Up The Mazaruni For Diamonds -Part 1
By W. Jean LaVarre
From
The American Boy magazine, January, 1919.
Digitized by Doug Frizzle, June 2012.
The Boy Scout Who Went Scouting in the
Wilds
Editor’s Note—American boys are
always doing interesting things. Occasionally one of them
does something that is of
extraordinary interest and value. Charlie Murphy did; his own story of his
fourteen months in the Arctic appeared just a year ago in THE AMERICAN BOY. W.
Jean LaVarre did; his own story of his remarkable adventures in the wilds of British Guiana
starts on this page and will continue for several months, each installment
taking him deeper into that strange land and revealing something
of new interest. Jean
LaVarre, a Virginian by birth, was 18 years old when he had the thrilling adventure which he describes so
graphically. He was "prepared" for it. In 1911 he joined the Boy Scouts of America and helped to organize one
of the first troops on Staten Island, New
York. He became a First Class Scout, and earned
sixteen merit badges and was appointed Patrol Leader of the
first Honor Patrol in his city. Outdoor subjects have always been his hobby,
especially mountain climbing and camping. He has been camping every year since
he was ten years old, and says he intends to keep it up the
rest of his life.
The voyage to South America and
the trip into British
Guiana wilds (several hundred miles farther
inland than Colonel Roosevelt penetrated on his visit there)
was the biggest of Jean LaVarre's
many experiences in the open. He and
his friend Edward P. Lewis, of Springfield, Mass., went hunting for diamonds,
and for five months lived in the
real "wilds” among uncivilized black men—an experience which few white men
have had. Not only the adventures
but the unfamiliar facts which
LaVarre learned there, at first
hand, make this a feature of unusual value.
“HERE'S A QUEER looking letter," I said
to myself, one day early in the
spring of 1917. I could hardly make out the
postmark. It was something of a
surprise to receive a letter from British Guiana, as I finally deciphered it, but the contents were even more surprising.
The letter was from my friend Edward P. Lewis. "I need a partner
in a diamond mining venture," he wrote. "Are you game to try it out
with me? It will be a long trip full of adventures and dangers, but there are diamonds here to be had for the digging."
He wrote much more. I became
enthusiastic on the moment and was determined to go if possible. I had
little trouble in arranging this and wrote him that I would come.
On the
tenth of May I sailed from New York on the
steamship Saga to Barbados
where Lewis met me. He was delighted and quite as enthusiastic as I. He had
been in Georgetown, British Guiana, for a while
on other business and had learned
about the diamond fields away up the famous, and treacherous, Mazaruni River.
From Barbados we sailed away In South America
on the steamer Parima. I was
surprised in find Georgetown
such a large city, 60,000 inhabitants, and, as the
buildings were all one and two stories, one can imagine how it spread out.
"Can we start
to-morrow?" I asked, after we had reached our hotel. Lewis laughed.
"Hardly," he said.
"This isn't like a trip back home
where you can toss some clothes and clean collars in a bag, buy your ticket,
catch your train and be off."
I had not given much thought
to exactly how we were to travel. But I soon learned that to journey up a great
river for hundreds of miles with a score of natives, taking all the food for a six months' stay, was a matter that
could not be arranged in a moment.
The starting out place for the trip was twenty miles from
Georgetown at a
town upriver called Bartica. But as Bartica has only twenty inhabitants we
bought everything at Georgetown.
There we busied ourselves with the
preparations. It seemed as though there
were a million details to look after, and I got an idea of what an explorer is
up against, as we had to outfit ourselves about the
same as an exploring party would.
"We must get lead guns,
beads, mirrors and other
trinkets," said Lewis.
"What's the big idea?" I asked. "Are we to open a
five and ten cent store for the
native Indians up there?"
"Not exactly,"
laughed Lewis, "but we must have something
to trade with. What use is a silver or gold coin to a native back hundreds of
miles in the jungle? He'd rather have a twenty-five cent kitchen knife than a
fifty dollar gold piece."
The "lead guns" are
not lead, as I learned, but the very
cheapest sort of cheap guns, manufactured in England solely for trading with
semi-civilized and uncivilized people. No live American boy would take one as a
gift, but I found that the natives
treasured them above everything else
they possessed.
