William La Varre

“ After two hours of this, and being almost exhausted, we came to a clearing.
“Here it is,” shouted Lewis.
And as if to prove it we heard a rooster crow. Eagerly we stumbled out into the clearing and saw the few huts, but the place was deserted.
“More further,” said the Boviander; “someone he die.”
By this he meant that some member of the village had died. The Indians always desert their village when anyone dies in it, and move on to establish another. They will never live in a village where anyone has died. ”

“ Rough washing boxes, rough troughs through which we turned water, shapeless holes in the ground partly filled with water, great heaps of worthless gravel, the dismal sucking sound of the old hand pump, and a clutter of boards, pans, shovels, and picks.
Yet we had one of the few good mines down there. The “pork knockers” have no mines; they journey from place to place up [Pg 133] and down the river with pick and shovel and sieve, with a small quantity of food on their backs, and make shelter wherever they happen to be. ”

“ I sat in a hammock, slung close to the fire, drying my wet socks and the legs of my underclothes, watching the women prepare a meal of eggs, venison, labbas and cassiri for us, and grinned at the picture we must have made.
“Not quite up to the etiquette of polite society at home,” I said to Lewis.
“But we are overdressed, even now,” he answered, “according to the style down here.”
The houses are called “benabs.” Abraham said he would bring the food over to our benab. This he did. It was smoking hot, heaped up in one big wooden dish, and with it a calabash, or gourd, of cassiri. ”

“ Several times in the night, poor scared Jimmy tried to light it, but I yelled at him.
Neither Lewis nor myself was 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. ”

“ 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. 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. ”

“ I asked Jimmy about the vampires and he assured me that the Indians were safe.
“Vampire bats ain’t got no use for Injun, suh. Reckin they don’t admire the taste of ’em.”
The Indians sleep without clothes, other than the mesh-like flaps of the hammocks thrown over them, giving plenty of opportunity for the vampires and also for the really [Pg 67] dangerous mosquitoes, which proved my undoing, as I will tell about later. The Indians seldom have jungle fever or malaria and if the mosquitoes do bite them there are no bad effects. ”

“ Eleven o’clock was always breakfast time. [Pg 31] 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. ”

“ What interested me most of all was the blowpipe. It is really a wonderful weapon. It is a wonder to me that we boys back home did not make similar weapons. I am sure that with a little skill we could have picked off rabbits, squirrels and game birds, although, of course, we would have had to become good woodsmen. Of all the weapons to be faced, I believe the blowpipe as made and used by these Indians is the most deadly. I would rather face almost anything else.
These pipes are from eight to twelve feet long. They are made of two strong reeds, a hollow-stemmed variety that grows in the jungle. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Seventeen days of paddling a fifty-foot boat made of great planks and laden with five tons [Pg 109] of goods, hauling it over portages, is not exactly a picnic, and the men certainly earned their forty-eight cents a day. And so they thumped and scraped their much-worn paddles along the gunwales of that old boat, worn smooth with constant paddling, and they sang their everlasting paddle song with more cheerfulness than they had done for days.
Finally Captain Peter spoke something to the bowman while he swung his steering paddle over, and our craft put in shore. ”

“ The captain was an expert in this river life, the Indians were chopping wood and bringing in game and fish, the blacks were busy now getting the mine started and later in digging, so that we were a very busy and quite contented colony.
Diamond mining on the Mazaruni is not [Pg 130] unlike gold dust mining. The diamonds, like the gold, being the heaviest substance in the gravel, naturally settle down to the bottom when a sieve is twisted about so as to make the water move around and around. The centrifugal force sends the heavy material to the bottom. ”

“ In the center of the boat on a large piece of wet and noninflammable bark, lay a heap of glowing coals, to be used for their cooking fire wherever they might camp or upon their return to their home. From this I figured it out that matches in the jungle were not to be had for the asking.
We gave each man cigarettes, which at once made us friends. The captain began to dicker with the men about securing game for us, and as they talked I made a study of them. One thing is certain, they are not bothered by the high price of clothing. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Something gigantic, seemingly as big as a [Pg 59] mountain, arose in front of me. I thought it must be a combination of crocodile and man-eating fish come out of the water to feast on me. Then I thought of something else.
“Good-night!” the thought flashed through my mind, “that nigger, Cavan, told the truth when he described the ‘Dodo’ as a hair-covered bird twenty feet high,” and I had visions of being transformed into either a Dodo’s supper or a Dodo’s slave. Instinctively I threw up my arms to ward off the terrible creature, and fell backward. ”

