KANSAS CITY, MO PU BLIC LiBR AR Y 




59-07262 

266 H19L ^ ' 

HaUiwell, Leo B 14.50 

Light in the jungle. D. McKay 

Co. [19591 



266 H19L 

Halliwell, Leo B $4.50 

ti$& in the jmigle. D. McKay 
Co. [19593 




LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 



LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

The Thirty Years Mission of Leo and 
Jessie Halliwell along the Amazon 

by LEO B. HALLIWELL 



Edited and with a Foreword by 
WILL OURSLER 



DAVID McKAY COMPANY, INC. 
New York 



COPYRIGHT 1959 BY LEO B. HALLIWELL 

All rights reserved, including the right to repro- 
duce this book, or parts thereof, in any form, except 
for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review. 



Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 59-9386 

MANUFACTTJKED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
VAN REES PRESS NEW YORK 



CONTENTS 

Foreword by Will Oursler vii 

1. A River at Night 3 

2. Destination: Rio 19 

3. Baia 32 

4. Oxcarts and Tigers 45 

5. Doorstep to Nowhere 71 

6. Logbook 95 

7. Hypos and Herons 117 

8. By Another Way 135 

9. Labyrinths in Green 152 

10. A Teacher Digs a Grave 171 

11. A Tree of Tears 189 

12. Aricatu! 204 

13. Into All the World 215 

14. River Patterns 224 

15. Personal Story 241 

16. Fleet Admiral 249 

17. Amazon Epilogue 264 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

following page 50 

Parade of the Luzeiros 

Jessie and I 

The Luzeiro brings assistance to a flooded home 

A native dwelling 

Native craft 

Visitors 

At work on board the Luzeiro 

Jessie and I and patients 

The first injection 

Jessie holding clinic 

A baptism in the Amazon 

An Indian of the Caraja tribe 

A chief, his wife, and their grandchild 

Elephantiasis, a condition we often found among the 
people of the Amazon 

Jessie examining a patient 
Jessie at the wheel of the Luzeiro 
Fishing along the Amazon 



FOREWORD 



IT was something like a scene in a dream the 
lush green of the jungle, the vivid golden yellow of the 
waters lapping against the banks, the deep blue of the 
sky beyond, a blue that was different from our Vermont 
skydeeper, more translucent, more mysterious. And yet 
it was here the Amazon itself, in all its color and glory, 
against the wall of a century-old farmhouse overlooking 
the quiet hills and woods in the town of Adamant, Ver- 
mont, where I have my summer home. 

On the wall of this farmhouse was another world, an- 
other continent, half a hemisphere away. As I watched, I 
glided with the camera down a dark stream past a jungle 
that seemed to reach out with its shadows, its deceptive 
fingers clutching even at this great distance, in this mo- 
tion picture thrown against the wall. 

The scenes were unlike any I had ever watched before, 
in travelogues, magazines, or guidebooks. These were not 
pictures taken by tourists. Here was a line of the sick wait- 
ing to board a boat, one by one, to be treated. This one 
had the yaws and the woman is giving him an injection. 
The woman is Mrs. Halliwell Dona Jessie, as she was 
known along the river. 

Here is another youngster, sun-tanned and bright-eyed. 



FOREWORD 



Yet his leg is terribly swollen and deformed, and his little 
body grotesquely misshapen. 

Out of the darkness of the Vermont room where we 
watched this picture, I hear the voice of Leo Halliwell 
Senhor Leo, the river folk called him. "That youngster was 
too sick, too far gone, for us to save him," he said. "We did 
all we could, but we reached him too late." 

Here is a scene of a minor operation on the little medical 
boat that these two people the Halliwells used on the 
Amazon. For more than a quarter of a century this white 
launch was their home, and consulting room, and clinic, 
as they traveled through streams and tropic torrents to 
serve these people, to bring them health and guidance. 

"Back in the Middle West where I grew up," Leo Halli- 
well was saying, "when I was just a young man about to 
start out on all this, one of my friends warned me that I 
was throwing away my life." 

His laughter filled the room. "That man was a good 
friend and he is now a big industrialist. He was trying to 
keep me from this work in Brazil because he didn't think 
it would pay off for me or Jessie, but it hasa thousand 
times over." 

Not in money, I knew that. The Halliwells are certainly 
not wealthy people. They are average, everyday Americans 
like those on any main street in any town in America. 
Graying now, growing a little older, overweight a little, 
more conscious of their years. Their children are grown 
with families of their own their daughter with her doctor 
husband in Texas, their son working in the American 
Embassy in Rio, 

And so they had come to my home in Vermont. They 
were telling me about their work. But the pictures, bril- 



FOREWORD Xi 

liant against the white wall, were more than a traveler's 
collection of movie films. They were a record of two people 
who had given a lifetime of service as medical missionaries 
in the Inferno Verde the Green Hell of the Amazon. This 
man and woman out of Nebraska, out of the cornfields and 
the wheatfields and the endless prairies, had gone into the 
jungle to serve their fellow man, to help make him well, to 
bring him the word of faith and the love of God. 

They had gone where not too many others dared go. 
Fevers and insects, snakes, wild animals, plagues and 
epidemics, storms and savage Indians none of these had 
kept them from this work through more than twenty- 
seven years along these rivers. There, in my Vermont 
living room, Leo rolled out a snakeskin for me to see. It 
was almost thirty feet long and three and one half feet 
wide. "We found the snake under our building," Leo said, 
"and we had to shoot it dead." 

The river changed in the years that they were there. 
The people who had been in the grip of every imaginable 
tropical disease are healthier and happier, and living with 
new hope and new ambitions and new futures. For much 
of this change the Halliwells are responsible. So much 
so that the government of Brazil awarded them the 
Brazilian Cross for their work. 

These were the people who had come to me with their 
story. It is still their story. They lived it; they told it. 

I have heard many adventures in my life and have 
written many and have lived through a few adventures, 
too; but none compare to the tale which this couple 
spun for me. The scope of their work was a continent; their 
people were like a nation apart, forgotten, swallowed up in 
the jungle shadows. 



FOREWORD 



This was the setting of the story as for a generation they 
roamed the waterways of the Amazon and mingled with 
its people, bringing medicine and healing where they were 
needed, counsel and advice, wisdom and patience and 
charity, as a counteraction to violence and poisoned arrows 
and disease and murder. 

To one of the most beautiful, fantastic, unbelievably 
exciting and violent places on the face of the earth, in 
unknown, unexplored byways, they brought their message 
of faith, their word of hope, and their store of freely given 
medicine to help these people in body and mind and in the 
dignity of the spirit. 

Their story is one that is unique because so few people 
would have dared to live it. But it is a story that I knew 
had to be told and told, insofar as possible, in their own 
terms, in their own way. At times this saga may seem 
rough and even brutal. At times it may seem unbelievable. 
But all of these things happened to them in the life that 
they found in the Amazon world. 

While we were working together, they took a little house 
nearby for a few weeks and Dona Jessie set up house- 
keeping. One night she said, "Come over to the boat to- 
night for dinner/' 

Of course, there was no boat, this was only a farmhouse 
close by our own in the hills. But somehow, somewhere, 
in this Vermont hill country Dona Jessie had found the 
ingredients for a Brazilian dinner. 

It was an exciting, even an exotic evening, that blend 
of Brazil and the backwoods of New England. We had 
never tasted a meal more delicious, and somehow as we 
ate and talked and Dona Jessie moved so easily around the 
room to give us extra helpings of everything, it was not 



FOREWORD Xlll 

too hard to imagine that we really were on the boat, that 
it really was Brazil, and that just outside the windows was 
the Amazon with its alligators, its man-eating piranhas, 
its giant bullfrogs in the shadows of the soaring trees along 
the riverbanks. 

WILL OURSLER 



LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 



CHAPTER 1 

A RIVER AT NIGHT 



NIGHT had come on the Amazon. It had come, 
as always to this river, suddenly, swiftly, precisely at six 
o'clock, with no twilight at all. Throughout the whole day 
we had treated the sick in an improvised clinic on the 
porch of a house by the riverbank. The malaria fever had 
been bad all along the Amazon that year, particularly in 
this area to which we had come in our boat, the Luzeiro 
the name is a Portuguese Biblical word meaning Bearer of 
Light. The people had been waiting for us, waving their 
white towels as they saw us coming upriver. On the banks 
they had collected their sick, people of all ages, many of 
them dying or almost dead. 

So we had set up our clinic, my wife, Jessie, and I. Word 
of our arrival with our medicines had spread quickly; 
canoes had seemed to come from all directions, swarming 
to this place, filled with men and women and children in 
pitiful condition, some with their bodies grotesquely en- 
larged or deformed from the terrible disease known in 
Brazil as malignant malaria. 

One fisherman that day brought to us in his canoe 
a little child who was suffering from this fever. He had 
found the child in a hut at the edge of a village a few miles 
up the river. The child had been alone in the insect- 

3 



4 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

infested abode. No one knew what had happened to his 
parents or any others of his family. We gave treatment, 
and the kindly fisherman promised to take care of this 
child who was too weak even to tell us his name. 

It was late in the afternoon when we treated the 
last of these patients, and Jessie was weary after the 
long grueling day. We pulled up anchor and moved 
a short distance downstream into a kind of lake connected 
to the main part of the river by a narrow stream only a few 
yards long but deep enough for our launch. We came into 
a beautiful place where the water was still and dark and 
deep, with the main currents of the Amazon sweeping past 
only a short distance away. Here, for the night, we re- 
treated into our own moment of quiet. 

The pattern of the evening began. The boat boy be- 
stirred himself with chores out on deck and the boat girl 
began to prepare our evening meal. Jessie rested in her 
bunk. Through the cabin window I watched the sun- 
set: the color had deepened to crimson, the reflection in 
the still lake was like a mirror of vermilion, broken only 
where tall palms that lined the bank threw long shadows 
far out on the water. Flamingoes and parrots winged by, 
on their way to their nests for the night. Now the crimson 
hue faded, the sun was gone, darkness closed in. Later, I 
remember, the moon rose, almost at the full that night, big 
and bright, throwing a soft silver haze across the lake and 
the Amazon River beyond. 

I lay awake in the dark of the cabin. Jessie and the 
others by then were asleep in their bunks. The hush of 
darkness was broken by a thousand familiar sounds of the 
Amazon night, the strange symphony which had become 
so familiar to us that usually we did not hear it at all. There 



A RIVER AT NIGHT 5 

were the mingling sounds of the giant bullfrog and leaping 
fish, the cry of a monkey or a bird, the sudden throaty 
grunt of the alligator, the snorting of the dulpan, which 
always reminded me of the horses on our farm back in 
Nebraska. The melody of the darkness on the river was a 
constant thing. 

Day or night, this world of the Amazon and the dense, 
trackless, largely untrodden jungles that reach out over 
half a continent is a world of sounds. An insect stops his 
song, a bird stirs, a tropical leaf rustles. Loud and soft, 
these half -heard sounds may mean life or death. Living on 
this great river, you learn to live by these sounds instinc- 
tively, without hearing them. 

In the cool darkness of our boat, against the symphony 
of night outside, my thoughts drifted across this river 
world that had been our home and was to remain so for 
many years. Half a lifetime has passed since we came to 
this world of Brazil out of the corn belt of Nebraska, where 
both Jessie and I had grown up. We were to come to know 
these people, to work with them and try to aid them where 
they needed help, to love them and to be a part of their 
lives, so that we, as medical missionaries on the Amazon 
River, were almost as much Brazilian as the Brazilians 
themselves. 

As I lay quietly, listening to the sounds of the night, my 
thoughts went back many years to a Sabbath morning in 
Rio de Janeiro. For the first time we had gone to a service 
of our church there that day the Seventh-day Adventist 
Church, of which we were missionaries. It was a lovely, 
sunlit church, beautiful in its simplicity. As we sat in wor- 
ship, into the pew beside us came a man and woman, 
carrying with them, on a brightly embroidered satin pil- 



6 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

low, a baby. It was so tiny that Jessie turned to me and 
whispered, "Look, Leo-that infant couldn't be more than 
a week or so old and they're bringing her to church 

already." 

All through the service the baby lay sleeping on the 
pillow. Little Olga, they told us, after the service, was only 
two weeks old. Her father had come from Germany and 
her mother from Italy to work in our church, first in the 
Brazilian state of Baia and later in the city of Belem, where 
we made our headquarters, near the mouth of the Amazon. 
But we had no idea, as Jessie took the tiny baby into her 
arms, that years later this infant would be sharing inti- 
mately our work and our lives. 

As I reflected on our work on the river, it was hard to 
distinguish one year and one season from another. It was 
as if we lived in a dream where the past and future merged 
and crisscrossed like the river shadows themselves. It was 
almost as difficult to distinguish between our many roles. 
We were minister and doctor, psychiatrist and match- 
maker, salvager of marriages, godparents to a thousand 
children, a large percentage of whom Jessie herself had 
helped to bring into the world. 

We had been godparents to the "nationals," as all de- 
scendants of the original Portuguese were called, no matter 
how mixed their blood had become. We were godparents 
to the children of the native Indians. For the people of 
the river, nationals or Indians, half-breeds or untamed, 
murder-spawned savages, had become our people. We had 
made ourselves a part of them and of this jungle world. 
We shared with them its joy and its beauty and its misery 
and pain, and we sought to bring help and healing and a 



A RIVER AT NIGHT 7 

new vision of our life and its meaning in terms of the love 
of God. 

Many years have passed since that night I lay thinking 
and remembering in the cabin of the Luzeiro. The malaria, 
that dread disease of the tropics, has all but been wiped 
out. Perhaps, I sometimes say to myself, Jessie and I have 
helped. It is sure that, along the river, we are given such 
credit. 

Only recently, a tall Brazilian national, his four sons 
towering about him, boarded our boat as we anchored at a 
small, isolated river community. It was obvious that he was 
an important citizen. He turned to Jessie, who stood be- 
side me on the deck, and asked politely, "Dona Jessie, do 
you remember these boys?" 

Dona Jessie looked at Senhor Leo these are the names 
by which we are known along the river and both of us 
shook our heads. At a thousand different points along the 
great stream we had treated tens of thousands of people. 
Try as we might, we could not remember them all. The 
father knew this, of course. But he persisted. "You ought to 
remember them, Dona Jessie. Were it not for you, they 
would all be dead." 

He paused, then went on with a smile, "Years ago you 
and this boat stopped before my house. They were sick, 
all of my boys. They were nearly dead with malaria, and 
the youngest here was still only a baby. You stayed all 
that day and treated them and saved their lives." 

I write of this now when malaria is no longer a major 
problem along the river. But that night, when I lay in the 
dark of the cabin, malaria was still one of the great killers 
throughout the Amazon and much of northern Brazil. 

Jessie and I have seen many changes come. In some 



8 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

measure we have helped to effect these changes. Although 
we were officially missionaries, we saw at once the diseases 
rampant on the Amazon and we knew that we had first to 
concentrate on making these people well before we could 
hope to convert them to any meaningful religion. We had 
not come to impose by force or fear our ideas or culture 
or dogmas; we had come to help other human beings. This 
was our assignment. To do this we had to become a part 
of the ways and the lives of these people. We learned their 
language and customs and traditions; we became truly 
Brazilian. We thought, spoke, even dreamed in Portuguese, 
the official language of the land. 

We served these people throughout that land, from the 
cities of the south to the wildest areas of the great river, 
as we were guided to serve. In the most primitive districts, 
in the dark regions of the River of Roosevelt once known 
as the River of Doubt and the deadly fringes of the River 
of Death, we came not as enemies or would-be exploiters 
or hunters or adventurers; we came to help with our medi- 
cines and our schools and our teachers. And these people,, 
some of them known as killer Indians, who had never 
before allowed white men upon their lands, accepted us. 
Today, in the very heart of this so-called perilous jungle, 
are our schools and our church and our teaching. 

Throughout this river world a new day had begun. 

Children who once would have grown up naked savages,, 
whose little bodies were wracked with yaws and hook- 
worm and other terrible diseases, are today well and 
healthy. They are clothed. They are attending schools, and 
preparing for high school and even college. Diseases that 
were rampant in the Amazon Valley have been wiped out 
or brought under control. In many places across this vast 



A RIVER AT NIGHT 9 

wilderness there are schools and churches, hospitals and 
clinics, new ideas and new understanding of sanitation 
and hygiene, new health among the people, new hope and 
new meaning. A world awakens, the great, sprawling, won- 
derful world of the continental valley called the Amazon. 

Moments and incidents crowded my thoughts that night, 
as they have many nights since. A time when the frogs 
leaped from every direction during my meeting and my 
congregation fled in terror. A child lying naked on the floor, 
in a house full of the dead. An aged, withered chief who 
had stonily rejected all the help we tried to give him and 
his people, but who came to us at last and fell on his knees, 
tears of joy streaming down the thousand wrinkles of his 
face. A child groveling in a hogpen because a witch doctor 
insisted this was the way to drive out the devil that was 
making her ill. A three-year-old youngster mangled to 
death by an alligator before the parents could reach the 
child. 

This was our work and our life for thirty-seven years. 
The perils we faced, the achievements and failures and 
challenges and difficulties none of them could we have 
guessed in advance. But throughout all that time, wherever 
we were on the Luzeiro or on some mission in the jungle 
itself from the very beginning, we placed our trust un- 
waveringly in the protection of God. Never once in all that 
time, in the moments of greatest danger or difficulty, did 
we doubt that protection; never once did it fail. 

Strange things have happened to us. Long ago we grew 
used to coincidences that are perhaps not coincidences 
at all. 

In the city of Manaus, a thousand miles from the mouth 



10 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

of the Amazon, a great modern city entirely surrounded by 
the Green Hell of the jungle, is a magnificent hotel, the 
Amazonas, equipped with every luxury anyone could 
imagine. The owner of this luxurious establishment came 
to us, one day when we were in Manaus, and introduced 
himself. "I have been trying to get in touch with you for 
weeks/' he explained. "It is about an experience I had a 
few weeks ago in the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel 
in New York City." 

A young woman had come up to him, he said, holding 
in her hand a small box, and asking for a contribution for 
a special charity campaign of our church. 

"I gave her fifty cents," he said. "Then, as she turned 
away, it suddenly came to me, very positively, that I ought 
to give this woman more than those few pennies. I called 
her back, drew out of my pocket a fifty-dollar bill, and 
handed it to her. 

"She seemed quite overwhelmed. She gave me a copy of 
a magazine one of your church's publications. On the 
cover was a photograph. It was a picture of your boat- 
tied up at my plantation here on the river, giving medical 
treatment to my workers. 

"While the woman was thanking me for my gift, she 
was giving me something that meant much more a lesson 
in the meaning of love and care. I didn't know about your 
boat or your work with these people. So I had to find you, 
you see to thank you/' 

We were a long way from Manaus or New York, with 
their luxurious hotels, when we encountered another of 
these coincidences one which made us more certain than 
ever of God's all-seeing eye. 

It was our first trip up the river in our own boat, heading 



A RIVER AT NIGHT 11 

west from Belem. I was new to navigation, unused to the 
river, and unaware of the location of shoals, and dangerous 
rocks that could destroy us. A river pilot could have 
guided us safely through, but a pilot is a professional man 
and earns a good deal more than we or any missionary 
could afford to pay. As neophytes on the river, we had no 
choice but to feel our way along and trust we would be 
guided. 

In some areas the river is fairly well populated along the 
banks. This is particularly so in the tidal areas within a 
few hundred miles of the mouth. There canoes come and 
go frequently, and at times we could see dozens of them 
going upstream close to the banks or downstream farther 
out in the river. Often the occupants would ask us to tow 
them along behind our boat; but because there were fre- 
quently so many and we couldn't take them all, we estab- 
lished from the start a policy of no hitchhiking. 

Yet on this very first trip we broke our rule. We had 
reached a desolate area where the jungle closed in deep 
and green along the banks and there was no sign at all 
of habitation, only a kind of forlorn tropic hush, when sud- 
denly we noticed, not too far from our boat, three men in 
a canoe. They were respectably dressed and when they 
called to us and asked us if we could tow them along be- 
hind us upstream, something impressed me. Something I 
did not understand led me almost involuntarily to reach 
out to the throttle and stop the boat. 

"Jack," I called to my son, who was then about fifteen 
years old, "throw them a line," They came alongside and 
we made the canoe fast. One of the men stayed in the 
canoe. The other two came aboard our boat and stood with 
Jessie and Jack and me near the wheel while we talked 



12 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

about the jute crop and the weather and the hazards of the 
shifting currents. They were friendly and we were having 
a pleasant chat when suddenly one of them said, "Which 
side of the rocks are you going on?" 

I saw no rocks at all-only the green bank with its lovely 
Pan Rosa trees off the port side and the gray-yellow water 
of the Amazon. "What rocks?" I asked. 

Without answering, the man grabbed the steering wheel 
out of my hand and turned it completely around. Our boat 
wheeled giddily and shot out away from the bank into the 
river. Then I looked back and saw, not twenty feet in front 
of where we had been heading, the jagged points of hun- 
dreds of rocks just beneath the surface of the water. One 
second more and we would have plowed into them and 
ripped our boat to shreds. We had no idea that these rocks 
were there and without our hitchhiking friends we would 
have lost our boat and, in all likelihood, our lives. 

Our visitors seemed to take our expressions of gratitude 
almost casually, however; and a few moments after we had 
passed this dangerous section of the river, one of them said, 
"Sir, thank you for the ride. If you do not mind stopping 
here, we'll get out." 

It seemed strange, for there were still no houses or any 
other sign of human habitation to be seen along the banks. 
But I stopped, and the men climbed into the canoe and 
pushed off into the current. 

"Look out and see where those men go," I said to Jack. 
"There's no house around here." 

It had been only a moment since they had left us. There 
were no bends in the river. But after scanning the river in 
all directions, my boy turned to me. "Dad, they've disap- 
peared." 



A RIVER AT NIGHT 13 

I turned from the wheel in amazement. There were no 
rocks, no debris, no sign of struggle or overturned canoe, 
no cry for help. Only the emptiness of the river and the 
mute green banks a hundred yards awaytoo far for them 
to have reached in that time. Yet the three men and their 
boat were nowhere to be seen. 

We have always believed, Jessie and I, that these men, 
whoever and whatever they were, were sent to us, the pro- 
tecting angels of Providence. Man's extremity and some- 
times even his ignorance is God's opportunity. As I turned 
back to the wheel of my boat that day, words from the 
book of Saint Matthew rang in my mind: "He shall give 
his angels charge concerning thee, and in their hands they 
shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot 
against a stone." 

We have made many hundreds of trips, short and long, 
on the river since that first one, and covered tens of thou- 
sands of miles along the Amazon and its tributaries. Many 
of them are great rivers in their own right, deep and dark 
as night, strong streams that overflow vast regions, drown- 
ing tiny farms and clearings and bringing death and devas- 
tation to these people. But we have never found help miss- 
ing when we needed it. 

It is a world of contrasts, this Amazon world. A world of 
backwashes and narrow streams, of floating islands, some 
of them two miles long; of channels not fifty feet wide but 
deep enough to accommodate ocean liners. Here is Man- 
aus, a great city rising in the middle of the jungle; all 
around it is an untamed, trackless world where there are 
no throughways or roads, paved or unpaved, often not 
even a visible jungle trail. The tangle that reaches out on 
every side in the Amazon Valley is one vast sea of green 



14 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

shadows across the width of South America, and the river 
and its tributaries combine into a series of water roads, a 
real communication network in the day-to-day lives of the 
river people, 

It was these people whom we served in our nearly three 
decades on the river. They were Brazilian nationals and 
natives; storekeepers and plantation owners and laborers- 
workers on the rubber plantations and in the jute and cot- 
ton fields. They were men of varied backgrounds and 
history; Indians of many tribes, some of them highly cul- 
tured and others naked and wild, often dangerous and 
hostile and ready to kill. The jungle is unique in its multi- 
plicity of types, its blend of the civilized and savage. On 
one hand are the witch doctors with their trances and 
incantations. On the other, in our clinics and those the 
government has been setting up along the river, are peni- 
cillin and the latest antibiotic drugs. It is a world of straw- 
roofed huts and grass skirts, blowguns, poisoned arrows, 
and drums pounding out savage rhythms; it is also a world 
past which the new luxury liners steam, en route from 
Europe or North America all the way up the Amazon to 
Peru. 

But it is still, and for many years will remain, the world 
of the canoe. To these people the canoe is the bicycle of 
childhood and the young man's sports car. It is the surrey 
that takes the family to Sabbath service, the car that goes 
visiting relatives miles away. It is the housewife's shopping 
cart and the fisherman's smack and the ambulance for the 
sick and dying who seek help. 

To one who has lived even briefly on the river, the sound 
of the canoe is as familiar and as easily recognized as the 
whoosh of a car along a city street. 



A RIVER AT NIGHT 1$ 

On that long-past night of remembering, as I lay awake 
in the darkness of our cabin, I heard a sound breaking into 
the rhythm of the river shadow. It was growing late, some- 
where around ten o'clock, I guessed, from the brightness of 
the moon on the water outside the cabin window, We had 
long ago finished our work for the day. But the sounds 
continued, and seemed to come closer. I got out of the 
bunk, slipped on a shirt, and, with Jessie following, hurried 
out on deck. 

We stood listening in the night. Now we could hear the 
canoe coming closer, cutting through the water. Soon the 
little craft shot out of the shadows on the far side of the 
lake. It came into the silvery brightness of the moon, and 
we could see its only passenger a frail, half-naked boy 
perhaps eleven or twelve years of age. 

As the canoe came closer the boy called out, "Do you 
have any medicine for the fever?" 

The youngster in the boat came alongside. We had a 
light on now, and in its beam we could see that he was 
shivering. He lifted his hands to pull himself up, but I saw 
at once that he did not have the strength. I put my arms 
around him and lifted him up into the boat. His pale, 
drawn face told us at once that he was a victim of the 
terrible malaria fever which at that time was ravaging the 
area. 

His name, he told us, was Antonio. He half pointed, with 
a weak gesture, when I asked where he lived. "I have been 
three hours paddling," he said, in Portuguese. "I have been 
trying to reach your boat/' 

"Where are your father and mother?" 

"My father died yesterday," the boy answered. "My 
mother is home. She is burning up with high fever," 



l6 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

"Do you have any brothers or sisters?" 
"They are both dead, my two brothers. They have been 
dead a week." 

While we were talking with the little boy there on the 
boat, we were opening up our medical supplies and Jessie 
was preparing a quinine injection for him. Neither of us is 
a doctor, but Jessie is a trained nurse. Throughout the 
river world, particularly during our early days, there were 
almost no doctors for thousands of miles. Thus we served 
as physicians and surgeons as needed, perf orming all kinds 
of medical work from midwifery to amputations, treating 
every kind of disease found in that area. 

As we gave him his injection, the boy looked up with the 
hint of a smile on his lips. "Antonio," I asked, "how old 
are you?" 

I have never forgotten his answer. "I am ten years old/' 
he said, "and struggling on toward eleven." 

I asked him then, "How long have you been ill with this 
fever?" 

"Three months." 

"Haven't you had any treatment?" 

"Oh, yes, I have been treated." He paused and added, "I 
have been treating with the witch doctor." 

Jessie, on the other side of the little cabin, glanced at 
the youngster. "J ust what did the witch doctor do for you, 
Antonio?" she inquired. 

His eyes were wide and frightened as he gazed up at 
us, looking from one to the other as though he, too, were 
aware of the bizarre things he was saying. "The witch 
doctor shut us up in a hut," he said. "All of us. He burned 



A RIVER AT NIGHT 17 

bits of hair and feathers and leather, the horns of oxen, 
anything you can imagine almost." 

My wife came over and knelt down beside the boy. 
"What did he say he was doing all this for?" she persisted. 

"To drive out the spirits," the boy said, his small voice 
almost echoing the tone of the incantations. "To smoke out 
the evil spirits that brought the fever." 

"And it didn't work?" 

The boy shook his head. "Then, when he couldn't smoke 
them out, the witch doctor went out into the woods and 
got a limb from the thorn tree and beat us with that." 

The youngster took off his blouse and showed us his 
back, covered with deep sores from the beating. 

We treated these sores on his back and we gave him 
medicines for himself and for his mother. There was noth- 
ing more we could do for him except to let him hurry home 
as swiftly as he could. We helped him over the side and 
down into the canoe; heard his words of thanks and saw 
him pick up his paddle and start out across the path of 
moonlight. We followed him with our eyes until he disap- 
peared into the dark shadows beyond. 

Antonio was going home. Not to what we who grew up 
in the United States would consider a real home, but to a 
hut of mud and palm leaves on the riverbank with the 
jungles behind and around it, a world of wild animals, 
snakes, and insects and the anopheles mosquito which 
transmits the fever from which he was suffering. His was a 
home of poverty, sickness, suffering, superstition, and too 
often death. 

This was the world to which we came. It was our assign- 
ment, as a part of our church mission, to bring these peo- 
ple, insofar as we could, new hope and new faith and new 



l8 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

vision. It was not our purpose to preach to them compli- 
cated dogmas they could not understand; nor to terrify 
them with imagined torments of hell. We could help them 
only with a message of love, the love of God and of Christ 
for them, a love that would care for them and reach out 
to them, even to this lonely little kid in his canoe. 

This was our purpose and our goal. 

The purpose burned strong in my mind after the boy had 
left, as Jessie and I stood out on the deck in the cool of the 
night. 

A new vision. A new meaning to life for a thousand or 
ten thousand boys like this one who had come to us weak 
and half dead himself, with his pitiable little tale of trau- 
matic tragedy in a mud-walled house at the river's edge. 

"I am ten years old and struggling on toward eleven." 

I could still hear the sound of his paddle as his canoe cut 
through the moonlight and shadows. 



CHAPTER 2 

DESTINATION: RIO 



IN certain areas along the Amazon River Val- 
ley, there are, surprisingly, settlements of Japanese. Most 
of them came to the river just before the outbreak of 
World War II; and after Japan lost the war, these people 
stayed, some going into business in the ever-growing cities 
of Brazil, others remaining to farm the rich soil along the 
Amazon. As the early settlers in North America had done 
three hundred years earlier, some sent back to their home- 
land for wives; others married native girls. All of them are 
hard workers; some of the neatest and best cared-for homes 
along the river bear the stamp of Japanese energy and 
artistry. 

In one of these homes we were permitted once to hold a 
religious meeting because, although it was not a Christian 
family, the owner's father-in-law had been an Adventist 
for many years. Shortly afterward the wife was baptized 
into our faith. The husband was slower to believe, but he 
was deeply impressed with the singing at the meeting 
so impressed that he learned all the words of "God Will 
Take Care of You" by heart and liked to sing them in his 
odd, tinny, broken Portuguese. 

On the Amazon island where these Japanese-Brazilians 
lived, the chief crop, in addition to the usual rice, was jute 

19 



20 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

or hemp. While the river is low, before floodtime, hemp 
plants grow twelve feet high in three months' time. As the 
river overflows, the jute is inundated in several feet of 
water. To harvest the crop, the menand often women, 
too-must work waist high in the water, pulling the jute 
up by the roots, cutting off the roots with a sharp knife, 
then tying the rest of the plant into bundles and setting 
these back into the water to soak. In a few weeks the bark 
or fiber is loose and can be pulled off easily. 

Working constantly in the water, they contend with a 
whole army of slithering dangers. I have seen hundreds of 
jute workers come out of those sunken fields with blood- 
sucking leeches an inch and a half long on their legs. They 
cannot pull off these creatures without breaking off the 
teeth and causing infection. Limes are the answer. They 
are carried by all the workers; they have learned that 
squeezing lime juice on the leeches makes them fall off. 

Toiling one morning in his jute fields, the Japanese 
farmer who had been exposed to Christianity was singing 
his favorite "God Will Take Care of You" when he felt 
what he thought was a leech on his leg. He paid no heed 
but continued to work, singing away happily in his high 
voice. Suddenly he felt as if something was crawling in his 
pant leg. Frightened, he ran from the water and snatched 
off his pants. As he shook them, an eighteen-inch poisonous 
snake slipped to the ground and slithered away. 

There were tears in the man's eyes as he told me the 
story. "Pastor, I did not know it was there but I am sure 
that snake would have bitten me and I would have died 
if I had not been thinking about God and singing that 
hymn. I believe it. I believe He protected me in that jute 
field, when I did not know/' 



DESTINATION: RIO 21 

Many times Jessie and I have known that same protec- 
tion and that same guidance. All of our lives, it seems, we 
have lived in the midst of peril, and never has harm come 
to us. 

Any expedition, whether to climb Mount Everest or to 
rescue lost souls in the Amazon, is a matter of planning and 
preparation, on which may ultimately depend triumph or 
failure, even life or death. It is almost fantastic how much 
preparation for our Amazon adventure Jessie and I re- 
ceived, without realizing it at all, in a world ten thousand 
miles away. Nebraska, with its flat outstretching fields of 
grain and prairie, where my grandmother once placated a 
band of murder-bent Sioux Indians with nine loaves of her 
special fresh-baked bread and a litter of newborn puppies, 
at first thought seems an unlikely spot for which to prepare 
for a missionary life in the South American jungle. 

But they are not so different, after all. Life close to the 
soil, where nature can be enemy or friend, is closely akin 
to life on the river. The self-sufficiency I learned as a boy 
on a Nebraska farm stood me in good stead years later in 
the Brazilian jungle. 

When my father, Sam Halliwell, came out west with his 
family as a boy of fifteen, Nebraska was still a frontier 
world, as the Amazon is today. Large herds of buffalo 
roamed the grass-covered plains. Indians still claimed all 
the land, and resented fiercely the settlers and the coming 
of the Union Pacific tracks. Attacks and killings were fre- 
quent. 

Often Sioux raiding parties would cross the Platte River 
from the north to burn homes or to lasso the smokestacks 
of Union Pacific locomotives as the trains chugged by. 
They hoped to drag these iron horses bodily from the 



22 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

tracks. Some of them, not lucky enough to have their ropes 
break, were dragged to their death. 

Many settlers, driving off these Sioux attackers, paid 
with their lives. My father's family might easily have met 
this end, for one night a band of these marauders attacked 
their home, surrounding the house and screeching threats 
to burn the place down unless they were let in. Once in- 
side, they stole everything food, livestock, furniture, farm 
tools, chickens, even the one gun in the house, which was 
used only to kill game for food. By the grace of God, the 
family was spared. 

This was the world in which my father grew up and 
in which, in 1884, he married Mary Rail, daughter of 
another pioneer family. The fourth oldest of their eight 
children, I grew up in this same rugged and untamed 
world, close to the earth. I fished and hunted and rode wild 
ponies. I skated on the Platte River in the middle of 
Nebraska's bitterest winters, and plowed my way to school 
through five-foot snows. Each morning before dawn it was 
my chore to drive the cows from the corral near our house 
out to pasture on our farm, a mile from town. 

When I was nine it became my job to ride the lead horse 
on the binder and to keep the animals out of the wheat. 
The sun would blaze down hot, the day would be long, 
and sometimes astride the horse I would doze off for an 
instant. Then I would hear my father's voice shouting 
above the roar of the binder, "Get out of the wheat, boy- 
keep them out of the wheat." 

Years later I was staying at a plantation on one of the 
Brevis Islands in the Amazon. The Brazilian owner oper- 
ated a store, raised all kinds of fruits and vegetables, and 
ran a small sugar-cane press that was operated by a yoke 



DESTINATION: RIO 23 

of oxen. The oxen had to walk around and around all day, 
and someone had to follow them and keep them going. 
Usually, I learned, this was the chore of one of the many 
sons of the owner. Watching one of those sons a ten- 
year-old trudging behind the oxen, shouting at them in 
his high young voiceI thought of the farm and my father 
and the binder back in Nebraska. 

But Brazil was only a large pink spot on the map in 1909 
when, at eighteen, I finished high school and embarked 
on my first real job teaching in a one-room country school 
in a tiny settlement in far-off Idaho. In that remote spot, 
in the midst of the tall pines, with the mountains towering 
on every side, there came to me what I can only call a 
vision, almost a command. 

The Bear River drains that part of Idaho and flows on 
down into the Great Salt Lake, twisting and bending and 
turning back upon itself, a coiling, foaming mass of water 
that plunges through pass and ravine and gorge. Near the 
town of Grace, a dam and a great electric power plant 
had been built, with generators that furnished power and 
light to Ogden and Salt Lake City. 

The idea of being a part of such an operation, helping 
to bring light and power to whole cities of people, seemed 
a magnificent way to serve the needs of modern life. As I 
would stand and listen to the sounds of the generators and 
the roar of the water, a voice seemed to be crying within 
me, "You can also do things like this. Prepare. Prepare 
yourself." 

I had no money to study electrical engineering, no pre- 
vious training, and no connections whatever in this field. 
Yet this was what I knew I was going to be. 

When school was over and I went home, I unfolded 



24 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

this new dream to my family. Like me, they had more 
enthusiasm than money; but with what funds we could 
raise in the family, my meager savings, and what I would 
be able to earn tending furnace and waiting on tables 
in a student rooming house, it looked as if I would just be 
able to make it. While I waited for fall, I took all the odd 
jobs I could get, One of them, the luckiest, was playing 
the fiddle at barn dances to pick up a few extra dollars in 
the evening. I say lucky/' for it was at one of these dances 
that I noticed a lovely brown-eyed girl in a white dress, 
her slim waist belted in red. I lost no time finding out who 
she was, and once I did I handed my fiddle to another 
member of the orchestra. "Hold this, I'm going to meet that 
girl." 

That was my first dance with Jessie. 

I think now that we were certain, almost from our first 
dance together, to the rhythm of those Nebraska fiddles, 
that our lives were inextricably bound together. By the 
time I went off to Lincoln that fall, to enroll at the Uni- 
versity of Nebraska, we had made our plans. Neither of 
us was twenty. Jessie had promised to wait for four years, 
until I had finished my engineering course and we could 
marry, 

But when I returned to Kearney the following spring, 
I discovered a subtle but important change in Jessie. She 
had come upon a religion that caught her interest deeply 
the religion of the people who called themselves Seventh- 
day Adventists. 

We had both been brought up in devout families. We 
had talked about religion and had agreed that ours was to 
be a Christian home. Together we had visited churches of 
different faiths to decide which most appealed to us. 



DESTINATION: RIO 25 

Now I realized that she had accepted this faith and 
was eager for me to want to follow her lead. That summer 
we began to attend services together. It was not long 
before I came to realize that this religion and its truth 
had deep meaning for me, as well as for Jessie. 

It was a simple and not particularly earth-shaking event 
the fact that two people in love happened to find a faith 
they wanted to share together, 

But of great importance to both of us was the dedication 
to service we found in this faith. Jessie was enthralled by 
the remarkable work the Adventists did in the field of 
medicine, by the hospitals and clinics that had been estab- 
lished in many remote missionary fields throughout the 
world as well as in the States. 

When I returned to rny engineering studies at Nebraska 
University at the end of the summer, Jessie went to Lin- 
coln, too to begin a three-year nursing course at the 
Adventist hospital. 

How could we have guessed then the role this training 
would play in our own lives, and in the lives of hundreds 
of people of whose existence we did not then even dream? 

I think of Jessie going out at all hours of the day or 
night in Brazil's ancient city of Salvador, to help deliver 
babies in the huddled world of twisting streets. I can see 
her delivering the afterbirth of a frail, half -dead woman 
lying on a mud floor in an Amazon straw shack and 
thereby saving that woman's life. Jessie delivered hun- 
dreds of babies along that river; in every settlement today 
there are little Brazilian girls who answer to the American 
name of Jessie. 

One family who lived far up the river about twelve 



26 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

hundred miles from the mouth seemed to need her mid- 
wifery skill every time our boat arrived in that district. 

"Isn't it remarkable," Jessie asked the mother once, 
"that the baby always seems to arrive precisely at the time 
our boat arrives on our yearly trip up the river?" 

"Why no, it isn't particularly remarkable/' the woman 
answered. "We plan it that way," 

Civilization had not yet arrived in many communities 
along the river, but planned parenthood was already in 
operation. 

There were moments of amusement and moments of 
grim tragedy in that world. Youngsters were brought to us 
too late to help or to save; adults often put their faith in 
superstitions and voodoo rituals rather than in the modern 
medicine that we tried to bring to them. 

Yet none of our help would have been possible without 
the training which began, for Jessie, in that hospital in 
Lincoln, Nebraska. 

In a different way, my training in electricity, my knowl- 
edge of motors and generators and power circuits, was put 
to use in our work in Brazil. The boat on which we 
traveled that network of the Amazon waterways, the thou- 
sands of meetings we held, showing colored motion pic- 
tures and providing light and amplifiers so that all could 
hear above the jungle night all of this was dependent in 
large measure on this experience and training in electricity 
without which we would often have been helpless. 

I recall one night when we set up a meeting in a clear- 
ing close to the water's edge, putting up our own screen 
and doing all the wiring in a matter of hours so that liter- 
ally hundreds of natives and nationals were able to hear 



DESTINATION: RIO 27 

us and see the pictures of the life of Christ which we 
showed. 

From miles around, the canoes appeared, loaded with 
passengers who sat quietly in their craft throughout our 
meeting. It was, I feel certain, the first Amazon drive-in 
theater. 

Power for a prayer meeting, the electrical system for a 
native clinic, helping to plan the electrical needs of a hos- 
pital in Belem, in how many ways did that training help 
us in our work and our lives! I remember particularly one 
Brazilian who examined the generator on our boat with 
great care and then declared, "It is remarkable. You bring 
all your own power with you spiritual and electrical as 
well." 

But back in Nebraska, as we worked and studied, we 
had no idea that our faith was to lead us so far from home. 

This church to which we both belong, however, is one 
which is concerned with remote corners of the world, in 
the need there, and in sending its members to give Chris- 
tian service and help to the world's people. Ours was and 
is a missionary church in its truest sense, the mission of 
service to others. 

We believe that a major part of our "assignment" on 
earth is bringing help where it is needed. Adventist doc- 
tors and nurses, Adventist clinics and hospitals, are found 
on every continent. In less than a hundred years of mis- 
sionary activity, our faith has established churches in 185 
countries. 

Workers within our faith preach in 748 languages and 
dialects. Our books and tracts are published, sold, or dis- 
tributed free in 213 languages. The church operates 
twenty-three sanitariums and hospitals in North America, 



28 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

and eighty-two overseas. The latter alone treat more than 
1,500,000 outpatients a year, in addition to 122,000 inpa- 
tients. Mission dispensaries and clinics care for more than 
800,000 additional patients annually. Ten schools of nurs- 
ing in North America and twenty-one overseas, graduat- 
ing a total of more than five hundred nurses a year, help 
staff these hospitals and clinics. So, too, does the magnifi- 
cent College of Medical Evangelists, located at Loma 
Linda, California, and Los Angeles. Founded by the 
church in 1905 to train medical missionaries, this modern 
medical center today has three main schools medicine, 
nursing, and dentistry and six related schools for die- 
tetics, tropical and preventive medicine, physical therapy, 
X-ray technology, medical technology, and graduate 
studies. 

These schools have graduated thousands of doctors and 
nurses of all religious faiths. As this is written, more than 
a hundred of these graduate physicians and more than 
a hundred of the graduate nurses are serving overseas in 
our mission hospitals. 

All of this was very real in our minds because it was 
real to our faith, but our own program and plans were 
much more immediate and down to earth. 

In the summers I took whatever work I could get to 
help pay my university expenses. Mostly it was on farms 
and sometimes it was rugged. Sometimes we worked on 
a threshing machine from farm to farm on a regular 
schedule. Once I even did my threshing at the point of 
a gun when an angry farmer insisted on having his work 
done ahead of the others. 

During the school year I continued to tend furnace at 
a student boardinghouse. In my senior year I worked 



DESTINATION: RIO 29 

nights at the Lincoln light plant. And finally, in 1916, the 
degree was mine. With war raging in Europe, electrical 
engineers were being offered good jobs. I accepted one 
with a tractor company in Charles City, Iowa, which was 
making howitzer mortar shells for the Allies. 

Sometimes, in my first weeks on the job, I would stand 
and watch the scrap iron and steel, old plows, and other 
farm machinery being dumped into the steel furnaces to 
be fashioned into shells, and I would remember the words 
of the prophet Joel, written many centuries ago: "Prepare 
war, wake up the mighty men, let all the men of war draw 
near; let them come up: Beat your plowshares into swords, 
and your pruninghooks into spears; let the weak say, I 
am strong." 

On October 1, 1916, Jessie was graduated from the 
nursing school in Lincoln. Two days later, on October 3, 
we were married in Mason City, Iowa, and the following 
day we began our life together in a humble dwelling in 
Charles City. 

The next year we were in the war, and in that era of 
turmoil and sacrifice and super-emotionalism, I was or- 
dered to stay on my job as plant electrician because we 
were turning out vital war materials. 

Two weeks before the Armistice, Jessie gave birth to 
our son. The influenza epidemic was sweeping across the 
world, claiming millions of lives, and Jessie was terribly 
ill even as our son was born. We did not know whether 
she or our son, who was also affected by the disease, would 
survive. It was a time of tension and anxiety, but we held 
fast to our faith in His protection, and within a few weeks 
they were past the danger point and getting well. 

Amidst the worry over Jessie and the baby, I didn't 



30 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

give much thought to the matter of a name for our son. 
It was not until later that we discovered that the nurse, 
who was also under considerable strain, had told the 
doctor the baby was to be called "Claris." By that time it 
was too late-the name had been officially recorded. But 
we call our son Jack. 

Both Jessie and I had regretted, when we settled down 
in Charles City, that there was no church of our faith 
there, but before many months had passed an evangelist 
arrived. From his meetings developed a permanent or- 
ganization of which I was chosen leader and through this 
had my first experience in conducting services. As time 
went on, I became more and more interested in my church 
work and less and less in my job at the plant. 

Two books made a deep impression on me: On the 
Trail of Livingstone, written by a missionary about his 
work in Africa, and In the Land of the Incas, the story of a 
missionary's life in Bolivia and Peru. The achievements of 
these men in salvaging human souls convinced me that we, 
too, must play a greater part in this work. You cannot, 
we felt, work part time for faith. 

Jessie and I talked and prayed for days, and at last we 
knew in our hearts that this was right for us. In the spring 
of 1920 I applied to our church conference for work on 
a full-time basis. 

The officials were delighted at my decision. They were, 
of course, uncertain as to what assignment I might receive 
for overseas service, or when. But there was other work 
to be done, close at hand. 

