3 i2 MY LIFE 



he used rice-chaff which was at hand, and which he thought 

 would do as well and this lot was stored under the cabin 

 floor, where the flames first burst through and where the fire, 

 no doubt, originated. 



Captain Turner had evidently had no experience of fire 

 in a ship's cargo, and took quite the wrong way in the attempt 

 to deal with it. By opening the hatchways to pour in water 

 he admitted an abundance of air, and this was what changed 

 a smouldering heat into actual fire. If he had at once set 

 all hands at work caulking up every crack through which 

 smoke came out, making the hatchways also air-tight by 

 nailing tarpaulins over them, no flame could have been pro- 

 duced, or could have spread far, and the heat due to the 

 decomposition of the balsam would have been gradually 

 diffused through the cargo, and in all probability have done 

 no harm. A few years later a relative of mine returning 

 home from Australia had a somewhat similar experience, in 

 which the captain adopted this plan and saved the ship. When 

 in the Indian Ocean some portion of the cargo was found 

 to be on fire, by smoke coming out as in our case. But the 

 captain immediately made all hatches and bulkheads air-tight ; 

 then had the boats got out and prepared for the worst, towing 

 them astern ; but he reached Mauritius in safety, and was 

 there able to extinguish the fire and save the greater part of 

 the cargo. 



On the receipt of my letter Dr. Spruce, who was then, I 

 think, somewhere on the Rio Negro or Uaupes, wrote to 

 the "Joad de Lima," referred to by me (and usually men- 

 tioned in my "Travels" as Senhor L.), giving him a short 

 account of my voyage home ; and a few months later he 

 received a reply from him. He was a Portuguese trader who 

 had been many years resident on the upper Rio Negro, on 

 whose boat I took a passage for my first voyage up the river, 

 and with whom I lived a long time at Guia. I also went 

 with him on my first voyage up the river Uaupes. He was 

 a fairly educated man, and had an inexhaustible fund of 

 anecdotes of his early life in Portugal, and would also relate 

 many " old-time " stories, usually of the grossest kind, some- 



