# Jack Heaton, Wireless Operator/Chapter 5

CHAPTER V
My Adventures in the Tropics
WHEN Bert Mackey and I got back to New York we were both in the same boat—to wit, we were without jobs. On the way down, though, Bert unfolded a very alluring scheme by which we could, he allowed, make oodles of money and at the same time stand a chance of meeting with something that looked like real adventure.
“Do you know, Jack,” Bert said confidentially, “that I went into the wireless game simply because it appeared to me to offer the best chance of meeting Miss Adventure. I’ve been at it for five years now and I’ve never even had the pleasure of getting a look at her face.
“Wherever I go she is always on the other side of the street and although I tip my hat to her she never looks up, much less gives me a tumble. I took that sealing job because ​I certainly thought I’d meet Miss Adventure somewhere among the ice floes and blizzards of the Arctic North. But no! all I did was to sit in my cabin and send what my Captain wanted to tell your Captain and receive what your Captain had to say to my Captain. And to what purpose? So that a few rich men could get richer by enabling vain women to run around the streets of New York and a few other big burgs bedecked out in the skins of baby seals that had been clubbed to death. Now that’s big business for men and women to be in, isn’t it?
“I wish I could get a job on a pirate ship or start a revolution in some punk Central Ameriean country. And it’s funny,” he went on complainingly, “how a fellow like you, who has only been in the service a couple of years, could meet with a big adventure like the sinking of the Andalusian. I’d have given a year of my life to have been in your place.
“Now down along the Amazon River there are great rubber plantations, savage tribes of Indians, tigers, monkeys, boa-constrictors and all the garnishings that go to make up a first class tropical jungle. I know a man in New ​York that does business with a rubber concern in Para, Brazil and he told me, just before we sailed north, that the Compagnie Francaise de Telegraphie sans Fil had a contract to put up half a dozen wireless stations along the river.
“It strikes me, Jack, that it would be a good scheme if you and I took a trip down there and looked over the ground. What do you say?”
Having a few dollars in my pocket and nothing else to do at that particular moment I said O K and agreed to join him provided we could get free transportation on some liner going down there. Bert assured me that he could fix it and he was as good as his word.
So it was we sailed in due time on the Ceara of the Holliday Line. It was an old tub that stood every chance of having on board Miss Adventure and I didn’t doubt in the least but that Bert would have ample opportunity to strike up an acquaintance with her and to swim back, if he got back at all, for the Ceara had no wireless equipment—such was her regard for the laws of the U.S.
As luck would have it we had fine weather and she beat her way down just as she had for the last quarter of a century if she was as old ​as she looked. We enjoyed the trip, at that, for there were not many passengers aboard and all of them, especially the South Americans, were very pleasant people. Having learned that we had never been in South America we were told that it was a great country full of possibilities for young men with some capital but that if we were unacquainted there it would be better for us to about face at Para and go home.
Bert and I had other thoughts on the subject but as we were nearing the Equator I kind of wondered why I had not staid at home selling crude-oil engines or taking the post on the new Cunarder that Sammis said he’d get for me, or doing something else that was nice and cool.
In a little less than a month’s time we landed at Para, as it is popularly called, or Belem, as it is more properly called, or to give it its full name Santa Maria de Del Belem do Para. Just as New Orleans is built back from the Gulf of Mexico, on the Mississippi River so Para is situated a hundred miles inland from the Atlantic on the Amazon River. So this is Para from which Para rubber comes, thought I ​as I looked about, and indeed I should have known it had I sailed into port with my eyes shut for the smell of rubber everywhere permeated the air.
But don’t think for a moment that it is made up of a lot of adobe houses as so many Mexican towns are. Far from it, for in architecture it is a miniature reproduction of Rio de Janeiro, which city in turn looks more like Paris than any other in either North or South America. Nor is Para a small burg, for it has a population of a hundred thousand now and some day, if the Amazon valley is ever developed, it may be larger than Rio de Janeiro, aye, even than New York itself.
Different from the equatorial city I expected to find, where every one had nothing to do but to lie under a palm tree, look at the blue sky, smoke cigarettes and agitate the air with a fan, there was much to do, for there rubber is King, and the white, yellow and black folks were doing it with a good deal of vim too. The demand for rubber, we learned, was greater than it had ever been before and consequently the people were prosperous and happy.