Within a few weeks we were busy at it. An evangelistic 
campaign in Cedar Falls, Iowa, came first. We went on 
from there to Fort Madison, where I supervised the 



DESTINATION: RIO 31 

building of a new church while I also had charge of our 
churches in nearby Burlington and Keokuk. 

In the routine of caring for the activities of three 
churches, and counseling and guiding the people and fami- 
lies of our congregations, the missionary dream was pushed 
into the background. There seemed hardly time for such 
wild ideas. 

Then one day, late the following summer, the postman 
handed me a letter from the Mission Board of the Seventh- 
day Adventists. I called Jessie, so we could open it together. 

Our proposal to go to Brazil as missionaries had been 
under advisement for some months, the letter said, and 
as the needs in that country had become more and more 
pressing they had made their decision. We were to make 
preparations at once and be ready to sail for Rio de Janeiro 
on the Munson liner Aeolus, scheduled to leave from New 
York on October 15. The sailing date, by an odd coinci- 
dence, happened to be my thirtieth birthday. 

Our hearts were light and heavy, all at the same time, 
as we stood on the deck of the Aeolus watching the New 
York skyline fade into the distance. We were sad at leaving 
our families and our home and our country. But we were 
happy at the thought that at last we were embarked on 
the work to which we had been called. The fall wind was 
cold as we left our homeland but as the days passed the 
weather became warmer, the sky sunny and bright. It was 
a lush spring morning when, on October 30, we looked out 
our porthole and saw the green mass of Cape Frio, our 
first sight of Brazil. 



CHAPTER 3 
BAIA 



BRAZIL has heavy rains and high waterfalls, 
large oysters and frogs and alligators and snakes, and 
water lilies three feet across. In the lush splendor of the 
Amazon Valley, anything will grow, although south and 
west of the valley are dry areas where droughts may last 
for several years. It is a land where plenty and want often 
sit side by side. 

In its backwoods are small one-street sleeping villages 
where, remote from modern life, living conditions are so 
primitive as to be almost unbelievable. Yet there are also 
great cities, particularly in the south: Rio; Sao Paulo, the 
fastest growing city in the world; Manaus, a modern me- 
tropolis in the middle of the jungle; and Recife, the Venice 
of the Western Hemisphere. It is a world of magnificent 
extremes flamingoes and factories, great universities and 
blowguns, ultra sophistication and the fine art of poisoned 
darts. 

Less than five hundred years ago in 1500 a squadron 
of thirteen ships set sail from Lisbon, Portugal, with much 
fanfare, colorful plumage, and gleaming armor, bent on 
reaching and capturing Calcutta, India, by way of South 
America's Cape Horn. The ever-prevailing trade winds 
from the east carried these ships to the coast of a new land, 



BAIA 33 

rich and fertile, which was promptly claimed for the 
Portuguese throne. A later expedition carried back to 
Portugal a cargo of bright-red wood from this land of so 
many varieties of wood that to this day the number, 
reaching into the thousands, has never been fully ascer- 
tained. The red dyewood was so bright and glowed so 
intensely that it seemed almost to be on fire. For this rea- 
son it was called brasso meaning a live coal. So did the 
new land where this wood was found get the name Brazil. 

Another expedition from Portugal sailed into Guanabara 
Bay, far south of the Amazon on the Brazilian coast, on the 
first of January, 1502. Thinking that this bay, which 
seemed to go on endlessly it is actually just over thirty 
miles long must be the mouth of a great river, it was 
promptly called the River of the First of January. From this 
came the shortened version of the name: Rio de Janeiro. 

We sailed into this harbor on October 30, 1921, to begin 
our new work. It was a magnificent sight. On our right 
was the beautiful city of Niteroi, with its background of 
many-hued mountains. Just behind us on the other side 
was the round soaring form of Sugar Loaf Mountain, 
extending in a great sweeping amphitheater across the 
entire horizon. Before us was the city of Rio itself, with 
its white gleaming buildings and its red-tiled roofs, thou- 
sands upon thousands of them, in a splashing pattern of 
color and sunlight and shadow. Of special significance to 
us was still another mountain, the Corcovado, on top of 
which stands the towering statue of Christ the Redeemer, 
arms outstretched, above the city. 

Coming into a world we did not know, to begin a life 
we could not fully foresee, our excitement ran high. It was 
to be a life of service, but in a new and strange land, where 



34 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

the people spoke a language we did not yet know, where 
the customs and ideas and ways of doing differed entirely 
from ours, where almost certainly some people would be 
hostile to our ideas and beliefs and our teachings. We 
had to come to help, not to take; to advise and guide and 
uplift where we could, but not to impose our will, our 
belief, or our language. We had come only to bring a 
message of love and to give love in terms of help. 

This, I knew in my heart, was the real challenge facing 
us that sunlit morning, as our steamer, with the mothering 
tugboats at her sides, edged closer to the dock and what 
would be, for us, the beginning of a new life. 

Momentarily there was the sense of the strange and the 
different Where would we begin all of this work, and 
how? How long would it take us to learn the language, 
to begin to know enough to be of help? How quickly 
would we begin all this? 

On the dock, as we came in closer, I saw a group of 
people who apparently had recognized us and were wav- 
ing at us. One of them had in his hand a copy of one of 
our Adventist magazines. It was like a touch of home to 
Jessie and me. 

Coming into any new city is always something of an 
adventure, and arriving in Rio this is particularly true, 
for it is one of the most exciting and beautiful cities in the 
world. 

When I think back on our arrival there, I always recall 
another occasion when we came into Rio, years later, under 
far different circumstances. My wife and I were flying in 
from the Amazon then with a tribal chief who had never 
before been out of the jungle. 



BAIA 35 

How full of wonder he was! Soon after we took off, we 
were flying over the jungles at about ten thousand feet 
and, instead of the steaming heat the chieftain was used to 
in the half-naked world below, it was suddenly very cold. 
His lips were blue and he was shivering under his blanket. 
But as he looked out the window, he could see the bright 
sun. Puzzled, he said to my wife, "Why is it that we are 
so high and so near the sun, but it is so cold up here?" 

And we tried to explain that to a man who still hunted 
with a war club! 

The chief had been staying in one of our hospitals in 
the north of Brazil for about two weeks waiting for this 
trip, and he had not particularly enjoyed the vegetarian 
diet he shared there with us. On this flight the plane came 
down at the city of Goiana for dinner. When a big thick 
steak was served to the chief, somehow he did not 
get a knife or fork. I started to call the waiter, but the 
chief stopped me. "No, no I do not need those things. I 
would prefer to use my hands." Which he promptly did. 

When we arrived in Rio that night, there were more 
than a score of reporters and television people waiting to 
meet our charge and interview him. They were full of 
questions about what he thought of this modern world 
into which he had been transported overnight. What was 
the most extraordinary thing he had encountered so far, 
they asked. The old chief grinned: "That big thick steak 
they gave me to eat last night." 

But at the convention of young church people, when 
someone asked him why he had not brought along his 
arrows and darts and other Indian paraphernalia, the an- 
swer of this aged tribal leader to his young questioner 
was, "I am no longer an Indian but a Christian." 



36 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

Our own arrival in Rio was perhaps not so vast a contrast 
as that the tribal chief experienced when he finally saw the 
streets and buildings of Brazil's capital and major seaport; 
yet it was, for us, as for any tourist, new and strange, beau- 
tiful and exciting. We were in a world where most people 
did not speak or understand our language a world of 
brilliant sun, tropical trees, and wide sidewalks with 
dazzling mosaic designs; a magic place that seemed to 
capture the imagination as no other city does. 

But our enjoyment of the vistas of Rio and the magic 
charm of the city was momentary. We were not tourists 
on a pleasure cruise; we were here on business. Only a 
few days after our arrival, church officials gave me my 
travel orders: We were to proceed at once to a city called 
Salvador in the state of Baia, seven hundred and fifty miles 
to the north along the coast of Brazil. In Salvador I was to 
take over as director of the newly set-up Baia Mission of 
our church. 

We had barely heard of Salvador, but in that ancient 
city no one had heard of us and only a handful of souls 
knew about the Seventh-day Adventists and their presence 
in the Brazilian state of Baia. 

Much of the district of Baia is farmland. Its crops are 
lemons and oranges and every kind of citrus fruit, as well 
as tobacco, sugar, and cotton. It produces cattle and hogs 
and poultry, and nearly a hundred different kinds of beans 
no other place in the world has as many different kinds 
of beans as Baia. From the earth come, too, iron and 
manganese and oil, and black diamonds for commercial 
uses. 

Yet, for all this activity, much of the state is wild, sub- 
tropical, and sparsely populated; and across the wide flat 



BAIA 37 

areas of farmland are many drought-parched districts 
with widely scattered one-street towns where a handful 
of houses huddle under the blazing Brazilian sun. 

In all these towns, without fail, can be seen the high 
gleaming spire of the Catholic church or cathedral, some 
dating back hundreds of years. Originally Roman Cathol- 
icism was the official religion of Brazil and it remained so 
for many centuries, until the establishment of the Repub- 
lic in 1889. Today all religions are equal in that country 
and work in amity for their congregations. But the padres, 
hard working as they may be, are still limited in number 
in the remote areas, and the communities each priest must 
serve are widely scattered. In many instances these 
churches, with their lofty spires, can be fully used or 
used at all only on those occasions when a priest is able 
to reach them. 

Many of the people in these areas had fallen away from 
their faith, or had grown up with little or none. Their lives 
were as desolate and hopeless and seemingly purposeless 
as the parched, somnolent little towns themselves. It was 
to help these people to find a new meaning and purpose 
in their lives that we had been sent to Baia. 

Salvador itself, which was to be our headquarters, is an 
ancient port city, once the capital of Brazil. It is built on 
two levels connected by two modern elevators and, for 
those who prefer to walk, an ancient flight of four hundred 
steps. The full name of the city, in Portuguese, is Sao 
Salvador de Baia de Todos os Santos Saint Saviour of the 
Bay of All Saints. But most people speak of the city and 
the state interchangeably as Baia. 

The lower part of the city is the area of commerce and 
shipping. There, among the coffee and sugar firms and 



38 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

the great buildings where the cacao is stored, the air is a 
blend of smells from the harbor, the coffee and tobacco, 
the bananas and sugar cane. In the harbor itself are hun- 
dreds of small fishing boats anchored alongside large ships 
and liners, some Brazilian, others flying foreign flags. 

Baia is an ancient town still and in the high city, where 
most of the people live, the old cobblestone streets are 
narrow and steep. In the days when we arrived and, in 
fact, until quite recently, there were hundreds of mule 
carts on these streets. All of them had steel-rimmed wheels, 
and we could see the sparks fly as they struck the cobble- 
stones. 

To us, it was a fascinating city we had come to, a city 
of legend and culture and history. It had grown rich on 
sugar and the slave trade, until slavery was abolished 
in the late nineteenth century, and some of the wealth had 
gone into its many beautiful churches. There are 365 of 
them, a church for every day of the year. Many of the 
buildings are faced with the brilliant-blue tiles which 
Brazilians call azulejos. There have been improvements in 
Baia since the days when we first arrived; many of the 
streets in the high city are now new and wide and paved 
with modern macadam or cement, and there are modern 
stores and buildings. 

But in the days when we arrived the city was still lazing 
sleepily in its lovely if slightly frayed ancestral dress. We 
had no time to laze with it. First we had to find living 
quarters and then set about the organizing work of the 
mission. There was little money for our personal expenses; 
our income from the church amounted to only a few 
dollars a month at that time. We finally had to settle for 
an apartment on the second floor of a narrow old building 



BAIA 39 

on one of those steep, narrow cobblestone streets. There 
were people above us, below us, and on all sides of us. 
They were people whose language we did not know, whose 
customs were strange to us. The apartment was moldy and 
dark. But it was at last the real beginning of our work. 

In that beginning, we were close to our own church 
people, of course, as we launched into the job of organizing 
and building and expanding our church activity. 

One of our happiest meetings was with the Starches 
Pastor Gustavo Storch, his wife, and the two-week-old 
baby on the satin cushion whom we saw at our first Sabbath 
service in Brazil. In Baia, and later on the Amazon, they 
were to become our good friends. Pastor Storch was one 
of the valiant workers of our church and he played a large 
role in our missionary activity in the Amazon Valley. 

At the same time we were trying to adjust ourselves to 
this new world, its people and its ways. Not far from us 
was a kindly Catholic woman who spoke some English. 
She became our friend and taught us our first Portuguese. 
She was a good teacher and a wonderful human being. 

Those early weeks and months were a time of trial 
and some amusement as well. As we began to meet native 
families, we discovered that many of them knew as little 
about the United States of America as our people did 
about the United States of Brazil. One night, not long 
after we arrived in Baia, a Brazilian Army lieutenant and 
his wife came in to see us. 

We had an enjoyable if somewhat difficult time trying 
out the Portuguese which we were so anxious to learn, 
and which today we speak as fluently as our native English. 
Finally the lieutenant's wife asked Jessie, "Where are you 
people from?" 



40 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

"We're from the United States/' Jessie said. 

The woman looked puzzled. "United States? Where is 
that? Does it belong to Brazil?" 

The lieutenant told her quickly, "Wife, don't be foolish. 
Everybody knows the United States is a part of England/' 

We laughed, but every day we were impressed with our 
own ignorance. Even to go to the open market where it 
seemed that everything under the sun was sold presented 
serious problems in the first days. We did not know the 
food or the language or how much anything cost. We 
didn't even know too well the values of the various coins 
and bills. 

We would go to the market, point to the things we 
wanted, and hold out a handful of coins in payment. The 
merchant would take out the amount required, and in 
only a few cases did one take more than the proper sum. 
But we soon learned the proper evaluations for ourselves, 
for our wages were limited and every milreis had to count. 

Our funds did stretch to include a maid-of-all-work, 
who was more than worth the infinitesimal pay she re- 
ceived. 

Tubusa helped us learn the language and acquainted 
us with the native dishes. Jessie had always been a won- 
derful cook, but the Brazilian dishes were very different 
from those she had cooked back in Nebraska. Unlike 
Tubusa, she didn't know a hundred ways to fix coconut. 
Most of the dishes had to be prepared from scratch; there 
were few manufactured foods such as we now find in a 
supermarket here in the United States. Tubusa thought 
perhaps we might be disturbed about her cooking for us. 
Shortly after she went to work for us a picture out of a 
storybook, with her bright bandanna and her full wide 



BAIA 41 

skirts she said to us, "You need never worry about my 
cooking for you. My hands may be black, but they are 
always clean." 

Since we had given her no hint of concern, nor did we 
have any, we had no idea why she felt impelled to make 
this remark. 

It is the belief of our church and one with which Jessie 
and I are in complete agreement, as I mentionedthat it 
is not the role of a missionary in a foreign land to impose 
his culture on the people he has been sent to serve. Our 
job, as we saw it, was first of all to make friends, and 
Jessie's method was to become acquainted with the women 
of Baia on a level on which, even with a language barrier, 
they could meet. 

The women of every social stratum lived on a far dif- 
ferent level than those in the United States at the time we 
first arrived. A wife was so protected from the world that 
she could not even go downtown to buy her own shoes. 
Her husband would buy them and take them home to her. 

A wife would not know and in most cases still does not 
how much money her husband earns. Today, particularly 
in the southern cities of Brazil, women are far more 
emancipated than they were twenty-five years ago, but 
they are still many years behind the women of the United 
States in the matter of equality. 

Jessie's freedom was to them startling. But through our 
meetings and evenings with these ladies, especially in con- 
nection with our church work, Jessie was making friends 
as she was learning the cooking methods of Brazil. One 
day she was to be as expert in Brazilian dishes as any 
native of that country and accepted by the women as 
one of them. 



42 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

One dish that both Jessie and I missed was simple old- 
fashioned American pie, apple pie particularly. It's strange 
how much you miss one special dish after a time; it be- 
comes a kind of symbol of the world you have left, We 
decided finally that perhaps we could teach the women 
of Baia how to make an apple pie or a lemon meringue- 
provided we had the pie tins, a cooking utensil of which 
they had never heard. 

"There must be a tinner in town/* I told Jessie. 'Til 
explain the situation and get him to make us some pie tins." 

I found the tinner all right, and he did make us the tins. 
Jessie baked her first batch of American-style pies with 
high hopes of showing the Brazilian ladies of Baia a sample 
of typical American homemade pie. But pride goeth be- 
fore a fall and so did the pie tins. The tinner had soldered 
the bottoms on and the solder had, of course, melted under 
the intense oven heat. The pie tins had no bottoms, and 
the pies themselves were ruined. 

Later, we sent to America for some real pie tins. Pie 
and a number of other American dishes is known today 
in many parts of Baia and other sections of Brazil, thanks 
primarily to Jessie's cooking skill. 

But these first weeks were not easy. We were constantly 
strapped for funds, and so was our mission. To augment 
resources, Jessie decided she could pick up at least a few 
cents as a midwife, and be a real help to the community, 
too. Since many folk in Baia were poor, they used doctors 
and hospitals as little as they could. (Public-health condi- 
tions in Baia and throughout the nation have greatly im- 
proved as a result of both governmental and private edu- 
cational and medical programs. ) 

Calls began to come in, often late at night. Would Dona 



BAIA 43 

Jessie go to the house at the corner of such and such a 
street, to help a woman already beginning her labor? And 
Jessie would hurry off to this house or, if it were late, we 
would go togetherto bring a child into the world. Some- 
times there would be a doctor and sometimes not. For this 
service the new parents paid her if and as they could; it 
might be fifty cents in one case, a dollar in another. Often 
it was nothing. 

However, we do not go into this work to amass personal 
wealth, but to give service. It is the belief of our church 
that as much as possible of its funds should be used di- 
rectly for the people and the work for which these funds 
were given, and that the actual salaries of workers engaged 
in carrying out this program should be kept to a minimum. 

It is a plan with which both Jessie and I are in complete 
accord. But at that time, in that small apartment looking 
out on an almost medieval cobblestone street in Baia, 
trying to organize this new mission and begin the expand- 
ing program, trying to pay the rent and feed and clothe 
ourselves and our three-year-old son, it was without ques- 
tion a grim and difficult challenge. 

We had been in the apartment only about two months 
when Jessie awakened me one night to tell me that our 
son was crying and apparently ill. "He must have a ter- 
ribly high fever," she said. "I'm taking his temperature. 
He's shivering, and he says his head hurts." 

She looked at me in concern as she handed me the 
thermometer. Jack's temperature was just over a hundred 
and four degrees! 

For a moment we were no longer missionaries, we were 
frightened parents with a sick baby in the middle of the 



44 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

night. We were strangers, here in a strange land, with little 
idea of how or where to go for help. 

Neither of us was speaking much Portuguese yet 
we didn't know where we could reach a British or Ameri- 
can doctor quickly. 

Jessie collected herself first and began using some of the 
methods for bringing down fever that she had learned in 
her nurse's training. None of them worked. Hot and cold 
compresses seemed only to make the fever worse. What- 
ever disease Jack had, it didn't respond to hydrotherapy. 

In my halting Portuguese I tried to get a doctor, but 
phone connections were not clear, service was not as effi- 
cient as it is today, and if the operator understood what I 
was trying to say, I couldn't comprehend her answer. 

Our son's fever was higher now. His body was still 
shivering, and sweat was pouring from his forehead. We 
felt alone and cut off from the world by our own ignorance 
of the language and the people. We could not, in this 
moment of immediate need, reach them or make them 
understand. I looked at Jessie. Her head was bowed and 
I saw that she, as I, was praying to the only source of 
help we knew. 



CHAPTER 4 

OXCARTS AND TIGERS 



WE sat up with our son all that night. With the 
first streaks of dawn I set out across the cobblestones to 
find a doctor. I wanted one I could trust and if possible 
one who spoke English, so that I could at least talk to him. 
The first person I reached was the Catholic lady who was 
teaching us Portuguese, and with her help it wasn't more 
than an hour before I had found an American physician. 
He had lived in Brazil for many years and was delighted, 
he said, to be of service to an American missionary family. 
On the way back to our apartment, I told him Jack's symp- 
toms. Dr. Downing nodded. "Well, let's hope I'm right and 
it will not be so bad. Let us hope I'm right." 

Jack's fever was still high when we reached the apart- 
ment and the doctor made his examination. Finally he 
looked up with a smile and said softly, "It is not bad be- 
cause we have reached him in time. Your son has malaria." 

"How serious an attack is it?" Jessie asked, in a tone of 
quite non-professional, motherly alarm. 

"Well, rather severe, I'd say, but not too severe." The 
physician answered her quietly, and his calmness was a 
tonic to us. In those days there was only one known 
remedy for malaria quinine, which is terribly bitter and 
difficult to give a child who cannot swallow a big capsule. 

45 



46 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

"Don't worry," Dr. Downing said, looking up at us from 
the side of the bed. "We'll have him fixed up with a choco- 
late syrup that tastes like an American ice-cream soda, 
and he'll never know there's quinine in it. In a few days 
hell be perfectly well." 

"Will there be other attacks?" my wife asked. 

I knew she was thinking of moments when we might 
be in remote areas, under conditions that would be far 
more difficult than the capital of Baia presented. 

He shrugged. "There is always that danger, of course. 
Anywhere you go in a tropical zone there is that danger. 
As long as you have quinine available, however, you can 
always bring it under control. And there is no reason for 
a recurrence, actually, unless" 

Both Jessie and I knew enough about malaria to realize 
that it is transmitted by one special type of mosquito 
the female anopheles, known in some areas as "the deadly 
ladies of the night/ 5 because they strike only after dark- 
ness. But we had thought we were protected as long as 
we kept ourselves fully covered whenever we went out 
after dark. 

The doctor, however, was looking around at our apart- 
ment. Then he turned back to us. "For your safety and 
your son's, you will have to get out of this place at once." 

To our unasked questions, he went on to explain: "Old 
buildings like this are infested with malaria mosquitoes; 
they breed in the walls and cracks in the rotting plaster. 
That means your son will be reinfected, and each time the 
attacks will be more severe." 

We must move to some place near the ocean, where the 
air would be largely mosquito free, he told us. Otherwise, 



OXCARTS AND TIGERS 47 

he added quietly, we would have to give up our whole 
missionary dream and return to the United States. 

Finding new living quarters, in a matter of days at most, 
seemed at first an insurmountable problem. We knew 
neither where nor how to look. But whenever there is a 
need, there is only one main Source of supply, and it is 
always our policy at prayers each morning and each night 
before retiring to ask His help and to have confidence that 
this help will come. 

In this case, despite the difficulties which beset us, we 
found what we wanted, a lovely house outside the city 
itself, overlooking the beach and the ocean at a price that 
was within our limited financial reach. 

Jack's malaria vanished almost at once and did not come 
back. And we were happy as larks in our charming house, 
with its exhilarating panorama of sea and sand and sun 
and the ocean winds that cooled the tropical nights. 

Tubusa, our mde preta, moved with us, of course. 

In the midst of our personal problems, we had not lost 
sight of the work we had come to do. Our church group 
in Baia was expanding, and we were already planning to 
start forays into the backwoods regions and farmlands. 
We decided first to follow our "colporteurs," or book sales- 
men, who had already started at least some interest in 
Adventist literature and beliefs in the more remote areas 
of the territory. One trip we planned was a lengthy and 
difficult journey up the San Francisco River to a com- 
munity far back in the hinterlands. Most of it would have 
to be made on horseback, muleback, or by canoe. 

I delayed leaving for this work, however, because Jessie 
was pregnant. She herself wasn't worried, but I refused 
to leave until our second child was born. Marian, as we 



48 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

called our daughter, arrived on August 22, 1922, less than 
a year after we had reached Brazil. She has always been 
"our little Brazilian"-and although she is an American 
citizen she can also, if she wishes, claim citizenship in 
the land of her birth. 

Shortly after her arrival, I left my little family in the 
care of Tubusa, and started on this long-postponed but 
important evangelistic journey to a remote and inaccessible 
area hundreds of miles in the interior. 

One of the reasons for the trip was a request for help 
which had reached us by letter from a group of people 
living far out on the banks of the Corrente River, in the 
southwest corner of the state of Baia. What they had heard 
of the simple directness of our faith appealed to them. 
Could we send an evangelist to teach them? 

So we started out. Since I did not yet speak the language 
well, I took with me one of my co-workers in Brazil, 
Gustavo Storch, to serve as my interpreter and assistant. 

From Baia we traveled for two days by train across the 
state, through flat, treeless, bleak farmland. The locomotive 
burned wood, and as we chugged along, black smoke 
poured out of its stack and sparks flew regularly in every 
direction. We had been warned to wear old clothes and 
we were glad we had heeded the advice. Our good clothes 
would have been ruined by the smoke if they weren't 
already burned by the embers. 

It was with a sigh of relief that we arrived, two days 
later, at the tropical river-port village of Juaziro, which 
lies on the banks of the San Francisco River. Here, while 
we waited for the steamer which was to take us up the 
stream to its junction with the smaller Corrente, we spent 



OXCARTS AND TIGERS 49 

most of our time trying to get the cinders and the smell of 
smoke out of our clothes and hair. 

The boat was a curious vessel, long and wide and as tall 
as a three-story house, not too different from the river 
boats which plied the Mississippi in the middle of the 
nineteenth century. It was propelled by a wheel on the 
stern which splattered water in every direction. 

The San Francisco is one of the few large rivers of the 
world that flow north, so we were heading south as we 
made our way slowly upstream, stopping at almost every 
village along the way. There was little refrigeration on 
board and no place to keep fresh meat in that hot humid 
world, Every day or so a new steer, purchased at one of 
the villages on our way, was slaughtered for our food. The 
drinking water was simply dipped out of the river but was 
neither filtered nor boiled. 

It took us nineteen days on this boat to reach the Cor- 
rente. Two days more by a little boat and, thirty days 
after we had set out, we arrived at Porto Velho, the com- 
munity which had asked for our help. 

The village the name means Old Port consisted of 
only a scattering of houses, many with palm-thatched roofs 
and bare mud walls. But the people seemed delighted that 
we had come. We agreed to hold a series of meetings for 
them, and to tell them the meaning of the love of Christ 
for them and for all people everywhere. 

This was always the first message that we tried to bring 
to people that they should put their trust in God and in 
Christ as the Son of God and in the Word of the Bible 
itself. Our message is one of love, not fear; of forgiveness 
for the repentant, not despair or brimstone. 

It was this message of joy, with its many ramifications 



g LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

and responsibilities, religiously and socially and morally, 
that we were here to bring to this group, and we agreed 
to stay with them for two weeks. 

Our first meeting started out well. We had found a large 
room to serve as a meeting hall and in its center had set 
up a powerful kerosene pressure lamp to provide light. 
By meeting time the hall was crowded with men and 
women some Indians but most of them Brazilian nationals 
who were largely of Portuguese extraction. Suddenly, as 
we were about to announce the opening hymn, one of the 
women screamed, jumped up, and ran down the impro- 
vised aisle and out of the building. 

"I don't know what's the matter," my assistant said to 
me under his breath. "Shall we stop the meeting to find 
out?" 

"We'd better try to keep going as planned," I suggested. 

But before we could get our hymn started several other 
women had jumped up and run out, and soon they were 
streaming out in droves. The reason when we discovered 
it was incredible: frogs, not by hundreds but by thou- 
sands, had invaded our meeting place and were leap- 
ing off the walls and over the seats trying to get to that 
powerful kerosene lamp by which we were lighting the 
hall! 

It was a real invasion. The frogs, two or three inches 
long, were coming from every direction and leaping over 
anything that stood in their path. Some climbed high 
on the walls and then attempted a broad jump in the 
direction of the light, only to land on a woman's hair or 
skid down the back of her neck. Pioneer women many of 
them were, used to primitive conditions, but to frogs they 



Parade of the Luzeiros coming 
to port for supplies. 





Missions Picture, 
General Conference cj 
Seventh-day Adventists 

Jessie and I aboard the Luzeiro. 



Missions Picture 



People along the Amazon are 
frequently flooded out of their 
homes. Here the Luzeiro brings 
assistance. 





Jessie and I and patients. 



This woman is getting her first injection. She is standing in a canoe alongside 
the Luzeiro while Jessie gives her the injection through the window. 

Missions Picture 





Missions Picture 
Jessie holding clinic at one of the regular stops of the Luzeiro, 



A baptism in the Amazon. 

- :J ^--;'"W^^^" ... 





An Indian from the Araguay River tribe 
called Caraja. The rings under his eyes 
are the tribal mark of the Carajas. 



A Caraja chief and his wife with their five-month-old grandchild. 

Missions Picture 





Missions Picture 

Elephantiasis, a condition we often found among the people of the Amazon. 



Jessie examining a patient. 



Missions Picture 





Missions Picture 
Jessie at the wheel of the Luzeiro. 



Missions Picture 



Fishing along the Amazon pays 
big dividends. 




OXCARTS AND TIGERS $1 

reacted just as the members of the ladies' aid back home 
would react to mice. 

Our first meeting, which we'd had pretty well organ- 
ized, we thought, wound up a shambles. But we had 
learned, as we were constantly doing. By meeting time 
next night we had the frog problem licked with draperies 
across the windows. 

We stayed for two weeks in the little village of Porto 
Velho, telling the people about our beliefs, our program 
of service through schools, hospitals, and medical care. 
Before we left, we had the nucleus of a new church group 
organized and under way. 

We began our most serious work often in the midst 
of a comedy of errors. We had arranged our return trip so 
that we would get back to the San Francisco River in time 
to catch the big river steamer on its return trip. Our 
timing, I guess, was just a shade too good. The ship was 
already in port when we arrived. I climbed on board, 
but my assistant, who had a badly sunburned arm, stopped 
a moment at a drugstore for some vaseline. By the time he 
reached the dock, the ship was pulling out into the stream. 
I hurried to the captain to tell him my companion had 
been left behind and to ask if the boat could possibly stop 
and pick him up. 

That's what I meant to say, at any rate. But in my ex- 
citement, and with my poor Portuguese, I used the wrong 
gender. To the captain, I was saying that my lady com- 
panion had been left standing on the dock. 

The captain smiled, a wide understanding smile, pulled 
a cord, and shouted an order. The ship stopped, the mighty 
stern wheel went into a reverse spin, spraying tons of 



52 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

water on the decks, and we backed up to the dock to take 
on my assistant. 

When the captain saw who it was he had backed up 
for, he was decidedly put out- "I thought he said his girl 
friend," the captain told my assistant later, "If I had known 
it was a man, I would have let you rot on that deck." 

My bad Portuguese had at least kept my friend from 
a long sun-baked wait. 

Oa my second trip up the San Francisco, not long there- 
after, I went alone. I went in answer to an invitation from 
another group of people who had heard of our work and 
were interested in it. They lived in a region even farther 
in the interior, many miles beyond where we had preached 
before. There were no roads, no river transportation, and 
the only way to reach this place after we left the river 
itself was overland on horseback, along trails through the 
tropical rain forest. 

Riding horseback was nothing new to me after my 
Nebraska upbringing, but the Brazilian saddle, which is 
like the English saddle in the United States, was new to 
me and difficult. For this part of the journey I had hired a 
guide and, since there were two other men going to the 
same remote community for other purposes, we were a 
party of four. Because we did not wish to delay our jour- 
ney, we were traveling at night. 

We had not gone far into the woods when my guide 
gave a warning. I had studied my Portuguese hard in the 
previous weeks and understood him completely: We were 
to stay close together as he had seen two jaguarsBra- 
zilian tigers following us. 

The tigers were on the far side of the clearing just be- 
hind us, he said. 



OXCARTS AND TIGERS 53 

"I'd like to get a shot at one of those overgrown cats/' 
one of the two strangers told the guide. "When we get to 
another clearing, you stop on the other side and when 
those tigers show themselves 111 let one of them have it." 

"We will all be torn to shreds if you try it," the guide 
said quietly. 

"Why? Are those tigers stronger than my bullets?" 

"There are two of themthat means they are probably 
mates/' the experienced guide explained patiently. "They 
probably have their young hidden somewhere nearby in 
the woods. That is why they are following us they are 
protecting their young." 

"But I don t see-" 

"If you shot the female, the male would attack in the 
smoke of your shot. You leave them alone. They'll stop 
following us after a while, when they decide the danger 
is past. They are smarter about that sometimes than 
humans." 

The stranger put away his revolver and we rode on. We 
did not see the tigers again. 

I reached my destination and for a few days was im- 
mersed in holding meetings. As I got ready to leave, elated 
that the Lord had prospered my work, I learned that two 
men from the village were planning a trip at the same time. 
Not anxious to start out alone, I arranged with them to 
take me overland and then by canoe down to where I 
could catch a San Francisco River steamer. 

At that time of the month the moon was full, and the 
two men suggested that it would be better if we traveled 
by night when we reached the stream instead of by day 
when the sun was so hot. They were complete strangers 



54 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

to me and I wasn't eager to travel alone with them at night, 
but their plan sounded sensible and I agreed. 

So we set out at night, the three of us, down the stream, 
in a small canoe. I sat in the center, with one man at 
either end of the craft. It was a beautiful night. The full 
moon shone bright, and the little stream was like a narrow 
silver ribbon. 

We hadn't gone far when one of the men drew out a 
loaded revolver and put it on the suitcase before him. 
Then he drew out a knife. "Mister," he called to me across 
the canoe, "are you armed?" 

In all my travels I have never carried a gun or a weapon 
of any kind. Now I hesitated for a moment, not sure how to 
answer him, and then I remembered that I had my Bible 
in my pocket. Paul mentions in his letter to the Ephesians 
that the sword of the spirit is the Word of God. "Yes/' I 
answered, "I am armed." 

He appeared slightly startled but made no reply. We 
continued on downstream. Soon, however, the moon that 
had been providing us with light began to disappear under 
thick dark clouds. There were so many logs in the stream 
that our journey was hazardous even in the moonlight but 
now, with this light gone, traveling became almost impos- 
sible. At least this was what one of the men told me. We 
would have to pull into the bank and make an improvised 
camp for the night, he said. I didn't much like the idea, 
but apparently I had no choice. 

The bank of the stream was high and muddy. As we 
came close, the man in the front of the canoe did a strange 
and as it proved utterly foolish thing. There was a pole 
in the canoe and he picked it up, stuck it into the mud of 
the bank, and literally pole-vaulted to land. 



OXCARTS AND TIGERS 55 

The whole thing happened so quickly that I had no 
time even to try to warn him that this was dangerous. I 
saw his dark form swing past me out of the canoe toward 
the bank and as he struck the ground I heard a shot and 
a terrible cry of pain. The other man cried out, "Bandits 
we've landed in the midst of a bunch of bandits. You'd 
better get out your gun now, and get out of this boat/' 

But I hesitated to make my move yet, and so did he. We 
sat in the canoe for an instant and heard nothing more. 
Then we edged our boat in closer and leapt out onto the 
bank. We found our companion a few feet away, lying 
half in the mud. He was conscious, and told us he had 
been shot through the foot. 

We had landed, actually, not in a bandit's hideout but in 
a spot where animalsdeer and tiger and tapir came 
down from the forest to drink. A hunter had set his snare 
so that an animal would be shot when he tripped the 
string across the path. He had caught a man instead, 
who now lay bleeding on the ground. 

We had not yet begun our medical missionary work, 
but the question of what to do for the injured man was 
immediate. I had no medicine with me except iodine and 
aspirin tablets. I knew enough, at least, to give him first 
aid. I tore up one of my white shirts and made bandages, 
dosed the wound with iodine and bound it up the best I 
could. Together the other man and I made a bed on the 
ground and put the wounded man on it. 

As we were in woods where we knew jaguars were 
plentiful, we were afraid at first to go to sleep. Then I re- 
called that I had with me in my belongings the pressure 
kerosene lamp that I used for my meetings. We got out the 
lamp and lit it, and with that light were able to collect 



56 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

enough wood to light a fire. This, I reasoned, would keep 
away the tigers and give us a chance for a little rest. 

But as we dozed off the wounded man began to moan 
with pain. I got up and went over to him and discovered 
that an army of black ants, evidently attracted by the 
blood, had swarmed over his injured foot. Some had even 
gotten under the bandage and begun to eat the lacerated 
flesh. I got the man under a mosquito-net covering, put on 
a fresh bandage, and finally got my folding cot out of the 
canoe and put him on that, so that the ants could not get 
at him again. 

At last it was dawnl We got the injured man back into 
the canoe and on down the river to the village where I 
was to get the steamer. Here we found a pharmacist, who 
was able to remove the shot and clean the wound. The 
iodine I had put on it the night before, he said, had helped 
to prevent infection. My first patient would be all right. 

Later that day, while I waited for the river steamer, 
some of the people who had heard what had happened 
told me how close I had come to death. Both my traveling 
companions were known as exceedingly dubious charac- 
ters; the police of this village wouldn't even allow them to 
stay in town. I was inclined to believe them, since they also 
told me that people used to the river, as these two men 
were, could travel it under all circumstances, day or night. 

"They were going into that embankment for one purpose 
to kill you, rob you, and leave you for the tigers to dis- 
pose of," one man explained succinctly. "You were exceed- 
ingly fortunate that they picked that particular spot, and 
that the first man tripped over the snare." 

I thought of the words I have read so many hundreds 
of times in the Book of Psalms: "The Angel of the Lord 



OXCARTS AND TIGERS 57 

encanipeth around about those that fear him and deliv- 
ereth them." 

Communications in those areas at that time were sketchy 
when they weren't just non-existent and there was no way 
I could get word back to Jessie. On my first trip to the 
Corrente I was gone about two months and she had no 
word from me from the time I left the river steamer, which 
did carry mail. 

On my arrival back, however, I was naturally excited 
and happy at the prospect of seeing my family again, but 
as I neared the house I smelled medicine. Someone must 
be ill! I hurried inside and found Jessie in bed, recovering 
from a severe attack of intestinal influenza, 

Tubusa had stood by her like a guardian angel when the 
attack came, Jessie told me, and had gone for the American 
physician, Dr. Downing. The church ladies had come in, 
too, to help take care of Jack and baby Marian, although 
our house was a long way from the city. And a wonderful 
Catholic lady across the street, who had sort of taken us 
under her wing, had also helped out in this unhappy time. 

Jessie also had one small story, one that I will never for- 
get, abot^t our boy Jack, who was then just four and a half. 

One Sunday morning, she said, he had been playing out- 
side the house with some little native boys. He had taken 
all his playthings out with him, and although they were 
simple toys, to the Baian children they must have seemed 
irresistible. 

"I was inside reading at the front window and I called 
Jack in for something. The other boys were out there beat- 
ing his drum/' Jessie said. "All at once I noticed there was 



58 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

no more noise. We looked out and found that they had 
gone, taking all his toys with them." 

Jessie felt particularly bad because she had called Jack 
in and given them the chance to take the things and run 
off with them into the woods, But our four-and-a-half -year- 
old boy had a suggestion. "Mother," he said, "if we just had 
a prayer, I think the boys will bring them back." So they 
prayed about this together. 

The next morning a big Negro lady knocked on our front 
door. She was holding out her apron-and in it were all 
Jack's toys. She told my wife, "You know, when that boy 
came back to my house yesterday he has no parents and 
I am taking care of him he had all these toys and I asked 
him, 'Where did you get them?' Well, he said, "An Amer- 
ican boy gave them to me/ But I knew that wasn't true. I 
knew he took them." 

The woman said she had tried to get the boy to bring 
them back himself, but he wouldn't do it. "So I made him 
tell me the direction of the house and I brought them back 
myself." 

Shortly after my return to Baia from my second trip, I 
learned some disturbing news. Our doctor informed us that 
Tubusa, whom we all loved so much, and whom we re- 
garded almost as a member of the family, had been ill for 
many years with elephantiasis. 

We were greatly distressed and asked him if there were 
some way we could help her. His concern, he explained, 
was not only for her but also for us, and above all for our 
children. 

Elephantiasis, he explained, is transmitted by the culex 
mosquito from the infected person to other people in the 



OXCARTS AND TIGERS 59 

area. With Tubusa in the house, it was likely that we would 
all be infected. 

Elephantiasis is one of the terrible diseases for which 
there is no known cure. It doesn't kill, but the leg swells up 
to two or three times its normal size. Sometimes doctors 
amputate, but in recent years they have learned to extract 
the small wormlike creatures which get into the lymph 
gland and cause this frightful illness. The operation does 
not cure but it does help. 

However, not even this much was known on the day 
Dr. Downing warned us we must get rid of Tubusa. We 
protested, for we had come to depend on Tubusa and we 
did not like the idea of casting her out as the lepers of an- 
other day had been treated. 

"It is one thing to be religious," the doctor said sternly, 
"but does your religion give you the right to act foolishly 
or to take foolish chances? That is what you are doing now, 
not only for yourselves, but for your two young children/' 

There was nothing to do but follow his advice. We were 
more accustomed to giving advice than to taking it. People 
came to us constantly for help, and we were amazed that 
many of them, troubled, concerned, anxious for something 
to hold on to in their lives, had no religion at all. At best it 
was a mixture of religion and superstition carried over from 
ancient ways and legends. 

Instinctively these people were seeking solid ground on 
which to build the inner life of faith by which they could, 
as the Bible tells us, "be born again." 

Our work was directed and financed by the Baia Mission 
of our church, operating under its East Brazil Union. Our 
church is organized into five unions in South America, and 



60 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

under these unions are subdivisions which we call missions 
until they are fully organized into conferences. The pri- 
mary task, of course, is the evangelistic to build groups and 
churches on the local level. The medical work, the social 
work, the schools all this follows. It was particularly im- 
portant that we organize schools in Baia because through- 
out Brazil school is held on Saturday, and for families con- 
verted to our faith this made a problem: the children of 
our faith would not be able to attend school on Saturday, 
the day we keep sacred for worship. 

Throughout this state, scores of groups began to form 
and churches began to be built, not only in the big cities 
but even in smaller communities, too. Schools were started. 
A wave of enthusiasm spread across Baia in the wake of 
our endeavors. 

We had not yet launched our medical missionary work. 
In the interior of the country, although there is consider- 
able hookworm, there is not the amount of disease found 
farther to the north, in the hotter jungle areas. Baia is not 
tropical but subtropical. There are, however, the terrible 
droughts which afflict this section, particularly in the west- 
ern part of the state. In some places where we went there 
had not been a drop of rain for more than four years. In 
some districts the government had to evacuate the people 
because the wells and springs and streams and rivers dried 
up and there wasn't water even for the people to drink. 

Because of these dry spells much of the state is treeless 
and sun-baked. In a typical Baia town you find no trees, 
and the unpaved streets are sandy. There are more motor 
vehicles today, and a few jeeps, but in those early days 
there were practically none. For carrying heavy loads there 



OXCARTS AND TIGERS 6l 

were only the oxcarts which are, of course, still widely 
in use. 

These oxcarts are a clamorsome remnant of Baia's primi- 
tive past. The wheels are of solid wood, turning on thick 
axles, and often the carts are so heavy that it takes five 
yoke of oxen to pull them. These are carts that carry the 
produce to market bananas and lemons and cotton and 
tobacco and all the other colorful fruits and agricultural 
products of this subtropical soil. They carry the supplies 
and do much of the toting of materials around the farms 
and fazendas, as the big plantations are called. 

The wheels and axles make a terrific clamor, an almost 
continuous groaning and whining that has a peculiar pene- 
trating quality, like an infant's cry. Riding through the 
farm areas, we could hear the oxcarts and the strange music 
of their wheels and axles on every side, a fretful, persistent, 
yet curiously beguiling clatter in the parching heat of 
a Baia afternoon. 

These backwood regions, lying just south of the full trop- 
ical jungle of the Amazon Valley, were and in large meas- 
ure remain primitive. Most of the houses are built of poles 
stuck into the ground to which strips of wood are attached. 
This base is covered over with a plaster made largely of 
mud; and a thatched roof, made of the leaves of pahn trees, 
finishes the job. Some of the better houses, of course, are 
covered with tile. Until recently there was little electricity, 
and most of the people who wanted to keep in touch with 
the outside world did so with battery radios. By 1958, how- 
ever, electricity was coming in to some of these places, 
bringing with it radios, motion-picture houses, and other 
evidences of our modern civilization. Roads, however, con- 
tinue to be difficult Jessie says they range from dusty to 



62 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

poor to non-existent. Usually our only means of transporta- 
tion was by horse, mule, or on foot. 

I recall once I was traveling through a district in south- 
ern Baia where large quantities of cacao the chocolate 
bean-are grown. Several associates and I were on our way 
to hold a meeting in a church and were riding mules I had 
hired for the occasion. I was in front. As we reached the 
outskirts of the town of Itabuna, I noticed a young girl 
leaning out the window watching our group. I glanced up 
at her, and just at that moment my mule plunged into a 
mudhole. He began to jump and buck violently, and I was 
hurled off his back and into the mud. As I got out of the 
mudhole, thoroughly disgusted, and began to wipe some of 
the primordial ooze off my face and clothes, the girl at the 
window called down to me, in Portuguese, <c Oh, mister, do 
that again. My mother didn't see it." 

I remember another early experience when, traveling 
over the countryside in the hot sun, I became terribly 
thirsty. I had, of course, been warned not to drink any- 
thing but bottled water unless it had been boiled. But thu 
man I was traveling with told me, "I can't stand it any 
longer. I'm going to have a drink of water." So we stopped 
at one of the thatched farmhouses. He talked to the farmer 
in Portuguese and I couldn't follow all that was said, but 
a moment later the fanner's wife came out with a tray of 
what looked like nice lemonade. 

It looked so delicious, in fact, that I decided to have 
some myself. I took a big gulp, Lemonade, it certainly was 
not; water out of a mudhole, it almost certainly was. But 
mudhole or not, I drank it with the relish of a thirsty man. 
Fortunately, neither of us suffered any bad effects. 

Wherever we went, we were treated as friends, and 



OXCARTS AND TIGERS 63 

there was always some home where we could spend the 
night. In most of these homes, however, we didn't sleep 
in beds but in hammocks we carried with us. Throughout 
northern Brazil, the individual hammock is part of one's 
personal equipment, as important as coat or hat or tooth- 
brush is to us. Not only in the wilder interior but also in the 
cities, the homes have hammock hooks in almost every 
room, sometimes even in the kitchen. There are many ad- 
vantages to this old custom. No matter how many people 
may drop in, there's always room to put them up for the 
night, for each will have his hammock with him and the 
host has only to help hang it on the hooks. 