“ The taste of the Indians in food I could never learn, such as their terrible drinks, the smoked intestines and the eyes of animals which they cook as a great delicacy. Nor am I at all fond of their pastry. It is simply a dough made of flour, salt and soda mixed with river water and fried in much grease in a frying pan. But their cooked fresh fish, their boiled tapir and other game meats are always good, clean and appetizing.
[Pg 121]
CHAPTER XX
PICKING UP JUNGLE LORE THE upper part of the Mazaruni River is no place for a white man to take up a permanent abode. ”

“ The fish would leap up and swallow the grasshoppers, only soon after to turn, belly up, and float on the surface where they were picked up.
Here we found the game more abundant than ever, which was natural as we were far out of the haunts of blacks and Dutch, except for the few “pork knockers,” or tramp diamond miners, and there were probably no more than a score all up and down the fields.
Several kinds of animals were shot, but the favorite food was deer and labbas. The tapirs [Pg 116] are like great hogs and their meat is rather tough though nourishing. ”

“ It was only with great endurance that we made this trip through the rain, but even the worst journey must come to an end and finally we reached our own camp. Nothing ever looked more homelike than our shelters, our fires and the boats moored alongside.
Lewis and I made a dash for the boat to get some dry warm clothes. Jimmy, glad to see us back, made some hot tea. Soon we had on lighter shoes, dry woolen underclothes and dry suits and socks, lay back in our hammocks and drank good hot tea and felt none the worse for our journey into the primitive homes of the Indians. ”

“ Of course that seems very unsportsmanlike to us at home, but remember that these natives do not hunt and fish for the sport of it, but to live. And then, bear in mind that while we have telescope steel rods and artificial bait and ball bearing automatic reels and oiled silk lines and transparent gut leaders, floats, spoons, spinners, rubber minnows, hundreds of artificial flies, nets for landing the fish, gaffs, and every sort of fishing tackle, these Indians have not even common hooks and sinkers. Spears and harpoon arrows are their only means of fishing, aside from poison. ”

“ The Indians built a hasty shelter alongside our canvas one, slung their hammocks, now daubed with dough, and climbed in. Jimmy started the victrola, the camp fires burned brightly despite the rain, and the Indians sat up and stared open-eyed, at the “hoodoo” box from which came the, to them, weird sounds. They believed that the spirits of the dead were inside that victrola, but when they saw Jimmy putting on the records and saw that no ghosts came out to kill them, they lost their fear of it.
MY JUNGLE FRIENDS
The plaintive Southern melodies seemed to please them most. ”

“ The “Big Bend” was a name to conjure with for Lewis and me, for away up the Mazaruni were the diamonds, where the river makes a sharp bend and begins to almost double in its tracks. This is due to the hilly formation and the lowlands between the hills.
“This is the Indian territory,” added the captain, whereupon I became instantly alert, for I was anxious to see the real natives of this wild country.
Our blacks are called “Native Blacks,” but [Pg 49] in truth they are no more native to British Guiana than are the negroes of the United States native to North America. ”

“ No live American boy would take one as a [Pg 4] 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. ”

“ But the Boviander explained that they were hunting stations. The Indians climb up and kneel on these platforms motionless for hours, waiting for game to pass so that they can kill it with blowpipes, spears, bows and arrows or with their crude guns.
It was getting late and I had just begun to wonder if we would have to camp in that dismal swamp all night when I heard the sound of a horn. It was some Indian call made by blowing on a shell. Simon nodded, meaning that it was the village. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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!” ”

“ Monday, our seventh day on the river, found us in the midst of some perilous rapids and facing some tough propositions in the way of portages. In the shallow waters there was no danger from the Perai, or man-eating fish, and the darkies could leap out, fasten a line at the bow and two at the stern and haul [Pg 46] the craft up over ledges to still and deep water. But frequently it meant that we were to pile out and lighten the boat by removing the five tons of supplies! ”