The Rivers Ran East - An Amazonian Adventure

Chapter 1

We Enter at Hazard

Every explorer has two faces, the secret one and the one he shows to the world. Both my faces hid the fact that I had $1,000 in my shirt pocket, secured by a safety pin, everything I owned in this world converted to ten $100 currency bills. It wasn't much, but I was after treasure, and every treasure hunter is optimistic. If he weren't optimistic he would be something else, but never a treasure hunter. True, at the moment I didn't know where the gold was buried, but I did have a clue - one single, solitary, threadbare clue.

This clue I had obtained in the United States on May 1st, and it was June 10th, 1946, when I crossed south of the Equator and landed by Panagra plane at Lima Airport in Peru. I was dusty, disheveled, hatless and relieved, for the long flight had been repeatedly delayed since leaving San Francisco, California, on June 1st. In addition to my small cash stake, I had a brief note from an old-time American resident of Peru, to one Miguel Maldonaldo - a Peruvian who might possibly know the location of legendary El Dorado, somewhere in the unexplored upper Amazon basin.

I already knew that Peru was an ancient and highly civilized country, and that the people were said to be among the world's most cultivated, still, I never suspected that this culture would extend to the airport officials. But by all the officials, including even the Customs, I was smilingly passed into Peru, a free man and without a worry to his name. To reap the benefits of face, so important in South America (and perhaps in North America as well), I put up at the city's finest, the magnificent Hotel BolÖvar, suite 216, facing the Plaza San MartÖn.

From this base I began hunting down my Peruvian and also trying to find an experienced jungle partner. After five days of threading the lovely old Spanish city with its flower-embowered patio walls and brown-wood balconies, searching out any number of itinerant Señor Maldonaldos, I learned that the Peruvian had left on a trip into the monte, but would return to Lima in a few weeks.

As to that second man, the partner whom I hoped would act as guide, I was assisted by the American Consulate people and by Colonel J. H. O'Malley, our Military Attaché, but no one could be found who would go under-financed into such a desolate region. Three weeks passed.

Maldonaldo finally returned to Lima, and after swearing on his mother's grave as to its authenticity, gave me a yellowed, badly cracked and very old Spanish parchment map of El Dorado, in exchange for a $100 bill. Of course, there was no way possible of cross-checking such a document; I simply had to take his word for it, and the hunch of my old friend back home, and go. Like the priesthood, treasure hunters burn with a faith and trust incomprehensible to the man in the street. Once he sees a treasure map, he will believe even his worst enemy, let alone a friend. I was here because of that belief, and here was a real map to substantiate that faith and hope. I simply had to find that lost land of treasure, El Dorado, no matter what it had cost others in disappointment and tragedy. Except for that $1,000 I was broke, for I had lost a considerable fortune through bad investments in China and the United States. Although I can look back now with a calm detachment, still at the moment, in Lima, I simply had to have that gold, and with the same unreasoning desperation that grips a man who loves a woman - he has got to have that one woman, though a billion others exist in the world. I knew too, that anyone rumored to be searching for El Dorado would be placed under surveillance - for there are strict treasure-trove laws regarding this sort of thing - and so great would be the rewards of its discovery that even his life would be in jeopardy.

My going into the high bush was secret, and my "cover" was that of looking for medical secrets of the Indian brujos (witchmen).

I was now reduced to a desperately small $700 working capital.

I decided I must leave Lima within the next few days, if not sooner. While in search of vital information on the regions ahead, I talked to Professor Cesar Garcia Rosell, head of the oldest scientific institution on the hemisphere, the Sociedad de GeografÖa. He was charming, enthusiastic and surprisingly cooperative; a very young man in spite of his sixty-five years. I did not dare to rouse the savant's skepticism by mentioning my true purpose in going into the interior, but as for my decision to go there in "search of medicine," I was frank.

Together Rosell and I studied his mouldy old Jesuit maps of the tierra incognita, the unbroken jungle lying east of the Andean Cordilleras. The whole strip - believed to be mostly flat-lands - called Loreto and Madre de Dios, was disputed between Peru on the one hand, and Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia and Ecuador on the other. From Madre de Dios in the southeastern quarter near Bolivia and the headwaters of the Purus and Juruá in Brazil, all the way north to the Ecuadorian and Colombian frontiers on the Napo and Putumayo, the strip averaged 1,100 miles long by 400 to 500 wide. Its eastern edge was backed up somewhere against the westernmost regions of wildest Brazil, inhabited by the cannibal Cunibos, the headhunting Mashcos on the Rio Manú, and such killers. Rosell explained that fully 90 percent of this largely disputed region was recognized by the government (which obtained its statistics from him) as completely unexplored territory on which no white man had ever left his footprint.

"Then, what are all these names on the maps?" I asked.
"Señor - please! They are only names! Sometimes an abandoned thatched hut on a main river bank... Only names, to fill the great white spaces. The governments of the five claiming powers must have colonies there, must they not? - to substantiate..."

The professor continued, saying that soldiers and rubber tappers, barbasco gatherers had covered but 8 to 10 percent off the main rivers, and few records had been left concerning La Selva (The Forest), as the Peruvians poetically called this worst jungle region in the whole Amazon basin. Nearly all the original parchment reports of the long-banished Jesuits, who had been recalled to Spain in 1767, plus the later reports of the few explorers and Indian-fighting Army officers, had been lost in a recent fire at the Society's offices. He then warned me that twenty bona-fide expeditions, fully armed and equipped, many having soldiers, had come to grief on the basin's 50,000 miles of navigable waterways in recent years. Everywhere the bravos were rising against further intrusion. And as for the vast, desolate desert-jungle lying unbroken between the greatest rivers, very little, almost none - if the truth were known - had actually been traversed. My track must lie across these areas and I must realize they were perilous and incalculable.

