ACROSS UNKNOWN SOUTH AMERICA 
which to my practical mind at once suggested great diffi¬ 
culty of steering. Her sides, coarsely cut with an axe, 
were from three to five inches thick; her bottom from 
six inches to a foot thick. The two extremities were 
solid blocks, so that her weight — she was carved out 
of unusually heavy wood — was altogether over 2,000 
pounds. 
When I went down to the water to examine my 
purchase I found that the vessel was in a pitiful condition 
and needed sound repairing before she could proceed on 
a long journey. She was sufficiently good for crossing the 
stream — that was all she was used for by the seringueiros 
— but it would be a different matter to go down rapids 
for some thousands of kilometres. It took all the strength 
of my men, the seringueiros, and myself combined to pull 
the canoe out of the water upon the beach and to turn her 
over. We worked hard for two days with saws and 
hammers, knives, tar, and wadding, in order to stop up a 
gigantic crack which extended from one end of the canoe 
to the other, under her bottom. Although the crack did 
not go right through, I could well imagine that a hard 
knock against a rock might be quite sufficient to split the 
canoe in two. We scraped her and cleaned her; we over¬ 
hauled and strengthened her thoroughly; we cut rough 
seats inside, and built an elevated deck upon which the 
baggage might be comparatively safe from moisture. 
We were proud of our work when we launched her. 
Wiping the dripping perspiration from our foreheads, 
necks, and arms, we looked just as if we had come out of 
a bath, we sweated so in our efforts to push her back into 
the water; the heat near the water, screened as it was 
from the breeze by the high banks and trees, was suffo¬ 
cating! We gazed at her — the queen of the Arinos 
River. She looked lovely in our eyes. On her stern I 
fixed the steering gear, a huge paddle twelve feet long; 
and upon a neatly made staff, which I had cut myself, I 
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