APPENDIX C 



MY LETTER OF MAY 1 TO GENERAL LAURO 

 MtJLLER 



The first report on the expedition, made by me immediately after 

 my arrival at Manaos, and published in Rio Janeiro upon its 

 receipt, is as follows : 



To His Excellency The Minister of Foreig)i Affairs, 

 Rio de Janeiro. 



May 1st, 1914. 

 My deae General Lauro Muller : 



I wish first to express my profound acknowledgments to 

 you personally and to the other members of the Brazilian Govern- 

 ment whose generous courtesy alone rendered possible the Expedicao 

 Scientifica Roosevelt-Rondon. I wish also to express my high 

 admiration and regard for Colonel Rondon and his associates who 

 have been my colleagues in this work of exploration. In the third 

 place, I wish to point out that what we have just done was rendered 

 possible only by the hard and perilous labour of the Brazilian 

 Telegraphic Commission in the unexplored western wilderness of 

 Matto Grosso during the last seven years. We have had a hard 

 and somewhat dangerous but very successful trip. No less than 

 six weeks were spent in slowly and with peril and exhausting 

 labour forcing our way down through what seemed a literally end- 

 less succession of rapids and cataracts. For forty-eight days we 

 saw no human being. In passing these rapids we lost five of the 

 seven canoes with which we started and had to build others. One 

 of our best men lost his life in the rapids. Under the strain one 

 of the men went completely bad, shirked all his work, stole his 



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