After a deal of searching we located the of-​fices of the Compagnie Francaise de Telegraphie sans Fil and Bert explained to Señor Benoit, the manager, that we were a couple of wireless operators from the United States. The manager acted as though he was dazed and Bert handed him our credentials to set him right.
In a moment, though, he recovered and I wish you could have seen the way he greeted us! You’d have thought he’d found two long lost brothers for he hugged us in turn and almost wept on our necks. I thought the heat and the smell of the rubber had made him nutty whereas it was only his great good luck. Believe me, he knew exactly what it was all about.
He had come on from France six months before to put up a chain of wireless stations beginning at Para and on up the river for 2500 miles to Equitos, at intervals of about 500 miles. Before the wireless men got to Jurutty they had been taken down with the fever and were even then on their way to Para, and so the job was open and ready for us to tackle. He agreed to pay us a million reis, including all our expenses and a million reis for every month we remained as operators in his company’s service. It didn’t take half-an-eye to see that if we ​could stick it out for a few months we’d be regular millionaires.
“I want to make our wireless system a success to show the Brazilian capitalists its superiority over the wire system. They have an overhead line stretched along the banks of the river but it gives very poor service for any one of a number of reasons, chief among them being that it is hard to keep iron wires from rusting away owing to the great amount of rain, and when copper wire is used the Indians have a great liking for it and cut out a length here and there whenever they want it.
“With wireless it is different and if I can only get the stations set up and working I will show the advantages of it over the wire system very quickly. Wireless will be safer and surer for the rains can’t affect it and I am quite sure the Indians will not steal the ether.”
We took passage on the Asuncion, one of the Amazon Steamship Company’s fleet of small steamers and sailed up the Rio Amazonia, or as we call it the Amazon River, the mightiest of all flowing waters. On either side of it for hundreds of miles lay a tangled mass of tropical vegetation—the jungle in very truth. The vil-​lages were far between but occasionally we saw the rude huts of a few settlers who had come forth from the civilized quarters of the world to sap out their energies and make their fortunes in rubber.
We were told that a mighty small area of the jungle had been explored though a few expeditions had made their devious ways through some parts of it either for scientific purposes, such as studying the vegetation and living things, or for commercial reasons as getting plants for medicines and more frequently rubber.
And rain! I can’t remember a day down there when it didn’t rain. The reason it rains so much is this: the warm winds that blow up the river from the Atlantic carry a lot of moisture with them and the winds that blow down the river from the Andes are cold and when they come together, the moisture condenses and it rains.
The scenery looked about the same all the way along—just one mass of tropical trees of all kinds for the warp and these were woven together with vines of every description for the woof. I could see our finish before we started ​in to “look over the ground” as Bert had suggested when we were in dear old New York. Yes, dear little old New York—how I wished I were back there again.
As for rubber plantations they were there, the savage tribes of Indians were there too—I didn’t see them on the trip up stream but they were there all right just as Bert had said. There were no tigers as Bert guessed but we saw the onea, or jaguar (pronounced ja-gwar), a buff feline beast covered with black spots that is a second cousin to the tiger in both size and ferociousness.
The whole blooming tribe of monkeys with faces on them that ought to make a fellow ashamed to look at himself in a glass, and make you know that Darwin was right; boa-constrictors and seven million, more or less of other kinds of snakes were there—in fact equatorial America was all that Bert, or I, or any one else, ever dreamed it was and then multiply it by about a hundred and you will get a faint impression of it. Yes, beasts, birds, fishes, snakes and insects end without number, and each a marvel of its kind, were there and so was the Indian princess.
​There was the tapir, a sort of a cross between a horse and a rhinocerous having a short proboscis as though its snout was made of rubber and some one had stretched it for him; it is a shy and harmless beastie that moves about chiefly at night. The sloth, a greenish-brown animal whose chief business it is to hang back downward from the branch of a tree and to sleep away its life.
The ant-eater who picks up a living by eating ants and other insects. All hail to the ant-eater! I’ve seen a dozen other animals down there that have no business outside of a jungle, or a zoo or a menagerie. Lizards are there in great variety from those that change their colors while you wait to those the natives serve up for you to eat.
And talking about colors, no coal tar dye was ever discovered that could begin to equal the plumage of the birds down there. Large parrots called macaws, parakeets, which are little parrots with long tails, cockatoos and love birds, which belong to the parrot family, and others on down to humming birds that are scarcely larger than wasps, are as thick as microbes in sour milk.