These hammocks are sometimes very elaborate. The 
hammock part itself is made of cotton. It may be hand- 
painted in lovely bright colors, or edged with fine lace that 
hangs down on the sides. In the interior sections, many of 
the people grow the cotton, spin the thread themselves, 
and have homemade looms where they weave their own 
"portable beds." Some of these homemade hammocks are 
truly works of art. I bought one with various scenes painted 
on the material with a homemade vegetable dye which, I 
was told, can never fade out. 

The hammocks are about six feet long, with strings at- 
tached to each end to hang them up by. They are made in 
both double and single sizes the former about fourteen 
feet wide, the latter about seven. They are hung up loosely, 
not stretched taut, and in some of the better houses the 
hooks are covered over with decorative plaster boxes set 
in the walls. 

It is something of a trick to learn to sleep in a hammock; 
you have to sleep eater-cornered so that you can lie straight 
and turn as you please without any difficulty. 



64 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

It was one of the most fascinating times of my life, those 
early years in Baia. The country was new and strange; so 
was the way of life of its people. At that time, Jessie usually 
stayed in the city to take care of the children, and I trav- 
eled widely throughout the state with one or two assistants. 
We would come into a community, the people would wel- 
come us and invite us to dine. Sometimes we would have 
beans and rice and sweet potatoes the latter fried, boiled 
and sliced, or candied. We might also have a coarse cab- 
bage called couve, which is usually boiled. Dessert was 
often fried bananas, and when they were the plantains, 
which I consider the most delicious of all the varieties of 
bananas found in Brazil, I always took a second helping. 

After sunset, around seven-thirty, we would usually hold 
our meeting. It might last an hour or an hour and a half, 
and much of it would be a song service. The Brazilians love 
to sing and many of them have truly fine voices. Then there 
would be a short message, perhaps, and prayers. After the 
meeting, we would go to the home where we were spend- 
ing the night it was often the house where the meeting 
was heldand we would sit around and talk; a few of these 
people always wanted to hear something about the city 
and what was going on that was new and exciting. The 
world loves to gossip a little, even in the backwoods of 
Baia. Around ten o'clock we would go to sleep in our ham- 
mocks. In the morning, as soon as it began to get light, life 
would begin anew. 

Most of the people in these areas are farmers, but there 
are some who are called truckers. They are not really 
truckers in our sense of the word, they operate mule trains. 
Some of these men have as many as twenty or thirty mules 
and they contract with the individual farmers to carry 



OXCARTS AND TIGERS 65 

their material down to the city. These mule trains are par- 
ticularly useful in the southwestern area, where the ter- 
rain is more mountainous and the big oxcarts are too heavy 
to be hauled up the steep grades. 

The mule train is like a caravan, with its eighteen or 
twenty loaded mules, a helper who runs alongside the ani- 
mals to goad them on, and the muleteer who shouts and 
cracks his whip as they carry their loads into town. 

Most of our first years in Baia, Jessie worked with other 
women in the community helping to build up our congre- 
gations. We had two churches in Baia when we left, both 
going strong. Jessie also continued to do her midwifery 
work, but she decided, finally, that this was not worth the 
tremendous effort involved, that her time and energy 
might better be spent in other ways. 

As the children grew older and we found good people to 
look after them, Jessie became a little freer. Eventually she 
decided to take a trip into the interior with another lady 
of our church, on a selling tour of Adventist books and 
magazines. Perhaps she envied me my adventures. 

In those days, ladies didn't travel alone and this tour of 
theirs was nothing short of revolutionary in that part of the 
world. Everywhere they went they were asked hundreds 
of questions. When Jessie would tell them she was married 
to an Adventist minister and missionary, they would look 
at her with redoubled interest. 

This unique book-selling junket was all Jessie's idea and 
perhaps it would be well to let her report it in her own 
words from the notes she wrote down sometime after she 
had returned to Salvador: 

"Everybody was very surprised to see us because ladies 



66 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

in those days weren't supposed to travel alone. We had a 
lot of big medical books with us and we knew the stores 
could sell these because they told people how to keep well 
anything about health down there is always welcome. 

"We hired a native to carry the books for usat least a 
sample of themin a high pile on top of his head. He would 
walk in front of us with the books on his head, and the 
people would stare at him and then at us and they would 
say, "What have you there?' We would tell them these were 
medical books and we would always sell some. 

"In one house where we stayed for some time we al- 
ways stopped with members of our church I told the lady 
that I wasn't used to sleeping in hammocks. She said it was 
all right, I could sleep on a table. She put on a tablecloth 
first and that did make it a little softer but not much. We 
would roll up Turkish towels and put them under our hips 
and then it was not too bad. 

"Wherever we went, people would ask us all kinds of 
questions about ourselves. When I told them I was mar- 
ried, they wanted to know how many children my husband 
and I had and they never could understand how we had 
only two children because in Brazil everyone has a big 
family. 

"But they were always interested and kind to us, treated 
us well and bought books like hot cakes. I just couldn't 
seem to get enough. . . . 

"On our first trip we spent ten days in the hinterlands of 
Baia, and there was never any trouble except with one 
poor man who couldn't seem to understand what we were 
doing, I was keeping my books stacked up in a store in a 
village and every time I'd stop in to pick some up he would 
come after me and put his face close to mine. Finally, I 



OXCARTS AND TIGERS 67 

looked at him and said, 'Did you know the Lord is coming 
soon? It's just marvelous what the Bible tells us, isn't it?' 

"He gave me a scared look and went out of the store. I 
never saw that tall man again, but many years later my 
husband went to that same town and stopped at that store. 
There was a tall man there and when he learned that my 
husband was an Adventist he told Leo, 'A long time ago 
there were two Adventist ladies here, and one of them was 
an angel/ " 

Baia became our world and our home, and as we cooked 
and ate the native dishes and spoke the language, we be- 
came as much a part of this world as we had once been 
part of the Nebraska prairies. 

Within a year after our arrival both Jessie and I spoke 
the language fairly well. I gave my first sermon in Portu- 
guese in Baia after about fourteen months in Brazil. Fol- 
lowing that came hundreds of more sermons in this 
language. Eventually it became as natural for us to talk in 
one tongue as in the other. 

After the first sermon in Portuguese, however, I did not 
ask how many understood. I had heard about another 
American who gave his first sermon in ^Portuguese and 
ended by saying, "I want to know how many understood 
me. Will all those who understood what I have been saying 
please raise their hands." 

In the grim silence that followed, not a single hand was 
lifted. 

I avoided this possibility by just not asking. 

I was still a lay minister in our church when I went to 
Brazil and for several years thereafter. It was in 1924 that 
I received a message from our church's South American 



68 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

headquarters in Buenos Aires when Peron came to power 
it was transferred to Montevideo, Paraguay summoning 
me to Sao Paulo, There was to be a board meeting, the 
message said, at which my family and I were expected. 

I was glad for the chance to take Jessie, for she had not 
been well since Marian's birth and, although she was natu- 
rally a sturdy Nebraska farm girl, she had lost weight until 
she was down to a hundred pounds. A change of climate 
and environment, I thought, would do her a world of good. 

We decided to make it a kind of vacation, so we went 
down to Rio and spent a couple of weeks there, enjoying 
the city's gaiety and color and cosmopolitan flavor. Then 
we went on to Sao Paulo. 

Sao Paulo is known as the fastest growing city in the 
world. At the time of our first visit there, it had about half 
a million population; by 1958 it had grown to three million, 
and the figure appears destined to soar. Some people call 
Sao Paulo the Chicago of South America. The city is in the 
center of the coffee-growing area and once its entire wealth 
came from coffee. Now other industries have come in, and 
with them have come the airlines, so that Sao Paulo is now 
a center of air traffic, It is located on a high plateau, about 
2,700 feet high, and the climate is generally mild and 
pleasant. It is today an ultra-modern city of wide streets 
and magnificent modern architecture. The population is as 
mixed as that of any North American city. 

There are many Italians and Germans and recently, 
since the war particularly, Japanese. But no matter what 
their birth or descent, there is a great pride among them. 
The Paulistas, as they like to describe themselves, are 
somewhat like the Texans; everything must be the best and 
the biggest, whether it is the tropic vegetation, the palm- 



OXCARTS AND TIGERS tk) 

lined streets, the new gleaming pink-and-white buildings, 
the charm of the villages,, or the vast reaches of the state 
of Sao Paulo itself, with its great coffee plantations rolling 
out as endlessly as the Texas plains. 

This was the city to which we came on order of Division 
Headquarters, I had a notion that perhaps we would be 
given new orders or programs to carry out. To my surprise 
I found myself in the presence, not only of church directors 
of our South American division, but also of many ministers 
and lay members of the church. 

I had been summoned for an ordainment ceremony, it 
turned out, and in the presence of this group, in a simple 
but moving ceremony, here in Sao Paulo, Brazil, I was 
ordained into the Gospel ministry. 

We returned to Baia to throw ourselves back into the 
duties of our mission, which had grown by then into a com- 
plex organization, with two churches in the city itself and 
many smaller groups throughout Baia and several neigh- 
boring states. We were known by that time, and our work 
was known. In the city of Baia we had many friends among 
all groups, and many of them, even those not of our faith, 
gave us financial help. Thus we were able to aid more 
needy families in some of the poorer sections, and to carry 
on the other work of our mission. 

But our eyes still looked to the north, toward our ulti- 
mate goal the Amazon. 

In 1927, our mission sent its first emissaries to the river- 
Elder John Brown and his wife. Elder Brown made a num- 
ber of important contacts on his several trips to the interior. 
But because he had to depend on river boats to get from 
place to place, there were many areas he could not reach. 
The going was rough, even so, and within a few months he 



70 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

was stricken with a terrible tropical sickness and had to 
return to the United States to recuperate. 

In 1928, three of our top division officers made a cou- 
rageous and grueling trip to the headwaters of the Amazon 
and back, traveling through difficult country by boat and 
by muleback. On their return they agreed that our church 
must begin at once extensive missionary activity through- 
out the river world. 

In November of that year, I received word from our 
division directors in Buenos Aires: Jessie and I were to 
prepare at once for a new assignment. It would involve 
drastic changes. We would have to prepare for an entirely 
new kind of life, get rid of most of our furniture, and tear 
up the roots we had sunk deep into the soil and soul of the 
Baia Mission and its people. 

But what lay ahead for us was new and different and 
challenging, the letter said, We were to go to Belem, the 
city that lies at the mouth of the Amazon, and I was to 
begin work as director of a new mission that reached across 
the jungles and across the continent of South America to 
the Andes themselves. 

This was our new assignment, mine and Jessie's the 
vast sprawling outreach of the Amazon. 



CHAPTER 5 

DOORSTEP TO NOWHERE 



THE Amazon is not a river but a vast mediter- 
ranean sea, a giant inland network of waterways, spread 
across the South American continent. At its mouth, which 
is more than two hundred miles wide, is the island of 
Marajo, as big as England. Close to three thousand miles 
in length, the river's hundreds of tributaries reach to within 
less than a hundred miles of the Pacific Ocean in Peru, and 
it extends its fingers into five other South American coun- 
tries. Its deep, strong tributaries are navigable by big 
liners over more than fifty thousand miles of waterways. 
When the giant river floods, it inundates tens of thousands 
of square miles of land, often sweeping away farms and 
homesteads and entire villages. 

We came to know this river world intimately over many 
years, Jessie and I. To know it and love it in many ways, 
and yet to be on guard against its hazards and its clutching, 
sometimes strangling, hands. If we can say that the Ama- 
zon is not a river but a sea, we can add that the country 
through which it flows is not a river valley but a world 
apart partially known, largely unknown. It is a world of 
contrasts, of wilderness and riches, of emeralds and di- 
amonds and mango fruit. It is a world of beauty and lush 
abundance, where everything seems able to grow in such 

71 



72 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

profusion that a myriad of varieties of trees and flowers and 
herbs remain unclassified to this day. It is a world of 
splendor and savagery and of death along the riverbanks. 

The powerful current of the Amazon spills out hundreds 
of millions of gallons of water into the Atlantic each 
second, and the water around its mouth is fresh for some 
three hundred miles out into the ocean. There is a famous 
story about a sailing ship some two hundred miles out 
from the mouth of the river that sent a signal to a pass- 
ing steamer: "We are out of fresh water. Can you spare us 
some?" 

Back came the reply from the liner: "Dip your buckets 
and drink." 

The Amazon embraces with its color and romance and 
stifling heat and humidity an area almost as large as the 
entire United States. Much of it is colorful and romantic; 
much of it is unknown. The Green Hell of legend is not 
just one thing or place but many. There are places within 
this hell that are lovely as heaven on earth; and there are 
places where no man goes, where the intertwining vines 
and trees and undergrowth defy man to intrude. There are 
vast inundated regions, desolate and silent drowned 
worlds. There are villages that stand mute and lonely 
against the jungle and the sky as the water recedes, it is 
a world that changes from one second to the next; a place 
of dread and violence one instant, a paradise of bright 
plumage and many-colored flowers the next. 

To Jessie and me, it was above all else the people, the 
strange community of souls, half forgotten, half lost, almost 
swallowed up in the shifting lights and shadows of a tropic 
wilderness. They were a people who needed help in a 
hundred ways: people starving in the midst of plenty; 



DOORSTEP TO NOWHERE 73 

ravaged by disease in the midst of this humid lushness; 
people who hungered not for food so much as for a vision, 
for a reason to live, for purpose and goal and direction. 

It was morning when we got our first look at the Ama- 
zon. We were still out of sight of land, but we could tell 
that we were entering the river mouth by the change in the 
color of the water. From the deep blue of the Atlantic, it 
had shifted to the yellow-orange we were to come to know 
so well. 

There are, of course, many legends about this river. Its 
early history is wrapped in mystery and folklore and some 
fact. Much of it centers around a Spaniard named Fran- 
cisco de Orellana, an explorer who was with Pizarro in 
Peru and left the main group to search for food. Following 
the river, he had a number of fantastic experiences, which 
included encounters with the "warrior women" who were 
said to be living along the river and who reportedly fought 
like men in battle. The women, so the stories go, were 
white and tall, and strong enough to shoot arrows that 
could pierce the planking of a brigantine. How much truth 
there was in all the many legends of these women is a 
matter of conjecture; the Spaniards, in any case, named the 
river after the lady warriors of Greek mythology because of 
these reports from Francisco de Orellana and his men. 

I like best, perhaps, a legend told to us by an old Indian 
chief, as he looked at the river through his narrow, squint- 
ing eyes and spoke in his halting Portuguese: 

"One evening just at the time of sunset," he told us, "the 
moon and the sun were in the sky at the same time, long 
ago, and the moon fell in love with the sun and its bright- 
ness and power and splendor, but the sun disdained the 



74 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

moon and vanished over the edge of the earth and the 
moon was left alone in the night and she fell to weeping 
about all this, and her tears came down endlessly, it 
seemed, and the tide of her tears spread out across the 
whole continent, and so the river was born." 

As the ship started upriver that first day, we stood on 
deck, Jessie and I and our children Jack was twelve then 
and Marian eight and it was there we got our first glimpse 
of the jungle. That particular region was fairly well popu- 
lated with small villages, and quite civilized. Yet it seemed 
to us wild and dense. Just beyond the clearings, with their 
handful of houses, along the banks, was a dark wall of foli- 
age and brush and vines, twisted and contorted like some 
senseless primitive painting. Green and orange and purple 
and violet flowers mingled with the vines, which wrapped 
parasitical fingers around the skyscraper trees, turning the 
region into a mass through which, as we were to learn, one 
had to cut his way with knife and machete. 

Our destination lay just ahead. Belem pronounced "Be- 
leng" is the capital city of the state of Para and, like other 
Brazilian state capitals, is sometimes called by the state 
name. No one, of course, calls it by its full title Nossa 
Senhora de Belem de Grao Para which, literally trans- 
lated, means Our Lady of Bethlehem of the Great River. 

Belem is a truly tropical city, scarcely two degrees 120 
miles south of the equator. Unlike Baia, it is flat; but like 
the city we had grown to think of as home, it is also a blend 
of the old and the new. The handsome architecture of the 
original Portuguese settlers slides away into narrow, dark 
streets; along the docks crowd the humble homes of the 
working people. There is a fantastic market place, officially 



DOORSTEP TO NOWHERE 75 

called the Docas de Vero Peso, "the docks for looking up 
the weights." 

Neither of us, of course, could guess how much Belem 
was to mean to us. It was to be our headquarters for nearly 
a quarter of a century, our only base apart from our boat, 
the Luzeiro itself. In many ways it was to become a central 
point in our lives and activities. But then it was only a new 
outpost to which we were coming to establish new 
churches and to begin our work in a "parish" that extended 
across the entire continent of South America. The total 
working staff of that "parish" was waiting for us on the 
dock. It consisted of three people. Two of them were what 
we call our colporteurs, or book salesmen. The third was 
the wife of one of them. 

They had prepared for our coming by renting a two- 
story building, the second floor of which was to be our 
apartment. Downstairs was a big hall fitted out to be used 
as a church. This was to be called the Central Adventist 
Church of Belem. 

They helped us get our things off the boat and hoisted 
up our trunks and valises and some of the packing cases 
of furniture to our new quarters. Within a few hours, Jessie 
had begun to transform the rooms into a real home. 

Belem today is a city of perhaps 250,000 people. The 
old section is the most picturesque, with its narrow, twist- 
ing streets, its red-tiled roofs, its ancient buildings with 
gleaming blue-tiled fronts. Just as they had done in their 
native Portugal, the early settlers faced the entire fronts of 
their buildings with tile, which could easily be washed and 
never needed painting. Windows were open all day long 
and closed at night with shutters. In most of the homes 
there is no glass. A good-sized city with a good electric 



76 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

system, waterworks, streetcars, and a modern twentieth- 
century air, it is still an ancient Portuguese port town, and 
the smell of the sea and the Amazon is at its doorstep. 

You get used to this strange mixture of the old and the 
new, the normal and the unusual. Once, years ago, the city 
fathers decided to install a new water system. They built a 
series of high tanks to hold the water-they are still visible 
for miles as you near the city but when they turned on the 
water, the pressure from the high tanks broke every water 
main in town. These were gradually repaired, but the tanks 
remain as a crumbling memorial to that colossal engineer- 
ing fiasco. All the time we lived in Belem, we found it 
necessary to boil our water, because of seepage in the city 
water pipes. (A new water system has been started as this 
is written. ) 

We arrived in the middle of the Brazilian rainy season- 
January, 1929. At that time of year the city is sodden and 
humid and far from exhilarating. But it was at least cheap. 
The apartment and the church hall below rented for 120 
cruzeiros a month, at that time the equivalent of $12. 

One of the first things we had to get used to was seeing 
people carry their burdens on their heads. The practice 
was and still isalmost universal. We saw coffins, which 
are simple and unpainted as a rule, carried across town on 
the heads of the deceased's family. We watched in aston- 
ishment as five or six men hoisted a piano on their heads 
and calmly walked away with it. In the market, we became 
accustomed to calling a man to follow us around with a 
large tray on his head. We like the local people placed 
everything we bought on this large wooden tray. To fill up 
one of those trays with every kind of food in the market 
cost about the equivalent of a dollar. 



DOORSTEP TO NOWHERE JJ 

In those first days there was no refrigeration, and meat 
had to be sold the day it was killed, Thus it was cheap in 
the morning; would go up in price around noon as the sup- 
ply became scarce; and as the hours went on, the price 
would drop again on whatever was left. Sometimes the 
markets would display live alligators, jaws tied, and cus- 
tomers who were hungry for this "delicacy" would come 
along and chop off pieces of the meat from the live animal, 
beginning at the tail. 

In the big public market we could buy the rarest fruits 
on earth, hundreds of varieties out of the jungle. There 
were all kinds of bananas and nuts and beans, papayas and 
cassavas and lemons. But many of the foods we were used 
to were rare and expensive; potatoes, which had to be im- 
ported, were beyond our means. Milk was available usually 
only in powdered form, and we almost never saw carrots. 

The city itself was and is a blend of the two worlds that 
meet here, the civilized modern world with all the latest 
improvements and the tropical jungle world that holds 
Belem in a green embrace. Sometimes the two meet under 
odd circumstances. 

When a visitor from the United States asked a lady who 
lived in Belem about the peril of snakes in the city, she 
replied with what she considered justifiable annoyance, 
"Snakes in Belem? Well, I've lived here fifteen years and 
never even saw one. Of course, you might try the zoo!" 

As she was telling him this, they heard something pound- 
ing and scraping under the floor in her living room. When 
the noise continued, her husband called in a carpenter, 
who took up the boards of the floor. There, to the visitor's 
delight and the lady's embarrassment, lay a boa constric- 



78 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

tor, living contentedly in a small space just under the 
player piano. 

In another instance, a recently arrived Englishman set 
up his hammock on the front porch one Sunday morning 
and was settling down with the newspapers when he saw 
something coming down one of the posts. He called his 
assistant, who told him it was a baby boa. They got a 
basket and put the boa safely away in it. A few minutes 
later another of the same size slithered down. They cap- 
tured it. Before the morning was gone they had caught 
forty-eight baby boas on the porch of their recently rented 
home. 

When the Englishman, extremely upset, spoke to the 
landlord about this, the latter was effuse in his apologies. 
Td forgotten to tell you, it just slipped my mind," he ex- 
plained to the startled Englishman. "A few years ago I put 
a pair of boas up in the attic to keep the rats and mice and 
such things away from the house. So that's where the 
youngsters came from." 

The Englishman and the landlord went at once to inves- 
tigate the attic and found the two boas still there. Thf 
Englishman handed the basket of baby boas to the land- 
lord. "If you don't get rid of these creatures and their pa- 
rents, we are leaving/' 

We grew used to the bizarre and the sometimes tragic 
in Belem, where we were settling down to organize our 
church, to recruit members, and to build our organization. 
One instance that occurred some years after our arrival 
involved a young lady who played the organ for our 
services. 

She was a very beautiful girl when she began to work 
with us, but after two years she began to change. Both 



DOORSTEP TO NOWHERE 79 

Jessie and I noticed it, and after Jessie examined her she 
was obliged to tell the mother that she thought the daugh- 
ter had leprosy. 

The mother was indignant and insisted it simply could 
not be true. In Belem at that time were Ferdinand Stahl 
and his wifehe was the author of the book on the Incas 
which had influenced us to come into the mission field. At 
Jessie's request, he and his wife looked at the girl. Both 
had seen many cases of the disease in their explorations 
and they confirmed Jessie's diagnosis. "She has leprosy," 
they told us. "You must separate her at once from the rest 
of the family and see that she uses separate dishes." 

The mother agreed. She also promised to call health 
authorities to make an official examination of the girl. The 
authorities came and made a mucus test. For about three 
months there was no report on their findings. Then it came 
through: The authorities said their reports indicated she 
was perfectly well. 

I still remember how the mother of this beautiful girl 
came to our apartment and shook the report in Jessie's face 
and cried out, "I knew my girl did not have leprosy." 

"Oh, I wish I could rejoice with you/' Jessie answered, 
"but I do not believe that report, and if you do nothing to 
arrest this case then " 

She left her sentence unfinished and the woman stalked 
angrily out and down the stairs. But the girl's condition 
became worse, day by day, until the authorities who had 
pronounced her "perfectly well" would not allow her on 
the streets. Ultimately too late for retardation of the ill- 
ness to any degree she was taken to the leper colony. As 
this is written, the terrible scourge has cost her ears and 
eyes. 



80 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

Meantime, because no precautions had been taken, an- 
other girl in the family contracted the disease and was also 
sent to the leper colony. 

Such incidents were rare in Belem. Not often were boas 
found in attics or lovely young girls sent off to leper col- 
onies. Yet these things happened; they were part of the 
world in which we began to organize our church. 

For these first months I stayed close to the city itself, 
studying conditions, learning as much as I could from the 
people who were already interested in our Adventist 
church, and making plans. One of my plans was an im- 
mediate down-to-earth one for a calcium carbide pro- 
jector which would enable me to show my slides. I took 
them to a local tinner who seemed fascinated with them 
and agreed to make the projector but wanted to know what 
it was being used for. 

When I told him it was for a religious meeting, he asked 
me more questions. Could he come and bring his wife? He 
could, and he did. The tinsmith and his family were the 
first family to come into our Belem church. Soon, as word 
spread, there were more. Almost at once we started 
a Sabbath school for the children. 

This organizing work in Belem might not have gone so 
swiftly had it not been for a kind of advance guard we'd 
had in the person of the colporteurs. Certainly no man 
could hope to grow rich in such work, particularly in a 
predominantly Catholic country where many people had 
no knowledge of any Protestant faith. Yet they gave their 
lives to carrying Bibles and books and pamphlets into 
obscure villages along the riverbanks and the narrow 
tributaries of the Amazon. Transportation was always diffi- 
cult; they were limited to river steamers or travel by 



DOORSTEP TO NOWHERE 8l 

smaller boat; with no large funds available, they usually 
traveled by canoe. 

One of these men was Andre Godrath, an Englishman 
who had come to Brazil half a century before and had 
dedicated his life to selling religious and health literature. 
His adventures in the sale of books are a story all by them- 
selves. In 1930, just a year after our arrival in Bel6m, Dr. 
Getulio Vargas and his followers staged a revolution and 
overthrew the government, establishing Vargas as dictator 
over all Brazil. During this period there was great agitation 
to keep down communism, which had already begun in- 
filtrating some areas of Brazil. The newly formed govern- 
ment was particularly vigilant against this peril, and police 
in local areas were alerted to be on guard against all per- 
sons who did not fit the accepted patterns of thought at 
that critical juncture. 

Andre was at that time selling his books in a nearby com- 
munity. For reasons beyond my understanding, one of his 
prospective customers apparently grew suspicious when 
Andre tried to sell him a volume entitled Twelve Great 
Signs of Our Lord's Return, and asked him to explain the 
book a little. When Andre got to the chapter which sug- 
gests that capital and labor should work together in har- 
mony to carry out the commands of the Lord, a policeman 
stepped out from behind a tree and arrested him. Without 
formal trial, he was hurried off to jail and placed in solitary 
confinement. He had only a hard bench on which to sleep, 
no fresh air, and no sanitary facilities. The food was very 
coarse, and as he was already suffering from a stomach dis- 
order he nearly died of starvation. 

For eleven days this man suffered in that jail. There was 
no organization of ours in the town to come to his aid. A 



82 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

Presbyterian minister who heard about his plight sent him 
a hammock to sleep on and milk and food each day. 

On Christmas Eve came a kind of amnesty from the new 
government: all Brazilian prisoners accused of being com- 
munist agitators were to be freed, as a gesture of Christian 
forgiveness. But this gesture did not extend to accused for- 
eignersand Andre was English. Instead of releasing him, 
in fact, his jailer informed Andre that he was to be shot on 
New Year's Day. 

During that week Andre spent most of his time in prayer. 
His attitude, as I found out later when I learned the story, 
was that he did not mind dying as a witness for Jesus but 
he did not want to die falsely accused of being a com- 
munist. 

On the day that he was to be taken out and shot, he 
was led beforehand into court for what could have been a 
perfunctory trial and condemnation. But I believe that 
the Lord must have heard his prayer. As he came into the 
court, he miraculously met a lawyer whom he had known 
for some time and to whom he had sold some of his reli- 
gious books. The lawyer was in court on other business but 
at once agreed to help Andre. With the lawyer's help, 
Andre was soon set free. 

This wonderful man and his work were known in many 
of the villages and backwash settlements in the tidal basin 
around Belem, as well as in remote villages which it scarcely 
seemed possible for a man to reach, traveling alone in a 
twelve-foot canoe, loaded down with pamphlets and books. 

I remember one place that I reached with several visit- 
ing church officials after a five-day steamer trip up the 
Amazon and a three-day trip on muleback over jungle 
trails into the interior. It was a village called Jeru, a one- 



DOORSTEP TO NOWHERE 83 

street town with houses built on both sides of a three-mile 
stretch of road. As we rode on our mules, people peered 
out of every doorway to see the strangers. 

We had come to Jeru because we had heard that there 
were many persons in the town who were interested in 
our work. And as we rode down the "Main Street" of the 
jungle, we came to a house with a sign on it reading: 
"Seventh-day Adventist School." This, in a village where 
the only Adventist visitor before us had been book sales- 
man Andre Godrath. 

The man who taught in this school took us to his home. 
Unlike most of the other houses in this village, the teacher's 
home was immaculate and well kept. The teacher obvi- 
ously practiced what he taught. 

As I glanced around the living room of this pleasant 
home, I noticed a large frame on the wall. In it there were 
several pictures. In the upper right-hand comer was a pic- 
ture of the president of Brazil; in the lower corner was a 
picture of one of the governors of the state; along the sides 
were smaller photographs of other government officials. 
But in the center of this frame, mounted on gold paper, 
was a picture of Andre Godrath, the seller of religious 
literature. 

The teacher explained to us, "It was he who brought us 
the books and told us about them and changed our lives." 

These sellers of religious literature for our faith regard 
themselves rightly as front-line workers. Their canoes, in 
the Amazon and its tributaries, become their homes their 
bedrooms, kitchens, and dining rooms. In the front of the 
canoe will be a "stove" made from a kerosene can and fire 
clay on which they cook their food beans usually, and 
rice, with whatever vegetables they can obtain along the 



84 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

way. The books are covered over with two thicknesses of 
palm leaves, with large banana leaves in between, to shed 
the rain. 

Their experiences are often startling. It is not unusual 
for a fish to jump into the boat and save a weary salesman 
the trouble of foraging for his supper. Sometimes at night 
an alligator will attack the canoe and try to tip it over. To 
guard against this, our colporteurs are furnished with 
canoes that rise at least eighteen inches above the water- 
too high for an alligator to overturn. 

Often at night a colporteur will paddle into a narrow 
channel where he can tie up to a tree and where the waves 
will not be high enough to be dangerous, as they would 
be on the wide river if a storm should strike. But this is no 
guarantee of safety or of a night without excitement. 

One night one of our colporteurs, a Brazilian named 
Pedro Bernardo, had tied up to a limb of a tree in one of 
these channels and gone to sleep in his canoe. It was dark 
when he tied up his boat, so he had not realized that the 
tree to which he tied was covered with thousands of what 
are called fire ants. These creatures get their name from the 
fact that their bite is terribly painful, like fire, and lasts a 
long time. Of course, an army of that size could have de- 
stroyed him. 

Pedro, however, slept peacefully in his canoe, unaware 
of this invading force crawling silently through the dark 
over the line from the tree limb to the canoe. 

While the colporteur slept on, a gust of wind stirred the 
canoe, turning it so that one side touched the limb of an- 
other tree on which were hundreds of black ants, slightly 
larger than the fire ants and their deadly enemies. 

Down the limb into the canoe, silently in the dark of the 



DOORSTEP TO NOWHERE 8$ 

night, came the black ants to meet and do battle with the 
fire ants. 

They met in the canoe, about a foot from the head of the 
sleeping seller of religious books. When Pedro awoke in 
the morning, he discovered their battlefield, strewn with 
piles of dead ants, while over the line from the canoe to 
the tree the black ants were still pursuing the fire ants and 
battling with them all the way to their nests. 

Only then was Pedro aware of the protection he had 
received that night as he slept in the dark after his hard 
day's work. 

We know of many other instances of the protection that 
seemed to hover over these men. One involved two col- 
porteurs who were making their rounds together, carrying 
a heavy pack of books to show. At one house, as they set 
their pack down to open a fence gate, one of the young men 
stepped back into the tall grass momentarily, and a bush- 
master, one of the deadliest snakes in the Amazon, bit him 
just above the ankle. 

They had no anti-snakebite serum, and the only other 
treatment possible was the ancient native Indian technique 
--to light a fire and burn the bitten leg to a crisp to destroy 
the poison. The bitten man understandably did not relish 
the idea of the fire treatment. 

"We are either doing the Lord's work or we are not," he 
told his associate. "If it is the Lord's work and He desires 
that I deliver these books to those who have ordered them, 
then I am going on and do that work right now. And if He 
does not intend that I should do so, then I am willing that 
His will be done." 

The two men found a stick and killed the snake, and 



86 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

then they knelt down in the path and prayed. After that 
they picked up their books and went on their way. 

As they went on with their work, the man virtually for- 
got that he had been bitten by a deadly snake. The wound 
did not even swell, the bitten man told me later. In the 
gospel of St. Luke there is a verse: "I give unto you power 
to tread on serpents and nothing by any means shall hurt 
you." 

To help Andre in his work in our newly opened-up 
Amazon mission district, we had a boat built for him 
actually the first of our boats along the river. It was seven- 
teen feet long and had only meager facilities for travel, but 
it marked the beginning of our expanded activity and it 
was designed to make Andre's life easier and his work more 
effective. After we built this craft, in 1930, two of our 
directors came to Belem from Rio de Janeiro and we ar- 
ranged a trip my first trip up the Amazon beyond Belem. 
Jessie did not go on this trip but stayed at home with the 
children. 

We did not start in the little boat, which we called The 
Messenger, but carried the craft along with us on a long 
river steamera twin-ruddered vessel built to carry five 
hundred passengers. There were screened-in cabins for 
first-class passengers, a promenade deck, and a music hall. 
Third-class passengers traveled on the lower deck and 
swarmed in like flies, people of many types and racial mix- 
tures. There were no sleeping quarters; everyone slept in 
his own hammock, which was attached to bulkheads or 
posts. At night it was impossible to walk through the lower 
deck, honeycombed as it was with hundreds of hammocks. 

The steamer, like most of the others of its type on the 
Amazon, carried no refrigeration. Below decks were teth- 



DOORSTEP TO NOWHERE 87 

ered about a dozen steers. Each day we would stop while 
some of the crew went out along the banks of the river and 
cut grass to feed the animals. And each day one or two of 
the steers would be butchered, so we always had fresh 
meat on board. 

When we ran out of steers, the ship would stop at one 
of the farms along the river and the sailors would go out 
and lasso a wild bull. Everyone was out on deck to watch 
as the animal was forced into a canoe and brought out to 
the boat usually with much difficulty and thrashing about 
and ultimately hoisted on board, weighed, and put down 
in the hold. The following day it would be served for 
dinner. 

After about seven days we arrived at the pleasant, trop- 
ical town of Parintins, and our boat was lowered over the 
side. Our pilot and guide, Andre, the two men from Rio, 
and I went ashore. The next day we planned to start up a 
small stream to a community where there were some Ad- 
ventists who wanted to talk about forming a church. 

We lazed through the tropical afternoon, talking of the 
journey to come; then to cool off we went for a swim in 
the crystal-clear waters of a little river, the Pirama de 
Limao. We were enjoying ourselves immensely in the cool 
water when suddenly a man came running out of the 
woods, calling to us, "Get out of the riverget out!" 

We looked at him in surprise. "There are only two kinds 
of people who swim in this river/' he shouted. "Drunkards 
and mad men." 

I was about to ask him why, when I glanced behind me 
and saw in the water where we were swimming about a 
dozen alligators, any of which would have relished a leg 
or arm. 



88 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

One part of this journey took us to Cinco Kilos,* an 
Indian village, far up the Maues River, about six hours 
above the town of Maues distances on the river are meas- 
ured almost exclusively in the hours or days it takes to go 
from one place to the next. 

It was our plan to meet with the Indians, make friends 
with the chief, and perhaps pave the way for holding one 
or two meetings. One of the directors from Rio had brought 
along, as a good- will offering, a trunkload of tin whistles. 
These he handed out to every man, woman, and child in 
the tribe. This giveaway program was a magnificent tri- 
umph; from the first moment on, the din of the whistles 
nearly drove us mad. After some hours the chief himself 
couldn't take it any longer and sent out an order for quiet. 

While his tribe sat around admiring the whistles they 
had been forbidden to blow, we talked with the old chief 
of some of the legends of the river and of Brazil, and he 
told us the story of the guarana, a flowering vine that bears 
fruit which at first looks something like ground cherries, 
but which later opens up to resemble the eye of a child. 

Once, the old chief explained, there was a little girl who 
was very beautiful and who had magic power to heal. One 
day the witch doctor, according to the legend, became so 
jealous that he slipped up behind this fairy child and 
clubbed her to death. Then everyone was sad. But another 
fairy appeared and told the people to take the child's eyes 
and plant them, and so they did, and the plant still looks 
like a child's eyes and still has power to heal any illness. 

There is a process of mashing the kernels of these berries 

* Years before, the Indians of that village had collected a ball of rubber 
weighing five kilos and sold it for a large sum of money. To commemorate 
the event, the local chief renamed the village. 



DOORSTEP TO NOWHERE 89 

into a kind of dough, baking it until hard, and grating it 
by using the dried, hard, sandpaper tongue o a big Ama- 
zon fish called the pirarucu. The result is a product that 
has five times as much caffein as coffee. Taken this way it 
becomes a terrible habit and one very difficult to break. 
And who knows maybe, as the old chief insisted, it cures 
something, if only drowsiness. 

A diluted form of this product is now manufactured in 
vast quantities and sold as a soft drink throughout Brazil, 
where it has become extremely popular. 

We talked with the chief of this and other matters of 
interest along the river, and after we had won his con- 
fidence he invited us to have dinner with him and to hold 
a religious meeting afterward. 

The chiefs house was a well-built structure, with beau- 
tiful ceilings of straw matting woven with great delicacy 
and art. Dinner was extraordinarily simple: the Indians lit 
a big fire and brought in a monkey they had killed. One 
fellow grabbed it by the tail and another by the front legs, 
and they pulled it back and forth over the open fire until 
all the hair was singed off. Then they cut it open, cut off the 
feet, and put it in a kerosene can to boil. As the water in 
the five-gallon can began to boil, a little paw kept appear- 
ing over the top of the can, for all the world as if it were 
saying good-by. Then it would disappear again. 

Bananas in the tropics are a great blessing. They were 
all we could eat for dinner that night. 

Sometime later, after this chiefs conversion, one of his 
proud boasts was, "We don't eat monkey meat any more." 

When it was time for the meeting the first I had ever 
held among Indians about fifty people crowded into a 
little room in the chiefs house, and we began by trying to 



go LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

teach them to sing some hymns. One was "J esus Loves Me, 
This I Know," which they liked so much they insisted on 
singing it over and over. Then our director from Rio gave 
the prayer while the Indians bowed their heads reverently. 

After that I stood up to begin my sermon. Only four of 
the group understood Portuguese, so I had one of them 
translate for me. I started with John 3:16: "For God so 
loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that 
whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have 
everlasting life." Then I built around this verse, telling how 
Jesus had been born in a manger, how He grew up, and 
finally how He loved us so that He gave His life to redeem 
us from sin. 

As I spoke, I noticed that my interpreter seemed to be 
saying the same words over and over. I called one of the 
others to my side and asked if the interpreter was actually 
getting across what I was trying to tell them. The man 
explained that my interpreter didn't want to take upon 
himself the responsibility for what I was saying, so he 
prefaced each and every sentence with, "The white man 
says. . . ." 

After that, I went on speaking, and despite this difficulty 
I could see tears in the eyes of some of these men and 
women, as I talked. When I asked how many wanted to 
know more about the life of our Lord, every hand went up 
instantly. 

These Maues River Indians had, of course, had previous 
contact with traders, and so were not frightened by white 
men and had no inclination to run from their villages when 
we appeared. Yet they were primitive in many ways and 
wore practically no clothes at all. Indeed, in the midst of 
the service, a young girl about sixteen years old came 



DOORSTEP TO NOWHERE Ql 

down the center aisle of the room, stark naked. No one 
appeared concerned in the least except the old chief, who 
stood up and spoke a few words to her quietly. She left 
and came back in a moment, wearing a shawl. 

This was the way these people lived at the time we first 
went there. We eventually started a group among them, 
and built a schoolhouse there. 

We went on down the Maues River after the meeting, 
back to the city of Maues. Near there was the man who 
had sent us up to preach to the Indians and we stopped for 
a brief visit with him. His name was Jose Baptista Michiles, 
and he was the first Brazilian in the Amazon district to 
come into our church; one of the colporteurs had brought 
him some literature, which had changed his life. 

Michiles was a man of some means and vast influence 
throughout the valley. He had large land holdings with 
more than nine hundred head of cattle and grew other 
crops, including Brazil nuts. He had many people working 
for him, and a number of them came into our church as a 
result of his example. The Michiles family came to be our 
good friends. His wife was part Indian and they had six 
children all were sent to our college in Sao Paulo and all 
are now college graduates. 

When we reached Maues on this return trip, I was 
anxious to send a message to Jessie in Belem, since she had 
had no word from me for some days. The man in the tele- 
graph office, however, explained that the machine had 
broken down and no one in the city knew how to fix it. I 
got out the kit of tools I had taken with me, and after three 
hours I had the machine operating and was able to send 
my message. 

We went on up the river to Manaus and then on back 



Q2 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

down the river in our little boat. There we ran into trouble. 
We came to one point where we could save about five 
hours if we could take a short cut by way of a narrow 
stream. We asked one of the natives if the water was deep 
enough for our boat, and he assured us it was three feet or 
more ample for our craft. So we started down this narrow 
stream. It was about five or six feet wide with high grass 
growing on both sides, and the sensation was something 
like riding in a ditch through endless hayfields. 

But it did not go on very far for us. Suddenly we found 
ourselves aground in less than ten inches of water. Because 
the current was strong even if the water was shallow, it 
was impossible for us to back up or to try to push the boat 
against that current. We decided that our best move would 
be to go ahead, even if it meant that we had to drag the 
boat over the mud. 

Since this was Andre's boat, to be used in delivering his 
books, we had accepted him as the captain, and in this 
crisis he proved his stamina. Our only chance was for all of 
us to get out of the boat and push, Andre stated firmly. 
There was danger in the mud and the tall grass snakes 
and other creatures that could bring destruction. "And 
anybody who doesn't get out, I'll throw out," the old man 
added for extra emphasis. 

We did as the gnarled veteran of the Amazon Valley 
ordered. We sank into mud and slime that held peril at 
every step, and together we strained and pushed and 
hauled the boat across the shallow areas. It was a grueling, 
sweating, hazardous business but somehow we kept at it, 
goaded and coaxed and badgered by that white-haired 
man who would not give up. 

It was not too long before the water began to deepen, 



DOORSTEP TO NOWHERE 93 

and after close to an hour of pushing we found ourselves 
over the shallow part and back again into deep water. We 
ran into one terrible storm on the rest of our trip down the 
Amazon but managed to get into one of the little side 
streams to ride it out. 

When we reached Belem, I learned that Jessie and the 
children, far from leading sedate and uneventful lives, had 
been in the center of a minor revolution, most of which had 
been fought out with wild gunplay directly in front of our 
house. 

Across from our house was a newspaper office, the larg- 
est building in town. The paper was opposed to the policies 
of the government and was not afraid to say so editorially. 
Apparently the government officials suspected, or said they 
suspected, that the building was to be used as the center 
of a revolt. Soldiers were sent to put down the rebellion 
and, if possible, to force the paper out of business. 

Jessie and the youngsters, of course, had no idea of all 
this. They had been asleep when shots began to ring out. 
Our police dog, whose job it was to protect them, had 
crawled under the bed in fright. 

The children and our maid and Jessie got down on their 
knees and prayed. "You don't need to be afraid," Jessie 
told them. "We will be protected." 

The fighting continued sporadically through the night. 
One man, Jessie told me, was shot right on our front steps, 
and in the morning the maid had to go down and wash off 
the blood. 

The next day men arrived with crowbars, determined to 
smash their way into the office of the newspaper. But the 
owner had outguessed them. He had obtained a high- 



94 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

tension transformer to step up the voltage and electrify the 
front door. When the men tried to break in with crowbars, 
three of them fell dead. 

The result was a kind of stalemate, but the owner had 
saved his paper from the invaders. Brazilians have a stub- 
born streak of independence, something like that of early 
New England. 

Right or wrong, they stick by their beliefs even unto 
death. 

But now it was almost time for our furlough back to the 
States. We had delayed it for a year in order to go to the 
Amazon and to learn about conditions there so we would 
know what was most needed to serve these people. 

I knew the answer now, after this trip. 

"We cannot do our full job or even a major part of it 
here in Belem, or by taking trips up the river on the steam- 
ers/' I told Jessie. "We're going to have to have our own 
boat so that we can go wherever we have to go." 

We talked a long time about this. I would have to design 
a boat myself, we decided, and build it here in Belem, 
after our return from the States. I knew nothing about 
building boats and not very much about navigation, and 
the Amazon is a wide and treacherous river and a chal- 
lenge even to the most experienced sailors. 

But such considerations, Jessie and I agreed, were 
merely details beside the far greater challenge of bringing 
help to the people of the river. 



CHAPTER 6 

LOGBOOK 



"APRIL 10. Pulled anchor at 3:10. Nice morn- 
ing. Little moon and two beautiful stars in east. At 6:20 the 
motor began to heat so the boy got in and found grass in 
propeller. Motor cooled down to normal. . . . 

"April 13, During the night a big island came floating 
down the small river and caught our boat, broke the big 
limb of the tree that we tied to, and pressed us into the 
trees along the bank and broke one window glass. . . . 

"April 15. Quiet night. Lots of rain. Left at 5 and at 11 
we saw a big bunch of orchids in a tree, so stopped and got 
the bunch, twenty-five flowers on one plant. Passed mouth 
of Rio Branco and at 7 stopped in front of a small town 
called Carveeira for night." 

So read a few scattered excerpts of the day-to-day notes 
I kept in pen or pencil in a five-cent copybook the log of 
the Luzeiro. 

In the woods of the Amazon, a monster of a tree spills 
over with a giant roaring protest as it crashes down into the 
undergrowth. It has been centuries in the growing, but 
now it is to be snaked out of the woods, floated down the 
stream, and brought finally to the boat yard in Belem 
where the boat I've designed is to be built. So we began to 

95 



96 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

make our craft out of the sinews of the jungle world it was 
to serve. 

But to reach that point there had been a long time of 
preparation. Our furlough was not merely a time for rest 
and visiting and gathering around the family table back in 
Nebraska to relate all our exciting adventures. It was a 
time for making a tour of many states. Throughout Amer- 
ica, particularly along the West Coast, we talked to both 
children and adults about our work and plans. 

Our Missionary Volunteer Societies helped, and the chil- 
dren's groups worked hard to raise contributions. When we 
returned to Belem in 1931, after our year's leave, we had 
collected enough to build our boat $5,400. 

Meanwhile, I had been giving myself a full-fledged 
course in boatbuilding. I read and studied everything I 
could find on the subject. I studied problems of navigation 
such as we expected to encounter on the Amazon with its 
currents, its tributaries, the floating islands of grass, the 
flooded areas and tidal lakes. 

