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THROUGH THE BRAZILIAN WILDERNESS
By Theodore Roosevelt

Chapter 10. 

TO THE AMAZON AND HOME; ZOOLOGICAL
              AND GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS OF THE EXPEDITION

Our adventures and our troubles were alike over. We now experienced
the incalculable contrast between descending a known and travelled
river, and one that is utterly unknown. After four days we hired a
rubberman to go with us as guide. We knew exactly what channels were
passable when we came to the rapids, when the canoes had to unload,
and where the carry-trails were. It was all child's play compared to
what we had gone through. We made long days' journeys, for at night we
stopped at some palm-thatched house, inhabited or abandoned, and
therefore the men were spared the labor of making camp; and we bought
ample food for them, so there was no further need of fishing and
chopping down palms for the palmtops. The heat of the sun was blazing;
but it looked as if we had come back into the rainy season, for there
were many heavy rains, usually in the afternoon, but sometimes in the
morning or at night. The mosquitoes were sometimes rather troublesome
at night. In the daytime the piums swarmed, and often bothered us even
when we were in midstream.

For four days there were no rapids we could not run without unloading.
Then, on the 19th, we got a canoe from Senhor Barboso. He was a most
kind and hospitable man, who also gave us a duck and a chicken and
some mandioc and six pounds of rice, and would take no payment; he
lived in a roomy house with his dusky, cigar-smoking wife and his many
children. The new canoe was light and roomy, and we were able to rig
up a low shelter under which I could lie; I was still sick. At noon we
passed the mouth of a big river, the Rio Branco, coming in from the
left; this was about in latitude 9 degrees 38 minutes. Soon afterward
we came to the first serious rapids, the Panela. We carried the boats
past, ran down the empty canoes, and camped at the foot in a roomy
house. The doctor bought a handsome trumpeter bird, very friendly and
confiding, which was thenceforth my canoe companion.

We had already passed many inhabited--and a still larger number of
uninhabited--houses. The dwellers were rubbermen, but generally they
were permanent settlers also, homemakers, with their wives and
children. Some, both of the men and women, were apparently of pure
negro blood, or of pure Indian or south European blood; but in the
great majority all three strains were mixed in varying degrees. They
were most friendly, courteous, and hospitable. Often they refused
payment for what they could afford, out of their little, to give us.
When they did charge, the prices were very high, as was but just, for
they live back of the beyond, and everything costs them fabulously,
save what they raise themselves. The cool, bare houses of poles and
palm thatch contained little except hammocks and a few simple cooking
utensils; and often a clock or sewing machine, or Winchester rifle,
from our own country. They often had flowers planted, including
fragrant roses. Their only live stock, except the dogs, were a few
chickens and ducks. They planted patches of mandioc, maize, sugarcane,
rice, beans, squashes, pineapples, bananas, lemons, oranges, melons,
peppers; and various purely native fruits and vegetables, such as the
kniabo--a vegetable-fruit growing on the branches of a high bush--
which is cooked with meat. They get some game from the forest, and
more fish from the river. There is no representative of the government
among them--indeed, even now their very existence is barely known to
the governmental authorities; and the church has ignored them as
completely as the state. When they wish to get married they have to
spend several months getting down to and back from Manaos or some
smaller city; and usually the first christening and the marriage
ceremony are held at the same time. They have merely squatter's right
to the land, and are always in danger of being ousted by unscrupulous
big men who come in late, but with a title technically straight. The
land laws should be shaped so as to give each of these pioneer
settlers the land he actually takes up and cultivates, and upon which
he makes his home. The small homemaker, who owns the land which he
tills with his own hands, is the greatest element of strength in any
country.

These are real pioneer settlers. They are the true wilderness-winners.
No continent is ever really conquered, or thoroughly explored, by a
few leaders, or exceptional men, although such men can render great
service. The real conquest, the thorough exploration and settlement,
is made by a nameless multitude of small men of whom the most
important are, of course, the home-makers. Each treads most of the
time in the footsteps of his predecessors, but for some few miles, at
some time or other, he breaks new ground; and his house is built where
no house has ever stood before. Such a man, the real pioneer, must
have no strong desire for social life and no need, probably no
knowledge, of any luxury, or of any comfort save of the most
elementary kind. The pioneer who is always longing for the comfort and
luxury of civilization, and especially of great cities, is no real
pioneer at all. These settlers whom we met were contented to live in
the wilderness. They had found the climate healthy and the soil
fruitful; a visit to a city was a very rare event, nor was there any
overwhelming desire for it.