​But the jungle is the paradise of the insects; there is every conceivable kind and then as many more that are beyond human belief: gigantic, gorgeous butterflies, beetles that looked as if they had been stencilled with the rainbow colors of the sun, and flies as numerous per square unit of space as grains of powder in the charge of an 8 gauge shell.
The ants, though, have all the other insects faded and everything else in the jungle that lives on the ground. Next to William Hohenzollern’s armies that devastated Belgium and Flanders rank the Amazon armies of ants that march out to seek what and whom they can devour. Everything from a jaguar on down that gets in their way becomes meat and drink for them.
You have, of course, often watched our little fireflies and wondered what kind of an apparatus was installed in their anatomy which produces the intermittent, phosphorescent light as they flit around. Well, down in Brazil there are fireflies that look like electric lights. They measure nearly 4 inches, long, and 1¾ inches wide and carry three light reservoirs—two in ​the thorax and one in the abdomen—and these give off a bright greenish light.
When the natives want a light they simply catch a few fireflies, put them in a bottle and cork it up. They could read by this light if they could read but they can’t so the chief use to which they put the fire-fly lights is to hunt around in their beds to see what has crawled in with them. This, then, is the cheapest form of light and, according to Sir Oliver Lodge, if man could produce an electric light with as little expenditure of power as the fire-fly then a boy turning the handle of an electric machine could light up a good sized factory.
The things that live in the Amazon River are just as plentiful as those that inhabit the jungle. The manatee, or sea-cow as it is called, is the largest having a length of something like 10 feet. If you were far enough away from it you might mistake it for a seal for it has the same general outline. Turtles grow to be 3 feet long, and oddsfish, there’s enough different kinds to stock the seven seas and then have some left over for the boarding houses.
I could talk to you for a week about the ​strange living creatures I saw in and along the banks of the Amazon and in the jungle, but the trees and plants are just as wonderful. For instance, there are palms out of which palm-leaf fans are made and palm trees that grow up as high as wireless masts and on their main trucks and pennants are cocoanuts. Trees that when you tap ’em rubber, milk or cold water comes forth depending on the kind of a tree it happens to be. Also a large number of most uncommon fruits are there in great abundance.
At last we arrived at our destination, Jurutty, a village about 500 miles east of Manaos. When we landed my first and only thought was of home and mother. My trip to the Arctic was a delightful little pleasure jaunt as against this one up the Amazon River! Had I been castaway on the moon, aye, even on Mars, I couldn’t have felt more remote from my native land than when I stepped ashore at Jurutty. And yet, would you believe it, now that it is in the past tense I would like to go there once again.
We were met at the dock by Señor Castro, the fezendero, that is the owner of the fezenda, which means the plantation. He was a mixture ​of Portuguese and Indian but none the less a gentleman for that. A motley crew of negroes, men, women and children with very little clothing on and Indians who hadn’t the remotest idea why any one should wear clothes at all, and mixtures of these races, were also at hand to see the newcomers.
Señor Castro was right glad to see us and after shaking hands with us half-a-dozen times he led the way back through a path in the jungle to his fezenda. We dined in his home as I had never dined before nor have since, drank coffee that threw the surpassing beverage of the same name which is brewed in Child’s and the Waldorf-Astoria in the shade and smoked his long tobacco wrapped cigarettes.
Then we talked wireless. The apparatus, as Señor Benoit had said, was there and Señor Castro assured us that we should have all the help we needed to set it up. He told us that there was an electric generator and a crude-oil engine to furnish the power to run it with—and yet there were hundreds of thousands of horse power to be had from the Amazon—but which had never been tapped. Fortunately I happened to know all about the history, theory ​and practise of oil engines and how to sell them if the alleged prospects had the slightest idea of buying such power units.
Señor Castro also had a billiard table, a phonograph and other civilized inventions to while away life as pleasantly as possible in the jungle, and taking it all in all Bert and I considered that things were not altogether against us.
After we turned in our bobbinet curtained beds that night all went well until we were awakened in the small hours by the sound of a woman’s voice outside. Thinking it was some female in distress Bert awakened the fezendero only to be told with great courtesy that it was not a woman but an organ bird. Bert returned saying something about forming a Society for the Prevention of Jungle Noises at Night, and we slept again.
In the morning Señor Castro took us out to show us his fezenda. Three small horses were saddled ready for us to ride—though I can ride a wave at sea much better than I can ride a quadruped on land. We rode around his rubber plantation and Señor Castro showed us how the rubber trees are tapped, explained that the ​fluid which comes from the trees is not the sap of the wood but of the bark and we saw how the natives stick little tin-cups to the trees with bits of clay to catch the fluid.
