100 Years Ago: April 1926

[George Thomas Wilson]

100 Years Ago: April 1926

 

This is the 135^th entry in my series of rewrites of one-hundred-year-old National Geographic Magazines.

 

 

Before the articles are listed on the cover of this month’s issue, there is a banner stating, “Twenty-four Pages of Illustrations in Full Color.”  These color plates are contained as blocks within two articles (articles 2 and 4), the first sixteen pages long, the second, eight.  A problem arises because the plates are number in Roman numerals, I to XVI in the first and I to VIII in the second.  This makes eight pairs of pages with the same posted number.  For example, the first plate VI represents page 430 while the second plate VI represents page 470.

 

The first article in this month’s issue is entitled “Exploring the Valley of the Amazon in a Hydroplane” and was written by Capt. Albert W. Stevens, U. S. Army Air Service.  It has the internal subtitle: “Twelve Thousand Miles of Flying Over the World’s Greatest River and Greatest Forest to Chart the Unknown Parima River from the Sky.”  The article contains eighty-six black-and-white photographs, of which twenty-two are full-page in size.  A block of sixteen full-page photos may be duotones, and I’ll treat them as such with an entry following the first article.  It also contains a full-page sketch map of the Amazon Basin on page 354.

Sketch Map courtesy of Philip Riviere

Man’s conquest over Nature was never more forcefully asserted than when members of the Alexander Hamilton Rice Scientific Expedition flew to the headwaters of the Parima River in northwestern Brazil.  The upper Amazon Basin was one of the last of the world’s blind spots to succumb to the persevering curiosity of the explorer.  For many years attempts had been made in vain to penetrate the dense jungles which covered it, and to navigate the seething rapids that blocked its rivers, but the undertaking had now been proven feasible from the air.  Where the untrodden jungle presented a matted and almost impenetrable wall to men on foot, it surrendered its secrets readily to men in the sky.  The hostile Indians who had hindered previous expeditions could not obstruct a plane flying 3,000 feet above them, and no ground scout could match an aviator in ferreting out the easiest trails to follow and warn of the obstacles to be met and overcome.  Their hydroplane served as the eyes of the expedition.  Their party assembled in Manaos, Brazil, on July 6, 1924, and was headed by Dr. Rice.  The author served as observer and aerial photographer.  With the India porters and paddlers, their party numbered more than 100.  The variety of professionals on the staff suggested the variety of objectives of the expedition.  Dr. Rice set the following program:  To survey and map the Rio Branco and its western affluent, the Rio Uraricoera, following the latter to its source in the Serra Parima, and trying to see if any passage existed between the headwaters of this river and those of the Orinoco, thus tying this survey to the one carried out on his 1919-20 expedition.  They also planned to test the usefulness of a hydroplane in survey work in map sketching, aerial photography, scouting, reconnaissance, and communication between separated party units.

Further, the expedition was to attempt astronomic and radio tests, to study the geology of the region, to gather anthropological and ethnological data, and to make a medical survey.  Their expedition started off with a bang – with several bangs.  On the night following their arrival at Manoas, a revolution broke out.  The city was peaceful as they sat down for dinner in the lobby of the grand hotel, when s troop of soldiers marched by dragging some light fieldpieces and machine guns.  During the first course a regular Fourth of July celebration broke loose outside.  Frightened hotel attendants slammed doors, banged down windows, and pulled the shades.  A hotel employee rushed to close the window by their table.  They waved him away.  They had no intentions of missing anything.  The author looked out upon an empty street.  Everything was shuttered.  A man came running into the street at full speed.  He zigzagged back and forth, wildly searching for a place of refuge.  The light from their window caught his eye and he made for it.  The window was high, but he jumped and they caught him and pulled him up and in.  He collapsed on the floor, his teeth chattering.  The author was convinced that his cabin mate on the way up from Rio de Janeiro set off the revolution.  At every port he donned a silk hat, dressed as a diplomat, and vanished ashore for the day.  Nd at every port they stopped a revolution subsequently broke out.  It was fortunate that they came on that boat for shipping on the lower Amazon ceased for two months after the outbreak.  The fireworks died down later in the evening, so they decided to venture out to look over the field of carnage.  The streets were still deserted.  They came to a soldier who let them pass; then another with the same result. They reached the public square where most of the fighting had occurred.

The police barracks facing the square was riddled by gunfire.  The police had defended Manaos from the unpaid soldiers, but when their barracks fort became too hot all had fled save one – an old police colonel, who held out.  His return fire finally ceased and the troops closed in.  They found him wounded, shot four times in the arms and legs.  The besiegers praised their prisoner for his gallant defense and packed him off to the hospital.  Manaos had changed hands with not more than a dozen casualties.  One morning a few weeks after the revolution their steamer and hydroplane started up the Rio Negro, and for nine months thereafter they were in, beside and over the world’s largest forest.  To take advantage of the cool, steady air and good observation conditions, Hinton, the pilot, and the author took off in early morning, flying about 100 miles up the river, photographing and sketching as they went.  By nightfall the steamer with the rest of the expedition usually arrived at their anchorage.  The Negro was well named; it was glossy black.  When it was smooth the Negro, by its blackness, produced a sort of mirror.  To a person on a steamer the beauty of the tropical scene was heightened by that phenomenon, but to a hydroplane pilot it offered grave danger, because he could not accurately gauge his distance.  Whenever possible Hinton came down in the wake of a boat whose waves broke the mirror.  For 200 miles they followed those waters, from Manaos to Carvoeiro, where, to their great relief, they saw the milky waters of the Rion Branco pouring into the Negro like cream into black coffee.  At Siroroco, some distance up the Rio Branco, they stood on their own shadows!  Siroroco was one degree off the Equator, and the arrived at the autumnal equinox.  At noon, therefore, the sun was directly overhead.

There they made their first repairs.  The hull covering had come loose at spots on the bottom of the plane.  They had the plane ready when the boat caught up with them that afternoon.  They pulled the plane up on the mud bank and Wilshusen stripped off the veneer and replaced it with solid planking.  He worked strenuously, day and night.  Two days later, with the help of 20 Indians, the hydroplane was eased into the water.  For the next six months two thin strips of mahogany with canvass between them were all that separated them from the water.  Six months proved to be about the limit of their endurance, as the hull was practically waterlogged when they landed at Manaos on their return journey in late March 1925.  Weather had a set scheduled in the Amazon Basin.  The day usually dawned bright and clear.  By 9 or 10 o’clock clouds gathered and in the afternoon it often rained.  The clouds tempered the sun’s heat making the days more comfortable.  The nights were very beautiful; the air was often so clear that the stars had the sparkle and snap of our coldest winter nights.  When the full moon was in the sky the night transformed the Amazon Basin into an illimitable fairyland of delicate light and shadow.  On the rivers, the rush of the waters by the tangled jungle, the distant murmur of the rapids, the peculiar odor of the forest, and even the harsh roar of the howler monkeys far inland, all added to the fascination of that wilderness.  Their expedition was a medical and dental clinic as well as a party of exploration.  They had not only their own sick to attend, but also the ailing for miles up and down the Branco.  Dental, medical, and surgical treatment was given to Portuguese and natives, alike.  To reduce the transportation of supplies, they lived off the country wherever possible.

