A MISADVENTURE 207 



naturalists made some valuable additions to the collec- 

 tion — including a boldly marked black, blue, and white 

 jay— and our photographs were developed and our 

 writing brought abreast of the date. Travelling through 

 a tropical wilderness in the rainy season, when the amount 

 of baggage that can be taken is strictly limited, entails 

 not only a good deal of work, but also the exercise of 

 considerable ingenuity if the writing and photographing, 

 and especially the preservation, of the specimens are to 

 be done in satisfactory shape. 



At the telegraph office we received news that the 

 voyage of Lauriadd and Fiala down the Papagaio had 

 opened with a misadventure. In some bad rapids, not 

 many miles below the falls, two of the canoes had been 

 upset, half of their provisions and all of Fiala's baggage 

 lost, and Fiala himself nearly drowned. The Papagaio 

 is known both at the source and the mouth ; to descend 

 it did not represent a plunge into the unknown, as in 

 the case of the Duvida or the Ananas ; but the actual 

 water work, over the part that was unexplored, offered 

 the same possibilities of mischance and disaster. It is 

 a hazardous thing to descend a swift, unknown river 

 rushing through an uninhabited wilderness. To descend 

 or ascend the ordinary great highway rivers of South 

 America, such as the Amazon, Paraguay, Tapajos, and, 

 in its lower course, the Orinoco, is now so safe and easy, 

 whether by steamboat or big, native cargo-boat, that 

 people are apt to forget the very serious difficulties 

 offi5red by the streams, often themselves great rivers, 

 which run into or form the upper courses of these same 

 water highways. Few things are easier than the former 

 feat, and few more difficult than the latter ; and ex- 

 perience in ordinary travelling on the lower courses of 

 the rivers is of no benefit whatever in enabling a man 



