In the morning, just before leaving this camp, a tapir swam across stream a little way above us; but unfortunately we could not get a shot at it.  An ample supply of tapir beef would have meant much to us.  We had started with fifty days’ rations; but this by no means meant full rations, in the sense of giving every man all he wanted to eat.  We had two meals a day, and were on rather short commons—­both our mess and the camaradas’—­except when we got plenty of palm-tops.  For our mess we had the boxes chosen by Fiala, each containing a day’s rations for six men, our number.  But we made each box last a day and a half, or at times two days, and in addition we gave some of the food to the camaradas.  It was only on the rare occasions when we had killed some monkeys or curassows, or caught some fish, that everybody had enough.  We would have welcomed that tapir.  So far the game, fish, and fruit had been too scarce to be an element of weight in our food supply.  In an exploring trip like ours, through a difficult and utterly unknown country, especially if densely forested, there is little time to halt, and game cannot be counted on.  It is only in lands like our own West thirty years ago, like South Africa in the middle of the last century, like East Africa to-day that game can be made the chief food supply.  On this trip our only substantial food supply from the country hitherto had been that furnished by the palmtops.  Two men were detailed every day to cut down palms for food.

A kilometre and a half after leaving this camp we came on a stretch of big rapids.  The river here twists in loops, and we had heard the roaring of these rapids the previous afternoon.  Then we passed out of earshot of them; but Antonio Correa, our best waterman, insisted all along that the roaring meant rapids worse than any we had encountered for some days.  “I was brought up in the water, and I know it like a fish, and all its sounds,” said he.  He was right.  We had to carry the loads nearly a kilometre that afternoon, and the canoes were pulled out on the bank so that they might be in readiness to be dragged overland next day.  Rondon, Lyra, Kermit, and Antonio Correa explored both sides of the river.  On the opposite or left bank they found the mouth of a considerable river, bigger than the Rio Kermit, flowing in from the west and making its entrance in the middle of the rapids.  This river we christened the Taunay, in honor of a distinguished Brazilian, an explorer, a soldier, a senator, who was also a writer of note.  Kermit had with him two of his novels, and I had read one of his books dealing with a disastrous retreat during the Paraguayan war.