The chief foods obtained were farinha (a sort of flour) and beef.  Oranges, pineapples, and bananas grew wild along the river and provided welcome variety for their diet, while fish of many kinds also graced their table.  Vicious piranha offered good sport and good food but made swimming dangerous.  Farinha, made from the mandioca root, which resembled parsnip, was the Indians’ staff of life, and it became an important addition to their own diet.  Eaten raw, that root was poisonous, but the natives had learned how to clean it.  The women shredded the roots on a grater, then packed the white fluff in long woven mat tubes.  After soaking those tubes in the river, the contents were wrung out.  That operation which washed out the poison was repeated several times before thee farinha could be used as a flour for bread.  They found that food satisfying and wholesome, but rather tasteless.  Its link with Indian religion showed its importance in the scheme of jungle life, for they believed their chief deity taught their ancestors the method of extracting the poison.  Disease came closer to halting the expedition than any other obstacle encountered.  Despite the best mosquito nets, the use of quinine, and the presence of two physicians, many of the party contracted fever.  Their greatest lose was the death of Dr. Koch-Grunberg, who was stricken in September and died 10 days later.  Furthermore, the captain and most of the crew of the steamer that brought them to the head of navigable water were stricken on their return to Manaos.  The author escaped the fever for nearly a year but finally contracted a “walking case.”  Quinine proved effective.  The worst zone of the disease was the lower river.  After the mountainous region was reached, fever was no longer dreaded; but, once contracted, it recurred from seemingly insignificant causes.

On October 25, they were glad to skim the waters of Boa Vista, the only sizable town on the Rio Branco.  Its population was “over 500.”  Boa Vista was the shipping point of a cattle country, and it was high and relatively free of malaria.  Close to the town rose Serra Grande, a lone mountain six miles long at its base.  The mountains on the Brazil-British Guiana border, 75 miles to the east, raised a low barrier to the northwest winds, which dropped much of its rain on the windward side.  West of that ridge, the great Amazon forest shredded out to grassy plains which provided a cattle-range the size of Vermont.  Boa Vista was on the edge of the parkland, “campos,” which enjoyed a much drier climate than down river.  There, free from the sapping effects of malaria, they were able to recuperate, to repair and paint the plane, and even enjoy a dance.  A “baile” was given to celebrate their arrival in the first plane Boa Vista had ever seen.  They were on fringe of a new frontier.  Boa Vista reminded one of bygone American frontier town.  It was their base for three months.  On November 1, they made an experimental flight up the Tacutu, an eastern tributary of the Branco, and on November 3 they flew 140 miles up the Uraricoera, to civilization’s last outpost, the two-hut settlement of Boa Esperanca, where the river divided to form Maraca Island, 50 miles long and 30 miles wide.  That brought them out of the campos region and into forest again.  At Caracarahy Rapids, between Vista Alegre and Boa Vista, gas and oil were shipped on launches, but beyond it was so rough that they used canoes to advance the fuel and lubricant.  The gasoline was in five-gallon cans, which had to be carried around falls and bad rapids.  The heavy loads nearly sank the canoes more than once, and only 50% of the fuel reached Parima-Aracasa junction, 250 miles upstream from Boa Esperanca.

Up to that point the river had nearly always offered a landing place, but beyond Boa Esperanca broad reaches had to be hunted.  Sometimes they did not see smooth water for 90 miles at a stretch.  One morning they took off from Boa Esperanca for a flight over the wildest country they had yet encountered.  They were privileged to view the jungle from the air, and so escape from the moist, heavy atmosphere at the surface into a temperate region at 5,000 feet.  Below them a sea of green billowed away over the low hills to a slender blue-black shore of mountains far to the west.  From their elevation, the palms scattered through the forest below looked like hundreds of starfish at the bottom of an ocean, their lighter green contrasted against the darker tones of the jungle.  At first, they could pick out creeks, streams, and rivers, over the country, by the lines of vapor hanging above them.  Three-quarters of an hour later, that vapor was burned off by the hot sun; but while it lasted the author got the compass bearing of many watercourses and to note them on their sketch maps.  From the head of Maraca Island, the south channel of the Uraricoera divided into many narrow streams studded with islets.  Then came a series of three cataracts, having a total drop of 80 feet, known as Purumame Falls.  Their supply canoes, which came later, required eight to sixteen days to pass that 40-mile stretch, over which they flew in 30 minutes!  Beyond Maraca Island the stream was still divided by jagged islets and outcropping rocks with angry rapids in the narrow channel.  Not even Indians seemed to frequent that wild section.  In 3 hours and 10 minutes of flying they saw no sign of human life.  Having searched for landing places upriver, they returned to Boa Vista to wait until the expedition could push forward, as they could not outfly their gasoline and supplies.

It was not until January that they again took to the air over the Uraricoera on what proved to be a most eventful trip.  They swooped down to the surface of the river at a previously selected spot, called Kuleikuleima.  They landed, but while taxiing toward shore they hit a submerged rock.  It was likely that the plane was damaged; and if they got it to shore it would be many weeks before the party reached them.  Hinton, risking tearing the plane apart, gunned the engine.  They rose from the river and headed toward Boa Esperanca and safety, 150 miles away.  Their race was with the sun, for it was already afternoon.  Twilight began to settle as they came to Maraca Island, and the plane sped down the north channel.  Darkness came quickly near the equator, and they had to land while they could still see.  Three small islands came into view, the middle one flanked by a sandbar.  Down they dove to the river’s surface, Hinton driving the plane as high up the sand as possible.  They climbed out to explore the jungle isle where they would spend the next eleven days.  Their “Robinson Crusoe Island was a mile long and a quarter mile wide, heavily forested with a great variety of trees, and apparently uninhabited.  Choosing a spot to camp, they stretched a cord between two trees and hung a canvas over it to make a shelter.  Under it, they hung their hammocks.  Hammocks were the universal Amazon bed for an obvious reason – few crawling insects could walk the tightropes in one night.  By creosoting the ropes, it stopped them altogether.  The first night passed uneventfully, and next morning they started work on the hydroplane.  They were able to patch up the damaged hull.  The problem was getting the plane back in the water.  The river level had dropped, and two men could not move the plane.  All they could do was wait.

About the middle of the third night, they were wakened by the sounds of a large animal prowling around their camp.  Cautiously, they got a flashlight, revolver, and ax, and crept toward the sound.  As the approached, the beast ran off into the jungle, bumping trees and breaking branches right and left.  By morning light, they examined the scene and found hoofprints.  The commotion was caused by a tapir, that queer but harmless animal, the largest quadruped of the Amazon jungles, weighing as much as 500 pounds.  Two days after the tapir episode, they entertained other visitors.  Four Indians were passing down the river in a dugout and, spying the smoke from their campfire, stopped to investigate.  They were boiling fish when the Indians appeared.  They pointed to the fish, offering to the new guests.  The guests were evidently satisfied, thus sealing a pact of good will.  Their visitors were superior in appearance to the Indians down river.  Their straight black hair was cut in a “soup-bowl” bob.  The top of the native’s heads came only to the author’s chin.  They were clean and bathed regularly.  They were keen mentally, sturdy, and independent.  This was the first time they had had any contact with civilization.  They had no iron; their boat and weapons being forest products, yet they saw at once the value of metal, for they did their best to obtain their machete by trade.  The plane was on the other side of the island, screened from camp, by they had worn a slender trail to it and the Indians saw it soon enough.  Evidently curious, they arose and filed don the trail.  They were not surprised at the sight of the big plane.  Those Indians were not bothered in the least by mosquitoes or gnats.  Their fine brown skin, smooth and satiny, showed no evidence of insect attacks, although they wore nothing for protection.

If unmolested, crawling insects, with few exceptions, would not sting or bite; flying insects, on the other hand, were out for blood and worked in double shifts.  During the day, swarms of piums (gnats) pestered mankind; during the night, swarms of mosquitoes took up the work where the piums left off.  As dark approached, the mosquitoes came out in great hordes.  There were so many of them and so many natives carrying the malaria parasite in their blood that, sooner or later, one was almost sure to become infected.  One night, Hinton hung his shirt up on a fish line.  The next morning when he started to put the garment on it nearly fell to pieces in his hands, being mostly holes.  During the night a battalion of ants had gone up and down the line, cutting the shirt to pieces bit by bit.  Nor was it their only experience with ants.  There were ants everywhere in the Amazon, and all kinds of ants – black ants, red ants, and white ants, great ants and tiny ants.  They got into everything and ate almost anything.  One of the most dreaded insects in the Amazon Valley was the large tucandeira ant, whose sting was very painful.  After three days of rain, on the tenth day of their exile on the island, the river rose and floated the plane again.  They had stretched their supplies by catching fish, but had run out of salt, and fish without salt was anything but delicious.  The Eleanor III took off beautifully next morning.  Twenty miles from Boa Esperanca they sighted the rescue party, struggling through the rapids.  The author left Boa Esperanca in a canoe the next day to take a message to the rescue party to push on with supplies to Kuleikuleima.  At the first rapids, he was surprised to hear the plane’s engine roaring above.  They had agreed that the plane would wait until more gas had been brought forward.