In short, these men, and those like them everywhere on the frontier
between civilization and savagery in Brazil, are now playing the part
played by our backwoodsmen when over a century and a quarter ago they
began the conquest of the great basin of the Mississippi; the part
played by the Boer farmers for over a century in South Africa, and by
the Canadians when less than half a century ago they began to take
possession of their Northwest. Every now and then some one says that
the "last frontier" is now to be found in Canada or Africa, and that
it has almost vanished. On a far larger scale this frontier is to be
found in Brazil--a country as big as Europe or the United States--and
decades will pass before it vanishes. The first settlers came to
Brazil a century before the first settlers came to the United States
and Canada. For three hundred years progress was very slow--Portuguese
colonial government at that time was almost as bad as Spanish. For the
last half-century and over there has been a steady increase in the
rapidity of the rate of development; and this increase bids fair to be
constantly more rapid in the future.

The Paolistas, hunting for lands, slaves, and mines, were the first
native Brazilians who, a hundred years ago, played a great part in
opening to settlement vast stretches of wilderness. The rubber hunters
have played a similar part during the last few decades. Rubber dazzled
them, as gold and diamonds have dazzled other men and driven them
forth to wander through the wide waste spaces of the world. Searching
for rubber they made highways of rivers the very existence of which
was unknown to the governmental authorities, or to any map-makers.
Whether they succeeded or failed, they everywhere left behind them
settlers, who toiled, married, and brought up children. Settlement
began; the conquest of the wilderness entered on its first stage.

On the 20th we stopped at the first store, where we bought, of course
at a high price, sugar and tobacco for the camaradas. In this land of
plenty the camaradas over-ate, and sickness was as rife among them as
ever. In Cherrie's boat he himself and the steersman were the only men
who paddled strongly and continuously. The storekeeper's stock of
goods was very low, only what he still had left from that brought in
nearly a year before; for the big boats, or batelaos-batelons--had not
yet worked as far up-stream. We expected to meet them somewhere below
the next rapids, the Inferno. The trader or rubberman brings up his
year's supply of goods in a batelao, starting in February and reaching
the upper course of the river early in May, when the rainy season is
over. The parties of rubber-explorers are then equipped and
provisioned; and the settlers purchase certain necessities, and
certain things that strike them as luxuries. This year the Brazil-nut
crop on the river had failed, a serious thing for all explorers and
wilderness wanderers.

On the 20th we made the longest run we had made, fifty-two kilometres.
Lyra took observations where we camped; we were in latitude 8 degrees
49 minutes. At this camping-place the great, beautiful river was a
little over three hundred metres wide. We were in an empty house. The
marks showed that in the high water, a couple of months back, the
river had risen until the lower part of the house was flooded. The
difference between the level of the river during the floods and in the
dry season is extraordinary.

On the 21st we made another good run, getting down to the Inferno
rapids, which are in latitude 8 degrees 19 minutes south. Until we
reached the Cardozo we had run almost due north; since then we had
been running a little west of north. Before we reached these rapids we
stopped at a large, pleasant thatch house, and got a fairly big and
roomy as well as light boat, leaving both our two smaller dugouts
behind. Above the rapids a small river, the Madeirainha, entered from
the left. The rapids had a fall of over ten metres, and the water was
very wild and rough. Met with for the first time, it would doubtless
have taken several days to explore a passage and, with danger and
labor, get the boats down. But we were no longer exploring,
pioneering, over unknown country. It is easy to go where other men
have prepared the way. We had a guide; we took our baggage down by a
carry three-quarters of a kilometre long; and the canoes were run
through known channels the following morning. At the foot of the
rapids was a big house and store; and camped at the head were a number
of rubber-workers, waiting for the big boats of the head rubbermen to
work their way up from below. They were a reckless set of brown
daredevils. These men lead hard lives of labor and peril; they
continually face death themselves, and they think little of it in
connection with others. It is small wonder that they sometimes have
difficulties with the tribes of utterly wild Indians with whom they
are brought in contact, although there is a strong Indian strain in
their own blood.