On returning we rode along the edge of the jungle and Sefior Castro cautioned us “never to go into the jungle for you will either get lost, be killed by jaguars, bitten by snakes, or by fever laden insects which are just as bad.”
“To the south of us,” he went on calmly, “are the Caripunas—aboriginal Indians that kill and eat people if they get a chance.”
“Cannibals?” I asked to make sure I had heard aright, and when he said “yes” I could feel an electric oscillation run up and down my spinal column.
“How far away from here are they?” questioned Bert with a peculiar light in his eyes I had noticed whenever he spoke of adventure.
“The village is about 200 kilometers from here,” Señor Castro replied. “It’s strange but they seem to have some kind of a sixth sense by which they can tell the moment strangers arrive—some kind of a wireless telegraph system, I guess,” and he laughed.
Then he went on: “I don’t doubt but that ​they have been stalking us because you fellows are new to the place. It’s seldom that any of them ever come across this road because I’ve put bullets into a couple of them and they won’t get away with any more of my rubber men on this side of the line.”
I asked him if they had captured many of his men.
“Every time my men tread the jungle outside of the fezenda they are taken unless they have an Indian guide with them.”
“Oh, I see, they are Union savages,” said Bert and he added, “I know I’m going to like this place, Señor Castro.”
In the days that followed we got right down to business for we wanted that million reis as soon as we could get it. We unpacked the materials for the aerial first and every move we made was watched with great interest by the villagers. The phosphor-bronze wire for the aerial seemed to have an especial attraction for them, for they would pick it up, look critically at it and examine it as carefully as though they were looking for flaws in it.
There were two palm trees at least 100 feet high and about 250 feet apart, and Bert and I ​decided to use these for the masts. When we had the aerial assembled with the leading-in wire soldered to it I asked if any one there could climb the palm tree and every man, woman and child said that they could. I gave one of the half-breeds a coil of quarter-inch hemp rope to hoist the aerial with and showed him how I wanted the end of the aerial made fast to the tree top and then told him to go aloft.
I wish you could have seen that fellow climb the tree! I used to think our old time sailors were about as clever as they made ’em when it comes to climbing but there’s no use talking they’re too civilized—too far removed from the monkey family to know how to climb anything but a rope ladder.
The half-breed grasped the back of the tree with the open palms of his hands and placing the bare soles of his feet in front like a jack-knife he just naturally walked up it. These same fellows can travel for miles through the jungle by swinging themselves from vine to vine and going as fast as you or I can walk. So you see there are some things an ignorant Amazonian can do that an educated New Yorker ​can’t do. And thus does Nature’s law of compensation work out.
After we got the aerial swung betvene the palms we set the engine and dynamo in place on their foundations and with some tinkering we got them to running pretty smoothly. To Señor Castro’s delight we had enough current not only to work the wireless set but for lighting up his house as well. Last of all came the transmitter and receiver and although these were of French make we had no difficulty in either installing or operating them and it was a cinch to get either Manaos on the west or Almeirir on the east.
It seemed that the operators at both stations could get us a deal better than we could get them though all of the transmitters were fitted with one kilowatt transformers. But never mind, we had established communication, thus fulfilling our part of the agreement, and Señor Castro, by all the arts of a true gentleman, showed us how deeply he appreciated our work. Nothing was too good for us. The only flaw in the whole system was the operator at Manaos. He was like the sloth in that he was just as liable to go to sleep as he was to stay awake.
​I believe that every message I ever sent had something in it about rubber, whether the body of it related to the doctor, medicines, or what not, for along the Amazon River they live and die by that commodity.
After we had been at Jurutty a few weeks Bert and I got so we knew the fezenda about as well as its owner did and we walked or rode about the place either alone or with Señor Castro for we made it a point for one or the other to be on duty all the time and so make a reputation for ourselves and for future United States operators who might happen that way.
I often thought, in my rambles, that I could feel the presence of some human being back of a tree, or see a human shadow come and go before I could really make it out, but as this happened very often I came to believe it was merely a case of nerves. I talked with Bert about it and he said he frequently heard and saw things too but that there was nothing more to it than a snake or an animal moving about.
“Señor Castro,” he said, “has told us this little yarn about cannibals so that we would keep inside the fezenda. There used to be tribes of cannibals in the interior but all that ​sort of thing has been wiped out by the Jesuit missionaries long ago.”