A can was dropped from the plane containing a message, but it washed down the rapids unrecovered.   Later, the author found out the message said that Hinton had taken Couzens, the party’s engineer, on a sight-seeing trip.  On that flight, the pressure on the gas feed dropped and poor Couzens had the hand pump to keep the pressure up, which he did for the entire hour and a half until landing.  The gas pump gave them great trouble.  One replacement did not work, and on two occasions the author had to pump to keep the engine going.  Flying in the rain was most disagreeable, especially since early on they removed their windshield to save weight and air resistance.  Even gentle rain pelted them like hail when flying at 70 mph.  While flying through clouds, they never knew if they would find the river or just the endless sea of jungle on the other side of the mist.  While radio proved its value during the journey, both its magic and that of the hydroplane were lost on most of the Indians of the upper river basin.  Commander MacMillan recorded a similar attitude on the part of the Greenland Eskimos.  [See: “The MacMillan Arctic Expedition Returns,” November 1925, National Geographic Magazine.]  The natives were shown a phonograph and were recorded.  After the playback nothing could surprise them.  Whenever they took off in the pane, the Indians would retreat to the forest.  The noise of the motor affected them more than the sight of the plane, which they called The Great Insect.  The radio interested the natives not at all.  The flash picture made the greatest hit of all.  It was not difficult to get the natives to pose.  The problem was rather to get them to “unpose.”  While they were preparing to photograph, the natives had the habit of standing on one leg like storks, the sole of the unused limb placed against the supporting leg at the knee.

Many photographic problems were faced in the Tropics, not the least of which was the lack of a darkroom.  At one place, the hollow trunk of a big tree served that purpose.  The first precaution was to keep the film dry. Packed in air-tight cans and kept out of direct sunlight.  Temperature presented another problem, for when the developing fluids got above 75 degrees the picture slid off the film.  The author usually developed films at the coolest time of day, 3:00 in the morning, but he could not hang them to dry until morning, due to the moist night air.  They were at Boa Vista preparing to fly to Kuleikuleima Rocks, when a radio message came from the advance party that the river had dropped and their landing place was a stretch of rocks.  A few days later a message came that the water had risen again and the landing place was smooth and deep; so, they took off and reached the Rocks safely.  Silvino Santos, the Brazilian motion-picture photographer with the party, set up his camera on the boulders to photograph two Indians shooting the rapids.  The water was swift, ending in a whirlpool, and as the Indians came down, Silvino waved them toward the rocks.  They became confused, capsized, and were swept down into the whirlpool, struggling for their lives.  A reserve canoe shot out from behind the rocks to the rescue.  The chief actors of the drama were nearly exhausted when they were pulled out.  From Kuleikuleima Rocks, they flew ahead of the exploring party, sketching the river and photographing sections that were cut up too much for rapid sketching.  The sketches were later proved to be fairly accurate.  Their last base was at the junction of the Parima and the Aracasa, where the tributaries joined to make the Uraricoera.  To that point, Charles Bull and his Indians had brought gas from Kuleikuleima.

Dr. Koch-Grunberg, ten years before, had pushed on up the Aracasa branch, the lesser of the two tributaries.  Near the junction, a deep canyon cradled the bad rapids of the Parima, which had ever been a barrier to white explorers.  They were now getting into the mountains.  The altitude of their farthest base was more than 1,000 feet above sea level (2,000 miles from the mouth of the Amazon).  On March 11, 1925, they made a four-hour flight to which they had been looking forward the entire journey, for from the moment they entered Parima Canyon, they were real pioneers.  The rushing waters swept under them viciously, the hills closed in, and the palm trees began to disappear, but the jungle still stretched on all sides.  They discerned many falls in the river and put them on their sketches to guide Dr. Rice’s party.  The river dropped 400 feet in 4 miles in one place.  High waterfalls were discovered on the short tributaries coming off the mountain slopes.  On and on they went to the headwaters of the Parima and beyond.  They rose to the watershed of the range, where serrated mountains divided the waters, sending some to the sea by way of the Orinoco and the rest down the Amazon.  Here and there, along the riverbanks and occasionally deep in the forest, they saw the round maloccas of the Indians.  That was the first time they had seen Indian huts away from the watercourses.  Some of those huts appeared to be occupied and others deserted.  Indian of that region had a superstition that when an important member of the tribe died, the others must leave the hut where he expired.  The tribe never used the hut again.  The cleared a new place and erected a circle of poles, wove basketry walls, and raised another thatched roof on center polls.

Over the Indian camp sites on the upper stretches of the river they released parachutes, to which they attached beads and trinkets.  Those gifts were peace offerings to show the friendliness of Dr. Rice’s party, which was to advance into that country later.  By that time their gas was nearly half used up, so they turned downstream through their newly discovered land.  The author regretted not stepping foot on the lands they had discovered.  From an elevation of 6,000 feet, they had greeted the inhabitants of that new country with parachutes!  The report they brought back, and the maps and photographs of the river were invaluable to the ground party.  At the head of the canyon was a good maloca, so they swooped to photograph it.  That brought them into the hot air of the valley.  The radiator began to boil furiously.  They were below the rim of the canyon and could not rise.  Hinton followed the twisting canyon, banking and wheeling, and finally the end of the canyon came and before them unfolded the welcome sight of a wide, smooth stretch of water.  The Eleanor III glided down to the base, where Charles Bull and his Indians were waiting for them.  They were thrilled with satisfaction, for they had finally accomplished that which they had worked nine months and traveled thousands of miles to do.  The author was to meet Charles Bull in California six months later and learned from him how useful their air sketches of that unknown country were.  On those sketches the course of the Rio Parima was shown, with its bends, its waterfalls, stretches of rapids and islands; all tributary streams were shown, with their directions and the estimated percentage of flow added to the main stream.  Indian clearings and huts, nearly always concealed from view from the river itself, but easily visible from the plane, were indicated.

When the surveyors, a month and a half later, had pushed their canoes to the farthest attainable point and were halted by narrowness of the river and high waterfalls, their only criticism was that our sketches were 8 degrees off in direction, due to compass error caused by proximity to the engine.  Dr. Rice and his main party later pushed on up the Parima to its source.  The author and his pilot left them at Kuleikuleima Rocks and began the return flight to Manaos, which they made in four actual flying days, in sharp contrast to the two months it took to go upriver by steamer, launch, and dugout.  Two welcomes awaited them at Manios.  The English and Americans of the town cheered them heartily, while the local police officials of an entirely new city government asked by what permission they landed there and whence they came.  They were hauled before the chief of police, then before the new governor, who, after due consideration, decreed that they might fly provided they notify the police first.  They made one more flight after that, to get pictures of the mixing of the yellow waters of the Amazon with the black waters of the Negro.  Opposite Manios, the Negro was about four miles wide, and a stiff wind across stream made the surface choppy; on landing, the “spank” of the hull across the wave tops proved too much for the many patches they had made on the boat, and some of the canvas strips came loose.  They immediately had the plane pulled ashore – for the last time.  Its days of usefulness were over, and their Brazilian flights were at an end.

 

 

Aa mentioned above, there is a block of sixteen pages (361 through 376) containing full-page photos that are quite likely duotones.  Duotones, formerly called photogravures, are images transferred to paper using acid-etched metal plates.  The deeper the etch, the darker the transfer.

