journey down this great river--which Theodore Roosevelt took so
many years later--was first made by a Portuguese missionary, who
found the same kind of gummy tree juice as that of the West
Indies. But the natives along the Amazon had discovered that
besides being elastic it was waterproof, and they were making
shoes that would keep out water. You can picture a native boy
spilling some of this liquid on his foot, then covering it, as he
might with a mud pie, and when it dried wiggling his toes to find
that, he had the first and perhaps the best fitting gum shoe that
ever was made.

Little by little samples of this new substance found their way to
Europe. It was another hundred years before thoughtful men
believed it worth while to investigate this gum. In 1731 the Paris
Academy of Science sent some explorers to learn about it. One of
these Frenchmen, La Condamine, wrote of a tree called "Hevea"
[Footnote: Hevea is pronounced Hee'-vee-uh. Caoutchouc is
pronounced koo'-chook.] "There flows from this tree a liquor which
hardens gradually and blackens in the air." He found the people of
Quito waterproofing cloth with it, and the Amazon Indians were
making boots which, when blackened in smoke, looked like leather.
Most interesting of all, they coated bottle-shaped moulds, and
when the gum had hardened they would break the mould, shaking the
pieces out of the neck, leaving an unbreakable bottle that would
hold liquids.

It was not long afterwards that Lisbon began to import some of
these crudely fashioned articles, and it is said that in 1755 the
King of Portugal sent to Brazil several pairs of his boots to be
waterproofed. A few years later the Government of Para, Brazil,