On the ship taking us back to Belem, I got out my draft- 
ing materials and began to design our craft. I had learned 
quite a lot about small boats. I also had to figure on the 
special problems of the Amazon: the need for a sturdy 
craft because of the storms which are often accompanied 
by high waves, yet the need as well for a shallow-draft 
boat because of wide variations in tides and depths, and 
the difficulty of getting into some of the little ports along 
the rivers when the water is low. 

The boat I designed was thirty-three feet long, ten feet 
wide, and drew only two and a half feet of water. It had 
a double- V bottom the two V's ran the length of the boat, 
one on each side, with a space between. The bottom was 



LOGBOOK 97 

designed in a convex curve slightly higher at the center 
keel than at the edges. This gave us a little dead space 
under the boat that helped to keep the boat steady. The 
double V was useful in many ways. The boat would stand 
safely on its V-shaped haunches when the tide ran out, 
and this gave us an easy method of cleaning the bottom 
or making emergency repairs on a mud flat miles from 
civilization. 

Once the boat was on paper, I had to have materials 
and a place to build. I found a yard in Belem where, in 
fact, we had built The Messenger for Andre but the man 
who owned it was dismayed at my design, told me it was 
unlike anything he had ever heard of, and said it would 
turn over the moment it hit the water. He finally agreed 
to let me build it in his yard but only on condition that I 
would not hold him responsible for the disaster he was 
certain would come with the launching. 

I hired a man who knew Brazilian woods to get my 
lumber, and we sat down and figured out what we would 
need. The keel was to be made of an ironlike wood called 
pan de arco. The main planking was to be of itatuba, one 
of the toughest woods known to man. Twelve trees were 
needed for the planking, and eight of the larger trees to 
make the ribs. Six large cedars went into the finishing 
woodwork for the boat. All of these had to be brought out 
of the jungle, down to Belem. It took two months. 

The planks that went into the Luzeiro were one and a 
fourth inches thick, eight inches wide, and thirty-three 
feet long. The trees out of which they were hewn were 
several hundred years old at least, for they grow slowly. 
There is no way of knowing their exact age. There are no 
age circles on trees in the tropics because there are no wide 



98 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

variations in the seasons or the rate of growth. In the 
Amazon jungle, the variety of hardwood trees alone is 
said to number more than 450. 

Cut in the jungle about fifty-five miles west of Belem, 
on the Muju River, these trees were dragged out by oxen 
to a small stream, floated to a larger stream and then on 
down to Belem. This was harder than it sounds, for itatuba 
logs will not float and we had to fasten lighter-weight trees 
to these logs to get them downstream. Naturally, when 
they are shaped into planks and put into place on a boat, 
they float. The itatuba has a kind of emery in its veins, a 
grit it seems to draw up from its roots. Because of this, it 
burns up the teeth of a power saw. There are only two 
ways to cut this wood. One is to use a hand saw, sawing 
up and down through the log lengthwise, with a high 
sawhorse, and one man sawing from a level above the 
other. 

The other is to square the log up with a broad ax and 
then cut little notches at just the width desired for a board. 
Sawdust and kerosene are put in these grooves and a 
match touched to them. This cracks the wood in a straight 
line at the desired point. After the same thing is done on 
the other end of the log, wedges are driven into the 
grooves and the rough board is split off and trued up to 
exact measurement with an ax. It is a hard job and most of 
our planks were sawed off with the hand saw, which wasn't 
quite so difficult. 

The ribs we made of piquia, a wood with a grain that 
is twisted and curled; it can be cut into odd shapes without 
splitting. I drew out the patterns myself on thin pieces 
of wood, and from these the actual ribs were made with 



LOGBOOK 99 

a hand saw and a narrow blade. Then we set the work to 
lay the keel. 

It was a primitive boat yard, with no circular saws, no 
power saws, no planing machines. At that time virtually 
everything had to be done by hand. I was in the boat yard 
most of the time, while Jessie carried on much of the 
daily work of our church. Jack would bring over lunch for 
me at noon and I would work right through the heat of the 
day. 

The boat-yard operator, Alfonso Mallo, still insisted our 
craft wouldn't float. But he did watch our progress with 
increasing interest, and asked many questions. I explained 
some of my innovations. He went over my plans again and 
finally agreed that perhaps he had been hasty. He had 
never before seen a craft like ours, but there was a chance 
it might stay right side up. 

By the time our hull was finished, our motor had ar- 
riveda two-cylinder, twenty-horsepower diesel I had 
bought for approximately $700 from a Belem dealer. I 
had put in the wiring myself. Now we were able to put 
in the motor, hook up the propeller and the electric 
equipment. By the remote-control system I had developed, 
the motor could be started like a truck from the driver's 
seat. 

Of course, we had brought back with us from the States 
many things hard to find in Brazil: winch, anchor, anchor 
chain, an auxiliary motor for an electric-light plant, little 
stoves for cooking. Our china and silver and stainless 
steelware were from home. Most of our other equipment 
bedding, mattresses, sheets, and towels we bought in 
Brazil. Our stoves were of the kind called primeless pres- 
sure cookers and worked with kerosene. They were good 



1OO LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

and provided a kind of elemental pressure-cooking system, 
but they made a terrible noise that frightened Jessie out 
of the kitchen the first time we tried them. 

At last she was finished. She was a strange-looking craft, 
I had to admit, more like a houseboat than a river-going 
launch. Yet she was sleek and slim, bright and sparkling, 
with her white paint and gray-and-black trim. I was as 
proud and excited as I had been as a youth, with my first 
long pants. 

July 4, 1931 approximately three months after we had 
begun to search for wood the Luzeiro was launched. 
Jessie christened her with a bottle of imitation champagne 
that was simply soda water while forty of our church 
people watched. The Luzeiro slid down the ways and 
floated nicely exactly at the line I had marked as the 
center of buoyancy. 

The first man on board was the boat-yard owner, effu- 
sive with his excited congratulations. 

We spent a couple of hours making a trial run around 
Belem harbor. All was well. We brought the boat back to 
finish the painting and to take on our final stores beans, 
rice, sugar, sacks of flour, matches, and our medical sup- 
plies, of course. On this first trip they were limited 
basically they consisted of quinine, medicine for hook- 
worm, Epsom salts, castor oil, and headache pills. 

We spent all afternoon loading the boat, had our 
evening meal at home, and then went back on board. 
About eleven o'clock the tide was in and we moved to deep 
water in the harbor and anchored for our first night on 
board. We had with us our children, Jack and Marian, 
and our good friend, Andre. 



LOGBOOK 1O1 

Of course, we had to spend a while looking everything 
over, like children examining toys at Christmas. We looked 
not once but several times, and we didn't miss a single 
detail. 

The boat was divided into four basic parts: Forward 
was a large room that served as a combination living room, 
dining room, bedroom, and navigating room. There were 
three beds that were hung on the wall by leather straps 
and came down at night like Pullman berths. Two hung 
lengthwise by the windows, one crosswise in front. All 
were completely curtained for privacy. There were two 
additional sofas under the window beds, so we could sleep 
five comfortably if necessary. 

Behind this main room was the engine room. Then came 
the bath and sanitary installations; and in the stern was the 
galley. Everything was snug and shipshape with storage 
of oil tanks below decks and other supplies in cabinets 
and drawers. We hadn't wasted one cubic inch of space. 

I can honestly say that this was one of the happiest 
nights of my life. After we had finished our inspection and 
climbed into our berths, I lay there trying to grasp the 
reality: We had reached a milestone in our work. We were 
here, we knew the language, and we had our own boat. 
With it we could go to the most remote places of the 
Amazon, where lived people we had never before been 
able to reach. 

We were up early to catch the tide, and were under way 
before dawn. We were heading upstream, almost due west, 
toward a sixty-mile-wide bay called the Baia de Marajo, 
formed where the Tocantins River spills into the Amazon. 
The day dawned clear and cloudless. The tide was behind 
us and the wind, of course, came in from the sea the trade 



102 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

winds always blow from east to west on the Amazon. Be- 
cause we were going with the tide and the current, there 
were no waves. 

Jessie cooked breakfast. It was a kind of celebration that 
morning; we had fried eggs and toast and chocolate. 

The day was full of excitement and satisfaction. The 
Luzeiro behaved perfectly, and I found that my do-it- 
yourself course in navigation had paid off. While Jack and 
Marian ran from one end of the boat to the other, and 
Jessie became acquainted with her kitchen, we crossed 
the dangerous sixty-mile stretch that was the bay and kept 
on up the south bank of the river into what is called the 
Straits of Brevis or the Narrows, a strange, spider-web 
world of hundreds of little rivers that flow through and 
around and past these islands. 

We anchored long after dark that night in a narrow 
stream, somewhat offshore. 

And then we began to learn the fantastic sounds of the 
woods and the river: the giant bullfrogs, the big rats of 
the woods called toros, the alligators, the insects. Later 
we were to grow used to them, but that first night they 
were all new and strange. 

Oddest of all were the howling monkeys, which live 
all along the river. These are small, reddish-brown animals 
who seem to delight in putting on symphony concerts 
about four o'clock in the morning. They even have a musical 
director who gives a recognizable signal that starts them 
off. Once this sounds, the woods come alive with hideous 
noises something like a bunch of hogs grunting. The 
symphony starts off softly, and the noise gradually builds 
up into a grand crescendo. Then, on another signal from 
the musical-director monkey, it stops. All is silent. The 



LOGBOOK 1O3 

quiet is impressive and lasts for about a minute. Then 
the next number begins. 

All these monkeys are huddled together in a group in 
the woods, and when they begin their concert they shake 
the limbs of the trees in rhythm. After one group has 
performed for ten minutes or so, it will halt and another 
orchestra, closer or farther away, will take up the per- 
formance. 

As the days passed and we drew farther and farther 
away from civilization, we saw nature as we had never 
known it existed. Leaping fish and birds of every type and 
color; great flocks of white herons so many hundreds of 
them that their wings seemed like white clouds. And odors! 
In the early morning, particularly, the smell of the woods 
is like perfume and flowers and earth, melons and rain 
and giant dripping leaves, all blended together. 

We had been heading up streams on our way west, often 
getting into parands, as the small rivers are called, getting 
lost, and having to find our way back to the main stream. 
Sometimes Andre himself had no idea of our whereabouts. 
Oil our first Sabbath we anchored along the way for 
morning service and weekly Sabbath school. We were sit- 
ting there studying our Bibles and singing a few hymns 
together when I looked out over the bright-yellowish 
water and saw, coming toward us, an old man in a canoe. 
He came up to our boat, excused himself for interrupting 
our religious service, and asked a question I have since 
heard many thousands of times on the river, "Mister, have 
you any medicine for the fever?" 

"Yes, we have some medicine," I answered. "Who is 
sick?" 



104 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

"In my home a number of people are sick. All of my 
family are there and they are all sick with the fever." Then 
he added, "We live up the river from here. Will you come 
to help us?" 

I assured him that we would hut that it would take us 
a little time to get under way again. 

"How will you know which house it is?" he asked. 

"That's simple/' I said. "When you hear our boat, come 
outside your house and wave a white towel." 

When we reached that spot on the river a short time 
later, however, he wasn't in front of the house. He was 
sitting in his canoe in the middle of the stream waving a 
big white sheet. 

I will never forget the sight that greeted us as we went 
into his house. The roof and walls were of thatched palm 
leaves, held up by poles on the sides and with one main 
support in the middle of the one large room. From that 
center post, radiating out to the side walls like spokes of 
some giant, quivering wheel, were twenty-one hammocks, 
and in each of these was someone who was sick. 

Some were shaking with the malaria chills. Others were 
burning with high fever, motionless and gaunt. Still others 
had broken out into a cold sweat. At that time all we had 
with us to treat this disease was quinine; more specific 
drugs and treatments were to come years later. But quinine 
we had. We sterilized our needles and began to inject it. 
It was obvious that the treatment did good, not only 
medically but psychologically; someone was doing some- 
thing, these people were not merely being left there to die. 

When we had finished with the injections, the old man 
said to me, "Mister, would you please sing some of these 



LOGBOOK 1O5 

hymns that I heard you singing when I was coming to your 
boat?" 

So we opened our book and sang to them; and I read 
from the Bible, and prayed, asking the Lord to heal them. 

The man asked us to go to other houses in the com- 
munity where there were sick who needed us. We spent 
the remainder of the Sabbath and other days to come 
treating the ill in this area. 

We knew then, in those beginning days, the need. There 
were no doctors for hundreds of miles. Aside from our 
medicines, which were given free, as were our treatments, 
the only medical supplies were a few brought in by boat 
and sold at prices most of the people could not afford. We 
knew that we had to get more medicines and further medi- 
cal training to help these people to better health. You 
can't preach to people too sick even to listen. 

So began our medical mission. On our second trip we 
had a much larger supply of medicines to fight the plagues 
of the river, and ultimately we made hundreds of trips 
and treated ten of thousands of people. 

Our journeys often lasted for many months. Our boat 
was not merely a boat, it was our home, in many respects 
perhaps more so than any house we had lived in before. 
It was also our clinic, our consulting room, and our coun- 
seling office for people as beset with emotional problems 
and worries and personality clashes as those in a more 
civilized world. By her counsel, Jessie helped to save many 
a marriage and kept many a home from smashing up. 

Many of our experiences were heart-rending, but there 
was also laughter and fun, and adventure enough. Our boat 
boys, who helped with the cooking and the chores and the 
details of boat operation, were always providing the unex- 



106 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

pected note. We had all kinds of them over the years- 
good and bad, those with experience and those without, 
some who seemed able to cope with any emergency and 
others who could be depended on to do the wrong thing 
at the wrong time. 

Our very first boy was a bright-eyed Indian who man- 
aged to get in the way of a small-time revolution later 
on, and was shot by government troops. 

There was also John, known as our reluctant bride- 
groom because for years he warded off marriage to a 
young lady to whom he had proposed. She insisted they 
were betrothed, and so did her family. After four years 
of stalling, John found himself trapped. In the city of 
Manaus, Jessie helped him choose the bridal outfit, and 
the marriage went off with an elaborate ceremony, fol- 
lowed by a brief honeymoon on our boat. That was the 
end of John's carefree life on the river. 

Another boy had come to our boat fresh out of the back- 
woods of the jungle. One night I asked him to take the 
wheel for a few moments while I rested. "Be careful," I 
warned him, "don't run us into the banks." We were mak- 
ing good time with the tide, doing about seventeen knots. 
Suddenly there was a terrible crash; we had run directly 
into the bank and only the fact that the river was high 
and the bank heavily wooded, so that the branches acted 
as a cushion, kept us from ripping apart. As it was, there 
was only minor damage and a startled boat boy who 
seemed to have no idea how it could have happened. 
"Maybe the bank hit us," he suggested. 

Later on, foolishly, I asked him to take over in mid- 
stream, where we were comparatively safe from charging 
banks. I pointed to a star. "All you have to do is steer by 



LOGBOOK 107 

that star/' I told him. "Don't take your eye off it and 
nothing can go wrong." 

"Yes, Senhor Leo/' he said. "Don't worry." 

After about half an hour, he called out. "Senhor Leo, 
Senhor Leo, I need your help!" 

I hurried back. The boy was standing worriedly at the 
wheel. *1 passed that star already," he said. "So could 
you give me another one?" 

I looked outside. We were completely turned around 
and heading rapidly in the wrong direction. 

The Luzeiro was crowded when another boy tried to 
light the stove and almost blew us up people, boat, and 
all. The kerosene caught fire and the entire galley and 
engine room were swept with flames. I got the people off 
the boat, ran back with a quilt and threw it over the 
stove, and then picked up the stove and threw it and the 
quilt into the river. 

By this time, however, I was overcome with fumes and 
collapsed on top of the motor. At that time the flywheel 
was not encased and it was turning at about 1,500 times 
a minute as my knee struck against it. 

In the excitement I felt nothing, but when the fire was 
out and things had calmed down, I noticed that there was 
blood on my leg. The flywheel had cut it through to the 
bone. Jessie staunched the bleeding and gave me first aid. 
In the morning we reached a city where we obtained ele- 
mentary medical care-these were the days before we 
ourselves had the latest medical equipment right on the 
boat. The gash was sewed up tidily, without anesthetic, 
with an ordinary needle and thread, while I gritted my 
teeth to keep from screaming with the pain. From that 



108 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

time on, we were careful to keep inexperienced boat boys 
away from stove and matches. 

As years passed, the importance of our work along the 
river increased. As the people came to depend on us, the 
services which our church rendered were many and com- 
plex, and administrative work became more and more of 
a problem. 

More boats were needed, and more people. It became 
part of my job to direct the building and operation of these 
additional craft. The people came largely from our local 
missions. In 1942, we built the Luzeiro II, which was of 
the same design as the first but slightly larger. Jessie and 
I took over and turned over the first for other missionary 
work. Later, after the war, came Luzeiros 111 and IV, and 
a number of smaller boats which we used for local work. 

With this growing fleet we were reaching out into other 
rivers in other areas of South Americathe world above 
Manaus, the world of Peru and Bolivia. One of our boats 
also covered the San Francisco River in Baia. In 1955, we 
built a small boat called the Sentinela for use by our book- 
selling evarigelists. By 1958, we had twelve boats scattered 
over South America. 

Other craft which look very much like ours also began 
plying the Amazon. During World War II, when the Amer- 
icans came to Brazil to try to build up the country's rub- 
ber production, they built eight boats patterned on my 
design and used them as they worked, up and down the 
river, to improve health conditions among the workers. 

Materials of all kinds got scarcer and scarcer, and I 
spent a good deal of my time scrounging for things we 
desperately needed. 

In Belem there were a number of American officials in 



LOGBOOK 10g 

the main office of the rubber-development program, and 
one day I sailed the Luzeiro around to their headquarters 
to see if I could pick up some equipment. 

As we pulled up to the dock, a well-dressed American 
came up to me and asked, "Where'd you get that boat?" 

I told him I built it myself. The man said, 'I'd like to 
buy it. How much do you want for it?" 

I said that it wasn't for sale, Then I explained that we 
were members of the Adventist organization and rather 
than sell our boats we wanted to build more if we could 
only get the motors. The man, whose name, I learned, 
was Hines, looked at me oddly and said, "What kind of 
motors?" 

"Any kind I can get." 

"Well/' he said, "I have three ten-horsepower outboard 
Johnson motors. If you want them, you can have them." 

Want them! I could hardly believe it. I did my best to 
thank him, and later we invited him to have dinner on 
board with us. Jessie outdid herself that night in preparing 
an especially delicious Brazilian dinner. She was as grate- 
ful as I and maybe even more curious as to why he had 
suddenly given us those motors, just like that. 

She did not dare ask him outright, of course. But as 
the evening went on Mr. Hines began to tell us of his 
background. He had worked for the Goodyear people in 
Africa, he said, and while they were there his wife had 
been taken ill and needed an immediate operation. They 
were in the middle of the African wilderness and the only 
civilized help available was an Adventist mission-where 
there was an American doctor. 

"We rushed my wife over to this mission by car and 
the doctor saved her life. Since then I've always had a 



110 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

warm spot in my heart for your missionaries and their 
work. I could never thank them enough." 

Every year we set out in February for the journey up- 
river from which we would not return until August. This, 
we found, was the best time of year, as the river reached 
flood stage in May or June and there was plenty of water 
to reach every home where we might be needed. At that 
time the river may rise as much as sixty feet. And the 
winds coming in from the Atlantic and sweeping upriver 
were not so strong or dangerous as at other seasons of the 
year. The tidal basin runs for several hundred miles up the 
river. ThQ pororoca or moon-tidal wave of twelve to six- 
teen feet sweeps up the river at least once a month. 

Making preparations for one of these trips was a pro- 
tracted undertaking. The boat had to be outfitted, and the 
bottom of the hull painted in copper or arsenic paint to 
protect it from the bore that eats into the planking and 
causes serious damage. Then came the supplies. We made 
lists which we checked and rechecked endlessly, for if we 
forgot anything we might have to do without it for a 
long, long time. Our first consideration, in our later trips, 
was medicine and here we always had the help of our 
church people in gathering and wrapping and storing the 
vital supplies. 

Groceries, linen the housekeeping side of things were 
largely in the hands of my wonderful wife and our boat 
girl, Irene. However, particularly in the early years, buying 
groceries in Belem for a long journey was not quite the 
same as shopping in a supermarket back in America. Fresh 
foods and fruit and vegetables we could obtain along the 



LOGBOOK 



way. But we had to settle for substitutes for many of the 
familiar manufactured foods and cereals. 

Finally, when everything was in readiness, our helpers 
would bring our luggage and supplies on down to the 
boat usually carrying most of it on their heads and medi- 
cines and personal baggage and perhaps some new article 
of furniture we had bought in Belem would all go on 
board. Then we would go around to the fuel dock to take 
on iron drums of oil 758 gallons in all. This was kept in 
our fuel tank or in the drums attached underneath our 
boat. 

So we would start up a river that had become as familiar 
to us as the street outside our house in Belem. Within an 
hour the skyline of the city would disappear as we rounded 
Parrot Island, and the sound of our motor would be almost 
drowned out by the screeches of the birds for which it 
was named. They would fly in pairs, hundreds of them, as 
we passed, making an incredible din with their shrill cries. 

We knew all the perils-the floating logs, some just 
below the surface where they could easily rip our boat 
apart; the alligators, as plentiful in our early years as the 
mosquitoes and still a navigational hazard; the tricky cur- 
rents and the rocks awaiting a careless or untried pilot. 

We had learned short cuts. Up a side river out of Belem 
is a canal dug by slave labor a hundred years ago. That 
saved us from having to cross the hazardous stretch of 
the Marajo Bay. 

We knew the ways of the river and of travel. Upstream, 
we would hug the shore, where we could hear the shrill 
cries of bright-plumaged araras as they flew back and forth 
among the tall palms. Downstream with the current, like 
the river folk, we would go farther out, toward midstream. 



112 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

We crossed wherever possible at the narrowest spots; 
knew that crossings from south to north can be difficult 
and dangerous; and that in a small boat such as ours it's 
often impossible to make headway against the currents. 

We learned to trust in the protection of the Lord. An 
anchor chain breaks on a night when I am away, and 
Jessie wakens to find the boat swinging giddily among the 
other small craft in the harbor. But she and the boat boy 
get the motor started and so bring the Luzeiro under con- 
trol and guide her safely to where she can be tied up at 
the dock. A rudder nearly breaks offbut holds, virtually 
by a thread, until we are safely across a dangerous place, 

One year we had both the Luzeiros I and II at our 
annual camp meeting in Maues. The people were hungry 
for festivals and get-togethers, and we tried to satisfy this 
desire. On this occasion we had anchored the two little 
boats together, side by side, and the director of one of our 
missions had stretched canvas across the two boats to 
make shade for those waiting to have their teeth pulled, 
or cleaned, or filled, as required. Our boatthe Luzeiro 11 
was filled that day with sick who came to be treated, 
including quite a few of our followers. Those who had 
come to the meeting were getting injections of quinine 
along with the people of the area. 

The five-year-old son of one of the directors was climb- 
ing around the boat when suddenly I heard a splash. 
Johnny had tumbled in. It was a moment of terror, for the 
waters were filled with instant death. The electric eel 
can stun and cause death by drowning I recall an in- 
stance where thirty-four head of cattle were drowned in 
this way on one plantation before their owner discovered 
it was an eel at work. The deadly piranha was there in 



LOGBOOK 113 

large numbers this is a little fish with teeth so sharp 
they can tear a man to a skeleton in a matter of a minute 
or two. There were entangling vines and roots and swirl- 
ing debris and logs and the killer alligators. 

But the boat boy heard the splash, too. All dressed up 
in white linen for the evening meeting, he plunged in to 
save the boy. The child's father dove in a second later, but 
our boat boy had reached little John and brought him, 
dripping and frightened, back to the boat. 

On one of our early trips we had to cross a fifteen-mile 
stretch of the Amazon, a journey that usually took about 
an hour. It was at floodtime, when the rains come and in 
the Andes the snows melt and rush down the streams 
feeding into this continental river way. The river rises 
rapidly and the currents swirl on toward the sea, uprooting 
hundreds of trees along the banks. Some of them, like the 
itatuba, are so hard that they are heavier than water and 
sink to the bottom. Others float just under the surface, 
making them hard to see and dangerous. 

On that particular crossing we struck one of these sub- 
merged logs right in the middle of the wide river, where 
the current is at its most dangerous. We had no lifeboat 
with us, not even life jackets. There we were in the 
middle of the river with a huge gaping hole in the bottom 
and our boat rapidly filling with water. 

Instinctively we sent up a prayer. I saw a long roll of 
canvas about a yard and a half wide. I had left this on 
top of the boat to dry. I felt impelled to unroll it. While 
I held one end and the boat boy the other, we passed it 
over the bow of the boat and underneath the bottom, 
working it back until we got to the place where the water 
was pouring into the gaping gash. As the canvas came 



114 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

near the hole, the pressure of the water forced it against 
the hole like a stopper in a sink, and no more water could 
enter. We were able then to make temporary repairs on the 
inside with wood and canvas, and to bail out the water 
that had poured in up to the floor of the boat. 

And we thanked the Lord that He had inspired us to 
use that canvas. 

I was the captain of my boat, licensed as such under 
Brazilian law. Later, in 1937, a measure was passed that 
only citizens of that country could have licenses to captain 
any kind of boat or ship. But because of the work we had 
done and were doing, and because I already had my cre- 
dentials in' any event, an exception was made in my case. 

On our other boats, however, as our fleet of "mercy 
craft" expanded throughout the Amazon and Brazil and 
later into other South American countries, we used na- 
tionals as captains. 

In many parts of Brazil the rivers are still the chief 
means of communication, and one of the responsibilities 
of little boats and their owners and operators is to serve 
as messengers and delivery boys and postmen all along 
the river. If we were going to a city or to some other place, 
we always asked if we could do anyone a favor carry a 
parcel, mail a letter, make a purchase, or get something 
repaired. Many times we traveled with collections of alarm 
clocks and watches to be fixed, umbrellas to be repaired, 
and letters to deliver. Often we would spend a whole day 
in a city running around delivering letters. 

One item in demand was shoes. Many of the people 
along the river had no idea what size shoe they wore but 
they would give us a piece of paper torn to fit their foot, 



LOGBOOK 115 

and when we reached a city like Manaus we would hunt 
for a pair of shoes that size. 

In addition to carrying "unofficial" mail for friends, all 
boats along the river were required to carry the mail offi- 
cially as well. We had to report to the post office in each 
community and tell them where we planned to go next and 
our estimated time of departure. If there was a mail sack 
for that port, we had to take it along; whether there was 
or not, we had to get a pass before we left, stating what 
mail, if any, we were carrying. Once, when leaving the 
town of Santarem, I forgot to get the pass. At our next 
port of call Alenquer I was placed under arrest by the 
local authorities because I did not have my pass. 

I got word to the mayor of my plight. He interceded 
in my behalf and sent a wire to Santarem asking if I had 
taken any mail. When the reply came back in the negative, 
I was released. This was the only time I was arrested and 
the closest I ever came to spending the night in a tropical 
lockup. 

Through this incident, however, the mayor, who was 
also a doctor, became a good friend. On our next visit he 
read the Bible with us and shortly thereafter he and his 
wife came to one of our meetings in Santarem and he an- 
nounced that he was giving up his job as mayor to become 
an Adventist medical missionary. 

After a three-year course at our college in Sao Paulo, 
he became director of our hospital in the Brazilian state 
of Mato Grosso, devoted to fighting the terrible disease 
known as "wildfire"--a rash that covers the whole body 
and burns like fire itself. He is now both doctor and 
minister. 



Il6 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

Being arrested was a small price to pay for such an out- 
come as this. 



The logbook was mainly sketchy jottings to keep a 
record of where we went. Yet for us these notes are a 
sample pattern of our lives: 

"January 17. Left Cuno at 12:00 Ran to Lauro. Canoe 
leaked. Stopped many times to bail out water. Lots of 
rain. Got into Lauro at 6:00. Stopped for night at 7:00. 
Run in all 7% hours." 

"February 18. Tied up at bridge and a woman came 
and asked for medicine. Then asked us to go to her home 
to see boy with cancer. We went across river and about one 
kilometer down-river to their home. The man is a member 
of the Pentacostal church. The boy is about fourteen years 
of age. His right knee very much swollen but no pain. We 
treated him with penicillin and left ten injections for him 
to take. The tide turned about 11:30. We went on up- 
river. . . . 

"September 3. Sabbath. Had Sab. school and in after- 
noon baptized seven souls. . . ." 



CHAPTER 7 

HYPOS AND HERONS 



MEDICALLY speaking, the world of the Ama- 
zon was one of primitive ideas, superstitions, and prac- 
tices. Disease was rampant. There were few or no doctors 
to be found in areas covering hundreds of miles; in some 
of the larger cities there were hospitals, but most of these 
were antiquated and outmoded. In the Amazon Valley, 
medical care was a luxury available chiefly to those aboard 
the ocean steamers heading up from Belem to Iquitos in 
Peru, with their tourist passengers lining the decks to gawk 
down at the natives along the riverbanks. 

The travelers and the river folk were truly worlds apart. 
When one of the native Indian women has a baby, she 
simply squats down on the ground and the child is born, 
then she gets up, takes the baby down to the river to give 
it a bath, and goes back to her work. It is the prospective 
father who apparently goes through the greatest ordeal. 
At the time of the birth I have actually seen this a num- 
ber of times the father wraps a white towel around his 
head, gets in his hammock, and stays there for two days. 

The Indian women did not and in most cases still do 
not have a midwife or medical care of any kind before or 
during childbirth. The midwives who do work along the 
river are usually wildly superstitious; they are also usually 

117 



Il8 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

dirty. They will arrive with a pair of dirty scissors which 
they use to cut the umbilical cord. Then the shears are 
put under the mother's bed, where they must stay. Once, 
when Jessie picked up the scissors, the midwife was 
furious and told her that the baby would have an infection 
and die because of what my wife had done. ( It didn't. ) 

There are as many superstitions as there are diseases. 
Some of them go back to folk ideas found in lands all ovei 
the earth for hundreds, even thousands, of years past. They 
can be mighty unpleasant in the twentieth century. In 
one better-class family, one of the children had an attack 
of asthma. The mother got one of the boys out on a horse 
and made him ride it back and forth at a gallop until 
the animal was covered with lather. Then she took a table 
knife and scraped the lather off the horse. That was the 
medicinetaken internally for asthma. 

In cases of measles along the Amazon, members of the 
victim's family would be and still are sent out to follow 
a dog around until they could get some of the droppings. 
Of this they would make a tea which then would be given 
to the children to drink. 

One of our workers called in a midwife in Manaus to 
deliver his wife's baby. The new mother noticed that the 
midwife was cooking something and when the midwife 
began to feed spoonfuls of the brew to the newborn infant, 
the mother asked what it was. "Oh, this is a tea I made out 
of cockroaches," the midwife told her. "It will make the 
cord fall off much faster." 

The horrified mother got her child off this unsavory 
diet in a hurry! 

One of our friends told us of a boy whose lower jaw 
had become infected after having been fed this tea. The 



HYPOS AND HERONS 11Q 

jawbone was in such bad shape that the doctor was able 
to lift it out. He put it in alcohol, cleaned the boy up and 
sent him home. The mother returned, furious, and this 
so-called "doctor" said, "Well, all right, I will put the 
jawbone back if you so desire." 

Within a few days this boy died. 

In some of the wilder areas, the techniques of treating 
snakebite still involve the "charring" of the bitten area 
over an open fire. This is one of the most painful treatments 
ever dreamed up by man but, if the patient survives the 
shock, the method does seem to neutralize the poison. 
Many times we saw people along the Amazon with missing 
limbs; it is often because they underwent this treatment. 
The need for doctors on the river was obvious and urgent; 
for many did not want to come to an area where there were 
few paying patients and virtually no modern facilities 
and technical laboratories. 

There are, of course, many snakebite cures sold in Brazil, 
as there were in the old days of the West. Printed right 
on the label of one of the most widely sold remedies is the 
legend about how it was discovered. The developer's goat 
was bitten by a deadly snake, the story goes, but ran off 
into the woods, ate of a shrub, and suffered no ill effects 
from the bite. The next time the goat was bitten, its owner 
followed it to the bush and when the goat again recovered 
from the bite, the man realized that he had something. He 
at once began to brew a medicine out of this shrub, and 
his secret elixir by which, it is claimed, thousands have 
been saved is sold all over Brazil. 

We didn't know much about tropical diseases and our 
remedies were few and scanty, but they were a vast im- 



120 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

provement on cures compounded of old wives' tales and 
witch doctors' incantations, 

The principal diseases we encountered were malaria, 
yaws, tropical ulcers, cancers, hookworm, and other tropi- 
cal infections. The people do not plant their food; for the 
most part they simply eat what grows in the woods, and 
their diet is not usually properly balanced. 

Malaria fever was the terrible killer we had to deal with 
first. The two types most prevalent along the river were 
the Vivax or tertian type and the Falcifurium or malignant 
type. The former comes in violent attacks every other day; 
the latter comes every day and can be fatal in a few days, 
but if treated properly it can be arrested and does not 
need to recur. 

There were times, during our first years, when almost 
everyone along the river had one or the other. I remember 
one village where every single person was ill with it. 
Everything in the town was closed up; it was like a village 
of the dead. 

Dogs were barking and somewhere in this straw-roofed 
world I could hear a baby crying. We found the house 
from which the sound was coming and called but got no 
answer. When we pushed back the straw mat that hung 
over the door, we saw a terrible sight. The hammocks were 
filled, and other people were lying on the floor. They were 
all dead. 

The only living thing in this house was a five-month- 
old baby; it lay in a hammock at the side of its dead 
mother. We got it out of the house and into the care of a 
good family, and the youngster has grown up without 
knowing anything of that tragedy or how close death was 
in that terrible hour of epidemic. 



HYPOS AND HERONS 121 

Another child in the same village, a ten-year-old girl who 
was also suffering from malaria, told us how her mother, 
father, and older brother had died. There was no one left 
to bury them, so the girl, weak as she was, had dug shal- 
low graves and dragged the bodies of her family into them. 
She had scarcely crawled back to the house when a dog 
had come, rooted up the bodies, and began dragging them 
back and forth in front of the hut. 

If these things sound shocking, it is because this was 
a shocking world and a shocking set of conditions we 
faced. These people, who were dying and helpless, were 
human beings whom we had come to help and to save, 
and we knew that we could not help them or save them 
spiritually until we could help them physically. 

When we got back to Belem after our first trip and told 
other officials of what we had seen, everyone agreed that 
we should throw ourselves into medical work as quickly 
as possible. Jessie, of course, was a trained nurse and had 
a good grounding in medicine. I was an electrician turned 
minister. But the moment we reached Belem again we 
began our "medical courses" by getting hold of every 
available book on tropical medicine. The one I found 
most helpful was a volume published in Africa called 
Medical Handbook for Tropical Diseases. Written in lay- 
man's language, it was at the same time accurate and pre- 
cise as to treatment. We were never without it on our 
launch from that time on. 

In Belem we not only studied medicine, we began to 
gather up medical supplies on a sizable scale. We wanted 
all the equipment and medicines we could get. Some we 
bought out of mission funds, some were gifts, and some 



122 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

were wheedled from the Brazilian government. Our 
church, which had grown tremendously, helped us. 

Many nights in Belem the members of our young people's 
organization would gather for a "Medicine Wrapping 
Night," sitting around the table and filling capsules with 
quinine literally thousands of them while others would 
measure out doses of Epsom salts. We used different 
colored papers red, blue, yellow, and white to indicate 
the size of the doses. These would be arranged in boxes, 
so that when we were treating a patient we could just 
reach into a box and pull out a dose of the proper size. 

I learned a great deal about medicine as a result of 
these years when Jessie and I were literally the only 
medical help thousands of people had for thousands of 
miles. I did because I had to do; we did because there 
was nothing else to do; we learned because we had to 
learn in order to help them. We are not surgeons, but we 
operated when there was no one else at hand to try to 
save a life. We are not chemists, but we performed some 
chemical analyses. We did whatever a doctor does. In later 
years, the scope of our work broadened. We had consider- 
able medical training in the Adventist Hospital and 
Medical Center in California. 

It had not been planned for us to do this medical work; 
we had gone to the Amazon for a totally different purpose. 
But we had found a need and it had to be met. 

There is no time in the jungle for debating the ethics 
of the medical profession. Here is a man who goes into 
the woods to cut rubber. A bushmaster snake attacks him. 
He lifts his large knife and slashes the snake in two, even 
as it is springing. But the part with the head and fangs 
continues its forward thrust and strikes him near the 



HYPOS AND HERONS 123 

heart. Before we can get to him, the man is dead. The case 
might well stand as a symbol of the emergency the im- 
mediacy of needs wherever we turned. 

During our first trips the only treatment we had for 
malaria was quinine. In recent years, for the most part we 
have used three modern medicines Camequin, Aralem, 
and Daraprein. Just a few of these pills are sufficient to 
arrest malaria. Modern drugs and an awareness of the 
need of these people have changed the whole pattern of 
this disease. Many people have helped: the Brazilian gov- 
ernment, American medical teams during the war, and 
the scientists who have developed the new drugs. A recent 
survey of three hundred residents of one Amazon district 
disclosed that, while all had had malaria, none had ex- 
perienced a recurrence of it for five years. This does not 
mean that it has been eliminated; it does mean that strides 
have been made toward its control. 

Perhaps in second place among the tropical diseases 
of the river is hookworm. Not a killer, it is almost as bad, 
for it saps the strength and makes the individual indolent 
and without ambition. The result is the kind of poverty 
and empty despair we found in so many of the districts we 
visited. 

Hookworm is contracted by going barefoot, which 
many people in Brazil have done for centuries and con- 
tinue to do. It is carried by a tiny, microscopic worm that 
gets in at the bottom of the feet and works its way up to 
the stomach, where it develops. Failure to dig proper 
sanitary facilities is responsible for the spread of the dis- 
ease, which we found prevalent in Western Baia as well 
as in the Amazon areas. 

One of our first jobs was to teach the people to dig 



124 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

toilets, which must be done in order to control hookworm. 
Now, Brazil's public-health officials supply seats made of 
cement for these toilets and give them to the public in 
these districts. In addition, animated cartoon movies are 
shown to impress on the people's minds the importance of 
owning toilets. 

Yaws, too, was one of the terrible diseases we found 
wherever we went. We saw hundreds of people, natives 
and Indians and nationals of varied blood, with sores all 
over their bodies, on their limbs, their feet, their hands, 
and sometimes even on their faces. We were in places 
where whole families, parents and children alike, lay help- 
less in their hammocks because the sores on their feet were 
so terrible they couldn't stand. Some of them had been 
prisoners of their hammocks for as long as three years, 
yet with a few injections of penicillin they were up and 
around again. 

There are other infections and tropical ulcers, however, 
which are not so easy to cure. One of them is trachoma, 
which attacks the eyes. Brought to the Amazon many years 
ago by migrating Japanese, it spreads like wildfire in a 
country that might have been made to order for it. People 
who used common towels in public restaurants, drank from 
communal cups, and in general lived under poor sanitary 
conditions spread trachoma widely along the Amazon. 
Then, because it was usually not properly treated, it 
brought on blindness. 

One night we were holding a dedication service in the 
large top-floor room of one of the few three-story houses 
along the river. Just as the meeting was breaking up, I 
looked out across the stream in the beautiful moonlit night 
and saw four men paddling across it in our direction in a 



HYPOS AND HERONS 

large canoe. When they were close enough, they called up 
to me from their boat and asked if I was Senhor Leo. They 
had been sent, they told me, by a man named Cornelius. 
"What does he want?" I asked. 

"He and his family are all sick. They have sore eyes. 
They are in terrible pain. They want you to come over 
and treat them." 

It was late, so I told them that I would leave early in 
the morning and be there by daybreak. They insisted on 
staying so that they could direct me; they hung up their 
hammocks in the big house and went off to sleep. Early 
next morning, we piloted the Luzeiro across the river, 
around some islands, and into another beautiful stream. 
It was a place of flame-colored birds and, a little farther 
along, herons great white crowds of them ahead of us in 
flight. 

At last we reached the home of Cornelius. A success- 
ful dealer in rubber and other products along the Amazon, 
he apologized to Jessie and me for having disturbed us 
and making us come so far. "But we are sick and we do not 
know what to do," he added. "Some of us are now almost 
blind." 

We hadn't had much experience in treating eye trouble, 
so we prayed for special guidance in this case. Then we 
examined all these people and found that they all had 
what appeared to us to be trachoma. The best drug we 
had available to treat this, we figured, was sulfathiazole, 
so we counted out sixty of these pills for each man, gave 
them all instructions about the proper dosage, and Jessie 
warned them, "As soon as you can, get down to the city 
to an eye specialist or you may lose your sight entirely. 
Do you all understand me?" 



126 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

Jessie's tone was firm but her brown eyes were gentle. 
Our patients, impressed, we thought, assured us they 
would follow our advice in every respect, thanked us pro- 
fusely, and stood waving on the dock as we pulled away. 

Four months later, on our return trip, I stopped to hold 
another religious meeting in the three-story house and 
again, as we were finishing, I looked out and saw four 
men drawing near in their boat. Once again they said that 
Cornelius had sent them. "What's the matter now?" I 
asked. "Didn't they go to town and have their eyes 
treated?" 

"Oh, they are all well now; they have no trouble with 
their eyes any more. They want you to come over and have 
a praise meeting to give thanks." The spokesman smiled. 
"They didn't go to any specialist; it was your pills that 
did it." 

So once again the white Luzeiro crossed the river, passed 
the islands, and tied up at Cornelius's dock. While I set 
up our projector and showed a motion picture, the first 
they had ever seen, Jessie, who had seen it many times 
before, wandered into another room. There she found 
four women. "Why aren't you watching the movie?" she 
asked. 

"We can hardly see," one of the women answered. 
"When you were here you treated the others but not us." 
This time, as Jessie hustled about handing out sulf athiazole 
pills, we didn't have to wonder whether we were doing 
the right thing. We had talked, meanwhile, to eye special- 
ists and learned that this is the exact drug they use for 
trachoma. One of them had told us, "By giving them that 
drug, you may have saved them from lifelong blindness." 

Even in the far back streams of the Amazon, word gets 



HYPOS AND HERONS 127 

around fast, and people always managed to get word to 
us when they needed us. When they were expecting a 
baby, they usually let us know well in advance. Of course, 
obstetrics was Jessie's special department. 

On one case we had ran all night long to get to an 
expectant mother in time. Jessie, in her crisp white nurse's 
uniform, was busy inside with the woman while the father- 
to-be and I were waiting on the deck of the boat. "Have 
you thought of any name for your baby yet?" I asked. 

"Oh yes, we have a wonderful name," the man answered. 
"We are going to call him Franklin Delano Roosevelt." 

"Well," that's a fine name," I said. 

As we were talking, Jessie came out of the house with 
the new baby in her arms, "I'm afraid," she laughed, 
"you'll have to call this one Eleanor." 

The obstetrical cases were sometimes difficult, and 
Jessie was fortunate, often, to save the mother. In one 
instance, the family waited nearly four hours to tell her 
the birth had been complicated; the child had arrived but 
not the placenta. Jessie successfully delivered the after- 
birth even in this case. 

Many of the complications arose out of plain ignorance 
or superstition and lack of facilities. Sanitary conditions 
such as are required in the most rudimentary hospitals 
were completely lacking in almost every instance. Yet my 
wife carried off these hundreds of cases successfully. 

The malaria and the hookworm and the yaws were bad 
enough in our early years, but what hit us hardest, I think, 
were the terrible injuries from alligator attacks. I recall 
one case of twins, each of whom lost a leg to an alligator. 
They used to joke about their plight, saying that since 
they wore the same size shoe and one had lost a left and 



128 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

the other a right leg, "We only need one pair of shoes." 
Somehow it never seemed very funny to me. 

Not too untypical was the case of Rachel, the oldest of 
a family of twelve children living along the river. She had 
gone one day to the bathhouse, which all Amazon families 
have in front of their homes. As she washed some clothes, 
a huge alligator came along and grabbed Rachel by the 
hips. Fortunately, its underjaw caught in a board under 
the bathhouse and, when it tried to pull the little girl into 
the water, it found it couldn't without pulling in the whole 
building as well. This was impossible, even for such a 
huge creature. 

While it threshed about in the stream, one of her 
brothers heard her screams and came running. As he 
began to hit the alligator over the head with a club, it 
made one last effort to pull the girl in. It failed and finally 
its teeth pulled away, tearing all the flesh on the girl's 
thigh. 

When we got there the next day, we patched up Rachel's 
terrible wounds as best we could and gave her an injec- 
tion of penicillin. Happily, she recovered without infec- 
tion developing. 

Accidents of this sort, which seemed so horrible to us, 
were commonplace to a people who lived close to violence 
and even savagery and certainly to the cruelty of nature. 
They grew used to it, and accustomed, too, to their own 
courage in the face of these dangers. 

A little woman came to our boat one day to tell us her 
story, although she knew we could do nothing about the 
empty sleeve which dangled from one thin shoulder. 
One night, she said, she was asleep in her hammock when, 



HYPOS AND HERONS 

suddenly, she was awakened by the shrill screams of her 
baby. She got up quickly and lit the kerosene lamp. 

"There by the flame I saw my baby with its arm in a 
big alligator's mouth. I didn't know what to do, but I 
prayed for God's help. Then I was impressed to pick up 
one of those long poles used in our fireplaces. It was red- 
hot at one end and I put that in the alligator's mouth just 
beside where it held the baby's arm. The alligator made a 
terrible sound and opened its mouth, and I was able to 
grab my baby away. 

"But as I reached down to pick up my baby, the alli- 
gator gave a lunge and grabbed me by the right arm, at 
the shoulder. Then it started to carry me out to the river. 
When it was trying to pull me through the door, I prayed 
again for strength. I reached out with my left hand and 
caught the door post, and it could not get me through. So 
it gave a mighty jerk to dislodge my hold and tore off my 
arm. It bled terribly, but, fortunately, neighbors came. 
They have an outboard motor on their canoe and took 
me to the city, and there the doctor fixed up my arm and 
saved my life." 

"Where did you ever find the courage to struggle with 
that creature?" we asked her. 

"I forgot myself," the woman said. "My one thought was 
to save my baby." 

Many times we saw examples of this sort of valor in 
the boys who had lost their legs to a ferocious twenty-two- 
foot alligator; in this woman who had saved her infant. 
Or in the case of one elderly lady whose daughter was ill 
in bed. 

