THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE.*
Tan is the narrative of a voyage by which the author, who is, or was, a journalist, escaped temporarily from the bonds of con- ventional life and occupation. All the normal practitioners of a life of routine dream occasionally of escape. A few act upon their dreams as upon a good omen, but they return as a, rule to drudgery. Perhaps they have discovered by that time- that work which is worth doing is not after all character- istically pleasant, and that the desire to escape from it was only a testimony to its necessity. The literature of escape from social or professional bondage, of which Thoreau may be reckoned the prophet—Borrow as the servant of the Bible Society is hardly to be counted among those who. have escaped from restraint—is already large, and may be- expected to increase in direct proportion to the growth of sophistication in civilization. The test of the genuineness of escape is perhaps the simple but searching one whether a+ man is willing to make great pecuniary sacrifices in order to. escape. Resolutely to leave a groove—for there is generally a good deal_ to be said in favour of the groove when the time comes—or to throw up a safe income is proof of the ardour of restlessness. Mr. Tomlinson seems to have satisfied the test), But he was glad to return to London at the end of hi& adventure, and we should be surprised to learn that the process of blood-letting, so to speak, has not cooled the fever. Escape, after all, is not generally a solution, but a shirking, of difficult questions. And the literature of the subject, though it is highly amiable and fascinating, often begins to offend when it adopts an air of lofty superiority to those who stay on in the old rut, simply and manfully doing the job that has come to their bands—possibly even making the pots and pans which the latest Thoreau,. however simple his way of life, is not above consenting to use.
And, then, is the written narrative of the escaped insurgent to be a self-conscious piece of introspection, such as even Thoreau was always in danger of writing, or a record of such value as can be extracted from an experience seldom described ? Very high among those who have used their escape to good. purpose we should place Dana, the author of the immortal, Two Years Before the Mast. He was a Harvard graduate or culture and nice tastes, who went to sea for two years for his. health, wrote one of the best books in existence on the sea- man's life, and afterwards devoted his attention to improving the lot of those whose circumstances he had so intimately studied.
Geographically Mr. Tomlinson followed almost the exact route of Bates, the famous naturalist, who spent some eleven years on the Amazon and its tributaries and brought home more than thirteen thousand different species of insects, of which about eight thousand were hitherto unknown to science. Mr. Tomlinson was suddenly offered the chance of going in a tramp steamer to the San Antonio Falls on the Madeira River, two thousand miles inland from Para, and be as suddenly accepted it. He signed on for the voyage nominally as purser, for the non-existent services of which office he received the fictitious salary of a shilling a month. Now, as to the manner in which he has written his narrative: it is very striking and vivid; he has the talent of acute • The Sea and. the Jungls. H. M. Tomlinson. London: Duckworth and [7g. 6) .
-observation and powerful expression. The narrative is so good, indeed, that we are vexed to find that it is not some- thing even more. The author is continually making us think that he might have written a book that would endure, and as -often makmg us feel that he has not. His insurgency -against the established ways of life, which of course may be highly respectable in itself, is not always put forth in a manner one can respect. It is sometimes irrelevant and sometimes lacking in taste. Again, the .agonizing search for the word to give a description dis- tinction or dignity too often results in the contrary effect, and we are conscious rather of a grimace or a contortion. If -only Mr. Tomlinson, with his unquestionable power of vigorous description, had been content to be a little simpler, .a little more direct, and a little less concerned to pursue cloudy fancies, he might have written the book of travel and experience which we believe he is capable of writing. However, it may be that we are only wasting words ; possibly what we dislike is to him the real zest, and our prescription for writing' something that will endure only in his judgment a. call to repudiate the thoughts best worth expression. We .do not suggest that Mr. Tomlinson should have tried to imitate Bates. Bates was a fully equipped professional naturalist—distinguished enough to be the co-operator of Mr. A. R. Wallace—and Mr. Tomlinson is not a professional.
We mean only that Mr. Tomlinson might have described waters practically unknown to British shipping with a more 'confident recognition of the essential interest of his subject.
So different is his method from Bates's that whereas Bates simply says in his book in a sentence that he went to the Amazon, and devotes the rest of his space to the eleven years .he spent there, Mr. Tomlinson describes at length his -experiences in the tramp. This is a fine description ; several passages might have been written by Mr. Conrad. The tramp was one of those iron decked vessels in which the masts are only .masts because they are derricks, and the upright, commercial- -looking funnel has a suspicion of a tilt forwards, apparently lest it should seem to have any of the affectation of rakishness. In a -heavy sea the forecastle, the bridge, and the poop stood out of the seething water like towers, while the decks below were awash like a half-tide rock. How the landsman's sense of -insecurity and discomfort grew into confidence and a sense of intimacy, with that personal note of gratitude that goes out 'towards the inanimate being which is a ship, is extremely well -told. The scenes on the Amazon and the Madeira deserve quotation. He describes the floating islands which are detached by the floods and move down-stream in enormous masses.