We were fortunate in finding
a Dutch captain, a man who has navigated the
turbulent waters of the Mazaruni for
twenty years. And he picked out a skilled "bowman," a native who
stands at the bow of your boat, with
an immense paddle, and fends it off rocks, gives steering directions and acts
generally as a sort of life preserver for the
boat.
Then there
was "Jimmy." He was a negro, rather
undersized and as black as the
inside of a lump of coal. He appointed himself our special guardian, a sort of
valet, overseer and servant. He looked after our personal belongings, cooked
our food, made our tea and devoted himself exclusively to us.
Twenty paddlemen were also
engaged. Sixteen of them were quite
as black as our Jimmy, and four of them
were in varying shades from tobacco
brown to light molasses candy tint. These were of mixed Dutch and Negro blood.
"They are
'Bovianders,'" said the
captain.
"Queer tribal
name," I commented.
The captain laughed.
"Not exactly a tribal name," he explained. "They live up the river quite a distance and so it is said that they come
from 'above yonder.' They have
twisted that into 'Boviander,' so that the
word always means people who live up the
river."
While we were engaging our
staff the captain was getting boats
for us. He selected a great fifty-foot boat seemingly as heavy as a locomotive. It looked like a crude craft, made of great
thick planks. I soon learned the
necessity of such a heavy boat. We also had a small boat for emergency and for
little side trips here and there.
Next came the "cats." We had to take enough food for
ourselves, our twenty-two helpers and partly enough for the
native Indians that we were to employ later. When the
big boat was finally loaded properly under the
skillful direction of the captain,
we had five tons of food aboard and this included no meat at all except salt
fish. There was no need to take meat, for game and fresh fish were so plentiful
that we were never without them.
There was a queer,
tent-shaped rig amidships of our big craft. Beneath this was room enough for us to stay sheltered during the heat of the
day. White men can seldom stand the midday heat in British Guiana.
Packed all about us was the food. Jimmy climbed to the
top of the pile. The captain took
his position aft. The sturdy Boviander bowman took his place at the bow with his immense paddle, the twenty paddle men took their
places in four groups of five, one group on each side, forward and aft of the cargo.
Then they
shoved off and began their peculiar,
noisy paddling.
The little town of Bartica fell away behind
us as we slid out into the broad
expanse of the old Mazaruni.
We were off at last, on our
great diamond mining adventure!
EAGERLY I scanned the waters and either
shore, determined that nothing should escape me, that I should see everything
and enjoy every possible thing there
was to be enjoyed.
The captain sat, complacently smoking, at the
stern of the boat, the great steering paddle, tied to the stern with thongs, in his hands. He looked as
bored as if crossing the street to
buy an evening paper. How could he, when there
was such glorious adventure, I wondered. But afterwards I realized that twenty
years of navigating the river had somewhat dulled the
novelty of it for him. With him it was work, and nothing more.
To a boy used to paddling our
own style of light canoes, the
paddling methods of those black men seemed the
most awkward in the world. Yet they "got there,"
and I doubt if any crew of white men, without years of practice, could have
propelled the heavy craft as easily
as they. Their method was to bend
forward, holding the paddle
horizontally and sliding it along the
gunwale with a loud scraping noise, then
suddenly lean over sidewise and dig the
paddle viciously into the water,
giving a sturdy backward tug with it, still scraping the
paddle against the gunwales. At the end of this stroke they
returned the paddle to the horizontal position with a loud thumping noise,
sat up straight, then leaned forward
and repeated the stroke.
They kept perfect time. No
varsity crew boys ever worked in unison at the
oars any better, and they were
forever singing. It didn't matter whether
they were paddling twenty feet
across a narrow inlet or making an all day pull upstream, they always had music with their
paddling.
They were crude songs, partly
English that was scarcely understandable, partly native dialect and partly something else that may have been handed down to them from
their ancestors who were captured in
Africa so many generations ago and brought over by the
early Dutch and English slave traders.