It was floodtime and the water was well over the river- 
banks when we came up in front of the house where the 



130 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

elderly woman lived. There was a stream about a foot 
deep flowing right through her house, and we could 
maneuver our boat to within about ten feet of her door. 
She stood there in the water, crying out that her daughter 
was sick and could we please do something to help. "How 
can we get in?" I shouted. "We can't get our boat in any 
closer." 

"Just stay there can you hold the boat there?" 
I said we could. The old woman said, "Wait, please." 
The frail old woman turned then and went into the 
house. In a few minutes she appeared again at the door, 
carrying in her arms her daughter, a girl much bigger and 
heavier than the mother. Before Jessie and I realized what 
she was doing, she was wading into the water, lifting the 
girl into our boat, and climbing in herself. 

We carried the girl into the cabin and found on examina- 
tion that she had malaria. We gave her a quinine injection, 
and supplied the mother with medicine to give her daugh- 
ter until the fever subsided. 

The mother's beaming smile of gratitude more than re- 
paid us. We helped her get the daughter back into a ham- 
mock in the partially flooded house, and went on about 
our work, warmed in spite of our water-drenched clothes. 

So the work we did developed and reached out to more 
and more people. Despite the drama of individual cases, 
the main element of our program lay in training the people 
to be aware of their own medical needs. This plan even- 
tually led to the organization of clinics and hospitals a 
later phase of our work and our story and to the unfolding 
program of our launches and their operators. Most of these 
latter were not foreign missionaries like us, but nationals. 



HYPOS AND HERONS 



It was our idea that Brazilians should take over this work 
wherever possible; they did not need outsiders, once they 
had learned. 

Many of the people with whom we dealt had no idea 
of medicine or what it was for, in those beginning days 
when we pioneered along the river. Scores of these folk 
were terrified of our treatment and wanted to stay with 
the old ways, even though these meant continued sickness, 
pain, hopelessness, and death. 

We had to teach the basic principles of hygiene before 
we could begin to make headway. Hundreds of times I 
have watched Jessie, clean and shining in her white uni- 
form, talking pregnancy and childbirth and infant care to 
a group of women to whom modern medicine was as 
mysterious as the atom bomb. 

Jessie held cooking classes for the Brazilian housewives 
along the Amazon. There was more to these lessons than 
a new way to cook sweet potatoes. She was able, in this 
way, to introduce new ideas of hygiene in cooking. Much 
of what we taught at the beginning was elementary-the 
need for proper sanitation and cleanliness and for taking 
care of the teeth. All of this was part of the early preven- 
tive program we introduced. Later, working with Brazilian 
health officials, we assisted in expanding this program 
over wide sections of the country. 

As our work progressed and we became better known, 
the people of these isolated communities would be waiting 
for us when our boat dropped anchor. Their sick would 
come to our clinics on the Luzeiro, case after case. Often 
there would be long lines of these people, waiting their 
turn. Many times we would inoculate a whole community 



132 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

against smallpox or some other disease if there was danger 
of an epidemic. 

Some of the cases we treated had their humorous over- 
tones. One day a black-bearded man came aboard. "Cap- 
tain, is it all right for me to shave now?" he asked. 

"Why haven't you been shaving?" 

"Well, I didn't think I was supposed to. I took castor 
oil two weeks ago." 

I recall another instance that occurred during one of 
our improvised clinics on the boat. We had arrived late 
at a community quite far up the river, but there were many 
persons waiting to be treated. One was a man who had 
brought his twelve-year-old son for us to look over. "I 
don't know what's wrong with him he eats dirt and sand 
and everything," the man said. 

Jessie examined the boy and then told the father, "This 
boy has hookworm, that's all." She gave him a remedy for 
this disease, which we always carried, in a healthy dose of 
castor oil. "See that he takes this at five o'clock tomorrow 
morning, on an empty stomach," she directed. 

"I can't do that," the man said. "We don't have any 
alarm clock and how will I know the time?" 

"Do you have a rooster?" Jessie asked. 

"Of course." 

"Well, when the rooster crows, give him the medicine." 

He agreed to follow instructions, and several months 
later, when we stopped by again, we asked him how the 
boy was getting along. "Oh, he's fine now, completely 
cured," the father said. "But the rooster died, after we 
gave him that medicine like you said we should." 

We spent many long days treating scores of patients and 
giving injections, while I perspired through shirt after 



HYPOS AND HERONS 133 

shirt in the intense heat. For a long time I was hesitant 
about using the needle and would leave this to the more 
experienced hands of Jessie, although I would help her 
with the preparations and knew every detail of the pro- 
cedure. I was perfectly capable of giving injections, but I 
kept finding excuses until one day Jessie simply left me 
alone with the patient and I had to do the job myself. I 
really sweated then, from nervousness, but the lad held out 
his arm and I hid my inner emotions and gave him the 
injection. When I finished, the boy's pal, who had been 
looking on, inquired eagerly, "Did it hurt?" 

The youngster lifted his head disdainfully. "How could 
it hurt when it was given to me by an experienced man 
like Senhor Leo?" 

Perversely, I suppose, this was to me one of the most 
important moments in all our years on the Amazon. From 
that moment on, I had no worries about giving injections. 
In a sense, I got my medical degree I had it on the word 
of my patient. 

As we went along on our trips up and down the river, 
almost every evening we would hold services, usually 
in some country store or village or farmhouse. (Many 
a so-called village is actually only a store to which 
people come from the surrounding area.) One evening 
we were to have a service in a home, but so many people 
came close to three hundred that we had to hold it out- 
side, under a giant mango tree. We put up our wires, 
showed our films, sang hymns, and I gave the sermon. It 
was afterward that we were told of a terrible epidemic of 
smallpox not far away. Everyone present needed to be 
vaccinated, and we actually set up an assembly line that 
night. We had them all bare their right arms. As one of 



134 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

our helpers wiped each aim clean with alcohol, Jessie and 
I would put on the vaccine and scratch the arm. This way 
we were able to handle several hundred individuals in 
something less than an hour. 

Even so, it was after eleven by the time we had treated 
the last person. Then we had to take down our wires and 
pack up our equipment and get it into the boat. As we 
shoved off, all three hundred people crowded around on 
the riverbank and asked us for one more song. So we 
stood there on the bow of our boat and sang the familiar, 
"God Be with You Till We Meet Again." 

It was a deeply stirring moment. As our boat pulled 
away from the shore, we could hear a tremendous chorus 
across the night, "Come back soon . . . come back soon " 



CHAPTER 8 

BY ANOTHER WAY 



THERE is elusive mystery in the world of the 
Amazon, where the witch doctors talk of powers that drift 
like green wraiths in the shadows of the palms. There is 
mystery in the cries of strange creatures, in the deepening 
of twilight and the dark fastnesses beyond which white 
man does not proceed. There is an eerie light in the black 
waters of the Rio Negro; there is enigma in the legend of 
Phoenician mariners centuries past sailing up the Soli- 
moes to find giant cedars for Solomon's Temple, and 
leaving his name behind, as the story insists, in the name 
of that river. 

It was a world of dark forces, superstitions, appeals to 
the demoniac and the damned. We came with another pur- 
pose and another Power in whom we put our faith. 

In Belem, after our first trip or two, we began to realize 
that medicine was expensive. The church could furnish 
some of the funds we needed to buy it, but our Amazon 
district was, after all, only one part of a world-wide or- 
ganization and we could not expect more than our share 
of help from that source. 

The governor of Para, Colonel Jocquin Barata, however, 
was a friend of the Adventists and I went to him and told 

135 



136 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

him of our need for medicines. "Oh/' he said, "you go on 
over to our public-health people and tell them I said to 
give you anything you need. Draw up a list/' 

I did as he suggested. It was a long list and when I took 
it over to one of the public-health officials he looked at it, 
listened to my story of our work and the governor's state- 
ment, and said very definitely, "The state of Para hasn't 
got enough medicine for our own medical posts here. We 
certainly haven't enough to furnish your needs, too. I'm 
sorry." 

I went back to the governor, showed him the list, and 
told him how I had been turned down. Without a word he 
wrote out an order instructing the public-health officer to 
give me every single thing I needed. 

I went back. I did not like having had to go over the 
man's head to his superior but I needed the supplies too 
desperately to let protocol stand in my way. 

This time I gave him the note from the governor. He 
read it, asked for my list, and began to cross off items he 
said they "didn't have." When he was through, the only 
thing left unchecked was a supply of Epsom salts worth 
about two dollars. 

The health official's tone was icy as he said, "Come back 
tomorrow, go to our supply department upstairs, and pick 
up your Epsom salts." 

He had even struck off the quinine! 

The next morning, before I went to get the Epsom salts, 
we had our usual prayer and reading and I took my prob- 
lem to God. Then I set out for the public-health offices. 

When I got up to the supply department, I found a man 
sitting at a desk piled high with papers. I don't think I 
ever saw a desk piled so high or in such a clutter; he had 



BY ANOTHER WAY 137 

to keep pushing the papers back to keep them from falling 
on the floor. He asked me what I wanted, and I explained 
that the medical official on the floor below had sent up an 
order for me to get some medicine. The man began to look 
for the requisition, but in the sea of papers it was obviously 
a hopeless task. Finally he said, "Well, what did you want, 
anyway, Mr. Halliwell? We're pretty well stocked." 

From my pocket I took out a copy I had made of the list 
with all the things I wanted and the note from the gov- 
ernor. He looked these over and said, "Sure, we've got all 
of it. You get over here this afternoon with a truck and 
we'll have it waiting." 

My pickup truck and I were Johnny-on-the-spot that 
afternoon, and the kindly man was on hand to help me 
load up. He knew about our work and, as I drove off, he 
said, "Now, any time you run out of medicines anywhere 
in the state, just send me a telegram and I'll ship it right 
along." 

From that time on, we had at least one main source of 
supply, although, of course, much more had to be bought 
in Rio or in the States. Even the official who had turned 
me down cold was extremely cordial and co-operative on 
my second visit some months later. 

During the war we had a tremendous problem with 
quinine, which we needed constantly to combat malaria. 
The Japanese had cut off the major source of supply the 
Far East and we scraped and scrounged continuously for 
even small quantities. 

This, too, was a problem we took to God. In Buenos 
Aires, not long after America came into World War II, I 
was giving a talk about our work on the Amazon, when a 
man named Williams asked me to visit him in his office 



138 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

when I was in town again. This I did. He was off visiting 
his copper mines, but he had told his secretary to talk to 
me. She wanted a few more facts about our work and our 
experiences, to report to him on his return. 

Then she said, "Oh, by the way, Mr. Williams has some 
quinine for you that he thought you might need because 
of the shortage." 

In a storeroom in the basement she pointed to a shelf 
crowded with packages wrapped in brown paper. "That 
is all quinine," she told me. "Ten kilosabout twenty-two 
pounds." 

It was a vast supply for anyone to have at such a time 
and I was gazing at it longingly, thinking of how many 
people it would help, when she said, "Look closer, Mr. 
Halliwell." Then I saw that all the packages were marked, 
"Halliwell. To be used in Amazon." 

In this time of need, when quinine was impossible to get, 
God had opened a way for me to obtain a supply that 
would serve the needs of hundreds on the river. 

But if our work was truly a mixture of medicines and 
miracles, it was grounded in solid medical training, too. 
To Jessie's nursing course we added training we gave our- 
selves in Brazil, and studies in tropical medicine in our 
faith's hospitals in America, from which come some of the 
finest surgeons and physicians and nurses in the medical 
profession. 

On our furlough to the States in 1936, we were priv- 
ileged to study at the White Memorial Hospital, a part of 
the medical school at Loma Linda, California, where Jessie 
amazed the doctors by her ability to diagnose tropical dis- 
eases without a flicker of hesitation. 

She was called into a clinic one day and shown a little 



BY ANOTHER WAY 139 

Mexican girl sitting on an observation table. "Now, Mrs. 
Halliwell," the doctor said, "I wish you would turn this 
girl around and tell us what you think she has." 

Jessie looked the girl over carefully. "Well, up here in 
the States I wouldn't know the name they use," she said. 
"But in Brazil I would call this a form of leprosy." 

This case had apparently been quite difficult to diagnose 
and the doctor was both startled and happy at her speed 
and accuracy. 

We worked directly in the clinics, side by side with the 
doctors. We put special time into the study of skin dis- 
eases, so prevalent in the tropics, and Jessie took extra 
training in obstetrics. While she was doing that, I was 
working in the laboratory, learning how to analyze blood 
and other specimens. It was a sound basic training in "lab" 
technique, and later we had instruments on our boat so 
that we could make our own tests on the spot. In addition, 
from the very beginning, and particularly when we went 
back to the States on leave, we got hold of every book 
available on tropical diseases and their treatment. None of 
this seemed like work to us, for it was a subject which had 
become one of the main interests of our lives. 

Of course, we were not the only ones to take these 
courses. Many of our boat captains have studied in our 
colleges and schools in Brazil, have worked in our hospitals 
in the south of the country, and as a result have a sound 
basic knowledge of the diseases which they have to deal 
with in their daily work. 

We always worked closely with doctors and medical 
officials in Brazil, and often doctors would go with us on 
our trips, both to study our problems and the way we han- 
dled them and to assist in treating patients. Where a case 



140 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

was serious, we made every effort to get the patient to a 
hospital in Belem, or Manaus, or to a doctor if there was 
one not too far away. But too often there was no practicing 
physician for hundreds of miles-even after thirty years 
of our work and "educational" program. 

This work of ours was a blend of medicine and faith, 
but it was also a constant war on superstition and igno- 
rance. Of this we had many examples from the man who 
wanted me to pour some of the light from the electric bulb 
into a bottle, so he could take it home to show his wife, to 
the mother who did not want us to cure her small son be- 
cause his begging on the town streets was her sole source 
of support. 

An ulcer had eaten away the whole top of this twelve- 
year-old's foot when we found him. I gave him an injection 
and some hot-and-cold-water applications, and told him to 
continue the treatments every day. To make it all seem 
more important to himmany of the people we dealt with 
could not believe that hydrotherapy had any value I gave 
him some harmless potassium permanganate to color the 
water. But the boy had scarcely had time to get home 
when his mother arrived at the Luzeiro, puffing and angry. 
What did we mean, she asked furiously, by trying to cure 
her boy and thus do her out of her only means of liveli- 
hood? But there were times when we had to get tough, and 
this was one of them. I finally went to the civil authorities, 
who compelled the mother to let us treat her child. 

He used his colored water faithfully after that and be- 
fore many weeks he could run and playand work like 
other boys. When she discovered he was then able to earn 
more than he used to get by begging, his mother, I heard, 
was properly grateful. 



BY ANOTHER WAY 141 

But selfishness, such as this mother's, was not one of our 
worst enemies. Ignorance, superstition, prejudice against 
the new and untried these were our real foes, as deadly 
often as the terrible bushmaster or the lunging alligator. 

The night we set up an assembly line and vaccinated 
some three hundred people against smallpox, there was 
one man I especially wanted to inoculate the old chief. 
He had said he would never let anyone puncture his arm 
and that nothing could make him change his mind. 

A year later, when we were back in the same little river 
town, several people told us, "You had better go visit the 
old chief right away. He is sick and stretched out on a 
banana leaf/' 

(When they have fever, the Indians lie on a large 
banana leaf instead of in their hammocks; they say the leaf 
is cooler.) 

I found the chief lying on his banana leaf, his body cov- 
ered with smallpox from head to feet. "I am happy to see 
you, I am glad you have come," he said, putting both arms 
around me and giving me an Indian hug. 

"Why? Is there something you want to see me about?" 

"I want to be vaccinated," he said. 

He said those five words with dignity, as if he were sur- 
rendering the most sacred traditions of his ancestors. Of 
course, he had made his fateful decision slightly too late, 
but the fact that he had made it was important. The word 
spread in the area. It was a symbol that the old days were 
gone. Fortunately, although he had a lasting reminder in 
his scars, the chief did recover. 

As our work in the Amazon developed, our problems of 
administration grew, too. From that first day when we ar- 



142 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

rived in Belem to take over a "parish" that included the 
whole river and a membership of three, all of whom were 
standing on the dock to greet us the Amazon Mission 
finally reached such numbers that it had to be broken up. 
One section, with headquarters at Belem, included the 
lower Amazon. Another, the Central Amazon Mission, 
operated out of Manaus. 

The man who helped me the most in getting this new 
organization under way was Walter Streithorst, who took 
over the central Amazon area with his wife Olga. It was 
she we had seen as an infant on her satin pillow at our first 
Sabbath service in Brazil. Her father, Pastor Storch, had 
worked in our church for many years, both in Baia and in 
the Amazon, and we had watched Olga as she grew up, as 
dear to us as one of our own. 

Walter was a Brazilian national, born in Rio Grande de 
Sal. He had studied for a couple of years in Germany, from 
where his father had emigrated, and had finished his edu- 
cation in our Adventist college in Sao Paulo. He served in 
the Brazilian army during the war and took some courses 
in nursing and caring for the sick and wounded. He and 
Olga were married in 1943. 

After the war, Walter became president of the Central 
Amazon Mission of our church organization, while I was 
in charge of the entire Northern Brazil Union, embracing 
the whole area. Eventually, Walter was to take over the 
Northern Union while I went south to be in charge of all 
boats and boat work in the South American division. 

The thoroughness of missionary training is exemplified 
in Walter. Although he had a sound basic educational 
background to begin with, we sent him to the States for 



BY ANOTHEK WAY 143 

additional study, first to our medical training college in 
California, where lie took courses in dentistry, and then to 
Washington, D.C., where he was enrolled at our seminary 
in business administration. 

Walter and Olga were close friends of ours, and many 
times, particularly at special conclaves along the river, we 
would tie up our boats side by side at a port along the 
Amazon and hold what was almost a family reunion. They 
have two children, a wonderful boy and girl, and seeing 
them always reminded us of the days when our own chil- 
dren were young and with us in Belem and on that first 
trip up the river. 

Thanks to men of this caliber and their families, mostly 
Brazilians but also some Americans, our work pushed for- 
ward. Conditions improved; diseases such as hookworm 
and malaria began to subside in the area; death from 
snakebite began to diminish. Even the alligators-possibly 
largely because they were being destroyed for commercial 
reasons began to be less of a terror in the more populated 
regions. Yet there was still widespread sickness in some 
areas; when American officials began their rubber-develop- 
ment program during the war, they found disease still a 
major factor in delaying production. 

Because of this, the Americans and Brazilians together, 
with America footing most of the costs, organized what 
was called the Servi9O Especial de Saude Publico-the 
SESP or Special Public Health Service. These experts came 
to us to study our boat and our techniques, and ultimately 
built eight launches patterned after the Luzeiro. They also 
brought up to the river for the first time a number of doc- 
tors who, by law, -had to be Brazilians. (In the past, Brazil- 



144 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

ian physicians had stayed away from the Ar^azon because 
they could not make a living among people who had no 
money; during the war emergency, they were paid by the 
government, and when the emergency ended, they re- 
turned to their regular practices. ) 

The principal reason for bringing in these doctors, or- 
ganizing the SESP, and building these boats was to im- 
prove health conditions rapidly over a wide area so that 
the people could go out and cut the rubber America des- 
perately needed. A Rubber Development Commission, 
with offices in Belem and Manaus, brought a number 
of boats and organized what was called a rubber bank. 
Anyone who had rubber trees could go to this outfit and 
get money to expand production. All of this activity 
brought a great boom along the river and hundreds of 
workers poured in, ready to go out and cut rubber. It was 
the new gold and diamonds and emeralds all in one. 

Without question, the wartime influx of American 
workers and engineers, with their ideas of sanitation, 
changed and in many ways awakened the valley as nothing 
else had done. While the rubber was being taken down- 
river and because of the number of Nazi submarines off 
the coast flown out in giant planes, sanitary conditions 
were improved and malaria control was broadened as 
many mosquito-breeding areas were cleaned up. 

Along with this came increased discoveries and develop- 
ments in anti-snakebite serums from the remarkable 
"snake farm" and laboratory called Butantan in Sao Paulo. 
This was founded some years ago by Dr. Vitel Brasio, 
whose experiments with Brazil's twenty-two varieties of 
poisonous snakes have provided medicines which have 



BY ANOTHEB WAY 145 

saved thousands of lives. Many of these serums we have 
delivered to villages and communities in large enough sup- 
ply to protect the people of the area. Wherever possible, it 
was our practice to leave enough medicines so that the 
people nationals or Indians could care for their own 
needs. 

We did what we could wherever we went, even per- 
forming minor surgery if there was no doctor or hospital 
within reach. We had gone far up above Manaus so far it 
would have taken days or weeks to get further medical 
help when we encountered a native with a toe that had 
become terribly infected. Long before we could have got 
him out of the spider web of rivers in which he lived, the 
infection would have spread and he could well have died, 
as the toe was definitely gangrenous. We had the man 
brought into the boat, sterilized the surgical equipment 
which we carried for emergencies, and Jessie began the 
surgical operation with me assisting. For anesthetics we 
used Novocaine. 

The amputation of a toe may not be a difficult operation 
under normal circumstances, but neither of us was a sur- 
geon, and we were in the middle of the jungle without 
professional help or guidance. With a sureness that I think 
would have done a professional surgeon credit, Jessie dis- 
jointed the toe and removed it, cleaned away all the in- 
fection, bathed and bandaged the wound, and sent this 
man hobbling on his way with instructions for changing 
dressings and guarding against further infection. 

I recall an incident that occurred not far from Sao Luis 
in the state of Maranhao. Olga's father, who was holding 
meetings there, announced one night that one of our boats 



146 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

was on hand and that on board was his assistant, a man 
named Americo Quispe, a fully trained "medic" or nurse, 
who would try to help any who needed him. 

The first person to reach Quispe after the meeting was a 
frightened woman. "Please come to my house at once/* she 
entreated him. "Two of my children are terribly ill. I don't 
know what to do to help them." 

When they reached her house, scarcely more than a 
shack, on the edge of the city, he found the two children 
almost lifeless in their hammocks. 

Examination told him that they were suffering from 
typhoid fever and were near death. "There is a specific 
drug for the typhoid chloromycetin," he told her. "I have 
no more of these pills left on my boat or I would give you 
all you need free of charge. But they sell them here in the 
city, in the pharmacy, and you can buy all you need/* 

"How many will that be?" the mother asked. 

"It will be expensive/' he told her. "Each child will need 
about sixty pills, and they retail at about forty cents a pill." 

Quispe didn't have to look in his pockets. He knew he 
had no money. He also knew it would take days to get the 
pills from one of our church officials hundreds of miles to 
the south. 

The woman began to cry. She told him, "The pills may 
be able to save my children but we have no money to buy 
them. I can only sit here and watch my children die." 

The young evangelist took her hand in his. "There is a 
God in Heaven who hears and answers prayers, and if you 
like we can bow down and ask Him now and He won't let 
these children die." 

The woman nodded. They knelt down beside the ham- 



BY ANOTHER WAY 147 

mocks, and the young man sent up a prayer of appeal for 
this woman and her children. Then he said good night. 

All the way back into the city he pondered this problem. 
Perhaps Pastor Storch might have a little money. Maybe 
they could make up a pool of a few dollars here and there. 
Perhaps. . . . 

As he passed the City Hall, a man stepped out of the 
shadows. "Aren't you the fellow on the little Adventist 
boat? The one with the medicines on board?" 

Americo Quispe nodded. "I wish you would come with 
me now, this minute, up to my hotel room/' the man said. 

The evangelist was not eager to go. Luring people into 
hotel rooms was a familiar trick. The man might be plan- 
ning to rob and kill him. Despite his doubt, he agreed to go. 

As he unlocked the door and ushered Quispe inside, the 
man said, "I happen to be a salesman for the Lilly Labora- 
tories in Sao Paulo. I heard your boat was here. A little 
while ago I felt impelled to go out and find you and make 
you a present of some pills I have here. Will you please 
accept them as a gift from me?" 

He handed the startled young man a bottle containing a 
thousand chloromycetin tabletsthe very drug needed so 
desperately for the children he had left only a few minutes 
before. 

Tears came to Quispe's eyes as he told the story to us 
later: "I thanked him and bounded down those stairs three 
at a time. I went right straight back to that woman's home, 
gave the children their dosage, and counted out the pills 
she needed." 

Within two weeks, these children, who had been in the 
very arms of death, were well. 



148 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

But the incident that stands out most unforgettably for 
Jessie and me concerns a detour I had no intention of tak- 
ing. We were in Manaus and were in a hurry to get down- 
river to Maues, where we were to hold a five-day old- 
fashioned "camp meeting." Four or five hundred of our 
church members were to be there. 

On the way down we were stopped near the mouth of 
the Madeira River. Some people were sick rubber cutters 
and their families. Even though we were pressed for time, 
we couldn't leave until we had treated them all. It was 
nearly four o'clock when we got under way. 

From that point there were two routes we could take to 
Maues. One was up the Madeira River and down a narrow 
channel in Maues. The other was down the Amazon itself 
and then back up a narrow channel to the city. The latter 
was five or six hours shorter. As we started out, about to 
cross the mouth of the Madeira, Jessie asked me which 
route I proposed to take. "Well," I answered, "since time is 
pressing, we'll go by the Amazon/' 

Jessie wasn't too happy at my decision. "J ust lk at 
those storm clouds over there. We'll ride right into them." 

I agreed. "Yes, we'll run the risk of a storm; but we've 
got all those people waiting, so we'll have to go this way." 

We started down the Amazon, across the two-mile 
stretch of water at the mouth of the Madeira. I was sitting 
at the wheel and had tight hold of it to keep it going 
straight. When we reached the middle, something hap- 
pened, something grabbed the wheel. I am a strong man, 
with heavy chest and shoulder muscles, and I tried to hold 
it, but I couldn't. Something stronger than I turned that 
wheel, and we started up the Madeira River. 

I thought perhaps a log had caught under the rudder 



BY ANOTHER WAY 149 

and I peered over the side. I could see nothing. I tried to 
turn the wheel back in the direction of the Amazon. It 
wouldn't budge. For once, I was really afraid. Finally, I 
thought: Well, if this thing wants to go up the Madeira 
Riverwe'll go up the Madeira. 

An instant later, Jessie came in. "What's the matter?" 
she asked. "What made you change course?" 

I told her I didn't change it, but that something had 
prevented me from turning the wheel. c Tm glad," she 
said. "I was back there praying we would go this way, out 
of the storm, instead of on the Amazon." 

As we kept on up the Madeira, the boat behaved per- 
fectly normally. About ten o'clock, long after dark, we 
pulled into the narrow channel that goes down to Maues 
and we decided to stop for the night. Just as we dropped 
anchor, lightning flashed and a storm broke. The rain was 
like a roaring cascade around us and the winds blew at 
cyclonic force. On the wide Amazon, we almost certainly 
would have met disaster; but here in the narrow stream, 
we were safe. 

All was calm the next morning. We started out early and 
about nine o'clock, as we rounded a bend in the stream, 
we saw a high bank, a house, and a man waving a white 
towel for us to stop. As we put down our gangplank to go 
ashore, the man a Brazilian-said, "I'm awfully sorry to 
stop you, but my daughter is just about dead. Can you 
come and try to save her?" 

When we reached the house, he pulled back the straw 
mat hung over the door and there we saw a young girl 
about nineteen lying in a hammock and groaning in pain. 
She was pretty and light skinned, her arm was wrapped 



150 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

up in an improvised tourniquet, a rag pulled around tightly 
with a stick, and the forearm was almost black. She had 
some kind of medicine on her hand it looked like an 
"ointment" made of cow dung which people in the area 
often used. 

Jessie took one look at the tourniquet, pulled out her 
scissors, and cut the bond. The father protested. "Oh, no 
we put that on yesterday to keep the blood poisoning in 
her hand from going through her system." 

Jessie paid no more attention to him than she would 
have to a fly. She was too busy trying to save his daughter's 
life. She began to heat water. She bathed the hand. She 
gave the girl a dose of penicillin and took off the layers of 
"medication." Then she treated the girl's hand with hot 
compresses of Epsom salts, and after some time we were 
able to open up the infected spot and drain off the pus. 
After a little while, the girl stopped groaning. Obviously 
she was feeling better. "I want to tell you a story now 
about this," she said. 

She had been picking fruit and a thorn on one of the 
trees had stuck into her hand. It had become infected and 
as time went on the infection had become worse and worse. 
By the afternoon before, pain was shooting up her arm and 
down her side. As she lay in agony, a man had gone past 
the house. "There is a little boat in Maues," he told them, 
"a little white medical boat that goes along the river. I am 
sure if they should come down this river they could help 

3? 

you. 

The girlwho later completely recovered told us that 
after the man left she got out of her hammock and knelt 
down and prayed that this little white boat would come 



BY ANOTHER WAY 

down the river. And she told her father to go out and wave 
a towel if any small white boat appeared. 

I asked her what hour it was that she prayed. 

"Oh, it was just a little after four yesterday afternoon/* 
the girl said. 



CHAPTER 9 

LABYRINTHS IN GREEN 



TO reach the Indians above Maues, you cross a 
wide clear lake and enter a narrow stream. It is only thirty 
or forty feet wide but very deep; the banks plunge almost 
straight down and the water is black as night. In the morn- 
ing, when there is no wind and no ripples, the water is like 
a translucent blue-black gem, reflecting the dark green of 
the jungle above, the giant Brazil-nut trees, towering above 
all others in the jungle, and patches of blue sky. By this 
route it was not the same as that we took on our first trip 
we could go from this stream into the wide, slowly mov- 
ing Andira River. It, too, looks black but if you dip up a 
cup it is as clear as water from a mountain spring. 

Our first visit to these Indians took us up the Maues 
River, but there are trails between the Maues and the 
Andira over which the Indians maintain communication. 
They are all part of the same tribal group. 

These Indians on the Andira had had contact with white 
people, but none had ever seen or heard a motor launch. 
When they heard us approaching they all fled from the 
village, but a little later they came back to see us. I took 
a boxful of dry goods over to the shore, along with an old- 
fashioned victrola, which I cranked up. A record of lively 
music excited them and they crowded around the victrola 

152 



LABYRINTHS IN GREEN 153 

like children, so close I feared they would break it. To sur- 
prise them, I put on another record of a man singing in a 
strong tenor voice. When they heard that coming out of 
the box, they turned and fled back into the woods, leaving 
me alone on the shore with my victrola and some tenor 
singing the Brazilian national anthem. I took that record 
off and played some more band music, and I could see 
them peeking out around the trees. Finally, they began to 
come back, one by one. 

This was on our second trip to this general area and I 
had brought along my projector and my film. I was very 
anxious to show this to the Indians. However, when I took 
the projector out of the box, they evidently thought it was 
a gun and turned once more and scuttled into the woods. 

Once again I played a little more band music and once 
again, after considerable delay, they came back. So the 
meeting began. 

The next day I wanted to go farther up the river. This 
was a side trip, actually, to explore the area; I had been 
told there were a couple of other villages farther on and I 
wanted to see for myself. I asked the chief if he could let 
me have a guide, since the area was new to me, and he 
called over a tall warrior and ordered him to go with me. 

The guide was a powerful-looking man, naked from the 
waist up, with teeth that were filed down to sharp points. 
I did not know how well I was going to like him or how 
friendly he would be, and was happy to see that he was un- 
armed. 

At any rate, we started up the river. It was a wild part 
of the world. There were no people, no houses, practically 
no signs whatever of civilization. This was the hot, green, 
humid backwoods into which these tribes had retreated 



154 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

before the advance of the white man, just as our own 
Indians in North America had fled back across the con- 
tinent before the tide of exploration. 

We had been traveling for about three hours when we 
saw a little hut standing in a clearing, back a short distance 
from the bank. It was rectangular shaped, with a thatched 
roof, a window, and a door. But what was extraordinary 
was its size; it was not much bigger than an overgrown 
doghouse, about four feet long, three feet wide, and no 
more than four or four and a half feet high. 

"What do they keep in that house?" I asked our guide. 

In broken Portuguese he answered, "That is where we 
keep our war birds/* 

"I would like to see them," I told him. 

"No, you cannot. If you open the door they will get out." 

"But if I open the door carefully so they do not get out?" 

"If you open that door in time of peace/' he said, "the 
old chief will cut off your head." 

It isn't only women who are beset by curiosity. All day 
long I found myself tantalized by the desire to see what 
was in that birdhouse. On the way back, I devised a plan. 
As we came in front of the little clearing, I stopped the 
launch and told the Indian I could not go on without some 
oil* I needed only a small quantity, I said, but I had to 
have it. Well, I might have been able to go along without 
the extra supply he could get only down at the next village, 
but my guide fell for the story and shoved off in his canoe, 
which we had carried with us on the launch. 

I waited until he had vanished around the first bend in 
the river. Then I hurried over to peek in the window of 
that house. Inside was a small bench built across the hut. 
On it stood two earthen jugs, about eight or ten inches 



LABYRINTHS IN GREEN 155 

high and six inches in diameter. On top of each jug was a 
dry banana leaf and on each leaf was a feathered bird- 
very dry and very dead. I went in and looked inside these 
jugs. I saw that there was a thick, brown substance in each. 
I learned later that this was curare, a poison brewed from 
the bark of trees and used on arrows. If a skirmish broke 
out between tribes, they could come by here and each man 
could dip his arrows in the earthen jugs of poison. That 
was why the guide did not want me to see what the birds 
guarded. 

When he returned I was waiting for him and we went 
on down the river. It had not occurred to me, until we 
reached the village early that night, that he might have 
laid a trap for me. 

As we came into the shore and let down the gangplank, 
a big Indian jumped down into the boat. "The chief wants 
to see the man's head in a box." 

For one instant I thought that my investigation of the 
hut had been seen and this was the result. I stalled. "What 
do you mean head in a box? What box?" 

"That box right there," the big Indian said, pointing. 

Jessie, standing beside me, thought he was talking about 
the kerosene cartons we carried with us. Her face sud- 
denly grew pale. In English she said, "They want to cut 
off our heads and put them in these boxes because they 
know you looked at the war birds." 

Her voice was calm, but I knew she was thoroughly 
alarmed and upset at me. 

I insisted then that the chief tell us himself what it was 
he wanted. The old man stalked regally onto the launch 
and pointed to the victrola. "I want to see the man in the 
box," he insisted. 



156 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

Then I remembered the tenor singing on the record. 
The chief actually thought there was a man's head in there 
and he wanted to see it. 

It appeared his curiosity equaled my own, as our two 
ways of living crossed. 

In any case, I took the victrola out and, as I played 
records for him that evening, I tried to explain the mech- 
anism. He marveled at it and shook his head, and I think 
he was finally convinced that there really was no head 
inside. 

The Maues are not what we call wild Indians. Actually, 
theirs is a rather high state of development, compared to 
that of the tribes we found to the south and in the far 
western areas. These others lived on an almost prehistoric 
level, often just a shade above the animals. But the Maues 
still hadand in large measure have not surrendered 
many primitive rites and customs and attitudes. We sent 
a teacher into this area for a time but we had to replace 
him because he was cross-eyed. The Indians have little 
patience with this infirmity; they destroy all infants born 
with any such defect. It is their belief that people with 
crossed eyes give the evil eye to those they look on. 

Most of these Indians speak their own dialect. Prac- 
tically none spoke or understood a word of English when 
we first encountered them, and only a few knew Portu- 
guese. I remember once, when we were vaccinating a 
number of them against smallpox, we saw two very ancient 
ladies standing by themselves. They must have been be- 
tween ninety and a hundred years old. As we were finish- 
ing up, I said, "We have vaccinated everyone except those 
two young ladies in the corner." 

The Indians who understood Portuguese began to laugh 



LABYRINTHS IN GREEN 157 

and the two old women wanted to know what the joke was, 
so one of the men translated what I had said. One of the 
women said something in reply and all the Indians began 
to roar. 

Then it was translated for me: "She says if she is a 
young girl, then she wants to be your daughter-in-law." 

They were a people of humor and gentleness and vio- 
lence. Often they combine wisdom and cunning with a 
naivete that is almost childlike. They had never seen ice 
before we arrived and the refrigerator on the Luzeiro was 
a source of wonder and delight to them. They also liked to 
rub their feet over the smooth, cool linoleum on the floor 
of our cabins. They enjoyed staying on the boat and often, 
if we had sick to care for, we would have to hurry them 
along. Jessie worked out a way of getting them out of the 
boat. She would take out a tray of ice cubes and put one 
in the hand of each Indian. They would change it from 
hand to hand as the cold penetrated. Finally, Jessie would 
say, "If you want to get that home before it melts, you had 
better go right now." They would all leave at once, and 
we would be left to go on with whatever we had to do. 

Once the old chief called me to his hut to make a serious 
inquiry: What did I know about alarm clocks? It seems he 
had bought one when they had gone to the city, but it had 
gone only one day. Then it had stopped and had not run 
again in months. He had not realized that he had to wind 
it up when it ran down. 

The morals of these people have always been very high. 
They do not practice polygamy and their home life is in 
most cases happy. The women do most of the work; the 
men do the hunting and fishing. But their marriage rituals 
are unique and extraordinary; the prospective bridegroom 



158 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

is put through one of the most terrible ordeals imaginable. 

The beginning is like many other primitive courtships, 
however. If a man wishes to marry a girl in the tribe, he 
first must get the consent of her father. Once he obtains 
this, he goes to the girl's mother and gets her permission. 
He is then able to call on the young lady of his choice. 
Finally, the wedding arrangements are completed. 

For the ceremony, the tribespeople make two large 
gloves, tightly woven of straw. They are decorated with 
the bright feathers of birds to make them as beautiful as 
possible. Next, nuts are gathered in the woods and strung, 
to be used later in the ceremony. They give out a hollow 
ring when jangled, almost like a string of bells. Finally, 
they collect an insect found in that region it is known as 
the tocandeira. The savage and poisonous sting of these 
tiny wasplike insects with their glittering wings hurts al- 
most unbearably for about twenty-four hours, and there is 
no known way short of morphine to deaden the pain. 

However, the Indians have developed a vegetable com- 
pound which can anesthetize the insect itself. A dose of 
this over the nest of these insects puts them to sleep, but 
does not kill them. While these creatures are in their coma- 
tose state, about eighty of them are put in each of the 
gloves, with their wings delicately woven into the straw, 
so that the stingers face in toward the hand. On the wed- 
ding day, about an hour before the ceremony, the commit- 
tee in charge of the festivities blows smoke into the gloves. 
The insects are awakened by this and, angered, they strug- 
gle to strike back. 

At the given hour, the bride and bridegroom appear, 
and the "wedding bells" the strings of nut shells gathered 
in the woods are placed on the leg of the bridegroom at 



LABYRINTHS IN GREEN 159 

the knee. This is one instance where, if the wedding bells 
ring, there is no wedding. For the bridegroom must not 
shake or quiver while he goes through his ordeal. 

Now the young man holds up his hands and, while his 
bride stands in front of him to watch, the gloves, with the 
angry insects inside, are placed on his hands. 

As a hundred and sixty angry insects sting him, all at 
once, the bridegroom must stand there unmoving and 
unshaken. If his legs tremble or his body quails to a point 
where the bells on his knee sound, the young lady will 
refuse him. If he cries out, or grimaces, or complains, she 
will refuse to have him as her husband. This is the law. 

Sometimes the man's arms swell up to twice their normal 
size after this ceremony. Sometimes the bridegroom dies. 
But if he withstands the test, and if he survives, he and the 
lady are considered from that moment on to be duly wed, 
and the gloves are hung upon the wall of their home as 
their wedding certificate. 

No wonder polygamy is unknown among the Maues! 

The primitive character of these Indians becomes just 
as apparent when trouble or danger strikes. I recall one 
occasion when some enterprising man had conceived the 
idea of building a rosewood distillery near one of the vil- 
lages on the Andira. This is one of the hundreds of varieties 
of hardwood found in the Amazon Valley; out of it is dis- 
tilled a valuable rose-perfume extract. The large trees are 
chopped down and run through a machine that slices them 
up into little chips from which the perfume is extracted. 
The extract goes to America or France to be used in manu- 
facturing commercial perfumes. 

This man's plan in building a rosewood distillery near 
the village was that the Indians would get him the rose- 



l6o LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

wood at low cost and work in his plant for a few cents a 
day. The Indians, however, did not like the idea of having 
their domain invaded by this man and his factory. 

Their method of opposing his activity was direct. When 
I arrived in the village, hundreds of Indians from farther 
up the river had come to join in a war meeting. Five chiefs 
were present for this conclave, and about two thousand 
poisoned arrows were neatly stacked up and ready to go. 
Their plan was to make a direct attack on the factory and 
its operators, kill the owner and all the others involved, 
and burn the place down. 

That, they said, would get rid of the rosewood opera- 
tions forever, and discourage any other invaders with sim- 
ilar notions. 

While hundreds of braves milled around ominously, the 
chiefs deliberated; and because they trusted me, they per- 
mitted me to listen and even to counsel them. I advised 
them to use moderation. "If you go off like this and destroy 
and kill, you will only bring down trouble and death upon 
yourselves. Why do you not try to resolve it peacefully?" 

The chiefs looked at me grimly. "How? What way of 
peace, Senhor Leo?" 

"The governor in Manaus. He is in charge of this district. 
Choose one of your chiefs to go to him and tell him that 
you do not want this rosewood plant on the outskirts of 
your village." 

After further discussion, they decided that perhaps I 
was right. The poisoned arrows were put away and the 
Indian warriors sent home. A single chief was sent up to 
Manaus. He returned some days later with the joyful news 
that the governor was all on the side of the Indians. 

Shortly thereafter, the rosewood plant was moved and 



LABYRINTHS IN GREEN l6l 

the war birds were undoubtedly replaced on the banana 
leaves which cover the urns of curare. 

Civilization is a matter o comparison and definition. 
The lower tidal basin of the river is considered a compara- 
tively civilized region, yet one does not have to go far 
from Belem to find dense jungles. We average, after all, 
over 80 inches of rain a year, all along the river. A little 
farther back from the stream, there is often more open 
forest with less of the thick undergrowth and many giant 
trees. Most of the land is flat and forested, and there are 
large areas in the western part about fifteen hundred 
miles from Belem where white men have never set foot. 
In some regions, back from the main river, we would come 
upon Indian villages, only to discover, on our return, no 
one and nothing. The nomadic Indians, following the game 
and the food, have moved on. 

At certain times of year they stay near the long sandy 
beaches that line parts of the main river. The turtles, which 
sometimes weigh up to 150 pounds, come there to dig 
holes and lay eggs. The Indians come to live for a time off 
the turtle eggs and the turtles themselves. At other times 
of the year they go where there is more animal life, deer, 
wild hogs, buffalo; there are great herds of buffalo, direct 
descendants of animals brought over from Africa by the 
Portuguese. These beasts don't live in the jungles but in the 
more open places, especially on the island of Marajo at the 
mouth of the Amazon. 

The wild boars, hunted both for their skins and then- 
meat, travel in large herds. Once, going up the Amazon, 
we ran into fifty or seventy of them, swimming together 
across the river. Sometimes, if a hunter shoots one, the en- 



l62 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

tire herd will turn and attack him, and to save his life he 
will have to climb a tree. I know of hunters who have been 
stranded all day in a tree, waiting for the angry animals to 
abandon the siege. 

The river is a strange neighborhood of customs and ways 
unlike any other place on earth. In this labyrinth of river- 
ways and jungle trails, over the years, we gathered a whole 
glittering notion counter of detail that is really a way of 
life. 

I think, for instance, of a little stream upriver where 
once, long ago, a group of our directors and I anchored for 
the night. In the morning, one of them, a man named 
Ulrich Wissner, got up early and, when he saw how clear 
the water was, took out his dental plate to clean it. As he 
was doing this, the boat lurched and Ulrich's teeth disap- 
peared into the depths. 

"Well, there goes six hundred cruzeiros to the bottom 
of the river/' he said resignedly. 

From that time on, this stream became known all along 
the river as "The Place Where Wissner Lost His Teeth/' 
Some time later, when this director came to the river again, 
this time with his wife, the thing she wanted most to see 
was this spot. When we showed her the place she looked 
long into the water and then said, with her quaint German 
accent, "Well, I suppose some alligator is using my hus- 
band's teeth now/' 

Often the losses on the river are far more disastrous. The 
floods sweep away livestock and farms and lives. The 
streams change and shift with the tides, and the rains and 
the flood waters swirl down from the Andes. At floodtime 
the river is a coiling monster, lashing out in its fury, spum- 
ing death and devastation in its uncontrolled rage. 



LABYRINTHS IN GREEN 163 

Raising cattle is a major operation along the river, but 
many farmers have no high ground to which to take their 
animals during times of high water. Their solution is to 
build platforms and rafts of logs. Whole herds of cattle 
stand on these until the flood waters recede often for sev- 
eral months and the farmers have to go out and cut grass 
and bring it in their canoes to these animals to try to keep 
them alive. Many of ti^ie cattle don't survive. It is not un- 
usual to see a raft crowded with other animals as well: 
hogs and chickens, even cats and other household pets. 

It is at this time that many of the green-grass islands are 
pulled away from the banks and carried down the rivers; 
often they are several miles or more in length. Sometimes 
a farmer will "capture'' a small grass island, tie a rope to it, 
and tug it, little by little, over to the platform where his 
livestock is standing. Then he will have feed close at hand. 

During floodtime it usually begins in the spring, which 
is the northern hemisphere's fall, and runs on into January 
and February houses also are flooded along the riverbanks 
and for miles back. As the torrent begins to swirl through 
the house, the unlucky owners put logs down on the floor 
and a raised floor on top of the logs. If the water keeps 
rising, they put down another layer of logs and another 
floor eight or nine inches higher. They do this as long as 
they can, but if the water rises too swiftly, they have to 
abandon their houses to the flood and flee for their lives. 

It is fantastic to see how fast the water can rise. One of 
our church members told me that one night, when her 
baby fell from his hammock, she had to rescue him from 
the waters sweeping in through the door to a depth of 
three feet. 

The Amazon is a world of strange sights, strange mo- 



164 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

ments, strange experiences. On a small stream that serves 
as a short cut into a larger river in the area of the Brevis 
Islands, we came around a bend to see a high tree on the 
bank. It had almost no leaves, but was covered with old 
clothes, pants, shirts, socks and pajamas, skirts, colored 
ribbons and tattered hats, all dangling grotesquely from its 
limbs. 

We asked the friend who was guiding us through this 
short cut and he told us the legend of the old-clothes tree 
of the Amazon. 