In effect, for he used both Spanish and English, his very words were:

"Señor Clark, you enter at hazard; there is a grave chance you will not get out alive from Madre de Dios and Loreto, should you be so unfortunate as to penetrate even a little way after crossing the Andes. Your head could be cut off and reduced to 2 1/2 inches. You should know that in the last ten years, we have lost approximately 700 Peruvian explorers, soldiers, officials, patrÃ3nes and bushrangers, who have tried to get off the rivers and 'pacify' the Indians. The explorer Robuchon is only one famous case of an investigator being eaten by cannibals, but I could name scores of unknown explorers who have fallen into the hands of the corpse-eating tribes, and those of the headhunting enclave. For every Colonel Fawcett known to the world, there are a hundred such who have disappeared and remain entirely unheard of."

Had I taken into account the many white-water rapids, unknown waterfalls which blocked the Andean watershed rivers? Also the forests would be denuded of all game and other foods. He believed man-eating jaguars were common. He spoke also of death from snake-bite, black crocodiles, paña (two varieties, cousins of the Brazilian meat-eating piranha). He mentioned the danger of the ten-foot cannibal zúngaro - tiger-fish, giant electric rays capable of electrocuting a man; even fresh-water sharks 3,000 miles (by twisting river beds and channels) from the salty ocean. There were scores of diseases; and ants whose single bite will cause blindness. In short, a hundred lethal possibilities existed.

"Usually our men just disappear. We never hear from them again. Others often go insane. If they get out alive they are incompetent for any sort of work. We have just received a report from the mouth of the Morona River north of the Marañ Ã3n. Juan Vargas is our mapper there. He has been found in the belly of a snake, the yacu maman, in his own screened launch. Our government launches have a heavy wire mesh carefully covering sides and roof so that the poison darts of the Indians will be caught in them. Vargas was sleeping on the boat. The crew were camped on a safe playa (river beach). The anaconda, apparently hunting food, came out of the river and entered the boat through a hole torn that day in one corner. After killing and swallowing Vargas, it could not return through the hole, and was found in the engine room next morning."

"Is it possible to swallow a man whole?" I asked. "How about a man's shoulders passing the jaws? Most experts have doubted Indian claims that certain varieties of those snakes can swallow a deer weighing a hundred pounds."

Rosell laughed indulgently, though quietly, as befitting his position. "These snakes are capable of swallowing not only a 150-pound man, but a 500-pound animal such as a tapir. You see, they crush the larger bones, lather the head and unjoint their jaws. After swallowing its food, the snake's digestive juices are so strong that even large bones are dissolved. When hungry the snake will take any kind of living food - marine, crocodiles, land mammals and even man himself."

"Señor Clark," Professor Rosell concluded, rather coldly clinical and with that manner of infinite patience assumed by Peruvians when talking with the skeptical, inexperienced gringo, "it is imperative, life and death to you, that you correct your mistaken ideas that the jungle is not dangerous. These ideas no doubt you obtained from the works of so-called explorers who have not themselves lived in the true, unexplored inner jungles but have spent only a short time on some main river, or operated a few leagues from a base on the edge of the forest."

As he talked, I took notes in my cryptic brand of shorthand:

"Herpetology: scores of poisonous snakes, not much known. Rosell has glass tubes (thirty poisonous snakes from the Ucayali River alone). Divided into two general families: colubrids and vipers. Says African and Asian cobras are colubrids. Here represented in the ring snakes - corals, genus Elaps, short-fanged (which, like cobras, hang on and chew after striking). Pit vipers much worse. Have two subfamilies or genera; first, the many tropical cascabels (rattlers - Crotalus horridus); second, genus Lachesis, like bushmasters in Guianas, aggressive, vicious, no rattles (to warn you with), exceedingly poisonous, very large. West Indies' fer-de-lance here called jararaca sometimes shushupe (long-fanged snake), night-rover, 94 percent fatal. Have one of this family only three inches long - most deadly of all. Rosell says snakes have killed more people in single year than have all the elephants, lions and buffaloes of Africa since beginning of historical times."

At this point Professor Rosell stopped to mop his brow with a linen handkerchief.

"Now! The colubrid victim suffers more than any other; because of the shock to his nerve centers, his blood is incapable of coagulation and becomes watery, often breaking out through the eyeballs. Some of these venomous reptiles, especially the vipers, will attack man without provocation. We do not know why; we only know they are irritable and vindictive, and account for the deaths of hundreds of our rubber gatherers, soldiers, patrÃ3ne Indians (workers) and others who live on the edges of the great forest, or clearings on the main rivers within it. Our rattler types are often enormous, thick as a man's thigh; their surprisingly plentiful white, creamy-thick venom does not paralyze the nerve centers but coagulates the blood, destroying the corpuscles. Of course...you have anti-venom!"

Now South Americans believe all norteamericanos to be rich; and though purposely I had arrived in Peru by a subsidiary of Pan American Airways, I had not dared tell Professor Rosell I had no funds to purchase anti-venom. I knew from previous experience in Latin America he would consider me a hopeless visionary, a crank, and so cease his briefing - which to me could well mean success or failure on the road to El Dorado.

I thanked Señor Cesar Garcia Rosell, and took my leave. I have no wish to appear melodramatic when I say that I was apprehensive of what the future might hold...

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