If the
water was smooth and open, with no current, our twenty paddle men would sing as
softly as the whispering of a summer
breeze. But if there was a current they would sing louder. And the
more difficult the paddling, the louder they
would sing. In boiling rapids where it took every ounce of their strength and they
had to take quick, short strokes to keep going, their
voices arose to an almost howling crescendo.
Soon Bartica was lost to view
around a point of land. For nearly six months we were to see no more
civilization than Indian villages here and there,
hidden far back from the river bank. As we swung up into the broad river where the
current became strong enough to cause the
paddlers to use a little extra "elbow grease" they
broke into a queer song which I heard so many times after that, that it still
rings in my ears. I cannot translate it. I do not know what it means, but
imagine that it is some sort of love
song to some dusky "Lena." This is the
way it sounds:
"San, Lena,
chile, I do love yo';
Me know so, hear so, yes!
Le, le, le, le, le, le,
Blow, ma booly boy, blow
Califo 'ge 'ole,
Splenty o'gol's for A've been
tol'
T' th' lan' o'
Mazaruni!"
We came in sight of another boat. On the
Mazaruni every boat one sees that is going in the
same direction is an "adversary" and every paddler believes that it
is his duty to pass it. Then you see some
fancy paddle strokes, so weird and unusual and grotesque that they are difficult to describe. One would think that
they were trying more to awe each other with their
paddle gesticulations than with speed. How they
race upstream, each determined to get and keep the
lead! The captain told me that many lives were lost at rapids because the racing paddlers would give thought only to
getting into the narrow passes first
and were frequently crashed upon the
rocks and overturned.
Not far from the
little town is Kalcoon, the
biological station where at various times Professor Beebe and the other
scientists take up their intimate
studies of tropical life. This station is on a high hill where the Mazaruni and Essequibo Rivers
join. It was at this place that Colonel Roosevelt stopped when he visited the colony.
From
this point the vegetation on both
sides of the river became so dense
that it seemed almost like greenish-black solid walls. No huts or signs of
human life were visible at first. But finally, with sharp eyes, we got so we
could detect a slight opening, a log landing at the
water's edge or a faint suggestion of a thatched hut in back of the shore row of trees.
It would have been fearfully
monotonous but for the fact that
Lewis and I devised a new sort of game— to see which one could detect the greater number of signs of human habitation. Our
natives, with sharper eyes, would verify our discoveries. All this was in the Boviander section, where the
natives come down from " 'Bove yonder." Just before nightfall
we reached the foot of the first falls and landed to make camp for the night.
Before the
big boat touched land Lewis and I had leaped ashore to stretch our legs. The
blacks jumped out into the shoal
water and swung the boat into place
and made it fast. Jimmy began taking ashore our shelters. Suddenly he began a
frantic search and in despair cried:
"No cookum!"
"You bet you 'cookum,'
" I shouted, "I'm starved."
"No cookum! No
cookum!" repeated the
distracted black boy, mournfully.
Lewis investigated and came
back with a long face.
"We did a bright thing,"
he growled.
"What's wrong?" I
asked.
"Left all of our cooking
outfit down at the village!"
"There's two things to
do, go without them or go back and
get them," I suggested.
"Can't go without
'em," said Lewis.
"Then there's one thing to do," I laughed. I was not
to be filled with gloom. The
prospects of a great adventure were far too joyous. Our landing was at the last settlement of the
Bovianders. These half Dutch, half Negro natives speak fairly understandable
English. I scouted around amongst them,
found a good canoe, took three black men and set out downriver. The two
paddlers were sturdy boys and, going down with the
current, they fairly made that old
canoe whizz.
IT WAS MIDNIGHT when we got
back to the village. Everyone was
asleep except the dogs. They greeted
us with howls, and many of the men
turned out. Perhaps they thought they were to be attacked by some
enemy tribe. But we soon explained, got our cooking outfit, lashed it carefully
to the canoe and started back. There
was no speeding up against the
current, although the light canoe
made better progress than our heavy boats. And then
I heard a sound that made me think I was back home.
It was the "put—put—put"
of a gasoline motor. I was amazed.
"Fire boat," grunted
one of the black men.