"Years and years ago a man was coming through this 
stream in a large canoe with four men rowing him while he 
sat in a reclining chair in the stern. Suddenly the canoe 
began to spin around in a circle. The water was deep but 
the canoe would not go on, either upstream or down. In 
despair they looked around and over on the riverbank they 
saw a mermaid sitting under the tree, naked. 

"She asked them for clothes and the man opened his 
trunk, took out several articles of clothing, and threw them 
to her. The mermaid left and the canoe proceeded on its 
course. From that day on, everyone who goes by here in a 
canoe must put a piece of old clothing on the tree or, if 
they have no clothes to spare, must turn what they have 
inside out before they continue on their journey. The place 
is caUed The Bend Where You Turn Your Shirt/ " 

So do stories and traditions start and live in the laby- 
rinth that is the Amazon. Just below the modern city of 
Manaus in the Negro River is a beautiful little island, only 
about a mile long and five hundred feet wide. It is known 
as Conscience Island. When I asked about the name I was 
told, "Years ago when the rubber workers came here, seek- 
ing their fortunes, they checked their consciences on this 



LABYRINTHS IN GREEN 165 

island, and went on into the jungles. None ever stopped to 
reclaim his on the way back/' 

All along the Amazon there is wildlife in abundance: 
birds, ducks of every variety and plumage, fish of all types, 
alligators, and beasts of prey. In the early days alligators 
were plentiful everywhere, many of them twenty feet long 
or more. After being called on often to treat these crea- 
tures' victims, I didn't have to leave my conscience behind 
to strike back at these predators. Once a year we would 
hold an alligator hunt on the Luzeiro usually for visiting 
directors from Rio or the States. I have shot many alli- 
gators at night, when it is easy to see them by the reflected 
light of their eyes, like two little electric lamps sitting 
motionless in the water. I remember one of our boat boys 
exclaiming one night, as an alligator lying in the water a 
few yards out from the boat closed his eyes, "Look he 
turned out his light!" 

The labyrinth also is a place of sounds, a thousand little 
half -heard sounds. Here is a man who asks us to lend him 
our shotgun; while we wait on the boat, he will go out in 
the woods and shoot us a deer. So we lend him our gun and 
some shells, and off he goes into the woods. A little later 
we hear shots and we begin thinking of venison steaks, but 
when he comes back he is dragging a big jaguar. 

The man dumps this huge dead Amazon tiger before us 
and tells us what happened. As he had been going along 
the trail, looking for deer, he noticed the song of the 
cigarra, the locust of the Amazon. As he would pass a tree, 
the cigarra would stop its song for an instant as it always 
does in time of danger. Then it would start up again. An in- 
stant later, it would halt again, as if another peril was upon 



l66 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

it. There must be, our hunter decided, someone or some- 
thing following him. 

He stepped into the shadow of the trees, turned, and 
looked back along the trail. There, outstalking his evening 
meal, was the jaguar. The hunter raised his gun and fired, 
before the animal could spring. 

Such is this labyrinth of green in which we lived and 
worked. But it had its other side, too, in our personal lives, 
and in the sacrifices we had to make to carry on our work 
for these river people. We were parents as well as mission- 
aries; our children were dear to us; and many times it was 
heartbreaking for us to have to leave them in Belem, while 
we went hundreds of miles away into the most inaccessible 
regions of the Amazon. Our wonderful workers cared for 
them, but still it was not like being with them ourselves. 
Always they would come down to the Luzeiro to say 
good-by, and always they would be waiting for us on our 
return, 

As they grew older, the question of their education and 
their future became paramount. We knew at last that we 
would have to face up to the question which we had, in a 
way, been dodging, trying to put off the inevitable deci- 
sion. 

This is a question that each missionary must ask himself 
and to which only he can give the answer: In a life dedi- 
cated to the work of the Lord, how much does the mission- 
ary owe to the service of others, and how great is his 
obligation to his own? 

Our life, Jessie's and mine, was adventurous and excit- 
ing. At least half of every year we were on the river, going 
from village to village, following some narrow winding 
stream along green corridors to a sick child or mother, to a 



LABYRINTHS IN GREEN 167 

community that needed us, to someone who wanted some- 
thing. And never knowing, for certain, what lay beyond the 
next bend. 

But it was a lonely life, too. Our children we could not 
take with us, except on that first trip. As Jack grew up, he 
went to school in Belem. Marian followed him a few ye^rs 
later. Each year, as we set out on our long journey, we 
found it harder to leave. 

Once little Marian came down with whooping cough in 
Belem. A change of environment is sometimes recom- 
mended for this disease, so we took her with us for a couple 
of weeks on the boat. As soon as she was better she was 
up and in her bathing suit and diving off the side of the 
boat like some diminutive mermaid, enjoying the morning 
sun and the cool shade and clear water. "Don't worry/' she 
would tell us, "I will watch out for alligators and big fish 
and nothing will hurt me." 

And nothing ever did. 

At another time, when we were coming back from a 
three-month trip into a very wild part of the river, we 
arrived at Maues to find a letter from Marian. The children 
were back in Belem under the care of Dona Maria, a 
Brazilian national and one of our reliable church workers, 
who was also a strict disciplinarian. One of her jobs was to 
keep little Marian from having too many cakes and cookies 
and other sweets. 

Jessie tore open the envelope. "Dear Mother/' Marian 
had written. "Please hurry home. Dona Maria won't give 
me any more butter." 

Somehow that letter with its childish phrasing summed 
up much that was in our hearts, and Jessie didn't sleep very 
well that night as she pondered over our problem. 



l68 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

At that time Marian was living with Dona Maria and 
her husband, an Adventist pastor, in Belem. Jack, who was 
fifteen, was staying in our apartment to look after things, 
and taking his meals at the pastor's home. Once Dona 
Maria asked him if he wasn't afraid to stay all alone in the 
apartment. "Why, I'm not alone," Jack answered. "Jesus is 
with me, and also Fox, our police dog." 

When Jack was ready for high school, we decided to let 
him go south to our school in Sao Paulo. It was a hard deci- 
sion to make, for it meant that we would be with him even 
less; but Jack was a self-reliant youth, and we knew he 
would do well in his work in the advanced school. Then 
in 1936 came our furlough to the States and Jack came 
north to go back with us to the States. By this time he 
already had two years of college and he was full of school 
and studies and plans for his life. He wanted to go to col- 
lege in America now, the Pacific Union College near An- 
guin, California. If we returned to Brazil, Jack would 
remain in our native land. While he had been away in Sao 
Paulo, in Brazil, many hundreds of miles to the south, still 
it was not as far distant as another continent, on the other 
side of the equator, 

By that time Marian was thirteen, and we were deeply 
concerned about her education and future, too. We wanted 
her to have the advantages of an education in the States, 
with all that this would mean to her. We thought of other 
missionaries who had given up their work in the field be- 
cause of the need to see their children through school at 
home. Now the question had come squarely to us, as we 
began preparations for our furlough. To leave our daugh- 
ter in America, too, would mean a terrible separation. Then 
both our children would be away from us. Marian was still 



LABYRINTHS IN GKEEN l6g 

so young. Who was there to care for her in the States? This 
was the problem that worried us day and night at this time 
of our lives. Then one day Jessie said to me, "Doesn't 
David tell us to 'cast thy burden upon the Lord and he will 
sustain thee? Isn't that how we should let this be re- 
solved?" 

That night we decided, Jessie and I, to make a proposi- 
tion and ask the Lord to answer us by a certain sign. We 
had our obligations to these people of the Amazon; we had 
promised, by taking this assignment, to look after their 
needs, and certainly those needs were still great and our 
work was far from done. On the other hand, we had as- 
sumed the responsibility of caring for our daughter. Our 
parents in the States, on both sides, were too old to look 
after her. That she should have proper care was the heart 
of the problem. So we left it in the Lord's hands. And the 
sign we asked for was to be this: If, when we returned to 
Belem after a brief trip, there should be word from some- 
one who would be able to care for our daughter in the 
States, and if this should come completely unsolicited, then 
it would be a sign from the Lord that we should leave 
Marian in America and return to the Amazon to complete 
our work. 

We told no one of this but kept our own counsel and 
left on this trip which, we knew, might well be our last 
on the Amazon. But as we went from village to village, 
treating thousands of sick, hearing "Ate o ana" from a 
hundred voices, we never said good-by but answered al- 
ways, "Ate o anosi Deus quizer" "Until next year if the 
Lord is willing." 

We wondered, as we rounded Parrot Island on our way 
back into Belem, what was in store for us, and we had 



I/O LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

never before been so eager to look over our mail. A huge 
stack had piled up and, squarely on top, was a letter post- 
marked Washington, D.C. It proved to be from a friend of 
ours, a nurse. She was concerned about us and our work 
and our family; she'd been thinking of us, she wrote, and 
wondered if we had given any thought to Marian's future* 
Perhaps we would like to have her educated in the United 
States. If this were so, she said, she would be happy to take 
care of her for as long as we or she might wish* 

We had asked for a sign and it had come to us, so di- 
rectly and so powerfully, that it was almost stunning, 

We would take our children back to America. And when 
our year's furlough was over we would return by our- 
selves to the labyrinth of the river. 



CHAPTER 10 

A TEACHER DIGS A GRAVE 



BOTH Jessie and I knew that we had no right to 
think of ourselves as martyrs because of this separation 
from our children. Our son was on the West Coast in the 
States, Marian on the East Coast; both were in good hands 
and we did not have to worry about them. Far greater sac- 
rifices than this temporary separation were being made by 
others because of the importance of education for all chil- 
dren, and adults as well. Even for those of this river to 
which Jessie and I returned, alone, to carry on our work. 

In terms of sacrifice and devotion in the cause of educa- 
tionof leading these people and their children out of the 
darkness of ignorance Jessie and I always think of a 
teacher named Honorino Taveres, his lovely wife Maria, 
their dog and their chickens and their cow, and their 
infant son. 

Honorino was a light-haired Brazilian who came from 
southern Brazil^ where he had been a teacher for several 
years. Loyal members of our church, this teacher and his 
wife decided that their greatest service could come in 
bringing light into the green-shadowed world of the river. 
If they reached only a few, they made a start, Honorino 
said, in all his young enthusiasm. Like a pebble in the sea, 
the waves would spread out from wherever they began. 

171 



LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

They had decided to start their work in a remote area 
on the Andira River where the Indian tribes had had little 
contact with white people and none at all on any pro- 
longed everyday basis. There was no school of any kind in 
this region; theirs was to be a pioneering effort, and we did 
not know what the reaction of the natives might be. 

We took Honorino and his family to their destination in 
the Luzeiro. We had an extra canoe in tow, and the cow 
and chickens and dog, a few furnishings, luggage, and the 
family itself. 

When we arrived the trip took several days we were 
greeted with the usual bowing and indications of welcome. 
But there was a noticeable reserve in the manner of the 
Indians; there were no smiles on their faces as they 
watched us unload. We told the chief why Honorino and 
his family had come; this was to be the teacher to help 
them and their children; we would build a school. 

The chief nodded as if in understanding assent. But the 
others around him gave no such indication and from their 
expressions we sensed a wave of hostility. The night of our 
arrival, they put on a ritual to which we were not invited; 
we were told it was a devil dance. Almost all night we were 
kept awake by the loud and incessant pounding of the 
drums. 

I was worried about what might happen, but the hostil- 
ity did not break out into any open acts at that time. We 
talked with the chief and his advisers, the elder men of 
the tribe, and after a few days they agreed that it would be 
good to build a school for their children, and a house for 
the teacher. The chief called the Indians together to tell 
them of our plans and they agreed, also, saying they would 
help us put up the school and the teacher's home. The 



A TEACHER DIGS A GRAVE 

chief assigned Honorino and his family a house to live in 
until their place was finished. (It happened to be, we 
learned afterward, the home of the local witch doctor, 
who at that time was away in another village. ) 

With these arrangements made, we felt safe in leaving 
our teacher and his family in this far-off place, to live and 
work among these people. I will always remember the 
sight of that couple standing on the bank waving to us 
with their white handkerchiefs and when we got farther 
away, with a white towel as we drew away from the bank 
and headed down the river. 

For a time all went smoothly. The chief had staked out 
a line, on one side of which was to be the village, on the 
other the school and the house for the teacher. We had 
drawn up plans and had laid out the positions for the two 
buildings. Work went along swiftly on the school; the 
frame was up and the roof was on by the time the witch 
doctor returned. But when he discovered what was going 
on, he was furious. These white strangers represented a 
threat to his own teachings and his authority and, to add 
insult to injury, they were living in his house! 

They were ordered out at once and the only place for 
them to move into all of them, including the baby was 
the still half -finished schoolhouse, minus walls or any pro- 
tection from the dampness and the tropical winds and 
rains. 

The rainy season had just begun and the storms whipped 
through the half -finished building with such a rage that 
everything was drenched for days. The baby caught a cold 
which turned into pneumonia. The enmity of the witch 
doctor and his supporters continued. Our onetime guide, 



LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

who was one of them, killed the teacher's dog and did 
everything he could to drive Honorino out. 

A strange, grim war went on in this village between a 
man and woman fighting to save the life of their infant, 
and a village of Indians, half friendly, half hostile. 

Honorino and Maria lost their battle to save their baby. 
The conditions under which they were forced to live were 
too much for the tiny son to combat, and after a few days 
of terrible fever he died. The two of them were alone in 
this rain-swept village of primitive terror. 

Together they took counsel. Their first step, whatever 
else they did, whether they decided to go or stay, was to 
bury the baby. The Indians have their own rites of burial, 
but of these this missionary couple wanted no part. The 
father borrowed a spade, went out into a clearing, and 
began to dig, with his own hands, his son's grave. With his 
own hands, also, he nailed together rough-hewn pine tim- 
bers to make a tiny coffin. 

The Indians watched in silence as all this went on, fol- 
lowing each step of the way with wordless intensity. They 
themselves care little about the dead beyond the ritualistic 
stage; at any rate they do not appear to grieve deeply when 
a loved one is lost their attitude seems to be that he is 
gone and that's that. 

Yet there was something different about this and they 
were aware of it as Honorino ploddingly, step by step, did 
what he had to do. By himself, with Maria following, he 
carried the small coffin to the grave. The rain poured down 
with its endless symphony against the leaves as these sor- 
rowing parents stood there while the father said a prayer 
and read a few words of Holy Scripture. "Lo, I am with 
you always," he read, "even unto the end of the world." 



A TEACHER DIGS A GRAVE 175 

Silent, unsmiling still, the Indians looked on, standing a 
little distance away. They had killed Honorino's dog and 
cow, and stolen his chickens, and done all they could, 
largely under the instigation of our former guide, to drive 
these two out. Now they appeared somewhat touched by 
this ceremony. 

As Honorino and Maria turned away, the chief ap- 
proached them. "Will you still stay and teach? Or will you 
go down the river and join the white boat?" 

"We are staying," Honorino answered. "If we were to 
run away, we would have brought on the death of our 
child for a worthless cause. We do not think it is worthless. 
Can you understand that?" 

Slowly, the chief nodded. "It will not be without pur- 
pose, what you are doing here," he told them. 

Subtly, in a way the young teacher could not explain, 
the attitude of the Indians changed. The building of the 
school and the house went forward swiftly; despite the 
witch doctor and his coterie of followers, most of the In- 
dians began working hard to complete them. 

After long weeks the school and the house were finished. 
Some of the Indians began to attend services held by the 
teacher on the Sabbath. They began to send their young- 
sters to school. Teaching and training and holding meet- 
ings in the midst of a people many of whom had been 
enemies, this bereaved father and mother forgot their loss 
and their sorrow. Maria taught the Indian women to knit 
and cook. As a result of the school and the dedication of 
this man and woman, the lives of these primitive people 
changed completely. 

There was a postscript to this story that was especially 
heart-warming to us. 



1/6 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

Once, long after Honorino and Maria began their work, 
we held a meeting of these Indians, who, under the gentle 
influence of these two wonderful people, had become 
friendly. 

Afterward, our onetime guide asked if he could go with 
us down the river. I knew him only from that one trip; I 
did not know the role he had played in trying to drive 
out our teacher. 

It was about eleven o'clock when we left the village, 
and overhead the skies were stormy and dark. As I sat 
steering the Luzeiro through the night, my thoughts 
eddied around the grim story of the teacher who had first 
come here, his courage in the face of the Indians' opposi- 
tion, and his victory. 

I was brought back to earth by our Indian hitchhiker, 
who had crowded so close to me that he was almost push- 
ing me off my seat. As I wondered what his nudging meant, 
suddenly he whispered to me, "I wish to ask a favor. Could 
you have your wife sing again the song she sang at the 
meeting tonight?" 

I called Jessie, and she came forward and sang the hymn 
called "Christ Saves Sinners." Jessie has a pleasing voice 
and it was lovely to hear her there in the night. When she 
finished, the Indian asked her to sing it all over again. 

Finally, when she had gone through it a second time, the 
Indian asked, "Did Jesus die to save all sinners everywhere 
or only the white man?" 

"Why, He died to save all of us," Jessie said. 

"I am a very wicked man," the Indian said gravely. "I 
tried to kill the teacher and I did kill his dog and had his 
cow destroyed and stole his chickens. I have killed six men 



A TEACHER DIGS A GRAVE 

in my life six men." He paused. "Do you think He could 
forgive me my sins?" 

"Jesus is our Saviour," I said. "He is ready to forgive any 
who come to Him with repentance in their hearts, regard- 
less of who they are or what they have done in the past." 

"I want to know Him/' this Indian said, his voice so low 
we could scarcely hear. 

Education is regarded in our faith as vital to the training 
for a Christian life. This is why, wherever we go with our 
missions, we build schools and hospitals and clinics as well 
as churches. Our goal is to build up mind, body, and soul 
to educate "the mind, heart, and hand" and through this 
threefold effort to make the individual capable of sound 
judgments of his own. We teach; we do not indoctrinate. 
We train but we do not regiment. We guide but do not 
seek to compel. 

In many places along the Amazon, youngsters had no 
opportunity at all for education, and the starting of schools 
has always been one of our purposes in the area, as far as 
our limited funds would permit. By 1958, when Jessie and 
I returned to America, our church was operating some 
twenty schools in the Amazon Valley, with more than a 
thousand youngsters enrolled. The schools are of different 
types. The first one we set up, in the neighborhood of the 
Maues Indians, was what we call a mission school, where 
adults as well as children are taught. Other schools are 
primarily for children. In all of them the problem is three- 
foldspiritual, academic, and manual. Pupils must work at 
least two hours a day, to help defray part of the expenses 
of their own education and to train them for work. 

The first Adventist school in Brazil goes back half a 



178 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

century in Sao Paulo, where a few classes were started 
in a one-room schoolhouse built with what little money 
was available. Located just outside Sao Paulo in Santo 
Amaro, today it has become a magnificent college, with a 
total of about seven hundred students in residence each 
year. Its principal object is to prepare them for the minis- 
try, but in addition to theological courses it gives com- 
mercial- and normal-school training as well. It is fully 
accredited by the Brazilian government. 

Our school program along the Amazon was not so am- 
bitious. It developed as our missionary activity progressed, 
and it advanced in a variety of ways, sometimes where we 
recognized a need and took the lead in starting a school, 
sometimes where the natives provided the impetus. As 
word spread of our schools and our teachers missionaries 
or church members usually we began to get many re- 
quests. Unfortunately we had neither the funds nor the 
personnel, trained or even partially trained, to send to all 
the school-less communities which asked for them. 

Once, I recall, three Indians arrived in Fortaleza, capital 
of the state of Ceara. This is a modern city on the Atlantic 
Ocean, with a population of more than a hundred thou- 
sand; and the sight of three Indians, barefoot and in native 
dress, with their long hair flowing down to their shoulders, 
attracted as much attention as they would have on Chi- 
cago's Michigan Boulevard. But the natives were oblivious 
to the stares. They had just one thing in mind: to find the 
people who operated the boats on the Amazon River and 
had opened schools for children. At last they located our 
minister in charge of the Fortaleza Mission, Pastor Roger 
Wilcox. 

The oldest of the three was their spokesman: "Our chief 



A TEACHER DIGS A GRAVE 

sent us to find these people. I am the chiefs brother; these 
are his sons. We need help. We are here to get a teacher 
for our tribe." 

"You came a long way?" Wilcox asked. 

"Yes/' the older man said. "We have walked this entire 
way. It has taken us thirty-one days and each day we 
walked many kilometers." 

Pastor Wilcox looked down at their bare feet, which had 
brought them over jungles and dusty roads to this city by 
the sea. 

"As soon as we can find a teacher who can go, we will 
send him to you/' he promised them. 

Happy with this promise, the three started their long 
trek home. But finding a teacher and the funds to finance 
a school was easier said than done. Months later, the three 
Indians returned. "The old chief is old and gray and his 
eyes grow dim/' they told the pastor. "Each morning we 
carry him to the river to see the teacher, but none has 
come." 

Again, with only a promise that they would get a teacher 
as soon as possible, the three men had to start home. 

One day a teacher will go there. But at that time we had 
no funds to hire one, nor any man or woman prepared 

to go- 
Classes in most of our schools along the river extend 

from the first through the fifth grade, as do the Brazilian 
public schools. Above that are junior high and high school 
Most of our work was with the primary grades, but we have 
an academy in the state of Pernambuco, where, for higher 
education, we send students from as far off as Manaus, 
750 miles away. In Belem itself, on the river, another 
academy was under construction when we left Brazil. 



l8o LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

Our schools are accepted by the state authorities in 
Brazil and maintain the highest standards. Our teachers 
are either graduates of our own institutions or of the state 
normal schools. Funds to run them are obtained in several 
ways, but come primarily from church allocations and 
where they can afford it from the families of the pupils. 

In Belem, all but one of our seven churches also main- 
tain their own school In most Brazilian schools, classes 
run only half a day; but in certain of our schools we hold 
two sessions, our teachers taking one group in the morning 
and another in the afternoon. Along the river, particularly, 
in addition to the three R's, we give courses in planting 
and cultivating the ground, and in cleanliness and body 
hygiene, and in all schools we have Bible classes for spirit- 
ual instruction. Our schools are open to persons of all 
faiths; religious instruction is based on the Bible and its 
prophecies. 

Each of our schools operates on an annual budget, From 
30 to 40 per cent of a teacher's salary is paid by the mis- 
sion, which also furnishes the building and equipment re- 
quired. Remaining funds come from tuition and from the 
church organization. Where parents can't afford to pay, 
the church makes up the difference, 

The schools along the river were primitive; some of 
them reminded me of my early teaching days in the 
Rockies, when the youngsters used to stack their guns 
outside the door before coming in for class. And, like those 
rural schools in the States, they were used for other pur- 
poses, too. 

I arranged to hold a meeting one night in one of our 
early schools, built on a knoll high above the river. It was 
to be for both the grownups and the children of our group, 



A TEACHER DIGS A GRAVE l8l 

and all the youngsters were getting themselves spruced up 
for the occasion. I was there early, looking on while one 
of our members was acting as barber, cutting a youngster's 
hair. The little fellow was perched on the desk where the 
teacher sat during classes and from which I would preach 
in the evening-when I noticed something moving under 
the table. I called some of our group and, as we snatched 
the boy to safety, we found a bushmaster snake on a 
ledge under the table top. They dispatched the snake with 
their big knives, and the meeting was postponed until 
they found the other bushmasters always travel in pairs 
and destroyed it. 

But snakes and wild animals and floods and the difficul- 
ties of transportation none of these could halt our school 
program for long. In Belem, in Manaus, in the little towns 
along the Amazon, wherever some few people came to- 
gether to form a church group, there followed quickly a 
school for their children. Literally thousands of youngsters 
have learned the rudiments of education in these schools 
built in the jungles-children who in other years would 
have been illiterates all their lives. And many of these chil- 
dren have gone on to our college in Sao Paulo, or to schools 
and colleges in other cities, following their elementary edu- 
cation in one of these "little palm schoolhouses" on the river. 
Many have taught others, in their own tribes, in the back- 
washes beyond where we or our teachers reached. Knowl- 
edge spreads like seeds on the wind, carried from one town 
to the next, from one individual to another. 

One story I like in connection with our schools involves 
one of our colporteurs who sold Bibles and religious litera- 
ture along the river and a blind man on whom he called. 
This book salesman had been told that this blind man 



182 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

wouldn't buy any Bibles or books; after all, he couldn't 
even see. But the colporteur had an impulsion to talk with 
him, without necessarily trying to sell him anything at all. 
He didn't even tell the blind man at first what he did, only 
that he was engaged in Gospel work and had stopped in 
to visit and comfort him. 

So they talked of religion, the colporteur said a brief 
prayer, and then rose to go. As he reached the door, the 
blind man said, "Now, what is your real business? I know 
that you have not come all this distance simply to comfort 
me and say a prayer. You must have some business or 
something to sell." 

The colporteur smiled. After a moment he said, "You 
are right. I am selling books about religion, and I am 
selling the Bible; but because you could not see to read 
any of that, I did not try to sell you anything/' 

The man was interested in the Bible, Could he hear 
some of it? The salesman took out a copy and turned to 
a passage with which he was familiar, in Isaiah (28:18) : 
''And in that day shall the deaf hear the words of the book, 
and the eyes of the blind shall see. . . .** 

The blind man listened attentively as the colporteur 
read. "Let me feel the book," he said then. "Let me hold it 
in ray hand/' 

The colporteur handed it to him, and the man carefully 
felt the covers and ran his fingers over the smooth pages. 
He asked how much it cost. The price was eighty cruzeiros, 
the salesman told him. "Go open the big trunk," the man 
called out to his wife in the next room, "and bring me the 
money/ 7 

"I can't read or write," the woman said, as she appeared. 



A TEACHER DIGS A GRAVE 183 

But the sale was completed, and the blind man, holding 
the Bible, told her: "Now go get a new towel, wrap up this 
book carefully, and put it in the trunk/' 

The colporteur was curious. What did they plan to do 
with the Book, he asked. "There is a school near here," 
the man told him. "It has been started by your people, I 
seem to remember. I have a grandson who is now of school 
age, and I am going to talk with this teacher today and 
see if she will take in my grandson, so that he will learn 
to read and someday he will be able to read this Book 
to me/' 

Our schools, and the broad educational program which 
operates throughout Brazil as in all countries where our 
missionaries are active, are more than merely an arm of the 
church; they are an endeavor to bring new light and mean- 
ing to the lives of the people. To Jessie and me, the school 
that symbolizes most what this work means lies in an area 
due south of Bel6m. It is in this region that one reaches 
the mouth of the River of Death. As this is written, no 
white man has ever gone up this stream and returned alive. 

It was in this general area that Theodore Roosevelt 
made his expedition up the River of Doubt, now called the 
River of Roosevelt. All of this country is jungle, much of 
it unexplored. The forests conceal hostile tribes whose 
arrows rain down on any invaders. 

To reach this part of the world and establish a school 
was a hazardous operation for us, even after our many 
years on the riverways of the Amazon, but in the middle 
1950's we set out. It was to be our last major pioneering 
activity before our return to America. 

The main "highway" into this area is the Tocantins 



184 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

River, the last great tributary to enter the Amazon before 
it spills into the Atlantic. About fifty miles wide at the 
point where it joins the Amazon, this huge stream follows 
a generally southerly course through jungles and forests 
wilder than any we had seen before. Some distance south 
we came to another large river, the Araguaia, along whose 
banks are the Chevantes Indians. They were really savage, 
we had been warned, and had always been hostile to all 
white men. Every night, as we proceeded on our way, we 
stopped on the east side of the stream; had we ventured 
to the west bank, we would have been showered with 
poisoned arrows. 

Chugging upstream, we came to the Island of Bananas 
and, shortly beyond, the Rio Morte (The River of Death) 
and the River of Doubt. Here, on the island and the east 
shore of the Araguaia, there is another tribe, the Carajas. 
It was with them that we hoped to start our work in this 
region. 

They were supposed to have become more docile than 
the Chevantes, and less given to aiming poisoned arrows 
at strangers, but they were still in a wild state, wore prac- 
tically no clothing, and their way of life was extremely 
primitive. The men, who were husky enough to do the 
heaviest sort of work, were hunters and fishermen only. 
What planting was done a few cassava roots and some 
fruits was taken care of by the women. 

As they lived close to the water, they were all on hand 
to watch as the Luzeiro pulled in to shore and we disem- 
barked with our gifts several hundred fish hooks of vari- 
ous sizes, a quantity of fish line, combs, looking glasses, 
small knives, and (because we had been told that they 



A TEACHER DIGS A GRAVE 185 

went around naked most of the time) five sacks of used 
clothing. We distributed the presents and the clothing, 
and had them dress up for us; but before I could even get 
motion pictures of them in their new apparel, they ran 
back to their huts, took off their clothes, carefully put them 
away, and came back as naked as ever. 

Only a few years before, this tribe had been hostile 
and ready to kill any white man who came into their area, 
Now, even though they would not wear our clothes 
(except at night to keep warm), they welcomed us as 
friends, taking us with them on a fishing trip, guiding us 
through parts of the woods where they hunted, and show- 
ing us the places where they did their planting. They even 
put on one of their ceremonial dances and permitted us to 
make motion pictures. On that occasion the men dressed 
in grass clothing with grotesque masks over their faces 
and huge and often magnificent headgear. The women, 
however, wore even less than usual. 

There was savage excitement in their pagan ceremonial. 
Yet these Indians seemed to be reaching out for something 
beyond this level of development. The gnarled, powerfully 
built chief talked to us about this, begging us to send them 
a teacher so they could learn to read and write and to 
speak Portuguese and also begin to learn a better way of 
life. He was quite in earnest about it. 

On our return to the Mission Office in Goios, we made 
an appeal to our superior organization in the south and 
were granted extra funds with which to organize a school 
for the Carajas. Within a year from our visit, we sent a 
man-and-wife team into this district to take on the job. 
We have a nice school building there; the wife teaches 



l86 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

and the man shows the Indians how to plant, use ma- 
chinery, and till their soil more efficiently. 

To help us with this program with the "wild Indians/' 
the Brazilian government has given them some farm equip- 
ment, a grist mill, a motor, and a small portable electric 
plant and lights. The schoolhouse is busy morning and 
night; the youngsters study during the day, and the "adult 
education" program of the three R's is carried on in the 
evening. It is a real transformation. 

Shortly after the school was opened, the old chief of 
the savage Chevantes tribe died. He left two sons and, 
as happens even in civilized areas, the two had a bitter 
quarrel as to which should be head now. The quarrel 
ended in a split of the tribe into two groups. The wilder 
ones elected to go even farther up the Rio Morte, deeper 
into the shadows they appeared anxious to draw around 
themselves. The younger brother drew around him the 
more tractable members of the tribe. 

The younger son and his followers moved to a place on 
the west bank of the Araguaia, not far from the Island of 
Bananas where our school is located. By this time, reports 
had begun to circulate about what was going on among the 
Carajas, with the white man's help. Finally, the young 
chief of the Chevantes sent over a delegation of twenty- 
four warriors. After they had put on a dance and made 
every effort to be friendly, they wanted to know: Could 
they have a teacher for their tribe also? 

We proceeded with the utmost caution with these 
people, as they had in the past killed many white folk. 
However, we are aware that a new regime has come into 
existence under the younger brother's leadership and we 



A TEACHER I>IGS A GRAVE 187 

are hoping to send them a teacher and begin the educa- 
tional and spiritual work they call for at last on the River 
of Death. 

The tides of custom change, like the currents of the river. 

On the Isle of Bananas, among the Carajas Indians, 
there is a curious puberty ritual for the young men, In the 
center of the village is the banco de honra the bench of 
honor to which, one at a time, each boy of the proper 
adolescent age must come. When he sits on this bench it 
means that he has arrived at a point where he is leaving 
boyhood and turning to manhood. But there must be an 
outward sign of his courage and fortitude. 

For this, the witch doctor has prepared a little bone 
only a few inches long, taken out of the shank of a deer. 
With this he pierces a hole through the youth's lower lip, 
from the inside out. He then treats it with a charcoal 
preparation so that it does not become infected. When this 
heals, it leaves a small hole through which the young 
man can pass the deer bone. Inside is attached a cross- 
piece, made of another bone, about three-quarters of an 
inch in length, to keep the longer bone from falling out. 

So the young Indian now has his symbol of manhood. 
Often, in giving a direction, the Indians use the bone 
in their mouth to point the way, in a bizarre, grotesque 
gesture. 

One day, less than a year after our school there opened, 
one of the boys who had gone through this puberty ritual 
came to our teacher and said, in broken Portuguese, "I 
have reached a decision. I am finished with this/' He drew 
the thin, sharp-pointed piece of deer bone out of his mouth 
and put it on the desk. "I will never wear this again/* 



l88 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

His whole appearance and expression changed with that 
bizarre bit of pagan decoration gone. His lips broke into 
a wide boyish grin. "I am not any more a savage/' he said. 
With great pride. 



CHAPTER 11 

A TREE OF TEARS 



THE witch doctor is outlawed in most Brazilian 
cities, yet he continues to carry on his activities and to 
flourish in many of them. In remote areas his power in- 
creases, usually in direct ratio to the distance from civiliza- 
tion, science, and true religion. In the regions least touched 
by the modern world, he becomes a dictator, whose herbs 
and brews, incantations and decisions and punishments, 
are accepted by all as the inevitable judgment before 
which they must bow; his prescription is the only safe- 
guard against demons on the loose; his muttered word is 
the law for all to accept and obey; in his dark foreboding 
nod is life or death. 

He plays on the fears and the ignorance of his tribe or 
village with consummate skill. He is doctor and judge and 
priest, jury and executioner, and in each role he claims 
special powers and authority. In areas where there is no 
doctor, he is usually the only person to whom the people 
can turn in time of sickness. If his brew fails, then it was 
the devil's fault. If it succeeds, it was the witch doctor's 
skill. In one case I heard about, a witch doctor prescribed 
as a medicine a tea brewed from an old pipe that had 
been broken up into a hundred pieces. The nicotine in 
the pipe was so strong that it killed the patient, but the 

189 



IQO LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

witch doctor blamed the evil spirits for having killed the 
man in spite of the "medicine/' 

Certainly the life-and-death drama of a little girl named 
Yvonne is an episode one can scarcely imagine happening 
in our mid-twentieth century, in a region over which 
fly some of our great airliners, only hours out of New 
York's International Airport, en route to Rio or Buenos 
Aires. 

Among the wilder Indians to the west out in the 
never-never world that lies on the borders between Brazil 
and Peru are the Campos Indians. These tribes live in 
the largely unexplored region around the Javari River, 
an extension of the Solimoes. Among them the witch 
doctor is almost a living god. Whatever happens in the 
tribe is his province to examine; if there is a death, it is 
up to him to decide by his rituals who is responsible; that 
individual, whoever he may be, must be punished. 

There are only four major punishments among these 
Indians. First, they tie a rock around the guilty one's 
foot and throw him into the middle of the river. Second, 
they tie him to a tree or a stake and leave him for wild 
animals to tear apart and eat. Third, they tie him to a 
tree and build a slow fire around it, so he will burn to 
death. The fourth punishment is to break his skin, put 
honey all over him, and tie him down over an anthill, so 
that these insects will strip away his flesh. 

Not many years ago, when one of the leading warriors 
came to an untimely end, the witch doctor prepared his 
brews to determine who was guilty. In his large pot he 
put all kinds of items: alligator meat, snake -meat, toads, 
frogs, herbs. When his brew was boiling, the witch doctor 
inhaled its steam, breathing deeply and rhythmically, and 



A TREE OF TEARS 1Q1 

then announced that the spirits in this compound had re- 
vealed to him the one who caused this tragic death. 

It was Yvonne, a lovely child of nine, the darling of all, 
the cherub. Her mother screamed and drew the little girl 
to her, crying out that Yvonne had done nothing, that her 
spirit knowingly or unknowingly could not have willed 
the warrior dead. 

The medicine man was unmoved. She was guilty, he 
repeated; the spirits do not lie about such things. She 
must be tied to a tree and a slow fire built around her. 
There she will be kept until she is consumed in the flames 
for causing in her evil thoughts the death of this man. 

The decision was made in the late afternoon. The 
execution was set for dawn the next day. 

As night came, the mother tried to think of some way of 
escape. No one was supposed to protest the orders of the 
witch doctor, no matter how grim the punishment he 
meted out, and therefore neither the child nor the mother 
was locked up. After all, where could they run? To the 
certain death of the jungle on all sides? To the alligators 
on the riverbanks? 

They could not hold back the dawn. Yet only seven 
hours away, down the river, was an Adventist mission 
station. The mother had heard of it and of the American 
who ran it, Pastor S. A. Rusker. If they could reach this 
mission, the mother thought, they would be safe. The 
witch doctor would not have any authority there, and 
therefore could not claim the girl's life. 

Just before midnight, the mother and Yvonne slipped 
out of their hut and down to the river's edge. In the dark- 
ness they got into the smallest canoe they could find and 
started out down the stream. They paddled all night long 



LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

through the dark, aware that when the witch doctor found 
they had fled he would be in a fury. 

When daybreak came the witch doctor arose, put on 
his ceremonial garments, and went to get his little victim, 
only to find that she and her mother were gone. His rage 
and frustration erupted in a great roar that echoed across 
the woods. The cry went up: "The girl must be brought 
back!" Otherwise, the death of the warrior, which the 
spirits say she caused by her evil thoughts, would remain 
unpunished. The medicine man called twenty warriors 
who agreed to set out at once to find her. It didn't take 
them long to discover that a canoe was missing; they 
knew then that mother and child could only have fled 
down-river. 

Twenty men in a canoe can paddle much faster than 
one woman and a child, and even a head start is not tre- 
mendous against such odds. As they rounded each curve 
and bend, the Indians expected to see their quarry just 
ahead, but to their surprise the mother and daughter were 
not in sight. 

But they were gaining steadily on this pair in flight 
before them. Both the mother and girl paddled with all 
their strength. As dawn broke, the exhausted pair were 
just half a mile from the mission. But behind them they 
could see the large canoe with the twenty warriors and the 
witch doctor bearing down on them. Their head start of 
time had almost run out. But in spite of their terror they 
kept on. The mother headed the canoe swiftly into the 
riverbank, they leapt out and ran along the shore and 
up a little hill toward the mission. 

Friendly Indians, most of them Christians, came out 
to greet them. Exhausted, sobbing in sheer panic, mother 



A TREE OF TEARS 1Q3 

and daughter collapsed into the arms of these men and 
were carried by them into the mission just as the pursuing 
Campos beached their big canoe and came running up 
the hill after them. 

Inside the mission, the friendly Indians turned the 
mother and Yvonne over to Pastor Rusker's protection. 

The warriors and their witch doctor surrounded the 
mission and began to bellow out demands for the pair, 
threatening to burn down the building if they were not 
turned over at once. Rusker came to the door to tell the 
savages they could not have this mother and child to 
murder. 

The witch doctor shouted back that they would go and 
get all their tribe and return and destroy the mission 
people and the Indians who supported them. As the medi- 
cine man poured out his stream of venomous imprecations, 
Pastor Rusker stood in the doorway, unarmed and uncon- 
cerned for his own safety. They would not get Yvonne or 
her mother, he said firmly. If they tried to take either by 
force, he would not be responsible for what the friendly 
Indians of the mission would do to them. 

The warriors were suddenly aware that they were out- 
numbered, and that the pastor was not quailing before 
them or their witch doctor. Avenging the death of one of 
their own began to seem less important than staying alive 
themselves. The witch doctor tried to make a show of it. 
"Come, we will go back for a council of war," he an- 
nounced loudly, as the twenty braves climbed into their 
canoe and started back to their people in complete de- 
feat. 

I talked with one of the young lady workers at that 
mission a few years ago. I had heard the story of the little 



1Q4 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

girl and her mother from several people who had been 
there and I was anxious to meet the girl herself. The 
young lady said, "Yvonne? I am Yvonne, but I am not 
a little girl now. You know, it was a few years ago that 
terrible night." 

It was from her that I got all the details of that story. 

One of the most dangerous things about the witch doc- 
tors is that they are trusted so completely by these simple 
people who, so often, have nothing more substantial in 
which to believe. And the more the witch doctor dresses 
up his humbug in obscure ritual with overtones of terror, 
the more certain he is of holding them in his power. 

In one far-oif place, a seven-year-old child became ill 
simply because of lack of hygienic living. Her little body 
was covered with sores; she was so anemic that she was 
little more than a living skeleton. The mother was ignorant 
and without funds. She loved her daughter, but she de- 
cided that her best course was to give the little girl to 
someone who could afford to give her medical care. In 
return, the child would grow up to be a servant for these 
people. It would be better, her mother thought, for the 
girl to be an indentured servant for the rest of her life 
than to be free but dead. 

So the mother took her skeleton of a child down the 
river to her new home and left her there, satisfied that 
this family would give the child medical care. 

As soon as the mother had gone, the family with whom 
this pitiful little girl had been left called in the witch 
doctor, a half-breed Indian, who went through a mumbo- 
jumbo of incantations and finally was "possessed" of the 
spirits which told him the "cure" for the child's illness. 



A TREE OF TEARS 1Q5 

On the bank o the river, to the left of the house, was 
a filthy pen where a few hogs wallowed. The witch doctor 
ordered the family to keep the child in this pigsty for 
three days with very little food or water, but with a medi- 
cine he would give her that would drive out the evil 
spirits which had possession of her. These spirits, he ex- 
plained, would go into the hogs and the little girl would 
then be well. 

The head of the family was a little concerned lest the 
spirits might destroy his hogs, but the witch doctor as- 
sured him that there was no danger, that evil spirits like 
these could live in hogs indefinitely without harming them. 

So, on the orders of this witch doctor, the half -dead 
little girl was put almost naked into the hogpen and left 
there. That same day, on a river boat which put into the 
village to take on shipments of rubber and Brazil nuts, 
was a woman passenger. Strolling around the town, she 
saw the child in the hogpen and at once demanded to 
know what was going on. The villagers explained that it 
was the witch doctor's orders. None dared disobey, the 
child must be left there alone for three days. 

But the visitor was unimpressed and insisted that the 
child be released at once. Before anyone could stop her, 
she snatched up the little girl and carried her on board 
just seconds before the river steamer lifted anchor and 
pulled away. In her cabin she gave the child a bath, got 
her some clothes, and asked the boat's nurse to give the 
child a penicillin shot and treat the sores on her little body. 

As they went on downstream, the woman began to 
wonder what to do with the poor child she had rescued. 
She was getting all kinds of advice from everyone on 
board, when someone happened to see the Luzeiro III, 



196 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

with Walter Streithorst at the wheel The river boat 
stopped and its captain called to Walter: "We have a 
little girl here who needs special care. Can you take her?" 

"Of course, we'll take her/' came the answer. 

In midstream the seven-year-old was transferred to the 
Luzeiro, where she was treated with all the love and care 
Walter and Olga could give her. When the launch reached 
Manaus, its home port, she was given additional medical 
treatment and, with proper diet and hygiene, began to 
put on weight and blossom out. A kindly woman in Manaus 
took the girl and has given her a wonderful home, is send- 
ing her to school, and today this lovely child scarcely 
remembers the terrible time when she was so close to 
death in the hogpen. 

To our faces, the witch doctors were always our friends, 
making big talk about favoring our work and praising 
what we were doing. But behind our backs, they continu- 
ally denounced us and in a hundred ways tried to under- 
mine us and our efforts. At the same time, they helped to 
keep alive and to spread superstitions of many kinds. This 
was not difficult, certainly, in the aura of ignorance and 
fear and legend which permeated so many parts of the 
river. 

There is, for example, a certain fish from which three 
small bones are taken. The uneducated river folk believe 
that, if sewed into a little bag and worn around the 
neck, these bones will keep away any sickness, Therefore 
they will pay almost any price to obtain them. 

They are also great believers in the efficacy of an alli- 
gator's tooth to ward off bad luck. To keep them safe 
from snakebite, they bore a tiny hole in the tooth and 
wear it on a cord around the ankle. Many people of all 



A TREE OF TEARS 1Q7 

classes, including the well-educated and some church- 
going Christians have this superstition so ingrained that 
they would not dream of going into a field or forest with- 
out an alligator's tooth. This belief is much stronger and 
taken far more seriously than, for example, the American 
custom of carrying a rabbit's foot for good luck. 

I spent an evening once with a man who believed so 
much in the power of the alligator's tooth that he had 
one tied around the neck of each of his cows, and assured 
me that this was the reason none of them had been bitten 
by snakes. When I tried to find out why he was so firmly 
convinced, he told me a story about a time when he and a 
friend were building a house. Every evening they would 
light a fire to cook their supper and regularly a bush- 
master snakethe variety that is attracted to fires would 
appear and with its writhing body extinguish the flame. 

"We had a nice house cat with us," the alligator-tooth 
advocate said, "and my friend and I decided to try an 
experiment. We weren't afraid of this snake and we wanted 
to see what would happen. So one night I took off the 
alligator's tooth which I was wearing around my ankle and 
put it around the cat's neck. When the bushmaster ap- 
peared, we threw the cat right down on top of it. The 
cat bristled up and the snake bristled back and then turned 
and slipped out into the woods. 

"The next night the snake was back again, and again we 
had the tooth around the cat and threw it down on the 
bushmaster. Once more the snake slipped away into the 
woods without harming the cat. 

"The night after that, we took the alligator's tooth off 
the cat before throwing him down on the snake and this 



198 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

time the bushmaster instantly struck the animal and killed 
him. 

"So, you see, we have proof/' 

I tried to point out that his "proof appeared to be little 
more than coincidence, or possibly merely an example 
of an even-tempered bushmaster which would put up 
with just so much trouble from a cat. But I got nowhere 
with my argument. 

Many people try to make real commercial operations 
out of superstitions. I remember a typical operator who 
"kept shop" right in the city of Manaus, on a raft down 
by the water front. There, among the crowded wharves 
with their ever-present smell of fish, he sat day after day, 
with all his dolls and figurines and bottles and potions 
spread out like the merchandise on a drugstore counter. 

In this big, modern city he carried on a lively trade with 
medicines and mixtures that would cure any disease. He 
had a preparation that would, he claimed, grow hair on 
bald heads but it wasn't quite ready to show. He had 
figurines that were guaranteed to help in all kinds of 
problems. He had a soap that wouldn't make any lather. 
(I bought a cake of it and discovered that it wouldn't 
clean either.) 