The following morning, after the empty canoes had been run down, we
started, and made a rather short afternoon's journey. We had to take
the baggage by one rapids. We camped in an empty house, in the rain.
Next day we ran nearly fifty kilometres, the river making a long sweep
to the west. We met half a dozen batelaos making their way up-stream,
each with a crew of six or eight men; and two of them with women and
children in addition. The crew were using very long poles, with
crooks, or rather the stubs of cut branches which served as crooks, at
the upper end. With these they hooked into the branches and dragged
themselves up along the bank, in addition to poling where the depth
permitted it. The river was as big as the Paraguay at Corumba; but, in
striking contrast to the Paraguay, there were few water-birds. We ran
some rather stiff rapids, the Infernino, without unloading, in the
morning. In the evening we landed for the night at a large, open,
shed-like house, where there were two or three pigs, the first live
stock we had seen other than poultry and ducks. It was a dirty place,
but we got some eggs.

The following day, the 24th, we ran down some fifty kilometres to the
Carupanan rapids, which by observation Lyra found to be in latitude 7
degrees 47 minutes. We met several batelaos, and the houses on the
bank showed that the settlers were somewhat better off than was the
case farther up. At the rapids was a big store, the property of Senhor
Caripe, the wealthiest rubberman who works on this river; many of the
men we met were in his employ. He has himself risen from the ranks. He
was most kind and hospitable, and gave us another boat to replace the
last of our shovel-nosed dugouts. The large, open house was cool,
clean, and comfortable.

With these began a series of half a dozen sets of rapids, all coming
within the next dozen kilometres, and all offering very real
obstacles. At one we saw the graves of four men who had perished
therein; and many more had died whose bodies were never recovered; the
toll of human life had been heavy. Had we been still on an unknown
river, pioneering our own way, it would doubtless have taken us at
least a fortnight of labor and peril to pass. But it actually took
only a day and a half. All the channels were known, all the trails
cut. Senhor Caripe, a first-class waterman, cool, fearless, and brawny
as a bull, came with us as guide. Half a dozen times the loads were
taken out and carried down. At one cataract the canoes were themselves
dragged overland; elsewhere they were run down empty, shipping a good
deal of water. At the foot of the cataract, where we dragged the
canoes overland, we camped for the night. Here Kermit shot a big
cayman. Our camp was alongside the graves of three men who at this
point had perished in the swift water.

Senhor Caripe told us many strange adventures of rubber-workers he had
met or employed. One of his men, working on the Gy-Parana, got lost
and after twenty-eight days found himself on the Madeirainha, which he
thus discovered. He was in excellent health, for he had means to start
a fire, and he found abundance of Brazil-nuts and big land-tortoises.
Senhor Caripe said that the rubbermen now did not go above the ninth
degree, or thereabouts, on the upper Aripuanan proper, having found
the rubber poor on the reaches above. A year previously five
rubbermen, Mundurucu Indians, were working on the Corumba at about
that level. It is a difficult stream to ascend or descend. They made
excursions into the forest for days at a time after caoutchouc. On one
such trip, after fifteen days they, to their surprise, came out on the
Aripuanan. They returned and told their "patron" of their discovery;
and by his orders took their caoutchouc overland to the Aripuanan,
built a canoe, and ran down with their caoutchouc to Manaos. They had
now returned and were working on the upper Aripuanan. The Mundurucus
and Brazilians are always on the best terms, and the former are even
more inveterate enemies of the wild Indians than are the latter.

By mid-forenoon on April 26 we had passed the last dangerous rapids.
The paddles were plied with hearty good will, Cherrie and Kermit, as
usual, working like the camaradas, and the canoes went dancing down
the broad, rapid river. The equatorial forest crowded on either hand
to the water's edge; and, although the river was falling, it was still
so high that in many places little islands were completely submerged,
and the current raced among the trunks of the green trees. At one
o'clock we came to the mouth of the Castanho proper, and in sight of
the tent of Lieutenant Pyrineus, with the flags of the United States
and Brazil flying before it; and, with rifles firing from the canoes
and the shore, we moored at the landing of the neat, soldierly, well
kept camp. The upper Aripuanan, a river of substantially the same
volume as the Castanho, but broader at this point, and probably of
less length, here joined the Castanho from the east, and the two
together formed what the rubbermen called the lower Aripuanan. The
mouth of this was indicated, and sometimes named, on the maps, but
only as a small and unimportant stream.

