300 



AMAZONIA AND LA PLATA. 



In 1882, Crevaux, after his brilliant discoveries in Guiana, attempted to 

 descend the Pilcomayo ; but about midway he was massacred with nearly all his 

 party by the formidable Tobas, who in the eighteenth century had driven back 

 Patino and killed Castanares. Crevaux was followed by Fontana, who surveyed 

 the middle course of the river in the Toba territory; Feilberg-, who ascended 160 

 miles to the rapids, which he was unable to surmount; Tliouar and Campos, who 

 descended beyond the point reached by Crevaux, and then reached the Paraguay 

 by an overland route across the plains ; John Page, son of the explorer of the 

 Paraguay, who died in 1890, worn out by nine months of surveys on the Pilco- 



Fig. 127. — The Pilcomayo. 

 Scale 1 : 4,000,000. 



94 Miles. 



mayo ; lastly, Olaf Storm, who in the sarne year overcame the rapids and then 

 went astray in a sea of floating vegetation. 



On the Bolivian frontier, as well as in its lower reaches, the Pilcomayo is 

 navigable by river craft of considerable size ; but towards its middle course it 

 spreads over a level plain, where the current is too feeble to excavate a deep or 

 permanent channel. In 1844 the Margarines expedition was arrested in a sandy 

 plain where the stream, dammed up by a barrier of snags, ramified into about 

 sixty branches with scarcely perceptible current, and even disappearing in the 

 ground. During the floods the whole of the region is a vast laTiado, " drowned 

 land," " slough," choked with islets of floating plants. Lower down the incline 



