about 70 oxen Most of them were well broken but there were about a score which were either not broken at all These were loaded with much difficulty and bulked like wild broncos Again and again, they scattered their loaves over the corral and over the first part of the road The pack men, however copper colored black and dusky white were not only masters of their art but possessed tempers that could not be ruffled When they showed severity it was because severity was needed and not because they were angry They finally got all their long horned beasts loaded and started on the trail with them On January 21 we ourselves started with the mule train Of course, as always in such a journey, there was some confusion before the men and the animals of the train settled down to the routine performance of duty In addition to the pack animals we all had riding mule The first day we journeyed about 12 miles then crossing the sapataba and camping beside it below a series of falls or rather rapids, the country was level It was a great natural pasture covered with a very open forest of low twisted trees bearing a superficial likeness to the cross-timbers of Texas and Oklahoma It is as well fitted for stock raising as Oklahoma and there is also much fine agricultural land While the river will ultimately yield electric power it is a fine country for settlement The heat is great at noon but the nights are not uncomfortable We are supposed to be in the middle of the rainy season but here there too Most of the days have been fine varied with showers The astonishing thing was the absence of mosquitoes Insect pests that work by day can be stewed and especially by settlers because they are far less serious foals than in the woods The mosquitoes and other night foals offer the really serious and unpleasant problem because they break one's wrist hitherto during our travel up of Paraguay and its tributaries in this level, marshy tropical regions of western Brazil we had practically not been bothered by mosquitoes at all in our home camps out in the woods they were at times a serious nuisance and cherry and miller had been subjected to real torment by them during some of their special expeditions but there were practically none on the ranches and in our camps in the open fields by the river even when marshes were close by I was puzzled and delighted by their absence Settlers need not be deterred from coming to this region by the fear of insect foals This does not mean that there are not such foals outside of the clearings and of the beaten tracks of travel they teen there are ticks, poisonous ants wasps of which some species are really serious menaces biting flies and gnats I merely mean that unlike so many other tropical regions this particular region is from the standpoint of the settler a ordinary traveler relatively free from insect pests and a pleasant place of residence the original explorer and to an only less degree the hard working field naturalists or big game hunter had to face these pests just as they had to face countless risk hardships and difficulties this is inherent in their several professions or advocations many regions in the united states where life is now absolutely comfortable and easy going offered most formal problems to the first explorers a century or two ago we must not fall into the foolish area of thinking that the first explorers need not suffer terrible hardships merely because ordinary travelers and even the settlers who came after them do not have to endure such danger, privations and wearing fatigue although the first among the genuine settlers also have to undergo extremely trying experiences the early explorers and venturers made fairly well beaten trails but it is incumbent on them either to boast of their own experiences nor to misjudge the efforts of the pioneers because thanks to these very efforts their own minds fall in pleasant places the ordinary traveler who never goes off the beaten route or who on this beaten route is carried by others without himself doing anything or risking anything he does not need to show much more initiative and intelligent than an express package he does nothing others do all the work show all the foresight, take all the risk and are entitled to all the credit he and his police are carried in practically the same fashion and for each the achievement stands about on the same plane if this kind of traveler is a writer he can of course do admirable work work of the highest value but the value comes that he is a writer and observer not because of any particular credit that attaches to him as a traveler we all recognize his truth as far as highly civilized regions are concerned when Bryce writes of the American Commonwealth a lull of European legislative assemblies our admiration is for the insight and thought of the observer and we are not concerned with his travels when a man travels across Arizona in a Pullman car we do not think of him as having performed a feat bearing even the most remote resemblance to the feats of the first explorers of those waterless waste whatever admiration we feel in connection with his trip is reserved for the traffic superintendent engineer, fireman and breakman but as regards the less known continents such as South America we sometimes fail to remember these obvious truths that have to be done in South America as hard, as dangerous and almost as important as any that has already been done work such as has been recently done or is now being done by men and women such as Hazelman, Farabi and Miss Snaglish the collecting naturalists who go into the wilds and do first class work encounter every kind of risk and undergo every kind of hardship and exertion explorers and naturalists of the right type have opened to them in South America a feel of extraordinary attraction and difficulty but to excavate ruins that have already long been known to visit out of the way towns that date from colonial days to a diverse old even if uncomfortable routes to travel or to ascend or descend highway rivers like the Amazon the Paraguay and the lower Orinico all of these exploits are well worth performing but they in no sense represent exploration or adventure and they do not entitle the performer no matter how well he writes and no matter how much of real value he contributes to human knowledge to compare himself in any way with a real wilderness wanderer or to criticize the latter such a performance entails no hardship or difficulty worth heeding its value depends purely on observation not on action but on does little he merely records what he sees he is only the man of the beaten routes the true wilderness wanderer on the contrary must be a man of actions as well as of observation he must have the heart and the body to do and to endure no less than the eye to see and the brain to note and record let me make it clear that I am not depreciating the excellent work of so many of the men who have not gone off the beaten trails I merely wish to make it plain that this excellent work must not be put in the class with that of the wilderness explorer it is excellent work nevertheless and has its place just as the work of the true explorer has its place both stand in sharpest contrast with the actions of those alleged explorers among whom Mr. Savage Landor stands in unpleasant prominence from the sepa tuber rapids the course at the outset lay westward the first days marched away from the river lay through dense tropical forest away from the broad beaten rep every step of a man's progress represented slashing a trail with a machete through the tangle of brushes low trees, thorny scrub and interlaced creepers there were palms of new kinds very tall, slender, straight and graceful with rather short and few fronds plantains or pacavus thronged the spaces among the trunks of