We had been two months in the canoes; from the 27th of February to the
26th of April. We had gone over 750 kilometres. The river from its
source, near the thirteenth degree, to where it became navigable and
we entered it, had a course of some 200 kilometres--probably more,
perhaps 300 kilometres. Therefore we had now put on the map a river
nearly 1,000 kilometres in length of which the existence was not
merely unknown but impossible if the standard maps were correct. But
this was not all. It seemed that this river of 1,000 kilometres in
length was really the true upper course of the Aripuanan proper, in
which case the total length was nearly 1,500 kilometres. Pyrineus had
been waiting for us over a month, at the junction of what the
rubbermen called the Castanho and of what they called the upper
Aripuanan. (He had no idea as to which stream we would appear upon, or
whether we would appear upon either.) On March 26 he had measured the
volume of the two, and found that the Castanho, although the narrower,
was the deeper and swifter, and that in volume it surpassed the other
by 84 cubic metres a second. Since then the Castanho had fallen; our
measurements showed it to be slightly smaller than the other; the
volume of the river after the junction was about 4,500 cubic metres a
second. This was in 7 degrees 34 minutes.

We were glad indeed to see Pyrineus and be at his attractive camp. We
were only four hours above the little river hamlet of Sao Joao, a port
of call for rubber-steamers, from which the larger ones go to Manaos
in two days. These steamers mostly belong to Senhor Caripe. From
Pyrineus we learned that Lauriado and Fiala had reached Manaos on
March 26. On the swift water in the gorge of the Papagaio Fiala's boat
had been upset and all his belongings lost, while he himself had
narrowly escaped with his life. I was glad indeed that the fine and
gallant fellow had escaped. The Canadian canoe had done very well. We
were no less rejoiced to learn that Amilcar, the head of the party
that went down the Gy-Parana, was also all right, although his canoe
too had been upset in the rapids, and his instruments and all his
notes lost. He had reached Manaos on April 10. Fiala had gone home.
Miller was collecting near Manaos. He had been doing capital work.

The piranhas were bad here, and no one could bathe. Cherrie, while
standing in the water close to the shore, was attacked and bitten; but
with one bound he was on the bank before any damage could be done.

We spent a last night under canvas, at Pyrineus' encampment. It rained
heavily. Next morning we all gathered at the monument which Colonel
Rondon had erected, and he read the orders of the day. These recited
just what had been accomplished: set forth the fact that we had now by
actual exploration and investigation discovered that the river whose
upper portion had been called the Duvida on the maps of the
Telegraphic Commission and the unknown major part of which we had just
traversed, and the river known to a few rubbermen, but to no one else,
as the Castanho, and the lower part of the river known to the
rubbermen as the Aripuanan (which did not appear on the maps save as
its mouth was sometimes indicated, with no hint of its size) were all
parts of one and the same river; and that by order of the Brazilian
Government this river, the largest affluent of the Madeira, with its
source near the 13th degree and its mouth a little south of the 5th
degree, hitherto utterly unknown to cartographers and in large part
utterly unknown to any save the local tribes of Indians, had been
named the Rio Roosevelt.

We left Rondon, Lyra, and Pyrineus to take observations, and the rest
of us embarked for the last time on the canoes, and, borne swiftly on
the rapid current, we passed over one set of not very important rapids
and ran down to Senhor Caripe's little hamlet of Sao Joao, which we
reached about one o'clock on April 27, just before a heavy afternoon
rain set in. We had run nearly eight hundred kilometres during the
sixty days we had spent in the canoes. Here we found and boarded
Pyrineus's river steamer, which seemed in our eyes extremely
comfortable. In the senhor's pleasant house we were greeted by the
senhora, and they were both more than thoughtful and generous in their
hospitality. Ahead of us lay merely thirty-six hours by steamer to
Manaos. Such a trip as that we had taken tries men as if by fire.
Cherrie had more than stood every test; and in him Kermit and I had
come to recognize a friend with whom our friendship would never falter
or grow less.

