against a submerged tree; all the freight was lost, and the passengers barely escaped with their lives.

Placed in a more trying situation than ever, they resolved to follow afoot the sinuous banks of the river through the thick tangled mass of shrubs and lianas. But their progress was so slow that they concluded to shorten their journey by taking a straight course through the woods, and, in so doing, they discovered after some days of aimless wandering that they were hopelessly lost.

Wearied by such long marches in an almost impenetrable forest, their feet lacerated by thorns and brambles, their provisions exhausted, and dying of thirst, their only sustenance was certain wild fruits and palm leaves. At last, overcome by hunger and fatigue, and too weak to stand, they fell to the ground and awaited the approach of death.

In three or four days they expired, one after another, with the exception of Madame Godin. She, stupefied, delirious and tormented with a choking thirst, remained for two days prostrate beside the corpses of her two brothers and those of her other companions. At length, however, she recovered sufficient strength and courage to resume her wanderings. She was then without shoes and her clothes were reduced to tatters. Cutting the soles from the shoes of her dead brothers, she used them as sandals.

On the second day of her random wanderings she found water, and the following days some wild fruits and fresh eggs, apparently of some kind of partridge. She was scarcely able to swallow, so constricted was her throat by lack of food, but her skeleton frame managed to subsist on such food as chance placed within her reach. Nine days after leaving the spot where her brothers and domestics had died, she reached the Bobonaza, where by the rarest of good fortune she encountered two Indians who were in the act of launching a canoe. She begged them to take her to Andoas, which they readily agreed to do. Thence she made. her way down the Pastasa to the Amazon, and then to Laguna on the Huallaga. There she was kindly received by

the superior of the missions, and, after her health and strength were sufficiently restored, she continued her voyage down the Amazon, and eventually succeeded in rejoining her husband in Cayenne.

But the recollection of the long and terrible scenes of which she had been a witness, the horror of the solitude and of the nights in the wilderness, the dread which was intensified every moment, so deeply affected her that her hair became white.

Her husband, who has left us in a letter to his friend, M. de la Condamine,1 a graphic account of the awful experience of his wife, well remarks that it is too improbable for a romance, for it does not seem possible that a lone, delicately-nurtured woman, accustomed to all the comforts of life, could survive privations and hardships which caused the death of her brothers and servants, and left her to continue the struggle unaided and alone. It would be indeed difficult, if not impossible, to find a parallel to such endurance on the part of a woman, and, for this reason, Madame Godin's name will ever be indissolubly linked with one of the most remarkable adventures, and one of the most thrilling of the many romances that have made the Amazon so famous.

Nearly a century and a half have elapsed since Madame Godin's memorable journey, but the forests and rivers she traversed are still as wild and as picturesque as they were in her day. Indeed, they have witnessed but little change since Orellana's voyage nearly four centuries ago. If we may credit the statements of Carvajal and Laureano de la Cruz, the chief difference between the Amazon valley, as they saw it, and as the traveler finds it to-day, lies in the incomparably less number of aborigines that now people the banks of the great river, as compared with the countless thousands that greeted the Spaniards and the

1 Published at the end Relation Abrégée d' un Voyage Fait dans l' Intérieur de l'Amérique Méridional, par M. de la Condamine, à Maestricht, 1778.

Portuguese under Orellana and Texeira. War and disease and soulless Dutch and Portuguese slavers have reduced the number of Indians to a small fraction of what it was when this region was first visited by Europeans. One still sees a native village here and there, and an occasional hut surrounded by maize, plantain and manihot, but the dense population that so surprised the early chroniclers, is a thing of the past. Many tribes have disappeared entirely, while others have retired far into the recesses of the forest, where a white man never penetrates.

The islands, too, that so thickly dot the river for a thousand leagues, and which were once the favorite haunts of the liberty-loving red men, are now almost entirely depopulated. In the upper Amazon alone in the time of Padre Fritz, there were more than fifty islands inhabited by four different Indian tribes, among whom were no fewer than thirty-eight reductions. Nearly all of these are now abandoned, and, instead of sixty thousand Christian Indians who, two centuries ago flourished under the benign rule of the missionaries of San Borja and Laguna, we find to-day only a small fraction of this number, most of whom are neglected and practically forgotten by those to whom these poor children of the forest have a right to look for the same assistance and instruction that were enjoyed by their forefathers.

And although this part of South America has, for more than a century, been the favorite resort of explorers and naturalists and ethnologists from Europe and the United States, it is still but imperfectly known. Notwithstanding the famous researches and explorations of the missionaries mentioned in the preceding chapter and of those of La Condamine, Spix and Martius, Poeppig, D'Orbigny, Castelnau, Herndon, Gibbon, Bates, Spruce, Wallace, Agassiz, Hartt, Chandless, Penna, Coutinho, and scores of others who have immortalized themselves by their scientific achievements in the Amazon basin, this greatest of the world's forests still holds countless secrets for those who

are willing to venture into its unexplored depths. So far, indeed, is our knowledge of the immense selva of the Amazon from being complete, that we can, to borrow an expression of the conquistador, Francisco Preciado, who declared that there was in the New World country enough to conquer for a thousand years, confidently assert that there is still in this exhaustless territory enough virgin material to occupy the conquistadores of science for ten centuries to

come.

CHAPTER XXIV

SAILING UNDER THE LINE

The first place of importance at which we arrived after leaving Yurimaguas was Iquitos, the capital of the department of Loreto. It is pleasantly located on the left bank of the Amazon about six hundred miles below Yurimaguas, and counts from twelve to fifteen thousand inhabitants, besides a large floating population. The city, which ranks as the most important port in Peru after Callao, is quite cosmopolitan in character, for it has representatives from almost all parts of the world, including, of course, the ubiquitous Chinese.

Here I left our trim little steamer, the Miraflores, in which I had spent two delightful days, and became the guest of the prefect of Iquitos, who at once planned for me a series of excursions up the Ucayali, the Napo and the Putumayo. I regretted then, and have often regretted since, that lack of time made it impossible for me to avail myself of his courteous offers, for nothing would have given me greater pleasure than to continue my wanderings in tropical wilds, especially under such favorable auspices.

Iquitos, which is a place of recent foundation, is to-day something like Leadville, Colorado, was three decades ago. The difference is that in the American town in its palmy days everybody talked silver, whereas in Iquitos the usual topic of conversation is rubber and the prevailing market price for this precious commodity.

"We care nothing for politics or religion here," said a prominent business man to me; "the only thing we have any interest in is the English sovereign."

For this everything is sacrificed, health and even life.