Through the Brazilian Wilderness | Page 4

interest in my
trip, informed me that he had arranged that on the headwaters of the
Paraguay, at the town of Caceres, I would be met by a Brazilian Army
colonel, himself chiefly Indian by blood, Colonel Rondon. Colonel
Rondon has been for a quarter of a century the foremost explorer of the
Brazilian hinterland. He was at the time in Manaos, but his lieutenants
were in Caceres and had been notified that we were coming.
More important still, Mr. Lauro Muller--who is not only an efficient
public servant but a man of wide cultivation, with a quality about him
that reminded me of John Hay--offered to help me make my trip of
much more consequence than I had originally intended. He has taken a
keen interest in the exploration and development of the interior of
Brazil, and he believed that my expedition could be used as a means
toward spreading abroad a more general knowledge of the country. He
told me that he would co-operate with me in every way if I cared to
undertake the leadership of a serious expedition into the unexplored
portion of western Matto Grosso, and to attempt the descent of a river
which flowed nobody knew whither, but which the best-informed men
believed would prove to be a very big river, utterly unknown to
geographers. I eagerly and gladly accepted, for I felt that with such help
the trip could be made of much scientific value, and that a substantial
addition could be made to the geographical knowledge of one of the
least-known parts of South America. Accordingly, it was arranged that

Colonel Rondon and some assistants and scientists should meet me at
or below Corumba, and that we should attempt the descent of the river,
of which they had already come across the headwaters.
I had to travel through Brazil, Uruguay, the Argentine, and Chile for
six weeks to fulfil my speaking engagements. Fiala, Cherrie, Miller,
and Sigg left me at Rio, continuing to Buenos Aires in the boat in
which we had all come down from New York. From Buenos Aires they
went up the Paraguay to Corumba, where they awaited me. The two
naturalists went first, to do all the collecting that was possible; Fiala
and Sigg travelled more leisurely, with the heavy baggage.
Before I followed them I witnessed an incident worthy of note from the
standpoint of a naturalist, and of possible importance to us because of
the trip we were about to take. South America, even more than
Australia and Africa, and almost as much as India, is a country of
poisonous snakes. As in India, although not to the same degree, these
snakes are responsible for a very serious mortality among human
beings. One of the most interesting evidences of the modern advance in
Brazil is the establishment near Sao Paulo of an institution especially
for the study of these poisonous snakes, so as to secure antidotes to the
poison and to develop enemies to the snakes themselves. We wished to
take into the interior with us some bottles of the anti-venom serum, for
on such an expedition there is always a certain danger from snakes. On
one of his trips Cherrie had lost a native follower by snake-bite. The
man was bitten while out alone in the forest, and, although he reached
camp, the poison was already working in him, so that he could give no
intelligible account of what had occurred, and he died in a short time.
Poisonous snakes are of several different families, but the most
poisonous ones, those which are dangerous to man, belong to the two
great families of the colubrine snakes and the vipers. Most of the
colubrine snakes are entirely harmless, and are the common snakes that
we meet everywhere. But some of them, the cobras for instance,
develop into what are on the whole perhaps the most formidable of all
snakes. The only poisonous colubrine snakes in the New World are the
ring- snakes, the coral-snakes of the genus elaps, which are found from
the extreme southern United States southward to the Argentine. These
coral-snakes are not vicious and have small teeth which cannot
penetrate even ordinary clothing. They are only dangerous if actually

trodden on by some one with bare feet or if seized in the hand. There
are harmless snakes very like them in color which are sometimes kept
as pets; but it behooves every man who keeps such a pet or who
handles such a snake to be very sure as to the genus to which it
belongs.
The great bulk of the poisonous snakes of America, including all the
really dangerous ones, belong to a division of the widely spread family
of vipers which is known as the pit-vipers. In South America these
include two distinct