I hailed it. A Dutchman
answered and came over to us. It was an ordinary native boat to which he had
attached one of those portable motors which may be put on any boat. He was
going upstream and gladly took us in tow, much to my delight. Otherwise I would not have reached camp until
daylight, and the tropical nights
(as I afterward learned) are not the
sort of nights for anyone, especially a white man, to be out in, because of the terrible dampness and mists as well as insect
pests.
As we chugged along upriver,
my three blacks sitting back and grinning at their
luck because they would be paid just
the same for the
trip although they escaped all of the hard work, there
suddenly came across the black water
the most weird sounds imaginable.
There were shrieks and
falsetto laughter, squeaks and tinkles and shrill pipings and heavy stamping. I
couldn't imagine what it all meant.
"Wedding
celebration," said the
Dutchman. "Let's put in and see the
fun."
I stared at the black bank of the
river whence came the weird sounds,
but could see nothing. Finally, as my eyes became accustomed,
I caught faint glimmers of light that seemed far inland, miles and miles, I
thought. In reality the natives were
no more than a quarter of a mile inland, or perhaps less. We found a landing
place and, guided by the fearful din
and the flickering lights, made our
way through the jungle to the higher, dry ground beyond. I had all sorts of
visions of great snakes dropping on me and wild jungle beasts grabbing at my
heels, but nothing worse than giant mosquitoes came near me.
We came to the opening and a group of huts. In front of one hut
was an improvised porch or platform. The boards were rough, uneven and loosely
laid across supports. At one end sat a wrinkled and grizzled old man playing a
squeaky fiddle. Beside him squatted two younger natives playing flutes. Another pounded upon the
platform with a cocoanut shell, beating time. We were welcomed with nods and smiles, but the natives could not pause in their festival to do more. They were dancing on that
platform. Overalls and frayed shirts and rough brogans made up the evening dress of most of the
blacks, but the women were decked out in gaudy skirts and waists. Up
and down and back and forth over the
rough boards, pouncing and scraping and stomping
their feet, they
danced and laughed.
Tallow candles, oil lanterns
and here and there kerosene lamps
were affixed to hut poles or trees, and by this light the
dancers cast amazing shadows over everything, shadows that moved and swayed and
intertwined in a most awesome
manner.
And everyone was talking and
laughing at the same time. Every
fourth word was understandable but there
were many dialects and vernaculars. There were cocoanuts to eat and a peculiar
sort of cake or bread. We watched the
merrymaking for quite a while. The newly weds were cheered by means of peculiar
calls when they danced together. I suppose those black children of the jungle danced all night. We finally grew weary
of it all and set out for camp.
Such food as could be eaten
without cooking had been served and everyone was asleep except Jimmy, who
awaited my coming, and tumbled me
into a hammock beneath a canvas shelter. I suppose I had slept many hours but
it seemed no more than five minutes before I was wakened and crawled out for
breakfast. The camp kitchen had been set up, the
blacks had already eaten and were getting the
boats ready. Our breakfast consisted of boiled rice, salt fish and biscuits.
The second day up the river was uneventful. There were broad sweeps of
water, grand, wide curves and the
seemingly endless mile after mile of thick jungle vegetation growing down to the water's edge. That night I had an opportunity to
see how such an outfit was handled. We landed in a rather
likely spot, not far back from the shore, at five o'clock. Some
of the blacks brought the kitchen outfit ashore, others
cut long poles and put up the canvas
shelters. It seems that we took our "hotel" along with us, merely a
great canvas cover, and spread it anew at each night's camp.
A great pole was placed in the crotch of two trees, about twelve feet above
ground, the canvas stretched across
this and propped up with shorter poles and ropes. Beneath this were stretched
two hammocks, one for Lewis and one for myself. Meanwhile Captain Peter and the bowman swung their
hammocks under the awning of the large boat.
Our twenty paddlers put up
three smaller shelters beneath which they
swung their own hammocks.
The tropic sun was turning the great Mazaruni to a sheet of molten gold, deep
blue dusk was falling, this turning to gray, and then
the camp fires began to glimmer here
and there.
