Three times he penetrated into this absolutely unknown,
Indian-haunted wilderness, being absent for a year or two at a time
and suffering every imaginable hardship, before he made his way
through to the Madeira and completed the telegraph-line across. The
officers and men of the Brazilian Army and the civilian scientists who
followed him shared the toil and the credit of the task. Some of his
men died of beriberi; some were killed or wounded by the Indians; he
himself almost died of fever; again and again his whole party was
reduced almost to the last extremity by starvation, disease, hardship,
and the over-exhaustion due to wearing fatigues. In dealing with the
wild, naked savages he showed a combination of fearlessness, wariness,
good judgment, and resolute patience and kindliness. The result was
that they ultimately became his firm friends, guarded the telegraph-
lines, and helped the few soldiers left at the isolated, widely
separated little posts. He and his assistants explored, and mapped for
the first time, the Juruena and the Gy-Parana, two important affluents
of the Tapajos and the Madeira respectively. The Tapajos and the
Madeira, like the Orinoco and Rio Negro, have been highways of travel
for a couple of centuries. The Madeira (as later the Tapajos) was the
chief means of ingress, a century and a half ago, to the little
Portuguese settlements of this far interior region of Brazil; one of
these little towns, named Matto Grosso, being the original capital of
the province.
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