A list of the duotones’ caption headings is as follows:

• “A Giant of the Amazon Forest”
• “The Average Explorer’s View of an Amazon Forest”
• “Islands in the Rio Negro”
• “Canoeing Up the Uraricoera River with Help of an Outboard Motor”
• “A Comma-shaped Island on the Uraricoera River Near Its Confluence with the Branco”
• “The Amazon Jungle from the Air”
• “The Expedition Making Its Way Up the Roaring White Channel of the Rio Uraricoera”
• “Kuleikuleima Rocks, a Place of Disaster”
• “Looking Down on a Horseshoe Cliff”
• “The Fliers Discover the Camp of an Unknown Indian Tribe, Skillfully Concealed from All but the Airmen”
• “A Nearer View of the Camp on the Upper Parima”
• “The occupants of the Communal Hut on the Parima”
• “The Airmen Reach the Headwaters of the Rip Parima”
• “Like Sun Spots on the Face of the Sun”
• “The Aviators Are Trapped in the Parima Gorge”
• “Sunset on the Amazon”

 

 

The second article in this month’s issue is entitled “Marvels of Mycetozoa” and was written by William Crowder.  It has the internal subtitle: “Exploration of a Long Island Swamp Reveals Some of the Secrets of the Slime Molds, Dwelling on the Borderland Between the Plant and Animal Kingdoms.”   The article contains five black-and-white photographs, none of which are full-page in size.  The article also contains sixteen full-page “Illustrations in Color from Paintings by the Author” on sixteen consecutive plates numbered I through XVI in Roman numerals representing pages 425 through 440 in the issue.  With a handful of references to the plates in the article, this is almost, but not quite, a field guide.

It was still dark when the author made his way into the marshy maze.  But soon, the sky appeared rose-tinged.  Within the humid retreat the ferns and flowers and dense tangle of wildwood began obscurely to take shape through the shroud of misty shadows.  Then, swiftly the swamp revealed itself in sharper outline.  Now was resolved the marvelous spectacle.  On every side a bewildering riot prevailed, living forms reared themselves among the debris of dead and dying.  That primeval picture of exotic exuberance laid not in some remote and faraway region of the globe, but within a minute’s walk from the station of Millneck, on Long Island, less than 40 miles from New York City.  Although a swamp was a paradise for plants, the land of honey for many animals, it was, to the average man, a dark and dismal reach – wet and filled with the miasmatic vapors of death.  The region seemed not the birthplace of life, but a vast soggy graveyard, a treacherous sink wherein death and disaster were supreme.  A swamp was said to have its moods.  It appeared at its best only to some, revealing a quite charming aspect; to others, it turned a sullen and forbidding countenance.  Here was maintained a constant ferment thrilling with life.  Nowhere on land did such a prodigious fertility prevail.  The author entered the Long Island swamp while the rest of the world was fast asleep.  He was on his way to watch the slime mold in its native haunts.  His target was a certain old log, lying half-buried in the soft, soaked soil.  He drank in the beauty of the surrounding scene.  Festooning the limbs and occasionally descending sheer to the earth, enormous vines hung suspended or wrapping themselves around stately trees.  On the trunks were expansive patches of greenish-gray lichens, often decorating their drab background of bark with fantastic figures.

Nearly every low-lying plant near a brook carried a curious burden of short, slender blue sprigs, delicate and diaphanous, over their leaves and stems.  Some of those sprigs displayed an odd contorting movement, bending into tiny loops.  Insects!  It was only when the plants were approached that the multifarious hosts detached and lifted themselves into rustling flight, the entire company dispersed in a glistening haze – a dissolving azure frost-cloud of somnolescent damsel flies!  The log the author was seeking had lain on the spot for perhaps a century or more.  It was now decayed throughout.  Still, little evidence of that condition was manifest from the surface; only at the crumbling of its one visible end and in places where the bark had fallen away were there traces of disintegration.  From the base to a point where the trunk tapered to what once was the treetop, the cypress was nearly concealed by an accumulation of detritus and a swaying forest of ferns, some of whose fronds, still ladened with dew, looked like silver plumes.  In one section the bark was almost gone, and the surface of the exposed smooth wood was punctured with numerous holes – the entrances to the galleries of woo-boring beetles and other insects.  Putting his ear to the surface, the author could hear a faint rustling within – white ants scraping, enlarging, extending their corridors.  Day and night, summer and winter, the toil of the tireless workers continued until the trunk was honeycombed and the frangible shell broke apart from its own weight; whereupon the termites migrated to a new shelter to continue their destructive labors.  The authors business had to do only with that part of the log which was partially concealed by undergrowth and deadwood.    To clear away the plants and debris was the work of a few seconds.  Behold!  Seldom had he seen such a gorgeous sight.

Spreading out over the bark was a rich red coverlet, like a pile of a bright Persian rug, consisting of thousands of small, closely crowded, funguslike growths.  They were the object of the author’s quest – myxomycetes, or mycetozoa.  A colony of those tiny organisms extended in an irregular patch over the top and sides of the trunk, covering an area nearly a yard long and slightly less in width.  To such a soft, velvety coat a touch or two was irresistible; but only the merest contact of his finger a cloud of spores arose, settling upon the barer portion of the bark as a film of reddish dust and leaving a tinge of ruby russet on his skin.  He brought his powerful pocket lens to bear upon the dainty individuals.  Each unit, less than a quarter of an inch in height, resembled a miniature morel, a small mushroom.  Of the total height, a third was taken up by a slender stalk which at its base was attached to the bark.  Surmounting that stalk was a cuplike expansion, which in turn supported a large, dense, elongated cluster of tangled threads – the sporangium (spore case).  That was all.  Simple in form, in detail unadorned; yet how impressive!  In some individuals, sporangium was immature, as was evident by the filmy, iridescent membrane enclosing them.  In others the membrane had burst, hanging in shreds, disclosing the compact mass of spores within the network.  For want of a better term, he called their color red.  He doubted that any other natural object had a color precisely like those slime molds.  It was a red that was almost purple, yet not purple; it was a nuance of red, that left one guessing whether he saw a vibration of color or was receiving only a hazy, illusive impression.  At one edge of the colony the slime molds were less crowded and, it seemed, less mature.  In that place was visible a thin patch of glair, about the size of the palm of a hand, which glistened.

That patch of slime was significant.  It was the last trace of a much larger portion that the author had been watching for several days.  The reason for the shrinkage was taking place before his eyes – the long-anticipated transformation of the slime mold into the colorful colony of pretty sporangia just described.  When a few days earlier, he had been prowling through the swamp, chance brought him upon the log.  At that time, it was mostly bare over the area now occupied by the slime molds, except for an exceedingly delicate and almost invisible pellicle of a creamy texture which caught his eye.  After studying the filmy mass, I became aware that it was moving. Spreading out fan-shaped, it advanced its borders almost as slowly as does an hour hand on a clock.  The rest remained stationary and was connected by a cordlike vein that led into a minute crack in the log.  As the advanced edge seemed to be the only part in motion and the area of the mass meanwhile was increasing, it was evident that the material for that augmentation was coming from within the log by flowing through the vein.  The author realized that a migration was taking place – that that curious mass of glair, which normally lived and grew in darkness in moisture-laden tissues of decaying wood, had arrived at the period of its existence when it must reach the outer air and light to reproduce and to enhance the favorable distribution of its spores.  During his visits on successive days, the only observable changes had been the increasing area of the slime and in the shifting of its location.  It had wandered, crossing and recrossing its path on the tree trunk, leaving a well-defined trail of organic refuse over its course.  Yet slowly and continuously it had kept on the move, like some creature uncertain of its way, groping aimlessly about.