I was out for a walk one morning not long after and I heard a monkey crying as though he was in great pain. I located him a dozen or twenty paces in the jungle and went after him. He seemed to have gotten tangled up in some vines and the harder he tried to get away the tighter they held him.
Just as I reached up and released him a piece of wood was slipped into my mouth by some one from behind making it impossible for me to utter a sound and before I could take my revolver from its holster my hands were pinioned back of me and my feet were bound so that I couldn’t kick, much less run. Although I kept my eyes open I couldn’t see a man-jack of my captors nor did they make the slightest noise.
They lifted me up bodily and after a few manœuvers in penetrating the jungle we finally reached a pretty well trodden trail and then they set me down and took the gag out of my mouth. Four strapping big, copper colored bucks with splashes of red paint on their stark naked bodies were the imps of Satan who had so unceremoniously abducted me. I would ​have given just $7.00 in American gold to have gotten each one of them to hold on to the spark-gap of a 10-inch induction coil for just one second.
They were a quartet of jim-dandies and all they needed was a stove-pipe hat apiece to complete their outfits.
Again they boosted me into the air and with a Savage at each corner of me they started off on a dog-trot, whither I knew not but what I did know was that I was a goner. After a march, or a trot, of two days and nights we came to an Indian village. There were several hundred men, women and children savages about but they were dressed better than the hunters who had brought me in for each one wore a string around his or her waist and a rattle-box on her or his ankle.
If any one thinks that cannibalism has been wiped out in the Amazon jungles he has another think coming for I saw with these—my own eyes—the whole horrible ceremony gone through with of eating human flesh.
After I had been there a few days a couple of savages, one with brown hair and beard and the other with red hair and beard, began talking ​to me in Spanish after trying Portuguese on me. I was quite surprised when they told me they were rubber men from Señor Castro’s fezenda whom the cannibals had captured nearly a year before.
We planned escape by the hour, though one of them said that was just what these man eaters wanted us to do and that when a fellow tried to escape they would recapture him, bring him back, put him in the proverbial pot and let him stew in his own juice. We were of a mind that it would be better to be live men turned savages than to be cooked men eaten by cannibals.
His most high worshipful King Oopla relieved me of my revolver, and came nearly shooting up the village,—which I heartily wished he had done,—also my watch, knife, compass and other trinkets which four former articles he generously kept for himself and the latter he gave to a wench whom I afterwards learned was his daughter, the Princess Jaci—which is as near as I could come to pronouncing her name. I called her Princess Mabel, the latter name being that of a shine kitchen-mechanic we once had.
​Her face was thin and small and was topped by an enormous mass of frizzled hair while her eyes set at a slight angle so that you couldn’t just tell whether she was looking at you to the leeward or a rubber tree to the windward.
Although her eyes were thus slightly out of alignment and her mouth was cut on much too large a scale, which gave her a hard look, she was always smiling good naturedly.
The first thing I knew Princess Mabel began to hang around me and to eat and drink out of my cocoa-nut shell. She was an artistic creation in olive drab, small, and lithe, but withal a very amiable and charming maiden as cannibal maidens go.
She hadn’t been spoiled by working in high-toned families in Montclair yet. I fought shy of her for some time for I thought they wanted to put up a job on me and that the moment I gave her a pleasant look I’d be on my way to the stew pot; this belief was further fixed in my mind by occasionally finding a skull, a rib, ulna, fibula, and other parts of the human skeleton lying around loose.
The rubber men, who could speak the Indian tongue a little, assured me, however, that the ​King had taken a great fancy to me—I suppose because I looked so young and tender—and that the Princess herself thought very well of me. The King’s idea, they informed me, was to have me marry the princess so as to improve the royal strain just as his own savage self had been improved in the slave days of South America when the niggers would run away from their masters and seek decent society among the cannibals.
“For heaven’s sake, boy,” one of the rubber men said to me, “make up your mind to marry her or we’ll all be served up a la chop suey in the grill room.”
Henceforth I treated her with all the courtesy and dignity I could command and she reciprocated by showing me where her papa kept my pistol, my watch and my compass—things I was glad to know, and she gave me these stones too, which I am told by dealers in gems in Maiden Lane to be diamonds. How much are they worth? No one knows until I have them cut.
