h 26. On the swift water in the gorge of the Papagaio Fiala's boat
had been upset and all his belongings lost, while he himself had
narrowly escaped with his life. I was glad indeed that the fine and
gallant fellow had escaped. The Canadian canoe had done very well. We
were no less rejoiced to learn that Amilcar, the head of the party
that went down the Gy-Parana, was also all right, although his canoe
too had been upset in the rapids, and his instruments and all his
notes lost. He had reached Manaos on April 10. Fiala had gone home.
Miller was collecting near Manaos. He had been doing capital work.

The piranhas were bad here, and no one could bathe. Cherrie, while
standing in the water close to the shore, was attacked and bitten; but
with one bound he was on the bank before any damage could be done.

We spent a last night under canvas, at Pyrineus' encampment. It rained
heavily. Next morning we all gathered at the monument which Colonel
Rondon had erected, and he read the orders of the day. These recited
just what had been accomplished: set forth the fact that we had now by
actual exploration and investigation discovered that the river whose
upper portion had been called the Duvida on the maps of the
Telegraphic Commission and the unknown major part of which we had just
traversed, and the river known to a few rubbermen, but to no one else,
as the Castanho, and the lower part of the river known to the
rubbermen as the Aripuanan (which did not appear on the maps save as
its mouth was sometimes indicated, with no hint of its size) were all
parts of one and the same river; and that by order of the Brazilian
Government this river, the largest affluent of the Madeira, with its
source near the 13th degree and its mouth a little south of the 5th
degree, hitherto utterly unknown to cartographers and in large part
utterly unknown to any save the local tribes of Indians, had been
named the Rio Roosevelt.

We left Rondon, Lyra, and Pyrineus to take observations, and the rest
of us embarked for the last time on the canoes, and, borne swiftly on
the rapid current, we passed over one set of not very important rapids
and ran down to Senhor Caripe's little hamlet of Sao Joao, which we
reached about one o'clock on April 27, just before a heavy afternoon
rain set in. We had run nearly eight hundred kilometres during the
sixty days we had spent in the canoes. Here we found and boarded
Pyrineus's river steamer, which seemed in our eyes