But in none of its excursions did it travel more than a yard along the length of the log.  Finally, its travel ceased and it began to separate into pellucid particles somewhat smaller than rice grains.  That change had come at dusk the day before the author’s current visit.  That meant that the most interesting activities of that curious organism were cloaked in darkness.  His early return to the locality was not without its compensation, for an entire colony of sporangia had sprung up overnight.  But he arrived almost too late to witness the manner of the transformation; for, even as he looked, the silvery splash of liquid light that still remained on the log began to break up into a compressed group of minute pearls.  The globules were creamy white, but gradually turned a delicate pink, and with the change in hue came a slow alteration in the form and size of each unit.  The tiny gems were strewn in shapeless clusters of a single layer.  In several instances they were so closely crowded that the soft, yielding bodies arranged themselves into geometric order, like the hexagonal cells of a honeycomb or the facet eyes of giant dragon flies.  Eventually, a more fundamental change occurred.  The developing sporangia increased in dimension along their vertical axes and began to resemble short cylinders standing on end, the topmost part of each being slightly enlarged.  As each column rose, gathering their substance from the surrounding slime, the globules topping them became less marked, until they completely disappeared when each sporangium had reached a height equal to three times its diameter.  Before that stage was reached, however, the sun was more than four hours old, and the oppressive atmosphere of the swamp began to assert itself.  The rising temperatures set the insect world in motion.

Wasps and bees hovered uncomfortably close, respecting the author’s person only when he was puffing vigorously on his pipe.  Occasionally, they would crawl over his face and hands, and although they made no attempt to attack, their presence was distracting.  The mosquitoes, the gnats, and buzzing flies, on the contrary, considered his welfare not at all; whole tribes took telling toll of his lifeblood.  Roundabout, a more attractive crowd appeared.  Gaudy butterflies settled lazily upon brilliant blossoms; a giant moth flick-flacked its way here and there excitedly, the metallic blue of its wings flashing in the shade like a fragment of the sky.  Now the author’s nostrils were assailed by the heavy odor of a nearby stinkhorn toadstool, which let loose its strangling stench on the humid air.  Despite those distracting factors, the author continued to watch the growing columns of slime molds.  The nascent sporangia were now becoming diffused with a deeper tone of pink, particularly at their bases.  For the first time, he noticed that the cylinders were no longer in actual contact with the wood; a hairbreadth space had intervened, and they were slowly being elevated into the air as the stalks began to form.  Those threadlike stalks, which were of a deep tone of garnet red, reach a length of one-half the entire organism and expanded like a cup at the top.  The flaccid group had now lost its compression, or honeycomb appearance; each individual unit stood staunchly upright, independent, seemingly apart from its neighbors, yet in crowded contact with them.  The surface now began to dry, and simultaneously the iridescent covering of filmy skin began to peel into shreds and tatters.  On the wings of the imperceptible movement of the heavy swamp air, those fragments vanished, and – presto!

There was revealed that wonder of wonders, a gauzy tangle of spore-laden threads called the capillitium.  The sporangia were now fully formed.  There was no further increase in the length or breath of any part.  The plasmodial slime was completely exhausted.  The microcosmic spectacle was at an end!

 

 

As mentioned above, the first article contains a set of sixteen plates upon which are sixteen full-page reproductions of color paintings by the author.  The plates are numbered I through XVI in Roman numerals and represent pages 435 through 450 in this issue.

A list of the sixteen paintings’ caption titles is as follows:

• “A Species of Slime Mold Found Throughout the World”
• “There Are More than 500 Species of Slime Molds”
• “Spore Cases of Badhamia papaveracea, Enlarged 40 Diameters”
• “A Member of the Physarum Family”
• “Trichia persimilis Is Found Throughout the Northern World”
• “Lamproderma arcyrionema Occurs in Large Colonies on Barkless, Decaying Logs, Enlarged 40 Diameters”
• “The Chaste Elegance of This Slime Mold’s Proportions Commands Admiration”
• “Physarum lateritium Resembles Closely the Familiar “Puffball””
• “The Iridescent Hues of Diachea leucopoda Rival the Tints of a Peacock’s Feathers”
• “A Glittering Skin Identifies Lamproderma violaceum”
• “Comatricha pulchella Is Probably Widely Distributed but It Is Rarely Collected”
• “Beautiful Diderma testaceum Is Found Throughout the United States”
• “Wondrously Wrought Details Distinguish These Ornate Structures”
• “Arcyria ferruginea, Enlarged 18 Diameters”
• “Arcyria denudate Is the Commonest Species of Its Genus”
• “Specimen of Physarum viride Magnified 50 Diameters, Suggest Eggs and Golf Balls About to Peel”

 

At the bottom of the last page of the second article in this issue (Page 443) there is a notice regarding change of address.  If a member wanted the magazine to be mailed somewhere else, the Society needed a month’s notice in advance, starting on the first of the month.  If a member wanted the May issue redirected, the Society needed to know by April first.

 

The third article in this month’s issue is entitled “The Amazon, Father of Waters” and was written by W. L. Schurz, Ph. D., Commercial Attache, American Embassy, Rio de Janeiro.  The article has the internal subtitle: “The Earth’s Mightiest River Drains a Basin of More Than 2,700,000 Square Miles, from Which Came Originally the World’s Finest Rubber.”  The article contains fifteen black-and-white photographs, of which three are full-page in size.  One of those full-page photos serves as the frontispiece for the article.  The article references the map on page 354 in the first article.

Recently, there returned to Para a party of six Americans who had completed the most comprehensive survey of the Amazon Valley every made by any expedition.  For nearly ten months those representatives of the U. S. Department of Commerce, sent out to investigate the crude-rubber industry in its original home, had traveled more than 20,000 miles on 37 rivers of the Amazon fluvial system.  They had carried the American flag up the Amazon itself, through the Pongo de Manseriche, the western gateway of the great plain, where the river cut its way athwart the last chain of the Andes, more than 2,500 miles from its mouth and less than 250 miles from the Pacific.  To the north, they ascended the Rio Branco to the open campos country that reached away to the borders of the Guianas, and to the south, in the Madeira basin, they reached Madre de Dios, above Riberalta, Bolivia.  The Brazilian Government supplied a finesteamer, the Andira, for the use of the commission during its stay in Brazil, and in Bolivia and Peru similar facilities and courtesies were extended by their respective governments.  In Brazil, thy were accompanied by a special Brazilian Commission of four members, who had much experience in the far interior- Dr. Oliveira, geologist; Dr. Kuhlmann, botanist; Dr. Soledade, public health; and Col. Monteiro, expert on rubber.  On rivers where those steamers could not navigate, they traveled in launches, barges, or dugout canoes.  They covered 400 miles on horse- and mule-back and one long stretch on foot.  The mightiest of the world’s rivers owed its name to a fanciful yard told by Francisco de Orellana, the first white man who ever descended the turbid waters of Rio Mar, as later generations of Brazilians had dubbed the stream that was more than a river.

In 1541, Orellana was sent down the Napo by Gonzalo Pizarro in search of provisions for the forlorn expedition that had come over the mountain from Quito in search of El Dorado.  Finding it easier to continue downstream than to return, he took to the “flowing road” that months later carried him out onto the Atlantic.  Among the adventures which Orellana related to his credulous contemporaries in Spain was one encounter with female warriors near the mouth of the Trombetas, or River of Trumpets.  It was those long-haired savages – whether women or men – who were responsible for the naming of what the Indians called “The Great River.”  Ever since the memorable voyage of Orellana, the process of exploring and opening the vast wilderness world of the Amazon Basin had been ongoing, and much yet remained to be done.  Some years later, the remnants of Pizarro’s expedition were led out of the Amazon and around up the Venezuelan coast.  Adventurers in search of treasure cities in the jungle or Catholic missionaries carried on the work from the Spanish side of the Andes.  From the east. Pedro de Teixeira led an expedition upriver that did much to secure Portugal’s possession of the greater part of the valley, and “bandeirantes” from Sao Paulo pushed northwest in long treks across Matto Grosso and into the basin of the Madeira.  The nineteenth century brought a more scientific study of the Amazonia.  The epic days of the Conquest were past. Among the new generation were the great German, Humboldt; the Frenchman, Castelnau; the Englishmen Bates and Wallace; Agassiz, the Botanist; and the Americans, Orton and Heath.  Two other Americans Lt’s. Herndon and Gibbon, of the U. S. Navy crossed the Andes from the Pacific in the fifties and descended the Amazon, the one from Peru and the other from La Paz.

