Imagine a country where all travel between cities is done only by boat. You would be in Brazil, in 1933, where travel was on rivers only. Ernest G. Holt will lead us up part of the great Amazon River to explore the boundary between Brazil and Venezuela, a place unknown and unmapped at that time. The National Geographic Society had been invited to accomplish this. Holt's report is A Journey by Jungle Rivers to the Home of the Cock-of-the-Rock: Naturalists Enter the Amazon, Voyage Through the Heart of Tropical South America, and Emerge at the Mouth of the Orinoco, National Geographic Magazine, November, 1933.
In most articles in the magazine, a map of the area is included. In this article, I notice something new. In all maps I've seen previously, the place where the river empties into an ocean is call "mouth" of the river. The Amazon River delta is so extensive, it is labeled, "Mouths" of the Amazon.
Mr. Holt includes a photo of a bird he labels as "the most beautiful bird in the world." It is the Cock-of-the-Rock, "so wary it is and so dark the fastnesses in which it lives," (photo caption, p. 588), that the photo is of a stuffed specimen in the National Museum in Washington, D.C. The bird has a very large crest from the top of its head to the tip of its beak.
The journey from the first city of Para, at one of the mouths of the Amazon River, by steamship, to their destination would take longer, Mr. Holt admitted, than it would to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Frequent stops had to be made on the trip to take on more wood for the steamer boilers.
At first, it seemed the journey would be boring. The river was so wide and hazy, shore could not be easily seen. Due to the mosquitoes, days would be spent mostly indoors. Even though the cries of monkeys and birds could be heard, the jungle was so dense that "animals in a forest a mile away might as well be on the moon!" (p. 593). Then the explorer noticed the change in the different kinds of trees, that dwelling huts would be built not on shore but on stilts in the river itself, and many other details. Holt ate alligator tail with reluctance, but admitted that it wasn't too terrible, tasting like mild fish.
There were a few towns and settlements on the Amazon. "At Obidos, a small town perched on a north-bank bluff, the mighty river rushes through a single channel less than a mile and a quarter wide. The significance of this is plain when one recalls that the Amazon is estimated to carry a fifth of all the running fresh water in the world, drained from 2,722,000 square miles, to form the largest system of inland waterways on the earth," (p. 596).
This part of Holt's trip took eight days and ran 900 miles. At the city of Manaos, the steamer left the Amazon and turned into the Rio Negro, a startling sight where the black waters of the Rio Negro joined the brown waters of the Amazon. Mr. Holt and the expedition left the steamship and were able to spend the night at a hotel. Manaos was in its glory years before when the boom due to rubber trees' popularity was at its height. In 1933 wild rubber was dead commercially.
Holt had to find another suitable boat for transportation up the Rio Negro. He found the necessary supplies and a smaller steamship for the party to proceed. It was amazing that Manaos was plopped on the edge of the jungle and boasted electric lights, roads, and other trappings of 'modern' life.
Farther up the Rio Negro, another mixing of the waters occurs. "Two hundred miles above Manaos, the Rio Branco, pouring its white waters into the dark flood of the Negro, reproduces on a gigantic scale the phenomenon that occurs when cream is poured into coffee," (p. 601).
After five days, the steamer's journey ended at the important settlement of Santa Isabel, important but having only three houses. Holt and his party had to wait for the rest of their team. Meanwhile, since Holt was a Naturalist, he set to work at night to capture specimens of birds. Apparently the birds hid during the daylight hours but came out to feed on insects at night. He had brought with him a battery-powered light to startle them.
Joined by the rest of their party, the group set out for an 85-mile trip up the Rio Negro to enter yet another river, the Cauabury. This is very close to the rapids and very close to finding their goal. Let's break here at mid-point of the article.
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