He was, however, a talkative and friendly merchant 
and reminded me somewhat of the medicine-show men 
who sometimes turned up in our Nebraska towns half a 
century ago. 

Once he asked Jessie and me to translate a letter he had 
received from a company in New York City. The firm 
might be interested, it said, in doing business with him. 
It gave the company's bank reference, and asked him for 
his bank reference as a preliminary step. 



A TREE OF TEARS ICJQ 

When Jessie told him all this, he said, "Bank? Here's 
my bank right here/' and made a gesture in the direction 
of his raft, with his bottles and idols and all the rest. 'If 
they don't want to do business with me on my terms, they 
don't have to." 

And they didn't. 

Another interesting personality along the river was not 
a witch doctor but a snake doctor, who claimed to possess 
medicines and powers that would cure any snakebite. No 
one appeared to know exactly what he did or how, but he 
used a variety of medicines and herbs and was reported 
to have a good deal of success in effecting cures. 

In Obidos, where he lived, and elsewhere along the 
river, the stories of his feats were legion. Why, we were 
told, he will let a snake bite a dog and the dog will die 
within seconds. Then he will let the snake bite him and 
he will be unharmed. 

One of his medicines, he claimed, would "protect" the 
user from snakebite for several weeks at a time. To many 
who used it, the medicine appeared to work, and conse- 
quently he made a great deal of money out of it. His 
reputation became such that the scientists at the snake 
farm at Butantan the world's center for the production of 
anti-snakebite serum invited him to come down and give 
a full-scale demonstration. They were not convinced of 
his claims or of the authenticity of his snakebite protection. 

Our snake doctor went down to the Butantan Institute 
in Sao Paulo, apparently full of confidence, but somehow, 
in front of all those learned scientists who had devoted 
their lives to this subject, his magic arts failed utterly. He 
allowed himself to be bitten and promptly became so ill 
from the effects of the bite that all the science and skill 



20O LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

of the Institute had to be called into operation to save his 
life. 

The man returned to his home on the river, greatly dis- 
appointed at his showing at Butantan, but full of excuses: 
the change of climate, the atmosphere of doubt and hos- 
tility, and all the rest. Many people believed him and 
continued to give him their support. When last I heard, 
he was training his son to take over his business after he 
retired. 

One superstition widely accepted in the river world 
and through most of northern Brazil is that of mau olhado 
the "bad eye" or "evil eye." There are people who claim 
to have this power so fully developed that they can put a 
jinx on anyone just by looking him once in the eye. I 
heard of one woman who was supposed to be able to look 
at a fruit tree in such a way that it would never bear again. 
Once I saw a withered tree in a yard in Belem. "What's 
wrong with that mango tree?" I asked the owners. 

"The woman came and looked at it with the bad eye," 
I was told. 

I said it could not be true. "You don't believe," they 
said, as though I should be ashamed. 

"No, I do not believe that story/' I told them. "And I 
never will." 

We found this "bad eye" superstition all along the 
Amazon. If a person was sick, then someone must have 
looked at him with the evil eye. A mother is afraid to let 
you hold her baby lest you harm the infant by looking at 
it with the bad eye. 

There are rituals for getting people to fall in love and 
for making them fall out of love, for putting together a 
marriageor trying to break one up. 



A TREE OF TEARS 2O1 

A woman trying to win a reluctant male will go to the 
witch doctor, who mixes together coarse corn meal, a 
certain red oil made from a tree, and the blood from the 
head of a freshly killed rooster. After a ceremony in the 
street, including incantations and "hand passes" over this 
mixture, the man may as well give up. Reluctant or not, 
he's hooked. 

Sometimes there is great fear that feitigo witchcraft- 
is being used to break up a home. Jessie and I were staying 
once at the home of a cultured lady, the wife of a doctor. 
In the morning, immediately after the man had left for 
his office, his wife jumped up from the breakfast table and 
hurried to the window. Her father-in-law, who was eating 
with us, asked her what she was looking at. 

"That woman across the street has started witchcraft 
against my husband to take him from me/* the wife said. 
"I wanted to see what she was doing/' 

Devil worship of various types is also practiced, not 
openly in the big cities, but often only a few miles away, 
on the outskirts. This is the sort of thing we think of in 
America as "voodoo," and often results in susceptible 
people's going into trances that may last hours or even 
days. People go out from the city to watch and laugh, but 
the effects are not always funny. 

Once, at church in Bel6m, when one of our important 
pastors was preaching, I was seated next to a youngish 
woman and her son. As the service went on, the woman 
began to rock back and forth in a strange manner. After 
this had continued for some time, the little boy said, 
"Mother, please, let's go." 

"What is wrong with her is she sick?" I asked. 



2O2 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

The child shook his head. "Bicho de fundo""It is a 
spirit from the evil world." 

The woman kept on rocking, apparently in a trance, 
until finally she toppled over. I got up and called a police- 
man, and he and I together half carried, half dragged her 
out through the crowded church. We were scarcely out- 
side when she went into a kind of trancelike spasm and 
pulled all her clothes up over her head. If ever anyone 
needed help, she did and she got it. Medical care and 
some psychotherapy improved her condition greatly. 

Along the river world, the superstitious also have strange 
ideas about the moon and its effects. Many feel that their 
lives are completely controlled by this globe in the 
heavens. If they want to go to town, they must go when 
the moon is in exactly the right position. A tree for lumber 
must be cut in the dark of the moon; otherwise, the wood 
burrs will hatch out and eat up the wood. Crops planted 
when the moon is wrong will never ripen. Some things are 
started when the moon is new, sbme when it is at the full. 
There is a pattern of good and bad in these things, and 
only the witch doctor can be sure. 

Burial beliefs and rituals vary widely from tribe to 
tribe. Some of the most interesting are found among the 
Carajas on the Island of Bananas, along the Rio Araguaia. 
These people bury their dead in shallow graves for six 
months, with their bows and arrows and war clubs at then- 
sides. Each day during that period they carry food and 
drink to the departed ones, to help them find their way 
into the spirit world. But after six months it is assumed 
that the spirits have left their earthly forms and need them 
no longer, for they have rotted away. Then the Indians 
remove the bodies, clean off the flesh, and place the bones 



A TREE OF TEARS 203 

in urns. In a Caraja cemetery what we saw were these 
earthenware urns piled up, one on top of the other, six or 
eight or ten high, an entire family together. Wherever we 
looked there were the stacked-up urns of the dead. 

It was among these same Indians that we found the 
custom of the weeping tree. This is actually a piqui, which, 
at a certain time of year, bears a lovely yellow flower. 
Among the Carajas there is a law that when anyone dies 
the tribespeople must weep and carry on until the flowers 
fall off the tree. This is not too bad if the death occurs a 
few days before the flowers fall, but if it is weeks or months 
earlier, the mourning becomes a terrific burden. Someone 
must be at the tree all the time, day and night, and the 
sound of the moaning and weeping was so terrible when 
we were there that we would pull our boat out of range 
for a little while each afternoon to get away from the 
sound of weeping. 

I was told that when some of the very old or decrepit 
become ill at about the time the leaves are going to fall, 
the others do all they can to hurry them on their way, even 
to the point of withholding nourishment, so that they will 
die before the yellow blossoms fall. 



CHAPTER 12 

ARICATU! 



THE true wilderness the no man's land of the 
savages, the head-hunters, the wildest and most dangerous 
tribes, and those with the lowest cultural level lies in the 
vast crescent bulge beyond Manaus, fed by the Negro, 
the Solimoes, the Purus, and the Rio Branco, reaching 
north into the territory of Rio Branco, across the state of 
Amazonas and south into the territory of Guapore. This is 
the true frontier world. It is the land of the head-hunters. 
Actual cannibalism I have not encountered, although it 
may exist; but head-hunting is a thriving business that 
still continues in this inaccessible and unworldly region 
"beyond the beyond." 

The greater part of our work was carried on along the 
main streams of the Amazon between Belem and Manaus. 
There were comparatively civilized areas; the people 
could be reached with our help and teaching; and we felt 
that this was the best place to start. It was only later 
around 1940 that we moved into the world beyond 
Manaus. 

The country that fans out in all directions from this 
lovely city with its magnificent modern airport is one of 
the most untamed regions on earth. Perhaps the most 
striking example of its violence and bloodshed and terror 

204 



Aricatu! 205 

is contained in the story of two men who tried to run away 
from the Word of God. 

Pastor Storch had been holding a series of meetings in 
Manaus. Among the many hundreds who had been attend- 
ing were a man who owned a big island in the river near 
Manaus, and his son-in-law. Apparently, in spite of them- 
selves, something kept forcing them to come again and 
again. Finally, the older man said to the younger, "These 
speakers seem to be talking straight at us. If they keep 
on, well surrender and become converted, and I haven't 
any desire for that religious stuff. I suggest that we get out 
of the city now." Although he spoke half -jokingly, he was 
very much in earnest. 

The younger man agreed and suggested a hunting party 
up the Negro River or one of its tributaries. "There are 
alligators up there by the thousands and these days they 
bring many cruzeiros a skin," he added. 

These two invited ten other men, making a party of 
twelve, and got together everything they would need for 
a journey into the wilds canoes, axes, guns, ammunition. 
Some miles up the black waters of the Negro, at the 
mouth of a tributary river, they encountered a man in a 
canoe who assured them that he knew this tributary well 
and that it was rich with alligators waiting to be killed. 
They took this man the thirteenth into their party. 

They paddled all day through seemingly untouched 
wonder and beauty until they came, in the late afternoon, 
to a lovely praia or sandy beach. Here they decided to stop 
for the night. 

It was an isolated, eerie world to which they had come. 
At that time of year wildlife was abundant and along 



2O6 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

the river were large fishing birds white herons as well 
as parrots and parakeets. Pulling their canoe up onto the 
beach, they began, in the midst of this wilderness, to pitch 
their camp for the night. But the older man and one other 
in the group felt they were taking too great a risk. "All of 
us are in the same basket," they told the others. "We are 
going to go down-river a ways. If anything happens to 
you, we may be able to get out. And if anything happens 
to us, you may have a chance to escape. It is much safer 
that way." 

The two started on downstream to pitch their camp 
some miles below, leaving the others encamped on the 
praia. 

About six-thirty the following morning, two large canoes 
of Indians appeared on the river and edged into the beach 
as the eleven men were rising. 

One, evidently the Indians' leader, asked in bad Portu- 
guese, "Where is your chief?" 

They tried to tell him that the chief was farther down 
the river. 

"I want Jo talk to the one in command," the leader 
insisted. 

They again tried to explain that their leader was not 
there. 

The chief then turned to the others and said just one 
word, "Aricatu" 

His men, standing behind him in a semicircle, lifted 
their bows and arrows, and shot. In a matter of seconds, 
as the arrows filled the quiet dawn, ten of the men lay 
sprawled in death on the silver strand of beach, stained 
now with their blood, 

Only two of the party were not hit; the son-in-law and 



Aricatu! 207 

a man who was too ill even to attempt to run. As the son-in- 
law tried to help the sick one to his feet, an arrow struck 
him, passing through his body. The son-in-law pulled it 
out and threw it to the ground without breaking it. 

The Indian raced forward and picked up the arrow 
as the son-in-law ran on despite his terrible wound. The 
sick man did not have the strength to go on. As he fell 
back the Indian picked up the arrow and inserted it in the 
bow. His victim lifted his hands in a last effort to save his 
life, pleading to be spared in the name of Jesus, but the 
Indian had no knowledge of what that meant. He shot 
again and killed. 

Then the Indians turned and followed the son-in-law, 
who was bleeding from both front and back and was 
afraid to get into the water for fear the blood would attract 
the piranha, which would tear him to bits in seconds. But 
better the uncertainty of the fish than sure death from the 
Indians. He slid into the stream and swam as far as he 
could. No piranha, he thought gratefully, as he got out of 
the water. He looked cautiously about, saw only one In- 
dian was following him. As the savage .raised his bow, 
the wounded man dived back into the river and swam 
under water a little way, in spite of his loss of blood. 
The shot missed and, since no others followed, he decided 
the savage had used his last arrow. 

The son-in-law headed for the woods. Holding one 
hand on his back to catch the blood from his gaping 
wound, he would smear it on his chest to keep it from 
leaving a trail. Near complete collapse from exhaustion, he 
climbed a tree, and settled back in a notch to rest. But 
rest was not to come. In the branches was a nest of ants 



2O8 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

about three quarters of an inch long. Attracted to the 
blood, they nearly ate him up. 

All was quiet in the sunlit woods. Any moment this 
tortured, bleeding man expected to see the Indians come 
out of the jungle. None came. The quiet bothered him. 
Then he heard a noise. Or was it only his mind? He was 
the only one who had escaped. If anyone was approaching, 
it was an enemy. He heard the sound again, footsteps 
drawing nearer. In an instant he expected to see an arrow 
fly out of that dense foliage. Then he heard a voice, words 
being spoken, repeated. "Vale me Deus" he heard: "God 
protect me." 

As he saw the man emerge from the trees, he recognized 
him as one of the eleven who had been attacked. He was 
also wounded, but his wound was in the shoulder and not 
serious. They hid until nightfall and then, under cover, 
made their way back to the river. All was silent there; the 
Indians were gone. So, too, were the canoes. The two men 
hid near the shore until dawn. Then they started down the 
stream on a raft they put together with logs and vines. 

It was hardly heavy enough for their weight and they 
sank into the water up to their chests. But they started. 
Both had developed fever and the water seemed to keep 
it down. All day they floated along on the raft, wounded 
and feverish and fighting mosquitoes and flies. All through 
the next night they kept on, always aware that the Indians 
might return to finish their work. 

The following morning, as it grew light, they saw a 
launch approaching. In it were the two men who had 
made camp farther downstream. Seeing the Indians, they 
had decided the best thing they could do was to go for 
help. Near the point where the river joins the Negro, they 



Aricatu! 209 

had run into a motor launch; on this boat were Brazilian 
nationals who agreed to search for the other eleven, despite 
the risk involved for all on board. There was medicine 
on board, and the two injured men were bathed and 
bandaged and fed while the boat chugged on upriver to 
the beach that had seemed so peaceful and lovely when 
they had decided to camp there for the night. The sight 
that met them was, for sheer barbarity, almost beyond 
belief. The Indians had taken their victims' axes, machetes, 
and big knives, intended for alligator killing, and had 
literally chopped them to pieces! 

In silence, the men on the launch dug a grave on the 
beach and, with a prayer of commitment to God, the nine 
victims of the attack were buried. 

On their return to Manaus, the older man and his son-in- 
law were treated at a hospital. When they were fully re- 
covered the younger man told the father-in-law, *1 think 
we should join this church from which we tried to run. 
This was the start of all that terrible tragedy on the river." 

The other agreed and both have become important 
members the younger man is in charge of all missionary 
activity in this church. Few men could have such reason 
to know the meaning of this work. 

Our own efforts "beyond the beyond" began in 1940, 
when we made our first journey west of Manaus, first on 
the Solimoes, which for some distance above Manaus is 
more heavily populated than below. It is a rich, fertile 
region of bananas, oranges, and rubber. Up on the Purus 
River, about six days from Manaus, a group was waiting 
for us. We found a house for a meeting but, the first night, 



210 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

toads were attracted by the light and made such a racket 
that we could scarcely be heard. 

The next night one of the men came up to me and said, 
"Do you have a flashlight? If you do, 111 play policeman 
to those toads." I got him a flashlight and he got himself 
a club. He stood outside with his weapons while I 
preached. Every now and then I would see his light flash 
and hear a loud thudding sound. But we heard no toads. 
When our service was over, our toad policeman an- 
nounced, "There're twenty-eight of 'em lying outside that 
won't ever again try to break up a prayer meeting." 

When w r e got away from the populated areas, there was 
a desolate quality to this part of the river. The people, 
living in widely separated villages and areas along its banks, 
are different from those farther downstream. For one rea- 
son or another, they were frightened of us. They ran 
when we approached; hid when we entered a village. 
Some are Indians, some are of mixed blood, a few are 
nationals. The most important one, of whatever blood, is 
the man who runs the store, who sells the others their food 
and their Brazilian brand of whisky. In almost any direc- 
tion from the villages along the main rivers are the areas 
of the wildest Indians. The Indians here are far different 
from those in other lands, including North America. The 
latter had to be industrious to stay alive and feed their 
families; to keep warm in winter; to store up food. None 
of that is true of these tribes. For them it is summer all 
year round. They have a constant supply of food, and there 
is no need for them to protect themselves against the 
elements. Hence they live from day to day. 

In the northern regions of this interior world, most of 
the Brazilian Indians use the blowgun. A primitive weapon 



Aricatu! 211 

to begin with, it has been perfected by them and its use 
is a highly developed art. It is made, very accurately, out 
of a long, hard, narrow piece of wood and to this writing 
no one knows how these unschooled folk accurately cut 
this strip in two, hollow out each half, and glue the two 
pieces back together almost perfectly. However they ac- 
complish this, they then, with sand and a string, rub the 
inside until it is silky smooth. This harmless-looking gadget 
is used to fire poison-tipped darts eight to ten inches long, 
and by a technique involving a piece of string wound 
around the end of the dart to hold in the air, an expert 
apparently can build up air pressure so that he can "shoot" 
his dart thirty to forty yards with accuracy. 

These Indians, whose level of culture is higher than 
those to the south, have developed curare solutions in vary- 
ing strength. With some they kill; with others they only 
knock out their victim. This enables them to capture live 
monkeys easily for sale or for pets. 

To the south are some of the most primitive tribes still 
in existence. With one group, the Pacanovos, we have not 
been able to make direct contact at all. One missionary 
who had been there for some time told me he took them 
many presents in order to win their friendship, and was 
able to travel with them for a while. One of them died 
because he had no resistance to the germs of the white 
man and caught a cold that developed into pneumonia. 

The dead man was not buried. His widow put his body 
on her back and the whole tribe moved out of the area of 
death. The missionary went with them. After several days 
of travel, they stopped, cut up the corpse, dug a hole, 
and cremated the body. Then they wrapped the ashes in 
a banana leaf and the woman carried them off with her. 



212, LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

The Pacanovos have no houses, this missionary re- 
ported, and no fixed residences. When the rainy season 
conies, they put poles against a tree, lay a few banana or 
palm leaves over the top, and live under their improvised 
shelter. When they are hungry they eat whatever fruit is 
available, or kill an animal. Often they eat the meat raw, 
with their hands, simply tearing the flesh apart, almost 
like animals. 

But as far as I know, the most savage Indians are the 
Jibaros. They are a large tribe and are divided into many 
branches, but all of them seem to have the same basic 
instinct they are cold-blooded killers. Some live in Brazil, 
some in Peru. The boundaries in that area are not always 
clearly marked. 

Usually called cagadors de cabeg a hunters of the heads 
they are truly a murderous people, and with their faces 
tattooed into grotesque masks of terror and their fantastic 
headgear, decorated with feathers of the large tucan bird, 
they look as savage as they are. 

To them, murder is a way of life, a ritual and ceremony, 
and an act of honor. Of late years, since shrunken heads 
became something of a big business, they have had an 
additional incentive for killing. They will lie in ambush 
for hours, waiting for an enemy or a prospective victim- 
male or female to pass. Then they attack, first with their 
blowguns, and then with their bone spears. 

The heads are cut off immediately and shrunk, I under- 
stand, by a technique involving hot stones and water and 
the breaking of the bones. This, at least, was the report 
of De Graaf, a great explorer and the only white man, I 
believe, who ever saw heads actually in the process of 



Aricatu! 213 

being shrunk. The finished product is called by the Indians 
shanas. 

One grotesque story is told of a German who went down 
to Peru not many years ago on one of the big liners. When 
he left the boat at Callao, port city of Lima, he told the 
captain, "When you get here a few trips from now, in 
about two months, I will go back with you." 

The captain had forgotten all about his former pas- 
senger when he came into port two months later and took 
on board another explorer, who was heading back north. 
Among the trophies he proudly displayed was a shrunken 
head he had bought for five dollars. 

According to the story, the captain gave a cry of horror 
as he recognized the German passenger who had assured 
him he would go back on this very trip. 

One sight we saw in this area was the railroad that cost, 
as the saying there goes, "a life for every tie." Begun 
by the French in 1900, taken over by the English, and 
ultimately finished by Americans, who had most of the 
ties shipped in from Australia, this road bypassed the falls 
and rapids of the Mamore River, which forms the bound- 
ary between Bolivia and Brazil, and the Madeira River. 
About 225 miles long, it is called the Mamore-Madeira 
Railroad. 

The Indians in the area are still wild and dangerous. 
They did everything they could to prevent the laying of 
this track, even to shooting poisoned arrows at workers 
who were already plagued by malaria and other diseases 
that cost hundreds of lives. American engineers strung 
high-tension wires around the construction groupsand 
the murder rate fell sharply. 



214 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

As I looked at this railroad, I found myself thinking of 
the tracks the Union Pacific had stretched across the great 
state of Nebraska, in North America, and of the Sioux In- 
dians there who made their raids across the river Platte, 
threatened my grandparents with fire and death, and tried 
to lasso locomotives and pull them from the tracks. 



CHAPTER 13 

INTO ALL THE WORLD 



IN one of the towns along the river, a group 
was preparing for baptism in the Christian church under 
our guidance. It included a number of young adults and 
one very old man. He had been twenty-three, he told me, 
at the time of a war in Paraguay; checking in the history 
books, we found he must now be in his hundredth year. 
He had studied the Bible and our Bible lessons and was 
well prepared. The problem was that the place of baptism 
was to be at a point twenty miles out of the city and the 
only way to get there was to walk. The old man Emidio 
told me not to worry. "I will be there, Senhor Leo." 

The day of the long walk dawned hot and sunny. 
Emidio was not in our group as we set out. Several times 
we had to stop and rest and quench our thirst by eating 
oranges the water we found along the way was not good. 
When we reached the baptismal place, Emidio was there 
waiting for us. The ninety-nine-year-old man had left at 
midnight the previous night to reach the place on time. 

After the ceremony, all of the newly baptized, including 
Emidio, went with me to a rented hall, where we began 
to discuss plans for a church. We tried to get each person 
to give whatever he would in whatever way he could, 
time, energy, money, planning, materials. I saw that 

215 



2l6 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

Emidio had his hand raised high. I asked him what he 
could do to help with our building. 

The old man arose and came forward so that all could 
see and hear. *1 have cut timbers for three chapels in my 
life," the old man said, "and now if the Lord will give me 
the strength I will go out into the woods and cut timbers 
for this church to which I belong." 

Despite the warnings of many of us that it was too much 
for him, the old man insisted. Each day he went into the 
forest, cut the wood for the beams, and helped to bring it 
out. Every beam needed for the church the old man hewed 
himself. It was not a chore for him, but a crusade, He did 
not live to see the actual opening of the church, but he did 
get to see his beams erected and the building take form 
and substance against the Amazon skies. 

Emidio's joy in helping to build a place of worship is an 
example of its meaning in the lives of thousands of people 
with whom we worked. Their church was not a building 
to them but the center of their faith. In one community, 
not far from Belem, a group of lay preachers built a 
church big enough to hold more than a hundred and 
twenty worshipers. It was a solidly constructed building 
which took more than a year to build, and every bit of it 
was done by these men in addition to their regular work. 

One church we built in 1954, at a place about eight 
hours below Manaus, is a floating church, as far as I know 
the only such in the world. Because of the sixty-foot rise 
in the river from October to June, and the resulting floods, 
it is difficult or impossible in some areas to find ground 
high enough for a church so that it can be used whether 
the water is high or low. 

Our answer was a floating church. Built over three large 



INTO ALL THE WORLD 217 

cedar trunks, each about six feet in diameter, it will hold 
more than two hundred worshipers. Around the edges 
we left room for a platform so the people can come to 
church in their canoes, tie them up to this floating side- 
walk, and, without even rumpling their Sabbath clothes, 
stroll into the building. 

Our building program was and is a continuing ad- 
venture. We have constructed scores of churches of all 
types, shapes, and sizes along the Amazon, in Belem, and, 
in fact, throughout Brazil. 

When a place of worship was needed quickly in San- 
tarem, about six hundred miles up the Amazon, one of our 
officials designed it, had most of the windows and door 
frames and other "prefabricated" sections made in Bel&n, 
put the material on a boat, and hauled it up the river. 
Seventeen days after its arrival, we had a church in actual 
use. 

In 1954, we built a church at Macapa, on the northern 
bank of the Amazon near the mouth of the river. The 
equator passes through the middle of town and through 
the middle of the church. When the minister stands up to 
to give his sermon, he is in the northern hemisphere; his 
congregation in the southern. 

When Jessie and I arrived in Belem we had no church 
building. The room below our apartment was used for 
our meetings at first and later we hired a large theater. 
For it we paid what seemed like a large sum but it was 
only about $4.00 a month in present terms. We distributed 
handbills announcing our services, and I would make my 
own slides for the projector by copying pictures onto glass 
slides and tinting them with water colors. I also used 



2l8 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

verses out of the Portuguese Bible, projected on cello- 
phane paper. 

That was how we started. Almost anyone who was in- 
terested would receive a visit from us. Gradually we built 
up our membership, and by 1935 our congregation had 
grown to such proportions that we had to build a real 
church. I had begun plans for it in 1932, and when we 
finally had the land and the funds, I took charge of the 
construction myself, to save expenses. It is a very beautiful 
modern church which holds three hundred people. Later, 
other buildings were added on this same property, in- 
cluding an office building and residence and two schools. 
As our congregation in Belem grew, other churches were 
put up, and by 1958, when Jessie and I left for America, 
Belem had seven beautiful churches for our more than 
one thousand four hundred members there. 

Before our arrival, the Amazon people had been in the 
habit of coming to the city once a year for a festival period, 
partly religious, partly merely to have a time of celebra- 
tion. Many of them did not want to give up this custom, 
so we decided that once a year we would hold a general 
meeting, bring all our people together, and have someone 
from the States or Rio speak to them and lead discussions. 
These have become camp meetings, very much like those 
in the States. Our plan was to present well-rounded pro- 
grams that would cover a great many areas of importance. 
Not only did we hold services, but also classes in hygiene, 
child care, and home-building, with special emphasis on 
toilets and sanitation. Jessie gave the talks on hygiene and 
child care, and sometimes added classes in cooking. From 
time to time we would also have dialogues, panel groups, 
and practical demonstrations. 



INTO ALL THE WORLD 

These "old-fashioned camp meetings" became, in fact, 
true conferences and seminars in the art of Christian living 
for native peoples and Indians. 

How is a church begun along the river? In any of a 
hundred ways. Once, as we were chugging along upstream, 
we saw a man on the bank waving frantically for us to 
stop. He took us back into the woods about a mile to his 
village where a number of people had brought their sick 
to be treated. The village had no church, but the people 
wanted a meeting that night. However, they were so far 
back from the river that our power lines from the electric 
plant on the boat would not reach them and they had no 
electricity themselves. One of the men suggested that they 
could cut a clearing in the jungle along the bank and hold 
the meeting there. Every able-bodied man in the village, 
it seemed to me, got out his ax and hurried down to the 
water's edge. Soon the stream echoed and re-echoed to 
the sound of their axes and the crashing down of trees. 
By nightfall they had cleared out a rectangular space 
where I set up my projector, tacked up a sheet between 
two trees for a screen, and we were ready to begin. 

By seven-thirty the place was crowded with men, 
women, and children. Another missionary, Pastor Steinweg, 
and his wife, who were with us, played a portable organ 
and we taught the group to sing hymns. Then I showed my 
slides and gave my lecture. There was a last hymn and the 
meeting was supposed to be over. But the people wanted 
more. Pastor Steinweg went out to the boat and got more 
slides, and we had another lecture and sang more hymns. 
When he was done, they wanted still more and I had to 



220 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

talk again, It was almost midnight when the meeting broke 
up. 

Now, in that clearing, there is a church and a school- 
house; the woods all around have been cleared away; 
and there are many houses there a flourishing little vil- 
lage has sprung up where there had been only jungle. 

Once, when we were making a trip during floodtime on 
the river with the treasurer of our South American divi- 
sion and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Owen Blake he is now 
assistant treasurer at our world headquarters we came to 
the house of one of our members who pleaded with us to 
hold a meeting that night. I said we would if he would 
send out and invite his neighbors. He agreed, adding that 
the neighbors lived a little distance away. 

At eight o'clock that evening, I had my projector and 
screen set up and ready to go. Walter Streithorst, who 
was going to do the preaching, was ready, too. The 
trouble was, not a soul had shown up. "Well, let's have 
the meeting anyway," Walter said, "just for this family/' 
So we showed beautiful pictures, had a sermon, and sang 
some hymns. All just for the family and ourselves. 

About ten o'clo.ck we turned out the lights on the boat 
and I was almost asleep when I heard a distant noise. 
It sounded like an engine. I looked down the river and saw 
a good-sized launch coining in our direction. As it drew 
closer I could see that it was jammed with people. "We 
hope we're not too late for the meeting," they called out. 
By that time it was getting close to eleven o'clock and both 
Walter and I were truly tired. But after a little grumbling 
from both of us, I heard myself saying, "Walter, these 
people apparently have come a long way; they have made 



INTO ALL THE WORLD 

a great effort to get here; we ought to make an effort to 
hold that meeting." 

So we got up and I set up my projector all over again, 
and my screen. Exactly thirty-seven people trooped in 
from that boat for the meeting. The member at whose 
home we had stopped was particularly grateful; he had 
sent his launch all around the district to pick up these 
people and bring them to the meeting and he didn't want 
them disappointed. 

Of course, the church building is more than just a 
structure. Its deepest meaning must be expressed in deeds, 
and the individual effort is often most dramatic. One of 
our members, now retired, developed a program of win- 
ning friends and converts to the Christian faith with white 
grape-juice bottles. 

This man took the empty bottles, put a bit of religious 
literature in each, corked and sealed them with wax, and 
threw them into the Amazon. As the white bottles bobbed 
along with the current, people could see that something 
was inside. Since many of these people feel that whatever 
comes down the river into their hands is sent by fate 
itself, they read and considered seriously the message 
inside the bottles. 

For a long time this unique propagandist for the church 
sent more than a hundred bottles a month down the 
Amazon, and at least a dozen people came into the Chris- 
tian faith as a result, to our knowledge. 

Where once we had only a handful of members and 
churches, today we have hundreds throughout the Ama- 
zon, and Brazil, and South America. In the state of Sao 
Paulo alone, for example, we have twenty-four churches. 

Each of these churches and the smaller chapels as 



222 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

well grows out of the need, the demand, of the people. 

Along the river we stop at a home. Here is an eighteen- 
year-old girl who has leprosy. She becomes interested in 
the Bible. At last the progress of her illness reaches a point 
where she must be sent to a leper colony below Manaus. 
In the midst of this institution with its suffering people, 
in all stages of illness, this young woman carries on the 
work of Christ. She reads from the Bible and discusses 
its meaning. Soon she has formed a group within the 
leper colony. 

Before very long these people are able, with help from 
our church organization, to build a chapel. Within five 
years, their membership has grown to fifty. 

In 1942, in Santarem, I baptized a young man who was 
suffering from leprosy. It already covered his entire body 
and I felt sure it would not be long before he was sent 
to the colony. He was, however, a devout Bible student 
and his faith was very strong. As he came out of the water 
after his baptism, he told me, "One day I am going to be 
a minister and a worker in the Lord's cause." 

After his baptism, he was separated from the rest of 
his family, keeping to one room where there was a door 
that had been cut in half so that the upper half would 
open. On the lower half was a ledge he could use as an 
altar. Because his family was not rich, church members 
took up a collection to put in electric light for him. 

He liked to play the guitar and sing hymns, and he knew 
the Bible well. His mother would go out and bring in the 
neighbors, who would stand in the hall a little distance 
from the door. While he played the guitar, they would sing 
and study the Bible together. From this room, he con- 
verted twenty-three persons. 



INTO ALL THE WORLD 223 

At the same time, we began giving him injections of 
some of the modern "miracle" compounds. They seemed to 
help him so we continued, supplying the drugs and teach- 
ing his family how to administer them. In all, he had more 
than 660 injections over a period of seven years. Toward 
the last we were using a Brazilian-made medicine called 
Promin. 

Gradually he began to get better. He was so well, in fact, 
that his family began to take him to hospitals and clinics 
for blood tests and other examinations. Finally, he was able 
to obtain twenty-three certificates from doctors and medi- 
cal institutions stating that there was no longer any trace 
of leprosy discoverable in his system. 

He was taken on as an employee by our organization and 
did remarkable work for many years in the state of Piaui. 



CHAPTER 14 

RIVER PATTERNS 



THE patterns of the river forever change and 
are forever the same. They are the patterns of ever-flowing 
excitement, of low water and flood. Homes along the water 
are usually built on stilts, but the hungry stream reaches 
up into them. There is constant struggle and conflict and 
swirling assault. The Amazon is so wide and so deep that 
we must carry a hundred feet of chain, merely to be able 
to anchor close in to the bank. The pattern of its floor has 
been mapped, and looking at these subterranean outlines 
one sees a world of valleys and mountains and rocks and 
weird patterns of growing, underwater forests a sunken 
world of unguessed wonders. 

The life we led on board our boat was far more than a 
day-to-day or hour-to-hour program of meals or treatments 
or meetings. Ours was the routine of the unexpected. We 
would be up at dawn, have our breakfast, and begin our 
day. We might be heading to Santarem or Manaus for sup- 
plies, but a canoe comes alongside, a white towel is waving 
in front of a house. All over the river "the white medical 
boat of the missionaries" is recognized. We are needed up 
there in that house, where someone is dying. A child is sick 
its parents do not know what is wrong. Supplies must 
wait; we always stop where there is need. 

224 



RIVER PATTERNS 



I remember one passenger on the Luzeiro became im- 
patient at all our stops. We were on our way to a meeting 
in which he was to participate and all that day people, in 
an area where malaria had broken out, were hailing us, 
asking us to treat them. How could we fail to answer their 
waving towels? But our visitor kept saying that, if we 
continued to stop, we would not make the meeting. 

Seven days later, as this same man was heading south on 
the high seas, he came down with malaria himself and was 
so ill that he turned over his money and personal belong- 
ings to the ship's captain and wrote a farewell letter to his 
wife. The ship's doctor pulled him through. That his illness 
had taught him a little of the real meaning of our work 
came in a letter I received from him: "Brother Halliwell, 
in your work there, never pass a home where a poor soul 
is suffering with malaria. It doesn't matter how many ser- 
mons you preach, but never neglect someone with a terri- 
ble, terrible disease." 

It was an injunction we had always followed and al- 
ways would. 

We did not know and could not guess the pattern of our 
lives for even a single day. Here we reach a village where 
we have friends. They run to greet us, to invite us to meals, 
and to ask when we are holding a meeting. In the store, 
which is the heart of the town, people gather around to ask 
us questions about the city and the world outside, and they 
tell us their own news. A boy has been struck by an electric 
eel, stunned and drowned. The eel has since been killed. 
A woman whose husband had been desperately ill with 
malaria comes to tell us about him. We had given her a 
quantity of half-gram quinine pills and told her to give 
them to him three times a day for three days. 



226 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

"Did you give him the medicine as we directed?" I ask. 

The woman answers: "I gave it to him all at once. All 
nine pills at once." 

Such a colossal dose ought to have killed him, but his 
wife tells us, "Oh, no. His ears rang and he was almost 
blind for a whilebut now he's completely all right and the 
malaria is gone/' 

We hear the stories o families and individuals. Here are 
three girls, daughters of one of the leading farmers in this 
area. We helped to bring two of them into the world, years 
back. They were educated in the school we built in the dis- 
trict. Now grown, they are going down-river to study for a 
life in the business world and in nursing. 

Outside, we meet a youngster we treated a few weeks 
back for snakebite. He is brimming over with healthand 
gratefulness. We remember when we first saw him, sitting 
there after our meeting was over. 

"I have been bitten by a snake/' he had said. "Can you 
help me?" 

"Why did you sit there all this time?" I had demanded. 
"Delays can be very dangerous in these cases/' 

"Oh, I couldn't interrupt a religious meeting," this boy 
had said. 

Now, fortunately, he is well. 

We have lunch on the boat and invite in one or two of 
our friends. Jessie prepares a special meal of fish and fried 
bananas. There are many different kinds of bananas in 
Brazil and they are all wonderful bananas are the perfect 
food, in fact but the plantains are the ones I like best. 
They grow about fourteen or fifteen inches long. Jessie 
slices them lengthwise into long strips and fries them. 



RIVER PATTERNS 227 

Then with a dash of sugar and cinnamon sprinkled on 
them, they make a wonderful tropical meal. 

We move on in the afternoon toward a place a little 
farther along where some people are waiting for us to hold 
a meeting. We are stopped several times by the towels. In 
every home, it seems, someone is ill. We do not reach the 
place of the meeting we had scheduled until three days 
later. 

On our arrival we find difficulties. There is a show troupe 
traveling through this area, putting on vaudeville. It is 
scheduled to use the only hall in the town tonight. The 
mayor asks us if we can hold our meeting out of doors. 
We agree. We drop over with the town official to ask the 
man who runs the show if he would mind starting his per- 
formance a little later than usual, to permit us to hold our 
meeting first. 

He is somewhat aloof. Just what kind of meeting would 
I be holding? he asks. When I tell him it is a religious 
gathering he shrugs. "Hold it whenever you want. No reli- 
gious meeting can take anybody away from my show/' he 
tells us. 

So we go ahead with our outdoor meeting. There is one 
building in the center of town with great white walls and 
I decide to use that as my screen. I get a box to hold the 
projector, and shortly after dark I begin to show beautiful 
color slides I had taken and had made up of Rio de Janeiro. 
When the gathered youngsters see these pictures they 
plead with me to wait until they can get their families. 
Four times I try to begin and each time I have to stop and 
wait. By eight o'clock it seems that every person in town 
is crowded around that building. 

I doubt if we ever have had a more enthusiastic gather- 



228 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

ing. There are shouts and applause when the film is over. 
I announce then that I am going to preach for half an hour 
and that then I will show more pictures until ten o'clock. 
No one leaves. I talk about Bible prophecies, and then I go 
into a discussion of the evils of various vices, particularly 
gambling and drinking. A drunk tries to break up our meet- 
ing by asking if alcohol isn't good for snakebite, and every- 
one starts to laugh but the mayor has the man arrested. 
Another drunk interferes and the mayor ships him off to 
jail, too. 

The owner of the show comes in to complain that he had 
not known we were going to show pictures or provide any- 
thing interesting. 

"You had your chance," the mayor states. "You didn't 
think these missionaries had anything exciting to say, but 
now you know they do." 

The showman continues to protest and only subsides 
when the mayor threatens to lock him up with the others. 

It is the unexpected which is normal, in the town or 
under way. We ride through a school of fish in the moon- 
light, and thirty-seven leap into the boat. A friend from the 
States is at the table in the salon when a fish leaps through 
the open window and lands flapping and ready for frying 
on the guest's dinner plate. 

In Itocoatiana we find some cookies in a bakery which 
a guest of ours considers delicious. While he is munching 
one, a canoe goes by our boat with a load of alligator eggs. 
Our visitor says, "Ask him what he does with these eggs." 
The canoeist explains, "If I can't sell these eggs along the 
river, I take them in to the baker in Manaus. He uses them 
to make cookies." 



RIVER PATTERNS 220 

Some of our guests on board the Luzeiro are fearful of 
the strange Amazon world. They note every unusual sound 
and often ask us, "Is something wrong? I heard the oddest 
noise." Usually it is nothing more than the wind, or some 
bird or animal or perhaps a leaping fish. They often get 
upset at the sounds of the motor; if the throb changes sud- 
denly, they are sure disaster is close. A guest on one trip 
had received as a gift two parakeets and a parrot to take 
home to his sons in Rio. We had the birds in a crate in the 
engine room. Early in the morning this guest was awak- 
ened by a strange noise that he thought was coming out 
of the motor. "Something has gone wrong," he calls. "The 
engine is out of order." 

It does indeed sound strange, and I get up and go aft 
to investigate. When I get to the engine room, our "peril" 
is cleared up. The three birds in their cages have entered 
into a running competition with the motor and are making 
the most incredible noises I have ever heard, trying to 
drown it out. 

We laugh, our boat boy at the wheel laughs, and the 
Luzeiro rides on. 

There are patterns, too, for the people who live along 
the river, for their customs and ways and habits. 

Here is a couple we will call Jose and Maria. These two, 
like many along the river, are nationals; they were married 
a good many years before in a civil court. They have five 
boys and a girl, and live in a house at the water's edge. 
The walls might have been made of mud and clay; they 
are, in fact, made of woven palm leaves. 

Both had been bora and reared here in the Amazon 
Valley. The man grows coca and raises cattle and catches 
fish. The variety of fish along the river is infinite, but the 



23O LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

simplest to catch are the piranha. Dangerous man-eating 
fish, if they get at you when you are in the water, they are 
so greedy for meat that they will take any bait that has 
meat on it and therefore they can be caught by the hun- 
dreds. Another fish often caught is the tambaque, which 
grows to twenty pounds or more and will eat only rubber 
seeds, Brazil nuts, or nuts out of the woods which fall 
from the plants and float down the streams. 

We can bait our line with a nut or a bit of fruit, leave 
it set overnight, and in the morning find we have hooked 
a tambaque. Because of their odd diet, these fish are com- 
mon in the waters of the woods when the river is over its 
banks. Fishermen set their lines then with fifty hooks or 
more each baited with a nutand often catch ten or even 
twenty fish at a time. 

Once I saw a man in a canoe loaded with a couple of 
hundred of these beautiful tambaques and asked how he 
managed to catch so many. His answer was that he had 
learned to mimic the monkeys. "The monkeys go to a cer- 
tain fruit tree and chatter a lot and spill fruit in the water, 
so the tambaques have learned to follow this noise. I imi- 
tate the monkeys, drop a little fruit into the water, and 
pretty soon I can pull in the fish as fast as I can bait the 
hooks." 

Jose goes after the pirarucu, or red fish, which is taken 
usually with a harpoon. It has scales so hard they can be 
used for sandpaper, and its tongue sometimes serves as a 
nutmeg grater. Some Americans have dubbed the pirarucu 
the Amazon cod. 

Jose has found of recent years that the fish in the river 
are not so plentiful as before, and the Brazilian government 
is beginning to make rules to protect fish life. The electric 



RIVER PATTERNS 231 

eels chiefly the one called the puraqueare still found, 
but not in great numbers in the more populated areas. 
These eels can generate six hundred volts with a frequency 
of about six cycles a minute. Their voltage is high but there 
is no amperage; however, by placing an electrode over the 
positive pole and another over the negative pole, back near 
the tail, scientists have succeeded in ringing a doorbell and 
lighting a neon lamp by eel power alone. 

Fish is one of the staple foods of the valley. In most 
houses the smell is ever present, and almost always there 
are fish hanging out on a line in the back. Each day the 
old are eaten or thrown away, and the newly caught hung 
up to dry, like clothes on a back-yard line. 

The roof of Jose's house, like the others along the river, 
is covered with palm leaves. These will last, with minor 
repairs, for four or five years; then new palm-leaf "shingles" 
must be brought in. The house is thirty-five or forty feet 
long, divided inside into one main room and several sleep- 
ing rooms. The kitchen is a separate small house because 
Jose's wife, like the other women, cooks over an open wood 
fire. The kitchen is always large because it serves many 
purposes. Here Maria makes her manioc flour, with which 
she bakes a substitute for bread. The flour is made by 
draining out the poisonous water from the manioc root, 
drying it, and then heating it. The process produces a high- 
starch flour which is widely used in Brazil. Here also in 
the kitchen is stored a pile of unthreshed rice which is 
stomped out in a large black bowl on the floor as it is 
needed. 

In Jose's house, as in most houses along the river, we find 
many tin cans. No one throws away a can in the Amazon 
Valley; it can be used for too many things. There are cans 



232 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

in the kitchen, five-gallon kerosene tins and smaller ones 
as well, full of water drawn from the river. This water is 
used for everything drinking, washing, and cooking. The 
drinking water is often kept in earthen jugs to keep it cool; 
but in many homes there is only one dipper, which is used 
by everyone. 

One of our jobs on the Luzeiro was to try to change these 
drinking habits. Today, there are many homes where, 
alongside the tin of water, is a board with a different cup 
for each member of the family and no one drinks from the 
dipper itself. 

Jose's stove is a simply made structure of brick covered 
over with a long cast-iron plate in which holes have been 
made for the pots. Such a stove may be ten or even twelve 
feet long, and the wood burned in it is usually cut into ten- 
foot lengths. A hole at one end of the stove serves as a 
flue but it is almost never used, and the kitchen is fre- 
quently as steamy and smoky as an old-fashioned coal- 
burning engine room. 

On top of every stove is the beanpot, which in some 
kitchens is never washed. Each morning more beans are 
added to what may have been left from the previous day. 
One of our major tasks it was particularly Jessie's job- 
was to teach the river folk to keep their pots and pans shin- 
ing clean. Jose and Maria always did; but along the river 
this was not always so. We also brought in many hundreds 
of toothbrushes for the river people. 

One curious, but practical, Amazon custom is that of 
using orange peels to start fires. The peel of the Bra- 
zilian orange contains an acid that burns readily. Paper 
is at a premium, but oranges are available everywhere. To 



RIVER PATTERNS 233 

start a fire in the morning, all Maria has to do is to throw 
a few orange peels into the stove and strike a match. 

Most of these homes have very few dishes, and these are 
reserved for special occasions. For everyday use, there 
are gourds. To make sure he doesn't run short, Jose, like 
every other home-owner, plants a few gourd trees around 
his house. They grow up to be about the size of orange 
trees and bear fruit which is sometimes as big as a water- 
melon. 

When the gourd is ripe it is pulled off the tree and cut in 
half. After the inside has been scraped out, the two halves 
are left to dry in the sun. According to their size, they can 
be used for any kind of dish or cup. They can be painted 
with charming designs or initials. On many tables there 
will be large gourds full of manioc flour, or rice, or beans. 

In the kitchen the gourds are usually kept in long, neat 
rows on a special shelf, upside down, so that if anything 
falls from the palm-leaf roof, any small snake or insect par- 
ticularly, it won't land in somebody's dinner plate. 

Gourds are useful not only as dishes but also as monkey 
traps. When a hole is cut in a round gourd and a banana 
put inside, the monkey will reach in for it and, once he has 
hold of the fruit, won't let go. With his paws in the gourd, 
he can't climb, but he hasn't the sense to let go the banana 
inside the gourd. He screams and screeches but he can 
easily be caught. 