The captain and bowman needed
no camp fire, sleeping on the boat,
but we had our own, and the natives
had their own at each shelter. Jimmy
presided over our fire, made coffee for us and prepared our supper. Captain
Pete and the bowman had charge of the food for the
natives. The English laws outline clearly to the
last ounce and gramme just how much food you must give the
natives that work for you, to live on.
It was interesting to watch
Captain Peter, assisted by the
bowman, with their scales, measuring
out the rations to our paddlers. The
Government standard of weekly rations for each man are: flour, 7 pints; salt
fish, 1 pound; sugar, 1 pound; rice, three and one-fourth pints; salt pork, 1
pound; dried peas, one and three-quarters pints; biscuits, 1 pound. Frequently the men prefer the
extra portion of sugar in place of the
peas, as the sugar is a delicacy
with them, desired above all else.
Captain Peter, through long
years of experience, knew just how to divide this weekly allowance into daily
portions and the blacks trusted him.
In line they would march down to the boat, each with a tin plate, and receive his
portion, carefully weighed on the
scales, then he would march back to
his camp fire and prepare his food as best suited himself. At the same time each one was given extra tea, sugar
and crackers for the light morning
meal, to save time in breaking camp. With their
pint of flour they baked a cake
beside the fire, using the salt from
their fish for the seasoning. Sometimes
boiled plantains were eaten with their
supper but these they brought with them
as they are not furnished by the Government. These plantains are much like
bananas, but smaller and really considerably different in taste. Then there was game and fish to supply additional meat so
that, with the foodstuffs we brought
along, everyone fared quite well.
As soon as they had eaten and cleaned their
tin plates they crawled into their hammocks and filled their
short black clay pipes with tobacco. I must say that it was not a very
attractive brand of tobacco, to judge from
the odor. That night we gave
cigarettes to those who did not have them
and after that we sold them
cigarette tobacco and papers from
our stock at cost. They are extremely fond of them.
IT WAS at these times, as I soon learned, that there was much amusement to be had with these blacks. I learned of their
many superstitions, their ambitions,
likes and dislikes and much of the
customs of that wild country that
could never be learned in any other
manner. This I learned both by means of questions and by listening carefully as
they talked to each other. Their English was about as easy to understand
as that of the Southern Georgia darkey, when they cared to talk it.
A "Dodo" they told me—and they
believed it, too—is a sort of hairy bird-beast twenty feet high which either eats men alive or carries them off to its jungle nest and makes slaves of them. Then they
would name this or that acquaintance and say, "Ah spec' he shuah was et by
a Dodo, yes suh."
Caven, one of our paddlers,
solemnly assured me that he had seen a Dodo. Caven looked much like a Dodo, or
some sort of a missing link,
himself. He said he was out hunting monkeys and saw one.
"He gi' me scar' fo'
true," said Caven, and he must have seen some
weird thing, or dreamed that he did, for his teeth chattered even at the telling of it. These blacks could talk fairly
understandable English when it was necessary for them
to make themselves clear to us. Otherwise they
could profess almost absolute ignorance of the
language, and among themselves they frequently talked a jargon that would defy any
linguist to interpret.
Our men soon formed themselves into cliques and they
stuck to these groupings throughout the long trip. The Bovianders kept by themselves; the
Berbicans (negroes from Berbice) by themselves; and the
Demeranans (who believed themselves
to be the salt of the earth) likewise flocked together. We had one Barbadian negro. Now to a British
Guiana darkey, a darkey from Barbados—one of the
Leeward Islands—is the
essence of laziness and good-for-nothingness. I think the
British Guiana darkey is right. But I found
that Caven and his brother Berbicans
were really the best of the lot. In every test of strength, bravery, skill
and endurance, they led the other
blacks.
I really did not get my
initiation into the mysteries of
hammock sleeping in the tropics
until the second night because on the first night I tumbled in about three in the morning too tired to know whether I was in a hammock or a feather bed. But on this second night I found myself
doubled up like a crescent moon. I twisted and squirmed and wriggled about in
my fantastic debut into the brotherhood of hammock sleepers before I discovered
that the trick was simple enough,
once you got on to it, that of sleeping diagonally across it from head to foot.
