the "great wilderness," or, as Australians would call it, "the bush."
Then, in 1907, he began to penetrate the unknown region lying to the
north and west. He was the head of the exploring expeditions sent out
by the Brazilian Government to traverse for the first time this
unknown land; to map for the first time the courses of the rivers
which from the same divide run into the upper portions of the Tapajos
and the Madeira, two of the mighty affluents of the Amazon, and to
build telegraph-lines across to the Madeira, where a line of Brazilian
settlements, connected by steamboat lines and a railroad, again
occurs. Three times he penetrated into this absolutely unknown,
Indian-haunted wilderness, being absent for a year or two at a time
and suffering every imaginable hardship, before he made his way
through to the Madeira and completed the telegraph-line across. The
officers and men of the Brazilian Army and the civilian scientists who
followed him shared the toil and the credit of the task. Some of his
men died of beriberi; some were killed or wounded by the Indians; he
himself almost died of fever; again and again his whole party was
reduced almost to the last extremity by starvation, disease, hardship,
and the over-exhaustion due to wearing fatigues. In dealing with the
wild, naked savages he showed a combination of fearlessness, wariness,
good judgment, and resolute patience and kindliness. The result was
that they ultimately became his firm friends, guarded the telegraph-
lines, and helped the few soldiers left at the isolated, widely
separated little posts. He and his assistants explored, and mapped for
the first time, the Juruena and the Gy-Parana, two important affluents
of the Tapajos and the Madeira respectively. The Tapajos and the
Madeira, like the Orinoco and Rio Negro, have been highways of travel
for a couple of centuries. The Madeira (as later the Tapajos) was the
chief means of ingress, a century and a half ago, to the little
Portuguese settlements of this far interior region of Brazil; one of