A still later group of specialists working over the Amazon Basin included the American ornithologist, Leo Miller and many others.  Among the explores were two remarkable women – Mme. Coudreau, who spent years exploring the rivers in the State of Para, and Dr. Emilia Snethlage, a Swiss scientist, who crossed overland from the Xingu to the Tapajoz through a wilderness unknown even to the rubber workers of that region.  In the vast field of Matto Grosso, Gen. Candido Rondon and his aides had spent a generation in exploration and in the collection of scientific data.  In 1926, that immense territory was known as Rondonia.  It was Rondon, then a Colonel, who was joint leader with Col. Roosevelt of the famous expedition that in 1913-14 descended the “River of Doubt” (in 1926, the Roosevelt).  Much of the opening of the Amazon Valley was the work of the men who pushed farther and farther up the river and into the country in search for rubber.  Some were like the Suarez brothers, who built up a veritable empire in Bolivia; others were obscure rubber workers, whose journeys and discoveries in the jungle were never recorded.  Among the most extraordinary of those anonymous explorers had been the Peruvian caucheros, or hunters of the rubber-yielding Castilla elastica, who had wandered all over the Amazon Valley in search of a new stand of the tree.  Those they ruthlessly destroyed and then pushed on in their jungle Odyssey.  Those ruthless nomads were found from Ucayali and Javary east to the Xingu and down into the Guapore country between Brazil and Bolivia.  They mingled with the Brazilian rubber workers in the rude camaraderie of the great solitudes, but have waged a truceless war with the Indians, whose tribal lands they invaded in their tireless quest.

Though not the longest of rivers, the Amazon was, by reason of its volume and the magnitude of its fluvial system, the true “Father of Waters,” the real “Rio Grande” of the world.  It rose in a mountain lake high in the Peruvian Andes and flowed north, through a deep gorge, for hundreds of miles.  Then it turned east and headed through the last range of the Andes at Pongo de Manseriche, where it entered the Amazonian plain that reached away across the continent to the Atlantic.  In the Pongo, it was like a swirling millrace, some 50 yards wide; 2,000 miles below, the banks of its main channel were, in places, scarcely visible from each other.  For nearly all its length the Brazilian Amazon flowed through a number of channels that were connected by cross canals.  Only at Obidos had it a single channel.  At that point it was less than 2,000 yards wide and 350 feet deep, and in midstream ran with a current of six miles an hour.  No other stream had such great tributaries as had the Amazon.  Some of them had vast fluvial plains of their own, like the Madeira, whose headwaters were found in faraway Bolivia; or the Negro, most mysterious of Amazonian rivers, which came down out of the wild country of Columbia and was connected the Orinoco system by the strange Cassiquiare Canal; or the Purus, with its long branches, such as the Ituxy and the Acre.  Those were also the widest rivers, the Tapajoz being eight miles from shore to shore at Boim and the Negro ten miles in the Boiossu Channel.  There was considerable variety among the rivers of the Amazon system.  Some, like the Purus and the Jurua, meandered across the alluvial plains in huge oxbows, across the neck of which a new way might be cut in a single month of flood.  Others flowed in fairly straight courses, like the Branco.

Some were black-water rivers, like the swarthy Negro and the Jutahy; others were clear streams, like the fine Tapajoz, or the Branco, so named for its “white” water, or the Guapore.  Most of them were yellowish streams, carrying vast quantities of alluvial sediment.  Such were the Purus, the Jurua, the Ucayali, and the Amazon itself, which was always muddy.  Where the black Negro and the white Tapajoz entered the tawny Amazon, a sharp line divided their waters for miles before the finally mingled; and some of the rivers had wide flood plains, and sometimes a veritable labyrinth of channels intersected those low-lying areas.  Sometimes they flowed between high banks, as did the Tapajoz for most of its course, or as did the Jurity and the Parauary.  Most of the Amazonian rivers bore the names given them by the Indian aborigines.  Some were majestic sounding, befitting the great streams so named, like the Xingu, the Purus, and the Jurua; some were melodious names, like Araguaya, Aripuana, Tahuamanu, Inambary, and Juruena; some were strange-sounding Indian names, like Tupi, Quichua, Gy-parana, Jacunda, or Buyuyumanu, “manu” being the Peruvian Indian word for river.  Some could have been left by an Arabian conqueror, as the Beni, Mandidi, and Abuna; still others bore the names of foreign explorers, like Heath, Orton, Chandless, and Roosevelt.  Comparatively few had Portuguese or Spanish names, the Amazonas itself, the Madeira, the Sao Manoel, the Trombetas, the Negro, and the Madre de Dios, know to the Bolivian Indians as Manutata, or “Mother of Rivers.”  Nearly all the rivers of the Amazon system were broken by rapids or waterfalls at a certain stage in their course.  The most famous of those rapids were those which broke the course of the Madeira and the Mamore for more than 200 miles.

It was around those rapids that the Madeira-Mamore Railroad was built to serve as an outlet for the rubber and other products of northeastern Bolivia.  Prior to its construction, rubber was brought down in canoes.  Those shot the easier rapids and were dragged painfully around the dangerous ones.  The return trip took months, and the loss of life was enormous due to malaria, Indians, and capsizing in the rapids.  First promoted in 1870, construction started in 1878.  The final impulse for the completion of the work came with the Treaty of Petropolis, in 1903, whereby Brazil agreed to construct the line as compensation to Bolivia for the latter’s cession of the Acre country.  Construction resumed in 1907 and the road was completed to Abuna in 1911.  It was opened to traffic in 1913 as far as Guajaramirim, the terminus of the 226 miles of line in 1926.  Hundreds died of fever in its construction, and it was finished too late to be more than a financial liability, for the great rubber boom had collapsed and traffic from Beni country declined in volume and value with the falling price of rubber.  More than $30,000,000 had been expended on the line, Beni country declined one of the most costly railroads ever built.  A group of British represented the company that administered the road for the Brazilian Government.  One train a week made the run through the jungle between Porto Velho and Guajaramirim, stopping overnight at the village of Albuna, where the traveler found the best hotel between Para and the Andes.  Guajaramirim was a small frontier town.  There, they saw blocks of caucho rubber from the Guapore, a carload of lean dogs for the lonely workers, and wild-eyed cattle from the Mojos plains of Mamore.  At Porto Velho, the Candelaria Hospital stood as a haven for the sick and injured for hundreds of miles up and down the railroad and the rivers.

A large fleet of steamers plied up and down all the large affluents of the Amazon.  It was possible to travel with comfort from Para as far as Yurimaguas on the Huallaga in Peru, hundreds of miles above Iquitos, and up all the great tributaries to the limit of navigation, fixed by rapids or bars.  During the rainy season, when the rivers rose 30 to 50 feet, it was possible to go much higher, unless there was a permanent barrier, as at Santo Antonio, on the Madeira.  Ocean-going steamers from Europe and the U. S. regularly ascended the Amazon to Manaos, nearly 900 miles from Para, and the same vessels could go up to Iquitos, more than 2,000 miles from the mouth.  Above Iquitos there were 500 miles of navigation for steamers drawing nine feet of water- it is, to within a few miles of the Andes.  A line of steamers ran from Iquitos to Callao, the port of Lima, on the Pacific, by way of the Panama Canal, making a journey of over 6,500 miles by water to connect two points, only 630 air-miles apart overland!  The common type of steamer user on the Amazonian rivers was popularly called a gaiola, or birdcage, because of its open superstructure, adapted to the tropical climate.  On the rivers of the Acre and on the Rio Negro shallow-draft, stern-wheelers of our Mississippi River type were employed.  A wide variety of other craft was seen.  The Peruvians were especially skilled in making canoes, some of their dugouts holding 15 or more people.  They were also famous builders of rafts, which were much more common in Peru than in Brazil or Bolivia.  Frequently those rafts carried a thatched hut, in which the family lived during the slow journey downriver, and they might carry cattle, pigs, or a flock of chickens.  Rubber was also frequently by making rafts of the balls, on which a low platform was built for those who poled it downstream.

