Sergeant Martial had followed orders. But he couldn’t care less about the sun, with his head of rough, close-cropped hair and his skull of boiler-plate.
It goes without saying that, since they could not renew their supplies en route, their luggage contained, without being overloaded, all the spare clothing, underwear, toilet articles, footwear, and everything that this type of trip required. There was also bedding and a basic arsenal of weapons and ammunition—a pair of revolvers for young Jean and a second pair for Sergeant Martial, not to mention a rifle that, being a skillful marksman, the latter might often find occasion to make good use of.
Often? Are the dangers so great in the Orinoco territory that one must stay permanently on the alert, like in the heart of darkest Africa? Are the riverbanks and the surrounding countryside constantly swarming with hordes of Indians, marauders, plunderers, cannibals?
Yes and no.
As indicated in the conversations between MM. Miguel, Felipe, and Varinas, the lower Orinoco from Ciudad Bolívar to the mouth of the Apure offered no serious threats. Its central portion, however, between the Apure and San Fernando de Atabapo, required a certain vigilance, especially around the Quivas Indians. As for the Orinoco’s upper reaches, the danger was clear—the tribes there lived in a state of absolute savagery.
It must not be forgotten that M. Miguel and his two colleagues had no plans to go farther than the village of San Fernando. Did Sergeant Martial and his nephew have a more distant location in mind? Might the goal of their trip lie beyond that village? Could some unforeseen circumstances take them to the very sources of the Orinoco? Nobody was in a position to answer such questions, these two least of all.
The only certainty was that Colonel de Kermor had left France fourteen years earlier, destination Venezuela. What took him there, what happened to him, what caused him to leave his homeland without a word to his comrades in arms—will the truth emerge as this tale unfolds? Few specifics on this subject could be found in the conversations of Sergeant Martial and young Jean.
Here is what the two of them had accomplished so far.
Three weeks before, after leaving their home in Chantenay outside Nantes, they had set sail from Saint-Nazaire aboard the Pereire, a steamer of the French Transatlantic
Line bound for the Caribbean. From there, another ship took them to La Guaira, port town for Caracas. Then, after a train ride of a few hours, they reached the Venezuelan capital itself.
They stayed only a week in Caracas. They did not spend it touring this otherwise interesting and picturesque city, whose lower reaches are separated from its heights by more than a thousand meters of elevation. They hardly would have had the time to go up Calvary Hill, from which every house in town can be seen—all of them built of lightweight materials due to the threat of earthquakes, such as the one in 1812 that killed twelve thousand people.
Caracas does, nevertheless, have many attractive parks, planted with rows of trees that remain green all year round, a number of handsome public buildings, a presidential palace, a cathedral of fine architecture, and many terraces overlooking the magnificent Caribbean—in short, all the vitality of a great city with a population of more than one hundred thousand people.
But not for one instant did these sights divert Sergeant Martial and his nephew from what they had come to do in this town. They had spent the last week gathering information on this journey they were about to undertake, a journey that might perhaps lead them as far as those distant and all-but-unknown regions of the Republic of Venezuela. The information they now possessed was still incomplete, but they hoped to fill in the blanks at San Fernando. From there, Jean was determined to continue his investigations as far as necessary, even into those hazardous lands around the upper Orinoco.
And Sergeant Martial knew only too well that, if he were to exert his authority and try to prevent Jean from braving the dangers of such a journey, he would run headlong into a tenacity quite extraordinary for a boy of that age, a willpower that nothing could weaken, and he would have no choice but to knuckle under.6
Arriving in La Guarira, port town for Caracas.
That is why these two Frenchmen, after reaching the town of Ciudad Bolívar, were to embark the next day on a steamer that provided service along the lower Orinoco.
“God protect us,” Jean had said. “Yes, may He protect us—in going as well as returning!”7
CHAPTER III
On Board the Simón Bolívar
“The Orinoco,” Christopher Columbus wrote in his reports, “flows through a paradise on earth.”
The first time Jean quoted this pronouncement by the great Genoese navigator, Sergeant Martial had only one comment: “That remains to be seen.”
And in casting doubts on this claim by the famous discoverer of America, he just may have been right.
He likewise dismissed as so many legends the belief that the great river led to the golden land of El Dorado, as its earliest explorers seemed to think, men like Hojeda, Pinzón, Cabral, Magalhaez, Valdivia, Sarmiento, and so many others who ventured into these South American regions.1
In any case, the Orinoco traces a huge half-circle on the face of the land between the third and eighth parallels north of the equator, and this curve stretches farther than longitude 70˚ west of the meridian of Paris. All Venezuelans are proud of their river, MM. Miguel, Felipe, and Varinas no less than their fellow countrymen.
And these three could very well have lodged a public protest against Professor Elisée Reclus who, in volume 18 of his New Geography of the World, stuck the Orinoco in ninth place among the world’s rivers, below the Amazon, Congo, Parana, Niger, Yangtze, Brahmaputra, Mississippi, and Saint Lawrence. Could not our scholarly trio have pointed out the report by the sixteenth-century explorer Diego de Ordaz2 where the Indians had nicknamed the Orinoco “Paragua,” meaning “big waters”? However, despite this potent argument, they were not inclined to voice their objections, and maybe it was just as well, because the French geographer could no doubt defend his conclusions with serious proofs.
At six o’clock in the morning on August 12, the Simón Bolívar—a name that should amaze nobody—was all set to go. Steamboat travel between this city and the villages along the Orinoco dated back only a few years and still did not go past the mouth of the Apure. Instead, the boat headed down this tributary, taking passengers and cargo to San Fernando,* and even beyond to the port of Nutrias, thanks to the Venezuela Company, which then offered bimonthly service to those destinations.
It was at the mouth of the Apure—or, rather, a couple of miles below at the village of Caicara—that travelers continuing on the Orinoco had to get off the Simón Bolívar and entrust themselves to the primitive vessels of the Indians.
As for the steamer, she was built to sail on rivers whose low-water mark changed dramatically from the dry season to the rainy season. Designed like steamboats on Colombia’s Magdalena river, she had a flat bottom and drew as little water as possible. Her only means of propulsion was a huge, uncovered paddle wheel astern, which was set in motion by a relatively powerful double-action engine. Picture a kind of raft beneath a superstructure that is crowned