134 Through the Brazihan Wilderness 



the first time, the Juruena and the Gy-Parana, two im- 

 portant affluents of the Tapajos and the Madeira re- 

 spectively. The Tapajos and the Madeira, like the Ori- 

 noco and Rio Negro, have been highways of travel for 

 a couple of centuries. The Madeira (as later the Tapa- 

 jos) was the chief means of ingress, a century and a half 

 ago, to the little Portuguese settlements of this far in- 

 terior region of Brazil ; one of these little towns, named 

 Matto Grosso, being the original capital of the province. 

 It has long been abandoned by the government, and prac- 

 tically 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 de- 

 scending 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 be- 

 tween 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 