"We passed numerous floating islands (Ilhas de Caapim) and -trees adrift, evidence, the pilots said, that the river was rising. These grass islands are a feature of the Amazon. They look like lush pastures adrift. Some of them are so large it is difficult to 'believe they are really afloat till they come alongside. Then, if the river is at all broken by a breeze, the meadow plainly Aandulates. This floating cane and grass grows in the sheltered bays and quiet paranas-miris, for though the latter are navigable side-channels of the river in the rainy season, in the dry they are merely isolated swamps. But when the river is in flood the earth is washed away from the roots of this marsh growth, and it moves .off, a flourishing, mobile field, often twenty feet in thickness. islands, lands, when large, can be dangerous to small craft. Small -.flowers blossom on these aquatic fields, which shelter snakes and turtles, and sometimes the peixe-boi, the manatee."
On the Madeira the floating islands are formed of trees rather -than of grass :—
"The average width of the river may be less than a quarter of a mile. It is loaded with floating timber, launched upon it by terras-c.abidas; landslides, caused by the rains, which carry away sections of the forest each large enough to furnish an English park with trees. Sometimes we see a bight in the bank where such a collapse has only recently occurred, the wreckage of trees being still fresh. Many of the trees which charge down on the current are of great bulk, with half their table-like base high out 'of the water. Occasionally rafts of them appear, locked with creepers, and bearing flourishing gardens of weeds. This charac- .teristic gives the river its Portuguese name, 'river of wood.'" -Such phenomena were the despair of the honest captain " ' The river is full of big timber,' he said. He went to stare • overside, and then came back to us. 'The current is about five knots, and those trees adrift are as big as barges. I hope they keep clear of the propeller.' The Skipper's eye was uneasy. He was glum with suspicion; he spoke of the way his fools might meet the wiles of fortune at a time when he was below and his ...hip was without its acute protective intelligence. He stood, a • The Lord Wardens of the Marches of England and Scotland. spare figure in white, in a limp grass hat with flapping eaves, Pease. Loudon: Countable and Co. 1-10.. 6d. rtet.1 gazing forward to the bridge mistrustfully. He had brought us in a valuable vessel to a place unknown, and now he had to go on, and afterwards get us all out again. I began to feel a large respect for this elderly master mariner (who did not give the beard of an onion for any man's sympathy) who had skilfully contrived to put us where we were, and now was unaware what mischance would send us to rot under the forest wall, the bottom to fall out of our adventure just when we were in its narrowest passage and achievement was almost within view. 'This is no place for a ship,' the captain mumbled. 'It isn't right. We're disturbing the mud all the time; and look at those butterflies now, dodging about us !' " No doubt when be saw his ship covered from end to end with butterflies he felt like the shocked fisherman in Captains Courageous, when the conversation had been improperly led on to farming by one of their number, that things were not
being " kep' separate."
Some of the descriptions of jungle scenery are quite first- rate, and so is the account of Porto Velho, where the tramp unloaded her cargo of patent fuel at the pier, from which point the listless heat-devoured colony of engineers were driving their railway two hundred and fifty miles through the jungle. We should like to know more about the singularly casual white explorers who, according to Mr. Tomlinson, think little of coming through to the Upper Amazonian districts in canoes from the Pacific by way of unknown and dangerously rapid rivers. They do not even think of themselves as explorers; they roam about merely in the hope of alighting upon some Eldorado of wealth. On the Madeira Mr. Tomlinson was among such tribes of Indians as were so diabolically maltreated in the Putumayo district. He formed the lowest opinion of the spirit of men whose life is summarized in the one word "rubber."
"Pars is mainly rubber, and ManaUs. The Amazon is rubber, and most of its tributaries. The Madeira particularly is rubber. The whole system of communication, which covers thirty-four thousand miles of navigable waters, waters nourishing a humus which literally stirs beneath your feet with the movements of spores and seeds, that system would collapse but for the rubber. The passengers on the river boats are rubber men, and the cargoes are rubber. All the talk is of rubber. There are no manufactures, no agriculture, no fisheries, and no saw-mills, in a region which could feed, clothe, and shelter the population of a continent. There was a book by a Brazilian I saw at Para, recently published, and called the Green Heil (Inferno Verde). On its cover was the picture of a nude Indian woman, symbolical of Amazonas, and from wounds in her body her blood was draining into the little tin cups which the rubber-collector uses against the incisions on the rubber-tree. From what I heard of the subject, and I heard much, that picture was little overdrawn."
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