Despite the cataclysmic floods that annually swept over the valley to pour out through wide mouths on both sides of Marajo, the Amazon Valley was not a gigantic morass.  Probably not more than 5% of the more than 2,700,000 square miles of the Amazonia were below the normal flood level of the rivers.  The great mass was upland country.  High bluffs bordered many rivers for long distances.  Isolated hills and mountains were also prominent phases of the Amazonian landscape.  A day above Para, one sighted to the north a broken chain of mountains that continued a long way to the west.  At Monte Alegre, it cropped out at the river’s edge in a remarkable hill, from which one might see the Amazon Valley in epitome.  To the south, beyond a maze of connecting channels that ran among lush meadows, rolled the wide yellow flood of the Amazon’s main channel.  To the north of that hill there stretched a country of open grasslands against a background of mountains that shut off the horizon.  On the lowlands to the east and west was the tropical jungle.  Far away to the northwest, in the compos, or open country, of the Rio Branco, mountains loomed up in every direction to culminate on the Guiana border in the Mountains of the Moon on the east and high Roraima on the north.  After weeks or months on the monotonous jungle-lined rivers, they always greeted those compos lands with a feeling of release from some oppressive confinement.  They had no more pleasant memory of the Amazonia than of galloping across the open country of the Rio Branco and the lower Amazon.  The Amazonian forest was not the tangled, impenetrable jungle that was usually imagined.  The heavy growth of vines and trees that lined the rivers was responsible for that impression, but, behind that matted curtain, the forest became open.

One could usually walk through that forest without the need of a machete to cut a way.  Progress was difficult only when the jungle fell into low ground, where bamboo formed a thorny maze, or when there was a heavy growth of palm trees.  The flooded forests were always forbidding and sinister, as the upland forest never was.  Yet it was easy for the unpracticed woodsman to become lost in either, once he strayed far from the trails.  The jungle was poor in food, except for the good marksman.  Edible plants were scarce, and during the dry season the only source of water for a long distance was the huge lianas that hung from the trees.  Een then, one must have a machete to cut the thick vine.  The outstanding tree of the upland jungles was the Brazil-nut tree, which towered high above the general level of the forest.  Sometimes those giants were found with a circumference of nearly forty feet.  Scattered through that jungle were hundreds of species of trees that ranged in hardness from the light balsa wood to the heavy, deep-red aita, on of the hardest of all woods.  Among those trees was the assacu, feared by the natives for the powerful astringent poison in its sap.  The Amazonian flora contained many poisons, some of whose virtues were known only to the Indians.  Among them were the terrible mata calado, or “silent death;” the capanco, from the Acre country; and the famous curare, used for tipping arrows.  A plant, known to the Peruvians as chuchuasco, had sap that was reputed among the natives to be a “fountain of youth.”  Another plant, the parauary, was a cure wounds, and was used by the party on several occasions.  A species of laurel, common on the Rio Negro, yielded a large quantity of a clear, inflammable liquid that should find a use in industry.

The climate of the Amazonia was not one of unmitigated heat, as was popularly believed. During the middle of the day, it was generally very hot and steamy.  However, the nights were nearly always cool enough to need a blanket, and in the so-called winter season, there was frequently a succession of cool days.  The daily temperature range might be very wide.  A cool wind that blew down from the Andes brought the friagem, that sent thermometers down into the forties and set the natives to shivering.  Nor did it rain incessantly, even during the rainy season, though the total rainfall was twice that of New York.  There was, in fact, a real dry season, which was at its height in June and July, when rain might not fall for a month or more.  They found the long Bolivian ponchos, made of cotton cloth covered with a layer of rubber latex, an excellent protection against the downpours, though very hot.  Except in certain ill-favored localities, it was not an unhealthy climate.  White men spent their lives there in excellent health, though they must follow basic rules of hygiene.  Hookworm was widespread among the barefoot natives, and malaria was rampant in some districts, but over wide areas it did not exist at all.  The gospel of quinine and the mosquito net had been spread widely by the Brazilian Public Health Service and by the Catholic missionaries.  Yellow fever and beriberi, which once took a heavy toll, had disappeared, the latter with a healthier diet.  Leprosy was all too common, but the Brazilian state governments were making strong effort to segregate and treat the unfortunates.  There was less wildlife in the Amazon forest than would be expected.  Every rubber worker carried a .44 Winchester and shot any animal he saw.  At night, he would set his gun as a trap behind some log.  As a result, game had been liquidated over a wide area.

The jaguar, the largest of the carnivora, was seldom aggressive, though a related black species had a bad reputation, and the other felines were dangerous only to the smaller creatures of the jungle.  There were still monkeys in profusion, and at dusk and dawn the forest reverberated with the roar of the “howlers.”  The morning silence might be broken by chatter of the noisy prego monkeys.  Monkeys were a highly regarded article of food among the Peruvian woodsmen and were everywhere hunted relentlessly in the vicinity of plantations because of their predatory habits.  Deer were very common in some parts, but the tapir and anteater were going the way of other large game.  One of the rarest of Amazonian animals was the wild dog.  The dog was amphibious, and instead of a bark, he made a noise between a squeal and a chirp.  The rivers and lakes teemed with life.  The author had never seen so many fish as at some places on the Solimoes.  The giant pirarucu, dried and salted in sheets, was the most valuable fish of the Amazonian waters.  The manatee was also widely hunted.  The savage, though small, saw-toothed piranha swarmed in some rivers, ready to prey on anything, from fish to man, that had any exposed cut.  Where those fish were present, it was even dangerous to trail one’s fingers in the water.  Fresh-water porpoises were seen frolicking far up the great rivers.  Swarms of alligators often showed their ugly snouts above water or bask on the muddy shores, though they never entered certain rivers.  Turtles abounded in some of the rivers, despite wholesale destruction of their eggs, and their pursuit was the most important industry in some districts, as on the Rio Branco.  The hunters shot them with arrows in the neck to which a large cord was attached.  They were then herded in pens by the hundreds, to be sent down to Nanaos or Para.

Electric eels grew to a large size, one which the author killed in Peru was seven feet long. The Amazon jungle was rich in bird life.  Parrots and Macaws, the araras of Brazil, and huacamayos of Peru, were very common.  A disagreeable feature of Amazonian towns was the flocks of funeral vultures.  The Amazon Valley, unfortunately, was rich in insect life.  Those included mosquitoes of several types.  Worse than the mosquitoes were the ants like the painful “fire ant.”  The savage taxi ant grew more than an inch long.  The sauba, or leaf-cutting ant, was the principal enemy of agriculture in the Amazon Valley.  Among other insects were the chigger-like mucuim, the pium, the borrachudo, and the motuca fly.  Tarantulas scampered around old buildings.  There was a profusion of butterflies.  One of the most curious of insects was the well-armored Traffic Bug, which had a red light on its head and a green light on its tail.  There were fewer snakes than people believed.  The best-known snakes of the valley were the jararaca and the surucucu, both poisonous.  The boa constrictor was sometimes domesticated to rid the house of rats and bats.  The anaconda grew to great length and was the source of many myths among the natives.  In all the topical Amazon basin there probably were between 1,500,000 and 1,600,000 inhabitants.  Of those, 1,300,000 lived in Brazil and the rest in the five Spanish-speaking countries.  The great mass of the population of the Amazonia was a mixed people, in Brazil a crossing of white, Indian, and Negro, and in Spanish countries of white and Indian.  For a long time, the Amazon Valley was the principal source of the world’s supply of rubber, until the vast plantations of the East came into production and left the wild rubber of the Amazonia a minor place in the world market.  [See: “Singapore, Crossroads of the East, March 1926, NGM.]