Early the following afternoon our whole party, together with Senhor
Caripe, started on the steamer. It took us a little over twelve hours'
swift steaming to run down to the mouth of the river on the upper
course of which our progress had been so slow and painful; from source
to mouth, according to our itinerary and to Lyra's calculations, the
course of the stream down which we had thus come was about 1,500
kilometres in length--about 900 miles, perhaps nearly 1,000 miles--
from its source near the 13th degree in the highlands to its mouth in
the Madeira, near the 5th degree. Next morning we were on the broad
sluggish current of the lower Madeira, a beautiful tropical river.
There were heavy rainstorms, as usual, although this is supposed to be
the very end of the rainy season. In the afternoon we finally entered
the wonderful Amazon itself, the mighty river which contains one tenth
of all the running water of the globe. It was miles across, where we
entered it; and indeed we could not tell whether the farther bank,
which we saw, was that of the mainland or an island. We went up it
until about midnight, then steamed up the Rio Negro for a short
distance, and at one in the morning of April 30 reached Manaos.

Manaos is a remarkable city. It is only three degrees south of the
equator. Sixty years ago it was a nameless little collection of
hovels, tenanted by a few Indians and a few of the poorest class of
Brazilian peasants. Now it is a big, handsome modern city, with Opera
house, tramways, good hotels, fine squares and public buildings, and
attractive private houses. The brilliant coloring and odd architecture
give the place a very foreign and attractive flavor in northern eyes.
Its rapid growth to prosperity was due to the rubber trade. This is
now far less remunerative than formerly. It will undoubtedly in some
degree recover; and in any event the development of the immensely rich
and fertile Amazonian valley is sure to go on, and it will be
immensely quickened when closer connections are made with the
Brazilian highland country lying south of it.

Here we found Miller, and glad indeed we were to see him. He had made
good collections of mammals and birds on the Gy-Parana, the Madeira,
and in the neighborhood of Manaos; his entire collection of mammals
was really noteworthy. Among them was the only sloth any of us had
seen on the trip. The most interesting of the birds he had seen was
the hoatzin. This is a most curious bird of very archaic type. Its
flight is feeble, and the naked young have spurs on their wings, by
the help of which they crawl actively among the branches before their
feathers grow. They swim no less easily, at the same early age. Miller
got one or two nests, and preserved specimens of the surroundings of
the nests; and he made exhaustive records of the habits of the birds.
Near Megasso a jaguar had killed one of the bullocks that were being
driven along for food. The big cat had not seized the ox with its
claws by the head, but had torn open its throat and neck.

Every one was most courteous at Manaos, especially the governor of the
state and the mayor of the city. Mr. Robiliard, the British consular
representative, and also the representative of the Booth line of
steamers, was particularly kind. He secured for us passages on one of
the cargo boats of the line to Para, and thence on one of the regular
cargo-and-passenger steamers to Barbados and New York. The Booth
people were most courteous to us.

I said good-by to the camaradas with real friendship and regret. The
parting gift I gave to each was in gold sovereigns; and I was rather
touched to learn later that they had agreed among themselves each to
keep one sovereign as a medal of honor and token that the owner had
been on the trip. They were a fine set, brave, patient, obedient, and
enduring. Now they had forgotten their hard times; they were fat from
eating, at leisure, all they wished; they were to see Rio Janeiro,
always an object of ambition with men of their stamp; and they were
very proud of their membership in the expedition.

Later, at Belen, I said good-by to Colonel Rondon, Doctor Cajazeira,
and Lieutenant Lyra. Together with my admiration for their hardihood,
courage, and resolution, I had grown to feel a strong and affectionate
friendship for them. I had become very fond of them; and I was glad to
feel that I had been their companion in the performance of a feat
which possessed a certain lasting importance.

On May 1 we left Manaos for Belen-Para, as until recently it was
called. The trip was interesting. We steamed down through tempest and
sunshine; and the towering forest was dwarfed by the giant river it
fringed. Sunrise and sunset turned the sky to an unearthly flame of
many colors above the vast water. It all seemed the embodiment of
loneliness and wild majesty. Yet everywhere man was conquering the
loneliness and wresting the majesty to his own uses. We passed many
thriving, growing towns; at one we stopped to take on cargo.
Everywhere there was growth and development. The change since the days
when Bates and Wallace came to this then poor and utterly primitive
region is marvellous. One of its accompaniments has been a large
European, chiefly south European, immigration. The blood is everywhere
mixed; there is no color line, as in most English-speaking countries,
and the negro and Indian strains are very strong; but the dominant
blood, the blood already dominant in quantity, and that is steadily
increasing its dominance, is the olive-white.

