Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 105, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 May 1910 — ADVENTURES IN THE JUNGLE. [ARTICLE]

ADVENTURES IN THE JUNGLE.

Returned American Telia of Civil Engineering; Perils in Bramll. “No need going all the way to British East Africa in search of perilous adventures.” said Willard P. Miller, a civil engineer, who arrived yesterday at the Holland House from Tampa, Fla., the New York Sun says. “If a man wants plenty of excitement all he's got to do is to join a surveying party on the new road that is being built through the jungles of central Brazil up into Bolivia. I have been down there a year and, just to get a change, I am going over to China to

work on the Yan-nan-tu railroad, which is being built by Americans.“I hadn’t been down in Brazil three months when I began to want to see Broadway the worst way. If I had stayed down there Idnger than I did the jungle would have driven me crazy. During the year I was down with malaria twenty times. And when a bunch of six of us reached Para, near the mouth of the Amazon, and found there was no passenger ship due to come this way for two weeks, who were so afraid that we would have another attack that we climbed' on board a British tramp steamer, the England, and came to Tampa. It was anything to get away. “Of the Madeira and Mamore railroad eighty miles have been finished and are in operation. AW the survey has been completed up into Bolivia, and I was with one of the engineering corps that were doing the work. Thei;e were nine Americans in our party and thirty-five or forty natives, ‘hombres’ we call them to distinguish them from the Americans, that being the Spanish word for men. The lab ter, of course, speak Portuguese, but in South American countries American engineers are used to dealing with Spanish-speaking workmen and use that term. “In going up the Rio Madeira it took us twenty-eight days to go 100 miles on account of the rapids and falls, which are numerous. Hundreds of boats come down loaded with rubber, and it is the object of the railroad to cut out the falls and make the product of the Bolivian forests easy to take to the coast. “When we got to the place where our survey was to start we found we had our hands full. It involved hewing our path as we wont along and every few days we would have to clear a space large enough to build a palmhouse. "Every night without exception we w-ould be awakened by jaguars breaking into the camp. The ‘hombres’ slept in hammocks, which were hung about three feet from thp ground, and there would be yells of alarm as some man awakened to find a big wild animal smelling about him. Lots of them were killed by the men, who said that the animals If hungry would not hesitate to attack human beings. “One day we found the bones of a native in the woods, but we did not know whether to blame his death on the jaguars or on the vultures, which hung about in the air near us, always in great numbers. And as for insects —why, there seemed to be no fewer than 3,000,000 species of ants, and the tarantulas were eight inches long, not considering their legs. YVe used to burn a path around the camp to keep the legions of ants from invading it and carrying away our rice and other provisions.”