Rubber in the Amazon Valley has had a checkered history.  Shortly before the rise of plantation rubber, the industry reached its zenith.  The price of crude rubber rose to $2.75 a pound.  Those were bonanza times for Para, Manaos, and Iquitos, and for every little settlement whose life depended on the price of rubber.  Men accumulated more money in a few months in the far interior than they had ever dreamed would come their way.  After the peak of the boom, prices fell with terrible rapidity, and those who had not liquidated their stocks in time were ruined.  That was the beginning of the great crisis, from which dated the present [in 1926] depression of the Amazon Valley.  An exodus of thousands of rubber workers followed from the upper rivers.  The Federal Government of Brazil made efforts to save the rubber industry from ruin, but its programs were too grandiose for realization.  The Amazonia in Brazil and Bolivia had continued to produce rubber in considerable quantities.  Temporary rises in the price of crude rubber had given a fitful encouragement to those still producing rubber the old way, but the wiser believed that only by adopting the plantation system could enable the Amazon country to compete with the plantations of the East.  Despite four centuries of exploration, large areas of the Amazonia still awaited the coming of the first white man.  The courses of all the important rivers were well known, but there was much unknown territory between some of them.  Many myths and misconceptions regarding the region persisted.  The Amazonia was neither hell nor an earthly paradise.  By far the greater part of it was entirely habitable by white men, though there were sections where nearly every circumstance of the environment militated against human existence.

 

 

The fourth article in this month’s issue is entitled “Where the Sard Holds Sway” and has Col. Luigi Pellerano in the byline.  He is not the author, but the photographer of the nine color photographs appearing on eight plates embedded within the article.  These plates, numbered I through VIII, represent pages 465 through 472 of the issue.  The uncredited article, or editorial, also contains a half-page, black-and-white photograph that is not documented on the cover.  The photo was taken by C. W. Wright.  The plates are referenced throughout the editorial, and by the black-and-white photo caption.

In most other parts of Europe fine old costumes of other days had entirely disappeared, but in Sardinia, if one visited the right places at the right time, beautiful souvenirs were still to be found of times when the pageantry of the Middle Ages expressed itself even in everyday dress of the common people.  There were almost as many variations of costume on that Mediterranean island as there were villages, for each little community had some feature of its own.  In one locality a certain combination of colors was used exclusively, while in another the cut of the apron or the arrangement of the headdress was the distinguishing characteristic.  Those differences in village styles were once found all over Europe and was traced back to the remoteness and comparative isolation of places in medieval times.  On the Continent they had been ironed out by contact, but in Sardinia, efficient and easy means of transport were of more recent development, and some of its mountainous solitudes had not yet felt the full force of that standardizing influence.  Although the Sards were a sober-minded people and not prone to display in other respects, their costumes were riots of blue, scarlet, orange, green, and all shades that went between.  Those were often elaborately embellished with embroidery, gold lace, brocade, and gold and silver buttons.  Many of the finer ones were handed down from generation to generation.  While varying so widely in color and style, there were certain features common to nearly all the island costumes.  The costume of the Sardinian woman consisted of a heavy skirt of silk or wool, a white waist, a colored bodice or corset, an apron, and a kerchief to cover the head.  The skirt was sometimes a sober hue, but might be of scarlet, blue, orange, or purple.

Over the skirt was worn the apron, which was nearly always of a brilliant color and varied greatly in size and shape with the locality.  The white waist was worn beneath the bodice, and the kerchief, white or a bright hue, covered the head and sometimes the shoulders, and was brought together under the chin with a fancy pin.  So impressive were the costumes of the peasants that the occasion of their leaving church on Sundays and fete days was likened to a scene at the court of some prince of the Arabian Knights.  The widow’s dress was not the same throughout the island.  While in most places she wore the black habit of mourning all her life, in some villages only a kerchief of black was worn, and she continued to wear a bright-colored costume.  Red or scarlet was ordinarily the color of youth and, with bright blue, was used in nearly every variation of costume.  The men of Sardinia also had an interesting heritage of costumes which, while differing with locality like the women’s, they showed fewer marked variations.  Generally, a man wore knee-length or longer, bell-shaped, baggy trousers of white and either leggings of coarse serge or high spats.  Over a white shirt was worn a gayly colored vest, sometimes closed to the neck, sometimes a cutaway, and over that a small doublet.  Around his waist was often worn a Turkish sash, which in ancient days was used to carry a knife.  The Sard kept his hair beneath a little black skullcap, over which he wore a regular Sardinian cap – a narrow cloth bag.  Many villagers also wore the ragas, a short overskirt, not unlike the Scottish kilt, or a pair of short, balloon-like top trousers.  The shepherd of some villages wore the mastruca, a sleeveless, fleecy sheepskin jacket.  Gun, pipe, and bandoleer were carried as inseparable companions.

The Sards were a brave, hardy, liberty-loving people, whose history was one of long and continuous struggle for existence against alien peoples that had repeatedly assailed their shores.  Although these people had maintained their individuality in the face of great oppression, they were influenced by the many races that had occupied their island the last 25 centuries.  Italian, Spanish, and Saracenic influences were all to be found in their costumes.  Probably as early as 500 B. C. there was record of a presence of Phoenician settlers on Sardinia, and Carthage maintained her sovereignty over the island until 238 B. C., when Rome took possession and declared it a Roman province.  But Rome never quite succeeded in subjugating the Sards, for the mountain dwellers of the Barbagia waged an unending guerrilla war against the legions of the Caesars.  Following the dispossession of the Romans, the island was overrun in turn by Vandals, Saracens, Pisans, Genoese, and later by the armies of Aragon, Austria, and Savoy, until finally it became part of a united kingdom of Italy.  Development of natural resources would bring the Sards material prosperity, but it would at the same time mark the beginning of the end of that picturesque remoteness that had been theirs.  The beautiful costumes that had distinguished the island were here reproduced as a valuable historical record through natural-color plates made with rare artistic perception by Col. Luigi Pellerano.  They cannot much longer resist the advance of modern styles but would soon join their counterparts in other lands as colorful memories of the past, to be seen only in museums.

 

 

The eight embedded color plates color plates contain nine photos – seven full-page and two half-page sharing a plate (Plate II).  The photos on that plate share a common caption and caption heading.

Here is a list of caption headings for the eight color plates:

• “Capidano Courtship”
• “Green Gives the Color Note to Oliena’s Gala Costumes”
• “Variety in Costumes Reflects the Diverse Influences Which Have Flavored Sardinian Life”
• “A Fair Sassarese”
• “The Widow Swathes Her Face in Black”
• “A Servant Salutes Two Gentlemen of Oliena”
• “She Dwells in the Highlands of Nuoro”
• “Sartorial Splendor Distinguishes the Sardinian of the Interior”

 

 

The fifth and final article listed on the cover of this month’s issue is entitled “Recent Contributions by Members of the National Geographic Society” and has no byline.  This half-page editorial contains no photographs.

While the National Geographic Society depended entirely upon the small annual membership fees of more than a million members, its activities for the increase and diffusion of geographic knowledge appealed so strongly to many individuals that bequests were not infrequently made to further those objectives.  Among the most recent bequests was that of Mr. George True Nealley of New York City, $20,000; and Miss Abbie M. White of Grafton, Massachusetts, in memory of Edward S Bowen, $15,000.

 

 

Tom Wilson

[Scott T. Shier]

This seems like its almost an exclusive "Amazon" issue.