mportance if located in some other
country--for instance, in the United States.

My object was to study the rubber-worker at his labour, to find out the
true length of the Itecoahy River, and to photograph everything worth
while. I had with me all the materials and instruments necessary--at
least so I thought.

The photographic outfit consisted of a Graflex camera with a shutter
of high speed, which would come handy when taking animals in motion,
and a large-view camera with ten dozen photographic plates and a
corresponding amount of prepared paper. In view of the difficulties
of travel, I had decided to develop my plates as I went along and make
prints in the field, rather than run the risk of ruining them by some
unlucky accident. Perhaps at the very end of the trip a quantity
of undeveloped plates might be lost, and such a calamity would
mean the failure of the whole journey in one of its most important
particulars. Such a disastrous result was foreshadowed when a porter,
loaded with my effects, clambering down the sixty-foot incline extreme
low water made at Remate de Males, lost his balance in the last few
feet of the descent and dropped into the water, completely ruining
a whole pack of photographic supplies whose arrival from New York I
had been awaiting for months. Luckily this was at the beginning of
this trip and I could replace them from my general stock.

A hypodermic outfit, quinine, and a few bistouries completed my
primitive medical department. Later on these proved of the greatest
value. I would never think of omitting such supplies even in a case
where a few pounds of extra weight are not rashly to be considered. It
turned out that in the regions I penetrated, medical assistance was
a thing unheard of within a radius of several hundred miles.

A Luger automatic pistol of a calibre of nine millimetres, and several
hundred cartridges, were my armament, and for weeks this pistol became
my only means of providing a scant food supply.

Thus equipped I was on hand early in the morning of the day of
starting, anxious to see what sort of shipmates I was to have. They
proved all to be _seringueiros_, bound for the upper river. Our
craft was a forty-foot launch called the _Carolina_. There was a
large crowd of the passengers assembled when I arrived, and they
kept coming. To my amazement, it developed that one hundred and
twenty souls were expected to find room on board, together with
several tons of mercha