Explorations in Brazil

The familiar smell of salt spray was gone from the easterly trades. In its stead came a delicate perfume, hauntingly sweet, the entrancing odor of wet earth, of leaves, of blossoms unseen; while above the low black line rose a dull-red three-quarter moon etched with a fretwork of branches.

Another turn and the electric lights of Para (Belem) blinked through the darkness; a startling rattle of anchor chain, a splash, and we had arrived in Brazil.

Two years before, Brazil and Venezuela had determined to mark their common boundary, which, according to treaty, follows the watershed of a rugged chain of mountains that extends from British Guiana more than 900 miles southwestward to the banks of the upper Rio Negro. Because this remote region was not only geographically unexplored, but was totally unknown zoologically, the National Geographic Society had obtained special permission of the governments concerned to attach a party of naturalists to the official commissions appointed to carry out the boundary demarcation. It was my privilege to be in trusted by The Society with the natural-history investigations.

The first work was done during the dry season of 1929-1930. On that expedition our party traveled with the Venezuelan Commission from Ciudad Bolivar up the Orinoco and down the Casiquiare to join the Brazilians on the frontier, but transport difficulties and the consequent loss of time prompted the Venezuelans to approach the international boundary this season from the southern side.

Accompanied by Charles T. Agostini and Emmet R. Blake, I had come to rejoin the Commissioners, through whose splendid cooperation our investigations had gained such a propitious start in the previous season. The rendezvous was Manaos, nearly 900 miles up the Amazonas (Amazon), one of the mouths of which we had just entered.

"There are few situations more intriguing to the traveler," writes another who has ridden at anchor here, "than to be lying at midnight off Nossa Senhora de Belem do Grao Para.

"Blackness toward the west, and silence. How it calls to the heart of a wanderer! Naked Indians on the shores of the Xingu, Alligators basking in the mud. Birds of gorgeous plumage and strange fruits. . . . It pulls with the force of a primal passion."

Since 1500, when Pinzon filled-his casks from a sea of sweet water while yet no landfall was made, and especially since 1543, when Orellana returned to Spain to spread tall stories of female warriors and a golden city of Manoa, this mightiest of rivers has kindled imagination..."