Only rarely did the river show its full width. Generally we were in
channels or among islands. The surface of the water was dotted with
little islands of floating vegetation. Miller said that much of this
came from the lagoons such as those where he had been hunting, beside
the Solimoens--lagoons filled with the huge and splendid Victoria
lily, and with masses of water hyacinths. Miller, who was very fond of
animals and always took much care of them, had a small collection
which he was bringing back for the Bronx Zoo. An agouti was so bad-
tempered that he had to be kept solitary; but three monkeys, big,
middle-sized, and little, and a young peccary formed a happy family.
The largest monkey cried, shedding real tears, when taken in the arms
and pitied. The middle-sized monkey was stupid and kindly, and all the
rest of the company imposed on it; the little monkey invariably rode
on its back, and the peccary used it as a head pillow when it felt
sleepy.

Belen, the capital of the state of Para, was an admirable illustration
of the genuine and almost startling progress which Brazil has been
making of recent years. It is a beautiful city, nearly under the
equator. But it is not merely beautiful. The docks, the dredging
operations, the warehouses, the stores and shops, all tell of energy
and success in commercial life. It is as clean, healthy, and well
policed a city as any of the size in the north temperate zone. The
public buildings are handsome, the private dwellings attractive; there
are a fine opera-house, an excellent tramway system, and a good museum
and botanical gardens. There are cavalry stables, where lights burn
all night long to protect the horses from the vampire bats. The parks,
the rows of palms and mango-trees, the open-air restaurants, the gay
life under the lights at night, all give the city its own special
quality and charm. Belen and Manaos are very striking examples of what
can be done in the mid-tropics. The governor of Para and his charming
wife were more than kind.

Cherrie and Miller spent the day at the really capital zoological
gardens, with the curator, Miss Snethlage. Miss Snethlage, a German
lady, is a first rate field and closet naturalist, and an explorer of
note, who has gone on foot from the Xingu to the Tapajos. Most wisely
she has confined the Belen zoo to the animals of the lower Amazon
valley, and in consequence I know of no better local zoological
gardens. She has an invaluable collection of birds and mammals of the
region; and it was a privilege to meet her and talk with her.

We also met Professor Farrabee, of the University of Pennsylvania, the
ethnologist. He had just finished a very difficult and important trip,
from Manaos by the Rio Branco to the highlands of Guiana, across them
on foot, and down to the seacoast of British Guiana. He is an
admirable representative of the men who are now opening South America
to scientific knowledge.

On May 7 we bade good-by to our kind Brazilian friends and sailed
northward for Barbados and New York.

Zoologically the trip had been a thorough success. Cherrie and Miller
had collected over twenty-five hundred birds, about five hundred
mammals, and a few reptiles, batrachians, and fishes. Many of them
were new to science; for much of the region traversed had never
previously been worked by any scientific collector.

Of course, the most important work we did was the geographic work, the
exploration of the unknown river, undertaken at the suggestion of the
Brazilian Government, and in conjunction with its representatives. No
piece of work of this kind is ever achieved save as it is based on
long continued previous work. As I have before said, what we did was
to put the cap on the pyramid that had been built by Colonel Rondon
and his associates of the Telegraphic Commission during the six
previous years. It was their scientific exploration of the chapadao,
their mapping the basin of the Juruena, and their descent of the Gy-
Parana that rendered it possible for us to solve the mystery of the
River of Doubt.

The work of the commission, much the greatest work of the kind ever
done in South America, is one of the many, many achievements which the
republican government of Brazil has to its credit. Brazil has been
blessed beyond the average of her Spanish-American sisters because she
won her way to republicanism by evolution rather than revolution. They
plunged into the extremely difficult experiment of democratic, of
popular, self-government, after enduring the atrophy of every quality
of self-control, self-reliance, and initiative throughout three
withering centuries of existence under the worst and most foolish form
of colonial government, both from the civil and the religious
standpoint, that has ever existed. The marvel is not that some of them
failed, but that some of them have eventually succeeded in such
striking fashion. Brazil, on the contrary, when she achieved
independence, first exercised it under the form of an authoritative
empire, then under the form of a liberal empire. When the republic
came, the people were reasonably ripe for it. The great progress of
Brazil--and it has been an astonishing progress--has been made under
the republic. I could give innumerable examples and illustrations of
this. The change that has converted Rio Janeiro from a picturesque
pest-hole into a singularly beautiful, healthy, clean, and efficient
modern great city is one of these. Another is the work of the
Telegraphic Commission.

