these little towns, named Matto Grosso, being the original capital of
the province. It has long been abandoned by the government, and
practically so by its inhabitants, the ruins of palace, fortress, and
church now rising amid the rank tropical luxuriance of the wild
forest. The mouths of the main affluents of these highway rivers were
as a rule well known. But in many cases nothing but the mouth was
known. The river itself was not known, and it was placed on the map by
guesswork. Colonel Rondon found, for example, that the course of the
Gy-Parana was put down on the map two degrees out of its proper place.
He, with his party, was the first to find out its sources, the first
to traverse its upper course, the first to map its length. He and his
assistants performed a similar service for the Juruena, discovering
the sources, discovering and descending some of the branches, and for
the first time making a trustworthy map of the main river itself,
until its junction with the Tapajos. Near the watershed between the
Juruena and the Gy-Parana he established his farthest station to the
westward, named Jose Bonofacio, after one of the chief republican
patriots of Brazil. A couple of days' march northwestward from this
station, he in 1909 came across a part of the stream of a river
running northward between the Gy-Parana and the Juruena; he could only
guess where it debouched, believing it to be into the Madeira,
although it was possible that it entered the Gy-Parana or Tapajos. The
region through which it flows was unknown, no civilized man having
ever penetrated it; and as all conjecture as to what the river was, as
to its length, and as to its place of entering into some highway
river, was mere guess-work, he had entered it on his sketch maps as
the Rio da Duvida, the River of Doubt. Among the officers of the
Brazilian Army and the scientific civilians who have accompanied him
there have been not only expert cartographers, photographers, and
telegraphists, but astronomers, geologists, botanists, and zoologists.