Let us rejoin Mr. Ernest G. Holt deep in the Amazon jungle in Brazil, on his quest to locate the true boundary between Brazil with its neighboring Venezuela. We are following the trip in his article, 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.
The party was already two weeks up the incredible Amazon River, now past the Rio Negro and on the Rio Branco at Santa Isabel, a small settlement. Joined by the second part of their group, they traveled 85 miles farther up the Rio Branco toward their goal, the Cauabury River. They were told to expect rapids, but not these rapids!
"Its first aspect is placid enough to reassure the most timorous. . . Within the hour we were brought up abruptly by a granite dike thrown across the stream in a jumble of rocks over which the river poured in a wild, beautiful cascade apparently impossible of passage. . . It was early morning when the fight began, and for two long, weary days, our army - there were about 75 of us all told - toiled like so many ants to get the boats through the rapids. . . The smaller craft were pushed and pulled by brute force through narrow channels between the rocks, but such methods could not be applied to the heavier boats. . . These had to be hauled with the aid of block and tackle, with logs for rollers, over dry granite," (p. 607).
On the third morning of their run up the rapids, "The engine chose a bad spot to become temperamental. . . She was saved from crashing on the rocks below only by the miraculous strength of the thin piassaba line at which the men were tugging," (photo caption, p. 608).
Onward to the next river! "From the Cauabury to the Maturaca was a leap from the frying pan into the fire! . . The narrow channel is a succession of hairpin turns, shallows, deep pools, and small but stiff rapids, so choked with logs and fallen branches that it was necessary to keep a gang of axmen ahead of the boats," (p. 614). Even in all this chaos, Holt managed to capture and preserve hundreds of native birds and gather plant specimens at every nightly stop for camp. All cooking was done aboard the main boat.
During a lunch break, Holt spotted a flock of unusual birds on the ground. He ran into the jungle to chase them and the worst happened: he got lost, by himself, without a clue as to which way back was the rest of his expedition. "I had no matches with which to raise a smoke, even if it could have been seen, I did fire a signal with my gun, but knew as I did so that I was too deep in the forest to be heard."
"I detail this for the benefit of those who may never have paused to consider what it means to be lost, with no traffic policeman handy to direct the way. The conventional terrors of the jungle - ferocious wild beasts, huge snakes darting swiftly from ambush to crush out one's life in their relentless coils or to deal a slower, more horrible death by poison - meant nothing to me, for I knew them to be dangerous only in the imagination of fanciful writers," (p. 615).
Holt's biggest fear was to slowly starve to death. Somehow, he made it back to the river, recognized a part of the river they had passed earlier, and followed it upstream to reach his group. Crisis over! "I threw down my bag of birds with a nonchalance that fooled even our keen-eyed Indians. I hope they never learn to read!" (p. 616).
At last they reached their destination, the falls of Salto de Hua, beyond which was Venezuela. "Though we had come 1,500 miles from the ocean, we had climbed only 279 feet above its level. Despite its lack of altitude and the fact that we were almost astride the Equator, the temperature was pleasantly cool . . . but the relative humidity was often 98%!" ( p. 617).
There is a huge granite rock in the upper Rio Negro in Venezuela called Piedra del Cucuy which marks the boundary between that country, Brazil, and Columbia.
The task of the men was to find a key hill "from which the international boundary follows the watershed of the Cordilheira, then survey and mark the divide," (p. 617). The engineers among them had to climb mountains and fell trees in their quest. Meanwhile, Holt set about capturing more unusual bird, bat, and plant specimens. His dream came true and he accidentally encountered several of the rare, elusive Cock-of-the-Rock birds which, of course, he captured and preserved. His excitement knew no bounds. "All too soon came the time to depart; but the rivers were steadily falling and we were in danger of being marooned in the forest," (p. 626).
Their return trip was filled with adventures and dangers probably exceeding the previous trip due to them now "shooting the rapids" with their boat. At last, the boat was beat up beyond repair. "On no other trip had I been so often on the ragged edge of disaster and come through without a scratch or the loss of a specimen. It was getting to be uncanny," (p. 626). Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Holt and the others, the government had changed at Rio de Janiero, Brazil.
Holt's group did not return by the way they came but continued to the Orioco River and on to the Atlantic coast. "Entering one of the mouths of the Amazon, we had voyaged 3,000 miles of continuous inland waterways through the greatest jungle on earth, and would soon depart by one of the 36 mouths of the Orinoco," (p. 629). On the final steamship bound for home, "The low fringe of mangroves receded into the general blackness of the tropical night, and, our last tie severed, we turned sadly into our bunks," (p. 630). Sigh.
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