Having made this discovery I
arose and got out the victrola we
bought in Georgetown.
It was a small, cheap one, but the
best investment 1 ever made. I don't know what induced me to do this, but with
a large assortment of records that machine drove away gloom
and dull care through many and many a dreary evening.
The blacks enjoyed it
immensely, and it seemed strange to be mingling the
voices of our opera singers with the
screech of monkeys and the howls of
red baboons and piping of strange night birds in the
tropical jungle.
The camp fire died low, at
last. Fresh lanterns were lighted and the
men prepared for sleep. This was no simple matter to them.
To me it was the most astonishing
sight I had witnessed. They made ready for bed by putting on all of the clothing they
possessed. Then they wrapped cloths
around their hands, feet and necks.
Some even pulled bags down over their heads and tied them.
The "wealthy" blacks had bags for each foot. Our empty flour bags
became grand prizes to be used for this purpose, which we awarded to the best workers.
By the
faint camp fire light and flicker of lanterns those natives certainly did look
queer, like fantastic goblins, all muffled up. There was little that seemed
human about them as they clambered into their
hammocks and rolled themselves up,
pulling over the flaps until quite
lost to view.
"Does it get so cold at
night that we have to wrap up like that?" I asked Jimmy.
"No suh, dey's feered o'
vampire bats. That there is a part
protection."
I couldn't get the "part protection" meaning of it, and
all Jimmy would explain was that they
had some sort of superstitious
"voodoo" rigamarole performances to keep away the
vampires.
I was quite excited about it.
From early boyhood I had read about the deadly vampire bats that come
upon you when you are sleeping and suck your life blood away. Secretly I hoped
that I would be bitten by one so that I could boast of it when I got back home.
The blacks were asleep. By
virtue of being a sort of aide-de-camp Jimmy was allowed to swing his hammock
in a corner of our shelter. He insisted that the
lantern be kept burning all night.
"No need of it," I
told him.
"Yes suh, they is, Mister Laver," (which was the best he could do in the
way of pronouncing my name). "Ef yo' don' bu'n a lantum all night yo' will
shuah be annoyed."
"Annoyed?" I laughed.
"Uh, huh, annoyed by
vampires," he answered, very solemnly.
But I couldn't sleep with the lantern light in my eyes and so blew out the light. Several times in the
night, poor scared Jimmy tried to light it, but I yelled at him.
Neither
Lewis nor myself were ever bitten by a vampire. Sometimes
one would alight on my hammock, but fly away without trying to bite me. Yet,
despite their great care, our blacks
were frequently bitten. They would become
restless in the night, kick off some of their
wrappings and then the vampires would get at them.
I have heard that vampires
are deadly. I never knew personally of a fatal case. I do know that they always pick out a blood vessel for their biting spot and that they
never awaken the sleeper. The more
blood they draw, the sounder is the
sleep of the victim and the bite does not become
painful until the next day.
I should say that our crew of
blacks must have lost, among them, a
couple of quarts of blood during the
trip. Some of them
were quite lame and sore and a bit weakened as a result, but that was all. As
near as I can figure it out the
vampires prefer the blood from gentlemen of color rather
than from pale-faced Americans.
"DAYLIGHT! Daylight!"
It was the
stentorian shout of Captain Peter. He was a human alarm clock. He never failed
to awaken at the first gleam of
daylight. In the tropics it does not
come on with a slow pink dawn as
here, but seems to burst through the
gray morning light in a flash.
There was a scramble
everywhere and all tumbled out of the
hammocks. Camp fires were lighted, tea was boiling and in a short time everyone
was getting into the boat. The
natives had our shelters down while we were drinking tea. They came down to the boat with their
pots and pans jangling at their
sides, and at the captain's cry,
"In boats all!" we climbed in, the
darkies took up their paddles and
began their noisy paddling, singing
at the same time. The sun was
flaming over the top of the jungle from
the distant shore of the river, three quarters of a mile away, and we set
out on our journey.
Lewis and I took seats on top
of the canvas where we could see
everything. We passed through a wide part of the
river full of islands and deep channels and treacherous currents and whirlpools.
