WORTHLESS MAPS 
two of the greatest rivers of Central Brazil — the Xingu 
and the Arinos (Tapajoz), the latter the most central and 
important river of Brazil, crossing the entire Republic 
from south to north, as far as the Amazon. 
On June twenty-first we crossed the Piraputangas 
(elevation 750 feet above the sea level), where, owing to 
the steep banks, we had much difficulty in taking mules 
and baggage to the opposite side. We then proceeded 
across another large plain, skirting the spurs of the Serra 
Azul. Nine kilometres from camp we came to a stream 
eighty metres wide, which flowed from northeast to south¬ 
west. It had an average depth of one and a half feet. It 
was, I think, the Cuyaba Grande. 
It was not easy to identify those rivers, as the existing 
maps of that country were absolutely worthless, most of 
them being filled in with fancy mountains and rivers, 
which either did not exist at all or were sometimes hun¬ 
dreds of kilometres out of their position. There were 
frequently mistakes of two, three, and more degrees in the 
latitudes and longitudes, even of important places. As 
for the tributary rivers, of which merely the mouths were 
known and named, they had supplied good material for 
the imagination of more or less artistic cartographers in 
order to fill in the rest of their course. Even the German 
map and the American maps of the International Bureau 
of American Republics, which were the two best, were 
extremely inaccurate in their representation of that region. 
For instance, the latter map — and nearly all the other 
maps — placed the Serra Azul some 180 or 200 kilo¬ 
metres south of its actual position. The German map was 
some 70 kilometres out. The Serra Azul could be seen 
from a great distance, and had been marked approxi¬ 
mately and not by actual observations on the spot. Nor, 
of course, had the tributaries of the Cuyaba been explored 
or even seen except at their mouths; hence their imaginary 
courses. 
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353 