the tall trees their bowls were short and their broad, erect leaves gigantic they bore bright red and orange flowers there were trees whose trunks bellied into huge swelling there were towering trees with buttress trunk whose leaves made a fret work among the sky far overhead gorgeous red and green trogons with long tails endless on the lower branches and uttered a loud, thrice-repeated whistle we heard the calling of the false bellbird which is gray instead of white like the true bellbirds it keeps among the very topmost branches heavy rain fell shortly after we restart camping place next morning at sunrise we climbed a steep slope to the edge of the parisus plateau at a level of about 2,000 feet above the sea we were on the plan alto the high central plain of Brazil the healthy land of dry air of cool nights of clear running brooks the sun was directly behind us when we topped the rise raining in, we looked back over the vast Paraguay marshes simmering in the long morning light then, turning again we rode forward casting shadows far before us it was 20 miles to the next water and in hot weather the journey across this waterless shadeless sandy stretch of country is hard on the mules and oxen but on this day the sky speedily grew overcast and a cool wind blew in our faces as we traveled at a quick running walk over the immense rolling plains the ground was sandy it was covered with grass and with a sparse growth of rays, ostrich and small pimpus deers on this plain the coloration of the rays made it difficult to see them at a distance whereas the bright red coast of the little deer and their uplifted flags as they ran advertised them a far off we also saw the footprints of cougars and of the small toothed big red wolf cougars are the most invertebrate enemies of those small South American deer both those of the open grassy plain and those of the forest it is not nearly as easy to get lost on these open plains as in the dense forest and where there is a long reasonably straight road or river to come back to a man even without a compass is safe but in these thick South American forests, especially on cloudy days, a compass is an absolute necessity we were struck by the fact that the native hunters and ranchmen last days continually lost themselves and, if permitted, traveled from miles to the forest either in circles or in exactly the wrong direction they had no sense of direction as the forest-dwelling nadurobo hunters in Africa had or as the true forest-dwelling Indians of South America are said to have on certainly half a dozen occasions our guys went completely astray and we had to take men to disregard their assertions and to lead the way aright by sole reliance on our compasses on this cool day we traveled well the air was wonderful the vast open spaces gave a sense of abounding vigor and freedom early in the afternoon we reached the station made by Colonel Rondon in the course of his first explorations there were several houses with white-washed walls, stone floors and tile-rathatch roofs they stood in a wide, gently sloping valley through it ran a rapid brook of cool water in which we enjoyed delightful bass the heavy, intensely humid atmosphere of the low, marshy plains had gone, the air was clear and fresh, the sky was brilliant far and wide we looked over a landscape that seemed limitless, the breeze that blew on our faces might have come from our own northern plains the midday sun was very hot but it was hard to realize that we were in the torrid zone there were no mosquitoes so that we never put up our nets when we went to bed but wrapped ourselves under blankets and slept soundly through the cool, pleasant nights surely in the future this region will be the home of a healthy, highly civilized population it is good for cattle raising and the valleys are fitted for agriculture from June to September the nights are often really cold any sound northern rays could live here and in such a land with such a climate there would be much joy of living on these plains the telegraphic commission used as motor trucks and these now to relieve the mules and oxen for some of them especially among the oxen already showed the effects of the strain traveling in a wild country with a pack train is not easy on pack animals it was strange to see these big motor vans out in the wilderness where there was not a settler not a civilized man except the employees of the telegraphic commission they were handled by lieutenant loriado who with a lieutenant mellow had taken special charge of our transport service both were exceptionally good and competent men the following day we again rode on across the plan alto in the early afternoon in the midst of a downpour of rain we crossed the divide between the basins of the Paraguay and the amazon we camped on a brook whose water ultimately ran into the top of host the rain fell throughout the afternoon now lightly now heavily and the meal train did not get up until dark but enough tents and flies were pitched to shelter all of us fires were lit and after a 14 hours fast we feasted royally on beans and rice and pork and beef seated around ox skin spread upon the ground the night cleared the stars blazed down through the cool night and wrapped in our blankets we slept soundly warm and comfortable next morning the trail had turned and our course led northward and at times east of north we traversed the same high rolling plains of course grass and stunted trees kermit riding a big iron math bullheaded white mule rode off to one side on a hunt and rejoined the line of march carrying two bucks of the little pompous deer or field deer behind his saddle these deer are very pretty and graceful with a tail like that of the columbian black tail standing most of us facing one and the sparse scrub they are hard to make out if seen sideways the reddish of their coats contrasted with the greens and gray of the landscape betrays them and when they bound off the upraised white tail is very conspicuous they carefully avoid the woods in which their cousins the little bush deer are found and go singly or in couples their odor can be made out at quite a distance but it is not ranked they still carry their antlers their venison was delicious we came across many queer insects one red grasshopper when it flew seemed as big as a small sparrow and we passed in some places such multitudes of active little green grasshoppers that they frightened the mules at our camping place we saw an extraordinary colony of spiders it was among some dwarf trees standing a few yards apart from one another by the water when we reached the camping place early in the afternoon the pack train did not get in until nearly sunset just ahead of the rain no spiders were out they were under the leaves of the trees their webs were tenetless indeed for the most part were broken down but it does they came out from their hiding places two or three hundred of them in all and it once began to repair the old and spin new webs each spun its own circular web and sat in the middle and each web was connected on several sides with other web while those nearest the tree were hung to them by spun ropes so to speak the result was a kind of sheet of web consisting of scores in each of which the owner and proprietor set and there was half a dozen such sheet each extending between two trees the web could hardly be seen and the effect was of scores of big, formal looking spiders poised in midair equidistant from one another between each pair of trees when darkness and rain fell they were still out fixing their webs and passing on the occasional insects that blundered into the webs I have no question that they are nocturnal they certainly hide in the daytime and it seems impossible that they come out only for a few minutes at dusk End of Chapter 6 Part 1