Only a skillful man like Captain Peter could have guided our boat through the right channels, as some
of them contain whirlpools that look
smooth enough on the surface but
would have dragged even as heavy a craft as our own under without a struggle.
Some
of the islands were a mile in area,
some no bigger than a doormat. In
and out amongst them we paddled and
finally came to a smoother, more
open part of the river.
"Eleven o'clock!" cried
Captain Peter.
I looked at my watch. It was just
eleven o'clock.
"Your watch is right,
Captain," I called.
"I have no watch,
sir," he replied. "I use God's time."
It was a fact, he told time
by the sun, and seldom was a minute out of the
way.
Eleven o'clock was always
breakfast time. How those black men could paddle up against a strong current
towing our smaller boat, from five
o'clock to eleven with only a cup of tea was more than I could understand. Yet they did it, and worked well and never seemed
hungry. At eleven we always went ashore and cooked breakfast, cakes, rice,
boiled plantains, salt fish and tea. Then we would pile back into the boat again and keep on until just before sunset,
trying to make a good landing in time to pitch camp before dark.
That long afternoon was tiresome to me. I scanned the
deep foliage everywhere in hopes to see many wild beasts and reptiles. I
recalled my geography, with its woodcuts of jungles showing great alligators on
the shores, giant boa constrictors
writhing in trees, monkeys hopping from
branch to branch and queer, bright-colored birds flitting about. This was
jungle, surely enough, with such thick vegetation that only crawling things
could penetrate it, yet for hours I saw no signs of life there.
There were wonderful orchids that would, if they
could be brought to New York,
sell for fabulous sums. There were queer looking trees, great fronded palms,
hanging moss as thick as large hawsers and other
growing things that I knew nothing about.
In Georgetown I had heard tales of giant
forty-foot snakes. I never saw one. I did catch a glimpse of a small snake
which they told me was deadly
poison. He was hanging from a limb
over the water. We were paddling
close inshore to avoid a current. One of the
blacks saw it and in a flash knocked it far away into the
stream with a blow of his paddle and kept on paddling, because to him this was
a common incident. His eyes were trained
to see such things.
That night we camped at Topeka Falls,
or just below them, and the roar lulled me to sleep.
I DISCOVERED that the first part of our trip up river was not as full
of adventures as I had hoped. But adventure came in good time. The routine was the same, night after night, but there were many new things of interest to see, many
narrow escapes and considerable trouble in one way and another. At this camping place I stripped and was about
to take a swim.
"Hey, quit that,"
shouted Lewis.
"I won't hurt your old
river," I laughed.
"You won't come out alive, sir," said the captain. "There isn't an alligator or crocodile
or whatever you call 'em in sight," I insisted and started to dive. Jimmy restrained
me.
"No go in. Fish eatum
up," he said. I laughed at the
idea of a fish eating me up. The captain tossed a salt fish into the water. There was a swish and a big fish came and
grabbed it. I didn't get a very clear look at the
fish but he looked bigger than a whale and his teeth seemed altogether too prominent
for me to fool with.
I discovered that the river was full of "perai," a decidedly
savage fish extremely fond of human beings.
One of them
will devour a man in a short while.
I gave up my plan of having a
swim and Lewis and I satisfied ourselves by sitting on the
edge of the small boat and splashing
water over each other.
Our fifth night was Saturday.
We did not intend to travel or work on Sunday. We selected a splendid camp
site. Heretofore the blacks had
waited and given us the best camping
place. But we had been treating them
so well that they thought our
kindness to them was not kindness at
all, but fear of them. And so they started to make their
shelter on the best spot.
"You can't have that
place," I said.
"We got it,"
grinned one of the men. Most of the others
stuck by him. One or two slunk off.
"Go down there," I commanded.
"We stay here," he
declared and stood his ground. I was in an uncomfortable
position. If I let them have their way this time there
would be no living with them. If I
got in a fight—they were, after all,
twenty-two blacks to three whites—they
could overpower us.
