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We had a guide; we took our baggage down by a carry three-quarters of a kilometre long; and the canoes were run through known channels the following morning. At the foot of the rapids was a big house and store; and camped at the head were a number of rubber-workers, waiting for the big boats of the head rubbermen to work their way up from below. They were a reckless set of brown daredevils.
An employee, either of this commission or of one of the big rubbermen, had been up the Castanho, which is easy of ascent in its lower course, to about the same latitude, not going nearly as high as the rubbermen had gone; this we found out while we ourselves were descending the lower Castanho.
We were, according to our informants, about fifteen days' journey from the confluence of the two rivers; but there were many rubbermen along the banks, some of whom had become permanent settlers. We had come over three hundred kilometres, in forty-eight days, over absolutely unknown ground; we had seen no human being, although we had twice heard Indians.
Pyrineus had been waiting for us over a month, at the junction of what the rubbermen called the Castanho and of what they called the upper Aripuanan. Since then the Castanho had fallen; our measurements showed it to be slightly smaller than the other; the volume of the river after the junction was about 4,500 cubic metres a second. This was in 7 degrees 34 minutes.
Accordingly, it was a rather sorry crew that embarked the following morning, April 15. But it turned out a red-letter day. The day before, we had come across cuttings, a year old, which were probably but not certainly made by pioneer rubbermen.
The upper Aripuanan, a river of substantially the same volume as the Castanho, but broader at this point, and probably of less length, here joined the Castanho from the east, and the two together formed what the rubbermen called the lower Aripuanan. The mouth of this was indicated, and sometimes named, on the maps, but only as a small and unimportant stream.
The lower main stream, and the lower portion of its main affluent, the Castanho, had been commercial highways for rubbermen and settlers for nearly two decades, and, as we speedily found, were as easy to traverse as the upper stream, which we had just come down, was difficult to traverse; but the governmental and scientific authorities, native and foreign, remained in complete ignorance; and the rubbermen themselves had not the slightest idea of the headwaters, which were in country never hitherto traversed by civilized men.
The dwellers were rubbermen, but generally they were permanent settlers also, homemakers, with their wives and children. Some, both of the men and women, were apparently of pure negro blood, or of pure Indian or south European blood; but in the great majority all three strains were mixed in varying degrees. They were most friendly, courteous, and hospitable.
He was in excellent health, for he had means to start a fire, and he found abundance of Brazil-nuts and big land-tortoises. Senhor Caripe said that the rubbermen now did not go above the ninth degree, or thereabouts, on the upper Aripuanan proper, having found the rubber poor on the reaches above. A year previously five rubbermen, Mundurucu Indians, were working on the Corumba at about that level.
We put upon the map a river some fifteen hundred kilometres in length, of which the upper course was not merely utterly unknown to, but unguessed at by, anybody; while the lower course, although known for years to a few rubbermen, was utterly unknown to cartographers. It is the chief affluent of the Madeira, which is itself the chief affluent of the Amazon.
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