In most of Brazil, especially in the wonderful cities 
of the south, the people are highly cultured, and living con- 
ditions rival anything in America. But along the Amazon 
it is a different story. For example, an Amazon house does 
not usually have a dining room or silverware. Meals are, 
in fact, one vast informality along the river. 



234 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

Each person takes what he likes from the table farina 
and beans and riceand puts it in his gourd, and he mixes 
all this up into little balls. Then, with the farina spoon, 
which is probably the only implement on the table, he flips 
this Amazon farina-burger into his mouth so cleverly that 
the spoon never touches his lips and can therefore be used 
by the next in line. 

Of course, like everyone else in Brazil, Jose and Maria 
drink coffee, but theirs is a real home brew. They buy the 
coffee bean green, put the two halves of the berries into an 
iron kettle, and cook and stir them until they are black- 
not brown, as in the States, but black as the Rio Negro. 
Then they add brown sugar and stir until each bean is 
glazed. They use a mortar to grind it fine, then boil it, and 
serve the dark, thick final product in cups about one fifth 
the size of ours. 

They drink it black. 

Breakfast, which they call cafe, is usually just a cup of 
this powerful brew with, possibly, a piece of bread on the 
side. For a tasty dessert, they fill a demitasse gourd, of 
course with sugar and pour coffee over it. 

None of the river people have much modern equipment. 
Refrigerators, washing machines, these are almost un- 
known. Often the kitchen will have only a dirt floor, and 
often the rest of the house, too. Often they make their own 
soap out of the pods of the cacao bean. It is cheap, dark, 
and not very good for the hands. 

Each family or individual has his private piece of water 
front. There he keeps his canoe; there he gets his water; 
there he or she washes the clothes. This they call their 
"port." 

Laundry, for Maria, is no simple matter of filling a 



RIVER PATTERNS 235 

machine, turning a switch, and having the clothes come 
out bright and shining. She lugs her wash down to the 
river, wets it, rubs on some of her homemade black soap, 
dips the clothes back into the water, and then pounds them 
on a board. More water . . . more soap . . . more pounding. 
This goes on until, as one woman explained to Jessie, 
"When there's no more buttons on them, then you know 
they're clean." 

Maria has never heard of a dryer, and doesn't have a 
clothesline. Her wash is hung on the wooden fence that 
Jose has built to keep the cattle away from the house. And 
when ironing time comes, she stokes up her charcoal iron, 
lights it, and goes to work. These implements, usually five 
or six inches high, are heated from the inside and it's quite 
a chore just to get one lighted. Some ladies use a palm 
leaf as a bellows. The ashes are apt to fall out, too, but 
many times I have had a white linen suit washed and 
pressed by this method and have been surprised at how 
white and immaculate it turned out. 

Always there are fruits around the house especially 
bananas. Often you would see bunches of bananas in vari- 
ous stages of ripening in several corners of the kitchen or 
the main room. You never wait until they are ripe to pick 
them; by that time the birds will have spoiled them. 

Mealtime along the Amazon is as informal as the meals 
themselves, and few people bother to sit down. People 
drift in and out. One will finish eating as another begins, 
and meanwhile the mother will be calling the rest of her 
brood from the fields or the riverbanks. I recall one woman 
who gave us a wonderful dinner; she had a birthday cake 
and other delicious foods to go with it, and she had gotten 
out her best tablecloth and dishes from the trunk for this 



LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

occasion. We did not have chairs, but sat on benches along 
the table. As soon as she put the food on, however, one of 
the men of the house had to get a switch and stand behind 
us with it to keep the cats off the table while we ate. I 
was pretty sure that they did not generally eat sitting 
around this table. 

Most river families have little furniture and what they 
do have is in their living rooms. Sometimes they have a 
supply of logs and planks, to raise their floors as the river 
comes up. The floods would wreck good furniture, so they 
have very little. Generally a bench or so or a few kerosene 
boxes (the ones in which the ten-gallon kerosene cans are 
shipped to Brazil-they look like soap boxes but are big- 
ger). 

Usually, too, somewhere in the house, possibly in the 
front room, is a sewing machine. All the women know how 
to sew. Often there is a little table, and if it is a Christian 
home it will have a Bible on it. A table is not to eat on, but 
to display the most precious belongings. 

Most of the houses have no electricity. For illumination 
at night the people use little kerosene lamps made out of 
bottles. These bottle lamps, made by local tinners, have 
wicks that go down into the bottles, and sometimes even 
handles and little reflectors with holes in the middle, so 
they can be hung up on the wall with a nail. 

All over the house are the hammock hooks, and everyone 
who goes out of an afternoon takes his sleeping para- 
phernalia with him. The hammocks have nets to keep out 
mosquitoes, but there is no linen problem. They don't use 
any. If it's hot the men take off their shirts. Otherwise, they 
sleep with their clothes on. 

There are no windowpanes, of course. Plaited palm 



RIVER PATTERNS 237 

leaves cover windows and door openings at night and are 
pulled up in the morning. When it storms, particularly in 
houses with palm-woven walls, the rain sweeps in. 

The hard-working women of the Amazon world do the 
cooking and sweeping and sewing. Often I have seen them 
sweeping up their dirt floors with brooms made of corn 
husks. They sew well and most of them know how to make 
lovely pieces of lace. Despite their poverty, both men and 
women love beautiful things and have a wealth of their 
own in the world around them the brightly plumaged 
birds, the exotic flowers, and the lush beauty of the jungle. 
In every house we found flowers giant orchids, in tin cans 
on the wall; Brazilian varieties of wild bougainvillaea, deep 
purple and mauve; vine flowers of a hundred shades; tree 
blossoms of rare fragrance. These are a people whose love 
of nature in its most beautiful dress is a lifelong thing. 

Most of the land on which the people live is owned by 
the government, because to have a deed they must have 
their holdings surveyed. But their rights are usually recog- 
nized if they have cleared off a space and built a home 
with or 'without deed. When Henry Ford in 1929 at- 
tempted to set up a rubber-producing empire on a tre- 
mendous tract of land given him by the government along 
the Tapajoz River, he had to buy off hundreds of these 
"squatters" to get it going. (Although Ford did his best, it 
was simply too big a project for the river at that time, and 
was ultimately abandoned. ) 

There are virtually no cars along the river, except in 
Belem and Manaus, and no use for them, for roads are non- 
existent. About two hundred and fifty miles of the Pan- 
American Highway, which goes through the state of Para, 
had been built by 1958. But beyond this, and the few roads 



238 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

mostly gravel or dirt around the major cities, the super- 
highways of the Amazon remain a remote dream. 

One piece of furniture found in every house along the 
river and indeed in every Brazilian homeis a trunk, usu- 
ally very handsome, with rounded top and high sides. 
Along the Amazon this is usually kept in the room where 
the owners sleep. Closets are rare; good clothes are folded 
away in the trunk, along with the fine laces, the best china, 
any silverware or other valuables. Often the trunk is made 
out of tin as a further guard against insects and the torren- 
tial rains. 

The trunk is the safe-deposit vault, the strong box, the 
repository of all treasures. It also serves with a clean towel 
on top as a kind of sofa on which visitors may sit. Often 
one house will boast several trunks. When we held a meet- 
ing in such a home, all the benches and trunks were hauled 
into the main room to serve as seats. 

The patterns are different from other places and other 
peoples, and they are the same, as good and evil are forever 
individual, and forever the same. 

One night, coming upriver, we saw several canoes full of 
people heading for a party. There are often dances in the 
towns and in larger homes; sometimes a good deal of 
Amazon whisky is drunk and sometimes just as on a Sat- 
urday night back in America violence erupts. 

On one canoe were painted the words "Amazon Jazz 
Band." We knew about the reque-reque music played with 
bamboo poles and sticks which is often held up as a substi- 
tute for what we call music. This is usually what is heard 
along the rivera combination of jungle rhythm, rhumba 
rhythm, and second-class American dance tunes, all in one. 



RIVER PATTERNS 239 

At Jessie's urging I moved upriver a half hour to be out 
of hearing, and for a while we had a quiet night. About 
two o'clock we were awakened when a canoe bumped into 
our boat. "Senhor Leo, your friend Alexander is calling for 
you. He is dying and wants you to come at once." 

"Where is he?" I asked. "What happened?" 

"He's back in that house where they're having the dance. 
He had a fight and was stabbed three times with a knife 
and is bleeding to death." 

We pulled anchor and with the messenger acting as pilot 
went down to a small house where we saw a light. There 
was Alexander, a man of about thirty years, lying in a ham- 
mock on the porch. He had been stabbed in the shoulder, 
the forearm, and the palm of the hand. Each stab wound 
had pierced ail the way through. We heated water, cleaned 
the wounds, gave him a shot to coagulate the blood, and 
then filled the wounds with sterile sulfa powder, followed 
by a big shot of penicillin. Alexander murmured his thanks 
and an explanation. "We quarreled over a girl at the 
dance," he said. "He attacked me and I was forced to 
defend myself and kill him, He was drunk and I was 

sober/' 

There was a long pause. Then he said, 'It is at a time 
like this that one remembers God/' 

I knew he meant it sincerely, but I reminded him that it 
would be a good idea to think of God before getting into a 
scrape that led him into taking the life of another creature. 

He promised faithfully that from now on he would be 
different and that we could hold meetings in his house. 

On our next stop there, three weeks later, we inquired 
about Alexander. He was fully recovered, we were told, 



240 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

and the man he thought he had killed was not dead at all 
but 'had fled into the woods thinking that he had killed 
Alexander. 

I was pleased at the happy ending of this Amazon ver- 
sion of a roadhouse brawl. 



CHAPTER 15 

PERSONAL STORY 



TO people reading our story, it must seem that 
Jessie and I were so involved in the lives of the river people 
that we had no lives of our own. Sometimes we would 
almost have agreed. And yet we know that it is not so. 
Under Jessie's crisp white uniform was a woman calm and 
strong in time of emergency, but with all the usual femi- 
nine frailties. And I though I was able to cope, I thought, 
with almost anything that arose was certainly no different 
from other men. 

We had treated thousands of cases of malaria, but when 
it struck us, we reacted exactly like anyone else: we lay 
in our beds, alternately shivering and burning with fever, 
and wondering if each moment was to be our last. 

For seventeen years we had lived on the river and man- 
aged to avoid "the fever." But one night we were tired after 
a long hard day and when we returned to the Luzeiro, 
anchored in the harbor in Maues, I dropped down on the 
sofa without bothering to close the window screens. Sev- 
eral hours later I awoke and put them up but the damage 
had been done. Within nine days, both Jessie and I were 
running fevers of 105 degrees and were too sick even to 
treat ourselves. 

We sent our boat boy into the city to get us a doctor. 

241 



2-42 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

When lie arrived he shook his head. "After treating all 
those people for a little case of malaria/' he said, "you get 
it yourselves and have to call in somebody else." 

We both felt so terrible it was hard to speak. I heard 
Jessie say, "Doctor, it's not the same when you get it your- 
self." 

I steeled myself and finally got out a question. "Doctor, 
do you think we ought to go to a hospital?" 

He stood in the middle of the cabin. "There isn't a hospi- 
tal in town that has the comfort you two have here. You're 
just acting like a couple of typical patients who want a 
little extra pampering." 

Sick as we were or thought we were we managed a 
laugh at that because it was so completely true. "Now what 
do you have for malaria?" he asked, and when we gave him 
a list of the special drugs, he said, "Give yourself a dose 
of your own medicine and go to sleep." 

We did just that and in the morning we were delighted, 
and maybe a little surprised, to find our medicines had 
worked just as well on us as on others. Before the day was 
over, we felt so much better that we were up and around. 

The malaria had hit us shortly after the end of World 
War II, a conflict that had made as many changes in our 
lives as in those of any other parents. While uniforms blos- 
somed like Amazon orchids on the streets of Belem, while 
American officials and technicians began zooming up and 
down the river in their launches, up in the gales of the 
North Atlantic, thousands of miles away, our son Jack was 
doing his part. And no parents watched the mails more 
closely than we. 

Jack had been a junior at Pacific Union College when 
war broke out. He was inducted into the Navy and we 



PERSONAL STORY 243 

were as proud as any father and mother in the southern 
hemisphere when he wrote us that he'd been present at the 
historic mid- Atlantic conference between President Roose- 
velt and Prime Minister Churchill. 

And then we got word that he was being sent to Brazil. 
Like every other mother, Jessie hustled out to the kitchen 
and began cooking and baking as if her life depended on 
it, for he was already en route, and was landing in Belem 
by noon the next day. 

So he flew to the land that had been his second home for 
so long. He had just one day to stop over in Belem with 
us not nearly long enough to eat all the good food Jessie 
had got ready for him. Then he would be on his way, he 
told us, to Baia, where he was to be assigned to a post in 
the Naval Observer Corps. 

He kept his most important news until the last. Before 
leaving the States, he said, he had fallen in love; he and 
his young lady planned to be married. Jessie cried a little, 
as women do, and I shook Jack's hand, as my Nebraska 
father had done years before, when I'd told him about 
Jessie. 

We had to keep track of the romance through Jack's let- 
ters, and when he wrote us that he had been able to ar- 
range for his bride-to-be to fly to Brazil to marry him, we 
were happy and sad all at once. Happy because of our 
son's happiness; sad because travel restrictions wouldn't 
allow us to be present at the ceremony. 

But we were able to get our first look at our son's bride- 
to-be. She had a two-day stopover in Belem, and we were 
delighted to be with her during that time. However, one 
of the documents which I will always treasure is a telegram 
we received at that time from Jack in Baia: "DAI> DON'T 



244 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

TAKE AUDREY ON A TRIP ON THAT LUZEIRO BUT SEND HER AT 
ONCE HERE TO BAIA YOUR SON JACK/' 

We did as ordered. Theirs was the first naval wedding in 
Baia and it was a big celebration. They were married, as 
Brazilian law requires, in a civil ceremony. Then the reli- 
gious ceremony was performed by a Protestant minister, 
and the young couple marched out of the church under 
an international arch formed by the crossed swords of the 
American officers on one side, the Brazilians on the other. 

Meanwhile, our daughter Marian was still in the States, 
and though we heard from her regularly, and treasured our 
snapshots of her, I found it hard to believe that the lovely 
young woman they portrayed was our little girl, the little 
girl I had kissed good-by on a station platform in 1936, 
while she cried inconsolably. 

Marian had finished high school and was taking pre-nurs- 
ing courses at the Washington Missionary College, near 
Washington, D.C., when we received a letter one day that 
gave us a real shock. Dr. Raymond Ernshaw, who had 
written it, described himself as an intern at a hospital near 
Washington, and his purpose in writing us was to ask, 
formally, for our daughter's hand in marriage. 

This news wasn't as startling to Jessie as it was to me, 
for she had visited Marian in the States in 1939, just before 
the war broke out. Besides, women have a sixth sense about 
such things. But for me, how could I think of my little girl 
as old enough to marry? And just who was this stranger 
who wrote us like this? As we went up and down the river, 
answering the white-towel calls for aid, I'm afraid my 
mind was often on my daughter, and her plans for the 
future. 

Then came a letter from Marian filling in all the details 



PERSONAL STORY 245 

that the doctor had left out, and saying that she wanted us 
to come to the States so that her dad could perform the 
wedding ceremony. 

The war was still going on and travel was almost impos- 
sible, but our son got me back to the States somehow on a 
naval transport and we managed to get Jessie on a sea- 
plane that one of the rubber-development organizations 
was using to haul crude rubber up to the States. Marian 
was waiting for us in Miami when we arrived on separate 
planes, one day apartand we went together up to Wash- 
ington, D.C., where Jessie and I met our prospective son- 
in-law, and gave him our stamp of approval. I married 
them in the Takoma Park Adventist Church; and Jessie 
and I headed back for the jungle, feeling a little sad and a 
good deal older. When Raymond was called by the Navy 
and sent to Guam, Marian stayed in Washington and fin- 
ished her nursing course, but after the war we were able 
to get together for a joyous reunion. Marian and her hus- 
band made us extremely happy when they came to Rio de 
Janeiro, where for a time he served as a missionary doctor. 
They have since returned to the States and are now living 
and working together in Texas. 

Seeing so much sickness about us, Jessie and I used to 
congratulate ourselves on our own good health. We took 
what precautions we could, of course, but we couldn't stop 
our work on account of rain or heat, or the dangers every- 
where present along the Amazon. It was the years, eventu- 
ally, which began to take a toll. 

During our visit to the States in 1936, Jessie had to 
undergo an operation for the removal of her gall bladder, 
and the following year I, the rugged Nebraskan who had 
never even owned a pair of glasses, developed a terrible 



246 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

eye infection. I got to a specialist as soon as I could, and 
he gave me medicine which cleared up the condition. But 
when I returned to the States after the war, and had my 
eyes checked, I was stunned to hear the word "cataract," 
and the news that I would have to have them removed 
from both eyes. The medical profession isn't sure what 
causes this disease, but in my case they figured the cata- 
racts might have developed from the bright glare of the 
Amazon waters over so many years of tropical sun. 

We weathered both these interruptions to our life and 
continued with our work, only to hear, in 1957, the most 
dreadful word of all 

We were living in the outskirts of Rio, and Jessie had 
remained at home while I went out alone. I was up the 
river from Belem, ready to leave on a long trip into Indian 
country when, just fifteen minutes before my scheduled 
departure, I received a telegram saying that Jessie was ill. 
If there had been any speed limits on the Amazon, I would 
have broken every one of them as I raced back to Belem. 
There the news was even worse: Jessie had cancer of the 
liver, I was told, and could not possibly survive. 

I hurried back to Rio. I had made that trip dozens of 
times before, but it had never seemed so long. At home, 
our doctor told me it wasn't Jessie's liver but one kidney 
that was completely destroyed. Almost all such cases were 
cancerous, he added. 

But I found that I was not alone in my grief and alarm. 
Our church set aside one Sabbath for fasting and prayers 
for Jessie's life. The operation was performed; Jessie sur- 
vived it; and four days later word came back that there was 
not a sign of cancer in the kidney that had been removed. 

Together, it seemed, we were to be allowed to complete 



PERSONAL STORY 247 

our years of work in the fastnesses of Brazil. Together, we 
were to be allowed to return to our native land. 

In our part of the United States, young people leave the 
parental nest as soon as they are able to use their wings. 
Some settle in towns nearby; others fly farther to other 
parts of the country. They marry and set up new homes. 
But summers, after the harvest, or at Christmas time, they 
visit back and forth and there are happy family reunions 
as the various members exchange news. 

Far away on the Amazon, this was one of the things 
Jessie and I missed most. We came from large families, 
both of us, and letters went back and forth frequently, but 
it was not the same. To see our parents again, and our 
brothers and sisters with their families, became one of our 
longings. 

In 1936, this wish had come true. We had ordered a new 
Ford, by mail, and it was waiting for us when we arrived 
in the States on that year's furlough* In it we drove out to 
Nebraska, where we spent happy days visiting with Jessie's 
relatives and mine, who still lived in the neighborhood of 
Odessa. My parents were more than seventy-five, and had 
never traveled much, and had not even seen some of their 
grandchildren, scattered throughout the West. 

"How would you like me to drive you out to see them?'* 
I asked my father one day. 

"Fine," he said. "We'll go from place to place. It'll be a 
family reunion on the installment plan/' 

Through Nebraska and on to Wyoming we went, Jessie 
and the children, my parents and myself. A stop in Chey- 
enne to visit my oldest sister, Flo, Then on to Nevada and 
California and throughout the great West, where my seven 
brothers and sisters and their families lived. 



248 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

In San Francisco, Dad got his first view of the ocean. 
As he stood looking at the vast expanse of the Pacific, he 
turned to me: "I have always wanted to see the ocean, son. 
That's one reason I came on this trip. To see my children 
again and this ocean." 

Back in Odessa, the train that would start me on the 
way to Washington, D.C., from where I would go on to 
New York and then to Brazil, was leaving at 3 A.M. We sat 
up that night around the fire and talked until almost mid- 
night. 

At two, when the alarm went off, Mother was already 
getting breakfast fried eggs and potatoes, toast and hot 
chocolate. Father had his lantern all shined up and his old 
handcart ready to haul my bags, the one block to the 
station. 

At the station we waited silently for a few minutes. Then 
we saw the headlight of the express coming down over the 
hill, and in the dark Father stood by the side of the rails 
waving his lantern until the train blew a blast on the 
whistle and ground to a halt. I said my good-byes and got 
on the train. From my window I could see them Dad 
with his lantern, Mother with a shawl over her shoulders, 
holding onto Dad's arm. 

It was the last time I ever saw them. 



CHAPTER 16 

FLEET ADMIRAL 



IN 1956, when we left Belem and moved south 
to Rio, where I assumed active command of the fleet of 
boats we now had in operation in many parts of South 
America most of them built on the design of the Luzeiro 
we had lived in the river world twenty-seven years. This 
was our home: Belem and its people, the river and its 
people, its bends and its rains, its smells and sights, its 
villages and houses, its thousand byways interlaced like 
the vines along the banks. 

In a way that one can never explain, we had put down 
our roots here; we were Americans in deed and in fact, 
yet we were Brazilians as well we spoke the language 
and understood the ways, and were a part of those ways. 
Leaving meant breaking with much of our life, with friends 
of years. Before we went south to Rio, the American con- 
sul, Mr. George Coleman, gave us a reception in Belem. 
It seemed as if everyone in town who spoke English was 
there, neighbors and friends, the prominent and the ob- 
scure of the city, who knew our work and had been part 
of it. 

They had made up a special book for us as a going-away 
present a handsome volume of the works of famous Amer- 



250 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

lean poets, with each poem in English on one side of the 
page, and in Portuguese on the other. 

We left friends behind us in that city as close to us as 
any people on earth. And we left, too, a few changes in 
which our work had played a part. There were clinics 
along the river, and in Belem itself was a hospital we had 
built, operated by Brazilian doctors and nurses and fully 
recognized by the country's medical and governmental 
heads. Original funds for this institution were raised by 
gifts from our Sabbath schools all over the world children 
who poured in a total of $51,000 in a single offering for 
this work. Additional funds were later provided. We 
bought a beautiful tract of land and I helped in the actual 
designing and building of this attractive two-story hospi- 
tal with some forty-five beds, its own electric plant, nurses' 
home, two homes for doctors and their families. When it 
was dedicated in 1951, not a penny was owed on it. 

People on the river who needed help thus had a place 
to which we could bring them or send themfor more 
protracted treatment than the Luzeiro could provide. The 
hospital was open to people of all faiths, and our doctors 
often operated for free. In our hospitals, each mission con- 
tributes a certain amount to a fund available for those who 
cannot pay. Charges are made where people can afford to 
pay, but no one is ever denied medical care, whether he 
has money or not. 

In Mato Grosso, I visited one of our special hospitals- 
one supported in part by Brazilian government funds 
primarily for the treatment of a terrible fever prevalent in 
this state at altitudes of from one thousand to three thou- 
sand feet. This infection, known as savage fire or wildfire, 
produces a red rash which spreads over the whole body, 



FLEET ADMIRAL 

with itching and pain that can drive the patient insane. 
For a long time this disease was considered incurable; at 
our hospital by the end of 1958 we were achieving close 
to 40 per cent cures, and were able to arrest the fever's 
progress in many other cases. 

Although I personally had nothing to do with the con- 
struction of this hospital, I did feel a certain proprietory 
interest because the doctor in charge was the onetime 
mayor of the Amazon city where I was arrested for 
having failed to check out with postal officials at the 
previous port of call. Following studies, at our college in 
Sao Paulo, he had volunteered to direct the work in the 
midst of this fever-infested area of Mato Grosso. 

Throughout all Brazil, our church has built hospitals. 
In Sao Paulo, we have one that concentrates on polio 
Casa de Saude Liberdade. We have another in the moun- 
tains on the outskirts of Rio. In Peru, we have hospitals in 
Lima and in Juliaca, where Dr. Howard Smith, formerly 
of California, has done wonderful work. And there are 
many others, and many smaller clinics, which are operated 
with Brazilian doctors and nurses and all the latest equip- 
ment. 

The life of a missionary isn't all grim; there are moments 
of true joy and laughter. I recall a wedding in one of our 
major cities one of our doctors and nurses were married 
in a ceremony we all attended. They were to stay that 
night at the hotel and start on their honeymoon in the 
morning. 

However, we had planned a little joke. When the newly- 
weds arrived at the hotel, the clerk said he had no room 
for them. They insisted they had made reservations weeks 



252 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

in advance, but the clerk was "so sorry/' There was some 
mistake, he said, some slip-up. The manager was called; he 
was a good friend of both bride and bridegroom, and ex- 
tremely apologetic. "There isn't a room left,** he insisted, 
"but don't worry we'll take care of you, even if we have 
to put up cots in the front hall." 

The poor bride was almost in tears when she looked 
around and saw all her friends there, including the busi- 
ness manager of the hospital. Then the young couple 
realized it was all a joke. The bridal suite was all ready 
for them, decorated with the loveliest flowers of the 
Amazon. 

Once we had moved down to Rio, I made a number of 
trips to other parts of South America, exploring rivers and 
helping the workers and missionaries in these areas in 
whatever way I could, particularly with problems of boats, 
supplies, and relationships with local authorities. 

As "admiral of the fleet," I had considerable administra- 
tive work. In 1956, 1 flew from Belem to Manaus and on to 
Porto Velho, deep in the interior, not far from the Bolivian 
border. We were trying to get medical work started in this 
district, I later flew to Iquitos, a Peruvian town 2,300 miles 
up the Amazon. It is the end of the line for large ships. 

My new work of caring for all the boats gave me a 
chance to see the scope of our activity on the rivers and to 
try to standardize our equipment and our procedures so 
far as practicable. It gave me a chance also to see much of 
South America that I had not been able to visit earlier. In 
Peru, on a mountain slope, pours a spring that is said to be 
the very start of the Amazon, and I stood astride the tiny 
brooklet that grows into the mightiest river known. 



FLEET ADMIRAL 



Part of my travels took me into Paraguay. In its capital, 
Asuncion, there are no water mains and no sewage system. 
I was invited to dinner there by one of our missionary 
couples, just arrived from the States. Their belongings had 
not yet caught up with them, and the wife cooked dinner 
on her only utensil a waffle iron. In the front yard were 
two stone benches, between which she put two suitcases 
one on top of the other. That was our dinner table. She 
had a few cracked dishes someone had lent her, and she 
cooked up a meal of potatoes and vegetables and bananas- 
all on her waffle iron. 

All the men in our party agreed that our lady missionary 
was a wizard at the waffle iron, and the whole incident 
symbolized a little the kind of life a missionary must be 
able and ready to accept. 

Two of our missionaries who worked in the wildest area 
of the interior were Peruvians Julio Gomez and his wife. 
They had gotten a foothold among some of the Purus In- 
dians, and they had built a church and a school; the 
Indians had put up a few buildings; and together they had 
formed a real community. Gomez was the preacher and 
his wife taught school. With this village as his base, Julio 
worked his way into the wilder areas. One day, at one of 
his points of call, the Indians asked him to dinner. He was 
slightly nervous about going, as he did not know his hosts 
or how truly friendly they might be but he felt he 
should accept. After the meal he felt ill. Some of the In- 
dians from his own area reached him and took him on the 
Binini River back to his home as quickly as they could. 

They got Julia back just in time for him to die of 
poison-in his wife's arras. In spite of this, his widow 
stayed on in that wild and hostile place where, one of our 



254 LIGHT IN THE JXJNGLE 

workers told me, the mosquitoes are so thick at night that 
they make a black covering on the outside of the mosquito 
nettings, and another said he woke up in the morning to 
see a seven-foot boa coiled around the pole that held up 
the house. 

But Mrs. Gomez stayed and went on with the work in 
the school and church. Finally, the president of that dis- 
trict, Richard A. Heyden, went out by boat to that lonely 
place, where there was no one but she and the Indians, 
and suggested that she come down to the city of Iquitos, 
in Peru, where she could teach in one of our larger schools. 

Certainly, he said, she would be happier living with 
people of her own culture and background. But Sister 
Gomez shook her head. "When we came here," she told 
him, with tears in her eyes, "we came because the Lord 
called us to work here with these Indians. The work is not 
done. He has called my husband but He has not called me 
yet, so I will stay here with our Indians/' 

When I heard this story and saw this woman, I asked 
myself: What have I done? What sacrifices have I made, in 
comparison to hers? 

Yet some things were achieved in Brazil, and especially 
along the river, in which we played a part. 

There is a new outlook in many parts of the river today, 
a new way of living and looking upon the world, a brighter, 
happier way. There is new health and new sanitation and 
better diet and hygiene. Standards have been lifted socially 
and physically and spiritually. Doctors are going there 
now, some on our boats, some entirely on their own. The 
Brazilian people and the government and churches are 



FLEET ADMIRAL 255 

working together to make this brave new Amazon world 
a lasting reality. 

The federal government of Brazil, in recognition of our 
role in this change, decorated both Jessie and me with the 
Brazilian Cross; the first time that a woman has been thus 
honored. This gleaming medal is one of the highest honors 
the government can bestow; to civilians it has the same 
aura as the American Congressional Medal of Honor. Our 
joy in receiving it came not from any personal or prideful 
preening but from the awareness, through this award, that 
our efforts and the work we had been allowed to do were 
understood and accepted in this land and among these 
people we had come to love as deeply as our own. The 
wording of the award they gave Jessie and me reached us 
in a telegram at a gathering of friends back in America, 
some months after our return from Brazil. The citation 
read: "For having awakened the Brazilian Government 
to the fact that, among the Amazon's rich resources, its 
peoples are the most important and that their health or ill 
health may well dictate whether Amazonia's potential is 
developed or left dormant." 

But this was not all. In another unprecedented move, the 
Brazilian government voted the sum of almost a million 
dollars $90,000 a year for ten years to be given to our 
missions to continue and expand the boat work along 
Brazil's rivers. The North Brazil Union, the East Brazil 
Union, and the South Brazil Union of our church each 
get $30,000 a year to be used solely for our work on those 
little white boats which ply the far reaches of the rivers. 

This was a signal honor. Brazil is a land predominantly 
Catholic, yet it has the vision and tolerance and apprecia- 
tion not only to accept but also to assist a Protestant mis- 



256 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

sionary effort like our own because of its meaning to the 
people. 

That they have done this is a tribute to the substantial 
worth of our missions and the work of our launches along 
the river, carried on by Brazilian nationals and by Amer- 
ican missionaries, teaming up to make the launch program 
a reality. 

Governments do not normally extend such grants to for- 
eign missions, religious or otherwise. This was a special 
recognition that the work of our church and of our 
launches extends beyond the boundaries of nation or 
formal creed or denomination. 

There are no boundaries in the work of the Lord. 

The launches stand at the heart of our work, the boats 
of burden that carried Jessie and me and our medicines 
and later others like us and their supplies along the dark 
rivers. Other Luzeiros; other bearers of light. 

By the time we left there were five Luzeiros in South 
America, built exactly or basically on the pattern of the 
original, plying the Amazon, the mouth of the Amazon, 
the Maues and Parani Ramos rivers, the Parnaiba. We 
have boats on the San Francisco River and the Araguaia, 
and several smaller boats for messenger work and the 
colporteurs. 

All of these boats are manned by our own church mem- 
bers; all are now medically trained doctors or nurses. On 
the San Francisco, as we left Brazil, we had Charles 
Scofield and his wife both Americans and both trained 
nurses. Scofield was treating 15,000 persons a year on that 
river alone. We had other boats in Peru and Bolivia, on the 
rivers of these countries. 



FLEET ADMIRAL 



In Asuncion, Paraguay, in 1957, I gave a talk to an 
audience of almost a thousand about our work. This was 
not a religious meeting but a discussion of our medical mis- 
sion on the boats. I also showed pictures of the launch 
work. When the meeting was over, a stocky, well-dressed 
man, in an immaculate white suit, came up to me and said, 
"I would like to talk to you for about an hour/' 

I had a very heavy program of meetings, and arranging 
an hour's time might be difficult. Yet I did not want to 
refuse anyone, so I asked, "Can we discuss whatever it 
is right here?" 

"Well, if there is no other opportunity right here," he 
said brusquely. He at once began talking over the pos- 
sibility of a boat for the Paraguay River, which reaches 
up into Brazil. In the midst of our discussion, someone 
came up and greeted him, "Oh, how are you, General 
Yergers?" 

I was talking to the most important and powerful mili- 
tary leader in Paraguay. His eyes sparkled as we discussed 
the boat. Finally he told me, "Listen, the day you Ad- 
ventists put a boat on that river you come to me and we 
will give you aU the help that the Paraguay government 
can give. All our machine shops, all our facilities will be 
at your command." 

Shortly after I returned to America I received a letter 
from a doctor in California. He stated that he had been 
impressed to write me to state that he had $1,000 to give 
us toward building a new boat for work in a new place. 
With additional funds added, it seems likely as this is 
written that we will soon have a boat serving the people 
along the Paraguay River from Asuncion, Paraguay, as 



258 LIGHT IN THE JTCJNGLE 

far north as the obscure villages in the southwest corner 
of Mato Grosso, Brazil. 

The Lord protects these boatsprotects them and guides 
them. 

Once we were delivering a newly built medical launch 
from Belein to the Parnaiba River, which flows east across 
the state of Piaui and empties into the Atlantic about 750 
miles south of the mouth of the Amazon. To get there we 
had to take that thirty-six-foot flat-bottomed craft onto the 
Atlantic. There were several of us on board including a 
licensed pilot we had hired for this dangerous journey. 

En route we ran into one of the most terrible storms I 
have ever experienced. Sometimes we would be on top of 
the crest of a wave and the next instant we would plunge 
down into a trough and the waves would threaten to 
engulf us. The pilot was lashed to his post on top to keep 
from being swept into the sea by the waves that broke 
over our tiny decks. 

We did not think we could stay afloat. We prayed for 
God's help. Off in the distance, on the shore, we made out 
what seemed like a river entrance. The river would give 
us refuge if we could reach it. We turned toward land. 
Soon we could see the white breakers, dashing against the 
rocks on both sides of the narrow entrance of the river, 
and hurling spume and spray high into the air. 

Sometimes we would ride on top of the crest and then 
we would spin downward, halfway turned around; it was 
almost impossible to hold on course. Finally, one giant 
breaker lifted us like a toy boat, swirling us forward into 
the river. And suddenly it was calm. We were in one of 
the most restful havens I had ever seen. For the first time 
in five days, we were able to have a peaceful night's sleep. 



FLEET ADMIRAL 259 

When we awoke in the morning, our boat was sur- 
rounded by scores of people in canoes. They all wanted 
to know who we were and what we wanted. When we told 
them, they said there was a Protestant church in their 
village and would we have a service there? Elder Fred 
Pritchard played a few solos on his saxophone, and we 
joined him then on our portable organ. And more canoes 
kept coming. One large canoe appeared with about thirty- 
five people on it and a man standing in the prow with a 
high stiff collar and a Bible under his arm. This was the 
Protestant group they had told us about. 

Pastor Pritchard leaned over to me and whispered, 
*TH have to preach them a sermon. I hadn't planned on 
this. What shall I teU them?" 

I told him, "Preach the Message and make it plain/* 

Fred did. He preached one of the finest sermons I ever 
heard and when it was over before we left to complete 
in safety the rest of our journey the tall pastor we had 
first seen put his arm around us and said, "Now I know 
why the Lord sent that storm and forced you into this 
river. It was to bring us this message from the Scripture." 

The story of the white launches has spread even beyond 
South America. In other missionary areas, our church and 
missions of other churches are using the same basic 
design of the original Luzeiro for new boats to penetrate 
new areas, wherever there is need for people to come with 
help and medical supplies and faith. 

Letters come to Jessie and me from others starting out 
to these far-off places-letters asking for guidance and sug- 
gestions, and plans whereby they can build a Luzeiro in 
some other part of South America, or in Africa or Asia. We 
send them whatever plans we have, and information and 



26O LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

suggestions, all the information we have available. There 
is no copyright on the Luzeiro pattern or design; it is 
available to any who wish to use it in the service of others. 

So today there are a number of Luzeiros, of various 
modified designs and plans, treading the dark rivers of 
the world in Burmese jungles and off the coast of China, 
manned by Adventists and missionaries of other denomina- 
tions as well wherever young adventurers of faith may go. 

Other Luzeiros in other lands. Varied in size and con- 
tour, yet basically the Luzeiro pattern. A dozen or more, 
perhaps, from the heavy correspondence that comes in to 
us, queries and occasional reports about the launches, 
from scattered areas of the globe. 

The Light Bearers have reached beyond Jessie and me, 
beyond Brazil, to the farthest corners of the world 

When we were in Charles City, Iowa, one of my close 
friends was a man named George Byrd, who worked with 
me at the tractor company. When I was trying to decide 
whether to go into missionary work, George opposed the 
idea, and told me I was throwing away my life. 

I was an electrician and a technological expert, he told 
me, and I could make a fortune in that kind of work, but 
what could I ever hope to make as a missionary? I remem- 
ber how he called me into his office and tried to make me 
change my mind. But the more he talked the more I was 
certain that he was wrong. I remember telling him, "There 
are different values and different goals for each of us." 

When Jessie and I left America for the Amazon, we lost 
track of many people, including this man and his wife. 
But in the mid 1950*5 they read a story about our work. 



FLEET ADMIRAL 26l 

Not long afterward, I had a letter from him, then a long 
radiogram. 

Our life sounded so fantastic, he wrote, that he wanted 
to know more about it. He and his wife were flying down 
to Brazil for a vacation. Could they come to see us? And 
where should they go and how? I radioed four words: 
"Will meet plane Rio." 

We had a wonderful reunion with them, told them what 
we had been doing all through the years; and took them 
out for a journey on one of our boats, back into the green 
world we had known for so long. 

One slightly embarrassing situation involved translation 
of a sermon for George on a Sabbath morning in Rio, when 
George and his wife, as well as a young American doctor 
and his wife, attended services with us at our Central 
Church. 

Neither visiting couple understood Portuguese in 
which, of course, the minister preached the sermon. One 
of our officials, Pastor Wilcox, translated for the doctor 
and his wife, while I translated for George and his wife. 
I didn't think the sermon that morning was particularly 
exciting, so I paid no attention to what was being preached 
and pretending to translate I preached a sermon of my 
own. 

In the course of this "translation," to illustrate a point 
about how often we cheat ourselves, I told of a man hired 
to build a house, who tried to cheat his employer by buy- 
ing the cheapest materials and charging for the best, only 
to learn that his employer, in gratitude for the man's faith- 
fulness, was giving him the house. 

George was impressed by my story and later that day, 
when we were all at dinner, he mentioned the illustration 



62 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

as one of the best things in the sermon. The doctor looked 
startled and said to Pastor Wilcox, "I don't remember 
that story. You didn't translate anything like that, Pastor 
Wilcox." 

Wilcox started to ruffle but then he looked at me and 
caught my high sign. "Well," he said, gently, "I guess we 
each have to translate according to our own interpreta- 
tion/' 

But the glance he gave me indicated some doubt as to 
how far afield an interpreter's interpretation has a right 
to roam. 

Later, on one of our boats on the San Francisco River, 
we showed George and his wife how our missionary doc- 
tors handle patients. In one afternoon the doctor on that 
boat took care of more than seventy-five patients, and also 
set up a dental clinic where patients were treated so ex- 
peditiously that George finally suggested, "Why don't we 
get our old doc from Charles City down here and let him 
take lessons? We just can't pull teeth that fast in Iowa." 

What he saw of our work there in Brazil impressed him 
as deeply as any experience of his life, George confided 
during that trip. 

He had risen in the world of industry to become the 
owner of a large factory. He was successful and wealthy 
and respected in his chosen field. 

"I'm a big financial success and I have all the worldly 
things I need," he told me. "Remember when I tried to 
talk you out of all this? Remember when I told you that 
you were crazy and were making the worst mistake of 
your life?" 

I nodded. Looking out across the water, he went on, 
"Let me tell you, I was the one who was wrong. You took 



FLEET ADMIRAL 263 

the only road that counts, and what you have done is 
worth far more than a dozen fortunes you might have 
made in industry." 

My industrialist friend smiled. The green world around 
us was quiet and pleasant in the early evening. 



CHAPTER 17 

AMAZON EPILOGUE 



THERE are moments that stand as symbols, 
even though they may not fall neatly into the proper 
chronological order. After we left the Amazon for Rio, 
there were many months of great activity before we re- 
turned to the States for good, in the spring of 1958. Yet 
for us the moment of moments came on the Amazon on 
the day we turned over command of the Luzeiro to Walter 
and Olga. 

It did not matter that my work continued, that now I 
was in charge of all the boats, including this one. This 
had been our home, this boat; leaving it was like saying 
good-by to a friend of long years' standing, a sharer of 
adventures and terrors, defeats and triumphs and joys. 

We tied up at the little dock as Walter and Olga stood 
facing me. I took off my hat and handed it to him. He 
put it on. Perhaps it would have seemed like a silly cere- 
mony to anyone looking on; to me, to us, it was meaning- 
ful. A palm leaf rustled on the bank. The river waters 
lapped against the dock. As I looked at Olga, in my mind's 
eye I saw her as a baby an infant on a bright satin 
cushion years ago, at our first Sabbath service in Rio. 

264 



AMAZON EPILOGUE 265 

I shook hands with Walter and kissed Olga on the 
cheek. They turned and boarded the boat, and Jessie and 
I stood there alone on the dock and watched the Luzeiro 
pull away, out into the stream. Walter and Olga waved at 
us, but as they rounded a bend, we were alone, and the 
sound of the Luzeiro s motor grew fainter in the distance. 

The world around us was not the same as that to which 
Jessie and I had come, as young missionaries, more than 
a third of a century before. 

The differences were to be seen not on the surface only, 
for they were many and far-reaching; the whole life of 
the river and its people had changed. No longer was it a 
world of rampant disease and filth, neglect, despair, hope- 
lessness, and death. 

No longer was it a world of malaria epidemics, of a little 
boy in a canoe gliding through the moonlight to tell us of 
the epidemic that had taken most of his family and the 
people in his village. Malaria had not been wiped out, but 
it was under control. 

So also were many of the other diseases. Hookworm and 
yaws particularly, while not defeated, were no longer the 
dreadful scourge that they had been. 

It was a world of new meanings. In many places now, 
where there had been nothing, there were churches and 
schools. Youngsters who might have died of some tropical 
fever, or survived somehow in the midst of superstition 
and violence and murder, today are going to school, learn- 
ing to read and write, and perhaps, as many now do, go on 
to higher education in the colleges and universities in the 
south. 



266 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

There are new ideas along the river, about hygiene and 
cleanliness and the value of water in keeping an infection 
clean, the ways of living and cooking and eating. On a 
Sabbath morning in many of the river towns you will see 
scores of people, sometimes more than a hundred, on 
their way to church, whole families and communities, in 
their white Sabbath-come-to-meeting clothes. 

There is a happiness about these people, and it is no 
false happiness, you will find, if you talk with them. There 
is an excitement and a joy that was not there when Jessie 
and I first arrived; it is the joy of people who have found 
inner understanding and peace. For many of these people 
have come to know Christ and His love. 

This is the heart of the change that has come to them- 
this awakening. They did not care before. They had no 
reason to care, because so far as they knew no one bothered 
about them. They were here alone on the Amazon to rot 
away, and no one would care. 

Now they knew better, for they had seen and learned 
that there were those who cared; and they have learned 
about the love of God, and the power and meaning it can 
have for each of them. This was the message that we 
brought to them, as others did also. We had come to bring 
His Wordand to bring this love in action. 

We worked with the tools we were given; and we asked 
no glory and no profit except to serve. We tried to teach 
the adults and to instruct the young, to improve their 
lives and their chances for the future. 

With full awareness of our own human frailties too 
many even to begin to count we sought nevertheless to 
put aside our personal wishes, to do what we could, to 



AMAZON EPILOGUE 267 

stop wherever and whenever the white towel waved along 
the bank, to go under whatever circumstances we had 
to face when we were needed by the sick, the injured, 
the frightened, the lost. 

In some measure, we had helped to lead these people of 
the riverways out of their own shadows. It was a work in 
which both Jessie and I could be glad and grateful to have 
played a part. 

Along the river, in any village or city, in almost any 
home, they knew about Dona Jessie and Senhor Leo, the 
medical missionaries in the white boat. Some could tell 
you little stories of having had a dinner with us on the 
boat and tasted some of Dona Jessie's wonderful Brazilian 
cooking. 

Or they could tell you about an alligator shoot with 
Senhor Leo, or hunting wild ducks, or deer and jaguars 
and tortoise, or fishing. Or some of the stories of the boat 
boys we had had or the storms we had weathered, or our 
moments of peril in distant corners of the great riverway. 

All of this, too, the excitement and adventure, the 
traveling, the most remote areas, the wild Indian territory; 
the great cities of the south all of this was a part of what 
we lived and experienced, and a hundred scattered mean- 
ings and incidents seemed to flood my thoughts in those 
moments of leaving the river, that day. 

It had been a joyous and unique experience and oppor- 
tunity. We had been privileged to work in many instances 
on an elemental level, with the basic, still unhardened 
clay of human beings, and to help them find their ways. 

As we stood there on the river dock, there came into 
my mind familiar words, words that had long been a 



268 LIGHT IN THE JUNGLE 

symbol, a standard of the road all of us should seek to 
follow, the way He pointed out to each of us in His words 
about the final judgment: 

"Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand. 
Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom pre- 
pared for you from the foundation of the world: 

"For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was 
thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger and ye 
took me in: 

"Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited 
me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me. 

"Then shall the righteous answer him saying, Lord, 
when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, 
and gave thee drink? 

"When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or 
naked, and clothed thee? 

"And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily, 
I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the 
least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." 

The beauty and depth of these words clung in my 
thought. Unto the least of these my brethren. The hush 
of the jungle and its people seemed to close around us. 

It was growing late. Jessie slipped her arm through 
mine. We would have to hurry to make our plane at the 
airport. The Luzeiro was out of sight in the harbor. 

If we were sad at this leave-taking, we also found 
joy in the vast changes that had brought to the river 
world a new meaning and a new start a new chance to 
grope its way to high heaven, out of its steaming Green 
Hell. 



AMAZON EPILOGUE 269 

This fact was uppermost in our thoughts as Jessie 
slipped her arm through mine and we turned away. 

In a little while, night would close in and, beyond the 
harbor, Walter and Olga would anchor near shore and the 
endless music of the Amazon night would begin again. 



m 



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