Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
the general procedures that they would adopt to begin their tasks, including part of the memo drafted
at this time.
Itwasnecessarytonavigatenightandday,onlycarryingoutthehydrographicmeasuresintheday;
sections that were traveled at night, even though not registered, would be included in the reconnais-
sance upon the return. This was a means, essentially, of making up for lost time by taking advantage
of the remaining floodwaters. In any case, we were still in the best-known regions of the Purús, and
weneededtodowhatwecouldtoattainthemostdistantpointsoftheheadwaters,theessentialobject
of our mission. These general principles would shape our future studies and would be, as in fact they
ultimately were, constantly modified by circumstances and our greater experience.
Thus, from that point on, the Peruvian Commission, whose single steam vessel made travel much
easier, began uninterrupted reconnaissance and was for a short stretch accompanied by the Brazili-
an Commission, as it had contracted the streamer
Tracuá
to tow the
batelão
—cargo canoe—
Manoel
Urbano
on the 13th of April in the village of Boa Vista do Bacuri.
Up to this point the voyage was extremely slow. It improved later when the two Brazilian launches
sailed tied together in order to establish greater uniformity in the speed of travel and to better verify
theongoingresearchtowhichwehavealreadyreferred.Unfortunately,thesteamshipthatwastowing
the
batelão
rammed a submerged log and was in danger of sinking, which contributed to more delays
in our travel, such that only on the 5th of May, exactly one month after our departure from Manaus,
could we continue to the mouth of the Acre for the headwaters.
There we took advantage of a stop for three days, where we carried out the coordination of the
chronometers, as well as the initial observations of the regimes and physical character of the rivers.
As these efforts required a protracted stay, we agreed (because the instructions required only a quick
surveyoftheLowerPurús)tobeginthecoordinatedobservationsandotherdetailsonlyaftertheAcre
River.Therewasalsothebasicrealitythattheareaweweretravelingthroughhadalreadybeenamply
studied, and there were well-determined points farther along that would permit the calibration of our
chronometers with greater accuracy, even subject as they were not just to ordinary causes of variation
but to other accidental effects and special conditions that we would experience on the voyage.
Wecoordinatedourequipment,andinlightoftherapidfallinthewaterlevelandthelowervolume
ofthe Purúsonce it hadlost its main tributary (the Acre), it wasestablished that wewouldtravel only
in the day, given the perils of moving upriver at night due to the submerged logs that began to appear
in ever greater number—the river was awash with them.
Atthesametimeweagreedonacodeofsignalssothatthetwopartsofthecommissioncouldcom-
municateeasilyandascircumstancesdictated.Andsothepassageproceededwithoutnotableincident
except for the required stops for buying firewood and the various, ever greater precautions that were
needed to evade perilous collisions with the logs and debris that increasingly congested our channel.
To better coordinate our navigation and the survey, which depended in part on a certain regularity in
our advance, we tied the two launches
Cahuapanas
(the Peruvian boat) and
Number 4
together; these
were accompanied by the launch
Cunha Gomes
, along with the
batelão
that was being towed.
On the 11th of May we reached the mouth of the Iaco, where we encountered the
Neptune
, the
last steamer to make it down the river, fleeing the severe depletion of the river waters. Navigation
soonbecameextremelyirregular,requiringconstantsoundingsandstops,notjustbecauseofthelogs,
whichwereexcessiveandprolificeverywhereafterweleftNovoDestino,butalsobecausetheshoals
of hardened laterite called
torrões
(clay shoals) and
salões
(deep pools) were continually making our
passage more uncertain. At the villages of Teruan and Catiana, the
Cunha Gomes
was beached on
these shoals.
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