We put upon the map a river some fifteen hundred kilometres in length,
of which the upper course was not merely utterly unknown to, but
unguessed at by, anybody; while the lower course, although known for
years to a few rubbermen, was utterly unknown to cartographers. It is
the chief affluent of the Madeira, which is itself the chief affluent
of the Amazon.

The source of this river is between the 12th and 13th parallels of
latitude south and the 59th and 60th degrees of longitude west from
Greenwich. We embarked on it at about latitude 12 degrees 1 minute
south, and about longitude 60 degrees 15 minutes west. After that its
entire course lay between the 60th and 61st degrees of longitude,
approaching the latter most closely about latitude 8 degrees 15
minutes. The first rapids we encountered were in latitude 11 degrees
44 minutes, and in uninterrupted succession they continued for about a
degree, without a day's complete journey between any two of them. At
11 degrees 23 minutes the Rio Kermit entered from the left, at 11
degrees 22 minutes the Rio Marciano Avila from the right, at 11
degrees 18 minutes the Taunay from the left, at 10 degrees 58 minutes
the Cardozo from the right. In 10 degrees 24 minutes we encountered
the first rubbermen. The Rio Branco entered from the left at 9 degrees
38 minutes. Our camp at 8 degrees 49 minutes was nearly on the
boundary between Matto Grosso and Amazonas. The confluence with the
Aripuanan, which joined from the right, took place at 7 degrees 34
minutes. The entrance into the Madeira was at about 5 degrees 20
minutes (this point we did not determine by observation, as it is
already on the maps). The stream we had followed down was from the
river's highest sources; we had followed its longest course. 

The End

A concluding word from Robert J.  Kuniegel

TR AMERICAN PATRIOT hopes you enjoy our books.  Theodore Roosevelt lived his life in a manner that is the only way possible to make government responsive to the people.  He has written how to make meaningful reform possible not only for his generation but for future generations, if we read what he has said.  We only need to interest others in reading what he has said to transform our government. 

Reading the books on TR AMERICAN PATRIOT DOT COM  and having others do the same, will develop citizens and leaders capable of transforming American politics into a system of government that will be honest, and responsive to “a square deal”.  A square deal has no special deals for the rich, the middle class, or the poor.  Our government today has degenerated into a system that rewards citizens for not being productive.  It promotes entitlements under the guise of helping people, when in fact it only helps politicians to protect their own royal positions.  Policies that foster a special privileged class was the type of government policies Theodore Roosevelt fought against and won.  He was a visionary.  He knew this fight would need to be fought through the ages if we were to keep our country strong.  He was an intrepid pioneer that blazed a trail through a jungle of corrupt government, so that others might follow his proven and highly successful common sense approach toward honest government.  His fearless course helped make America a beacon of hope to all that seek justice.  His endless devotion to America helped make America a super power that no just nation has needed to fear as long as our citizens value his lofty resolute square deal policy toward our fellow citizens and those of other nations. 

Theodore Roosevelt’s greatest gift to this country is before us.  It is not in the past, if we as Americans recognize that his message is not just a story from American history pages.  His message is an example, clearly defined.  It details actions that are required if we desire to do something meaningful for our country.  Join the good fight today.  You only need to read and interest others to do the same.  

David Boyd, repeating what he had read, once said, “The person we become is because of our experiences in life, the people we meet, and the books we read. ” It is time to have others meet Theodore Roosevelt.  It is time for a Theodore Roosevelt revival, “Fear God and do your own part”.  Dare to help make Theodore Roosevelt the standard and not the exception.  America needs to adopt a wise, fearless and honest role model as the standard we revere, so that our public servants know what we expect.  The first step to honest government is no harder than setting proper standards of conduct for our public servants through the use of a proper role model.  Can you find one quality in Theodore Roosevelt that is not right in a public servant?  If you think you can, I bet your conjecture is based upon something other than truth and honest reasoning and this American would love an opportunity to debate any such conjecture.