Suddenly I had a vision of
how they would abuse us if I gave
in. I could see them grinning at
each other, believing that we were
afraid of them. That situation would
be unbearable. I turned on the black
man and pointed with my left hand down the
slope.
"Get down there and stay down!" I commanded.
"I won't —"
He didn't say any more. My
fist shot out and took him under the
ear and he went over like a stick of wood. Then I wheeled to face the others.
I REALLY EXPECTED a fight,
but the blacks stared at their fallen companion
who rolled down the slope, their eyes bulging, and before I had time to bark
out a short command for them to get out they
hastily snatched up their belongings
and ran down the hill.
I stood there a moment,
waiting to let my anger cool oft a little to make sure that I would not say
things or do things unnecessarily severe or that I would regret. Then I strode
down to where they were grouped and
where the first black was dazedly
rubbing his chin. When they saw me
approach they again dropped their things and started to run away
"Don't run. You are all
right there," I shouted. They
paused and looked at me suspiciously.
“We are running this little
outfit," I said to them,
pointing to Lewis, and we are hiring you to work for us. You know your places.
Keep them and you will get good
treatment, otherwise you will be the sorriest niggers in British
Guiana. For every wrong that you do, you shall be punished. For
every good thing that you do you shall be rewarded. We are treating you kindly
because it is the right thing to do,
not because we are afraid of you. Your punishment for attempting to dispute our
authority shall be to sleep to-night without your shelter cloth!"
Then I picked up their shelter cloth, turned my back on them and walked away. To be quite truthful, I was
not a little frightened when I turned my back fearing treachery yet it was the only thing to do. I knew that I had to make them believe that I was without fear of them or of anything else, otherwise
I would not win their respect or co-operation.
Meekly they
arranged to hang their hammocks
without the shelter cloth, seeming
to take it for granted that they had
this penalty coming to them for the
way they had acted.
"You acted like a
veteran explorer" said old Captain Peter to me. "You did just right,
boy. If you had given in they would
not have worked, they would have
stolen everything and they would
have abused you during all the trip."
Most of the white men that these
native darkies knew had been of a rough sort, adventurous Dutchmen and others, who kicked them
about and treated them without the least regard until the
poor black boys—we call all blacks "boys"—thought that it was the white man's natural way. When we showed kindness
to them and full regard for their comfort
they mistook it for fear. And,
thinking that we were afraid of them,
they decided to run things themselves. It did not take them
long to learn that American white men are not brutes and that when they worked hard and acted on the
square they would be treated with
kindness. And I am sure no group of native blacks, as a whole, ever worked more
faithfully than this bunch after they
had learned their lesson. There are
always a few exceptions. One or two became lazy, one or two tried to steal
diamonds, later, but we had our own methods of handling them.
For the
first time in my life I learned by direct experience the
value of superiority of intelligence. We white men, being mentally far superior
to the blacks, could rule them. Had they
known their own strength they could have overpowered us at any time. And I
recalled that in all of my histories the
same has held good. The mentally superior people have ruled the less intelligent.
This was our fifth night of
camping on the banks of the Mazaruni. We were to be two nights here, as we
did not intend to travel or work on Sunday.
By the
time we had our shelters erected and this little mix-up with the blacks had been settled, Lewis suddenly looked
up from his notebook in which he was
keeping a sort of journal, and said, "Say!"
"Say it," I
remarked, lazily, from my hammock where
I was resting.
"Whoop-ee!" shouted
Lewis, leaping to his feet.
"What's got you?" I
demanded. "Is it a vampire down your neck or a crocodile up your trousers leg?"
"This, my beloved fellow
American, happens to be the fourth
day of July, in the year of our Lord
nineteen hundred and seventeen, and the
one hundred and forty-first year of our country's independence!" was his
reply, whereupon I stared at him a moment
and then I, too, leaped up and
emitted a war whoop. Fourth of July in a far-away jungle! What to do? Well, we
did it—did it up brown—but what we did, and how, I shall have to tell in the next chapter.
A weird Fourth of July
celebration, baboon hunting, visits with the
first native Indians encountered, and further
hard progress up the Mazaruni—these
are features of the second part of
Jean LaVarre's story which will appear in the
February number of The American Boy.