Everything went fine for the next couple of months but I was getting pretty sick of the life and kept scheming to get away. This tribe of Savages used powerful bows and arrows barbed ​with bone and tipped with feathers. It was all I could do to bend them but the King had one made for me that was more to my strength and I learned to use it with precision and great effect.
Every day I would go hunting and I always had the company of a couple of pleasant secret service savages. Whatever I bagged I gave King Oopla and Princess Mabel the very choicest of it and I always tried to get game that was to their liking. We became great friends and I wouldn’t leave these good simple minded people—no not for anything in the world unless I got a good chance.
But I went a little farther every day and often lost myself from my savage guides, but, never fear, I always came back like a dutiful prospective son-in-law should. On returning one day from a hunting trip that had lasted longer than-any of the others I had ever made, I found they had killed one of the rubber men and were cooking him en casserole.
That evening at sundown the ceremonies began and when it had grown dark great bonfires were lit and the cannibals, with hideous painted faces and bodies were dancing as if ​their very lives depended on it to the bombastic beating of tom-toms. Old King Oopla had on his dress suit which consisted of a pair of long horns projecting from either side of his head, a red undershirt, and a celluloid cuff on each ankle. Her royal highness, Princess Mabel, wasb edecked out in a wonderful head-gear and a fluffy ballet skirt built up of macaw and other brilliant feathers. A few strings of human teeth around her neck completed her bridal costume. She looked awful nice.
The King, Mabel, and myself were squatting on a kind of throne built up in the center of the ring of dancers but so enthusiastic did these royal personages become that the King and the Princess must needs have a fling at it too.
After keeping the dance going into the small hours of the morning they stopped and gorged themselves with human flesh until they fell down in their tracks, actually drunk with the gruesome orgy. It was a preliminary feast to my marriage with Princess Mabel. When at last the coast was clear I recovered not only my revolver but another one from the hole in the tree where the King hid his treasures and giving it to Señor Paes, the surviving rubber ​man, we stole forth determined on gaining our freedom or else going to our deaths.
At the end of every mile we covered I put my ear to the ground and listened in, but there were no sounds of our being followed. After ten hours’ travel over trails that I knew I figured that we were nearer Jurutty than to the cannibal village. We kept right on and after another five hours my ground telegraph told me that human footsteps were coming and I knew it was a question of only a little time until the savages would overtake us.
When they were within arrow shot of us we each stood back of a tree on either side of the trail and as a squad of them came up unsuspectingly we blazed away at them with our revolvers and there were eight cannibal carcasses ready for the buzzards to pick.
When we reached the fezenda Bert came near to giving the buzzards still more pickings, for he mistook my companion and myself, with our long, unkempt hair and bare bodies, as brown as those of Indians, for a precious pair of cannibals and he took a couple of pot-shots at us.
After we had taken our baths and put on ​some honest-to-goodness clothes we had a long talk-fest. Señor Castro, he said, believed that I had been devoured by jaguars, but he had somehow felt that I had been captured by the cannibals. He had searched into the depths of the jungle for some trace of me until he was taken down with the fever where he lay nigh unto death for a month. When he got well he concluded he’d go north for in the meantime Señor Castro had gotten another operator.
“I’m certainly an unlucky dog, Jack,” Bert bemoaned his fate; “I can’t understand why I couldn’t have had even a look-in on that cannibal business. Here I’ve been down with the fever while you’ve had as fine an adventure as ever befell a man. Back to Broadway for mine where the only cannibal princesses I shall ever see are those that trip the light fantastic in the chorus.”
“Truly, I’m sorry, old man,” I consoled him, “but it wasn’t my fault though it was your misfortune. You’ll get yours yet, so cheer up.”
A week later we were ready to sail down the Amazon to Para, there to take ship for New. York. Señor Castro paid us the full amount agreed upon by the manager of the Compagnie ​Francaise de Telegraphie sans Fil and we had in all a total of about 4,000,000 reis between us—in fact we were, as we had anticipated, bloated millionaires. I had a satchel full of bills of big denomination—there is neither gold nor silver money down there.
When we got to Para, though, and we began to spend our money we were astonished and disgusted to find that a meal cost about 6000 reis, the street-car fare was 400 reis and the postage on a letter home was 300 reis. In other words, a 1,000,000 reis was just about equivalent to 325 dollars in our money. Well, we were millionaires while we thought we were anyhow.
What about the diamonds I have? I don’t know but if they are the real thing I think I’ll organize a company, go down there with a machine gun, wipe out the cannibals and open up a diamond field.