by H. M. Tomlinson, 1930
This was a book recommended on the book-a-day calendar that Christie gave me. I almost gave up on it at the start because it was so difficult to read – big words I didn’t know the meaning of, long sentences, etc. But, I hung in there and I’m so glad I did. I LOVED this book! It is humorous, beautiful, adventurous, heart-warming, a slight edge of suspense. It took me on a journey across the Atlantic from England and up the Amazon on an English steamer with a wonderful person. It is a true story. The author quit his boring accounting job in England after applying for and being hired as a purser on a steamer. Here’s what he writes on the cover page:
The Sea and the Jungle
Being the narrative of the voyage of the tramp steamer CAPELLA from Swansea to Santa Maria de Belem do Grao Para in the Brazils, and thence 2,000 miles along the forests of the Amazon and Madeira rivers to the San Antonio Falls; afterwards returning to Barbados for orders, and going by way of Jamaica to Tampa in Florida, where she loaded for home. Done in the years 1909 and 1910 by H. M. TOMLINSON with woodcuts by CLARE LEIGHTON, 1930
from the cover page
I thought the journey was from the 1700s or 1800s because the written English was so formal and different. I am very surprised it was a journey taken in 1909 and 1910 and a book published in 1930. The world has changed a lot since 1909. The Amazon river basin was unspoiled but deadly due to malaria (Yellow Fever) and some savage Indian tribes. On this journey, they were delivering ??? to a small settlement building a railroad deep in the Amazon.
Here are the some of the many words I had to look up:
- Bow – the forward part of the hull of a ship – the point that is most forward.
- Lambent – running or moving lightly over a surface; brilliantly playful; softly bright or radiant.
- Aft – at, close to, or toward the stern or tail; situated toward or at the stern.
- Stern – the after part of a vessel; the back or rear of anything.
- Starboard – the right hand side of or direction from a boat or aircraft, facing forward…toward the right side.
- Port – the left-hand side of a vessel or aircraft, facing forward.
- Poop – a superstructure at the stern of a vessel
- Poop deck – a weather deck on top of a poop
- Purser – an officer in charge of the accounts and documents of a ship and who keeps money and valuables for passengers.
- Skipper – the master or captain of a vessel
- Pellucid depths – translucently clear
- Hyacinthine air – of the light purplish blue color
- Forecastle – the forward part of a ship below the deck. Historical – a raised deck at the bow of a ship.
- Refulgent – shining brightly
- hirsute nature – hairy; literary-humorous
- Oleaginous place – rich in, covered with, or producing oil; oily or greasy
- Parsimonious – unwilling to spend money or use resources; stingy or frugal
- Vermilion – a brilliant red
- Sansculotte – a lower-class Parisian republican in the French Revolution
- Insolence – rude and disrespectful behavior
- Eumenides – an ancient Greek tragedy written by Aeschylus
- Fathom – a unit of length equal to 6 feet, chiefly used in reference to the depth of water
- Stephanotis – “smell something like stephanotis” – most commonly Madagascar jasmine.
Here are some of the many quotes that I loved from this most enjoyable book:
And what are these things? –yet how can we tell? A strip of coral beach, as once I saw it, which was as all other coral beaches; but the ship passed close in, and by favour of the hour and the sun this strand did not glare, but was resplendent, and the colours of the sea, green, gold, and purple, were not its common virtues, but the emotional and passing attar of those hues…
And now, this is Christmas morning. I am in the Chief’s bunk, and he still sleeps on the settee. We fell asleep where we lay yarning on our backs after midnight. I wake at the right moment, opening my eyes with the serene and secure conviction that things are very well. The slow rocking of the ship is perfect rest. There is no sound byut the faint tap-tap o something loose on the desk and resonding to the ship’s movements. The cabin is strangely illuminated to its deepest corner by an extraordinary light, as though the intese glow of a rare dawn had penetrated even our ironwork. ON the white top of the cabin a bright moon quivers about, the shine from live waters sent up through the round of a port. When we lean over, the port shows first the roof of the alley-way dappled with bright reflections; then a circle of sky, which the horizon soon halves; and then the dazzling white and blue of the near waves; we reverse.
This is life. This is what I have come for. I do not repose merely in a bunk. I am prone and easy in the deepest assurance of good.
from page 67
Sitting on a hatch with the Doctor, smoking, we confessed, with ease at the heart, and with minds in which nervous vibrations had ceased, that we must have reached the place that was nowhere, and that now time was not for us. We had escaped you all. We were free. There was not anything to engage us. There was nothing to do, and nobody who wanted us. Never before had I felt so still and conscious of myself. I realised, with a little start of surprise, that it was Me who felt the warm air, and who looked at the slow pulse of the waters, and the fulgent breaks in the roof, and heard the droning of the wake, and not that mere skin, eyes and ears which, as in London, break in upon our preoccupied minds with agitating sensations; and I took in this newly-discovered world of ocean and cloudland and my own sure identity centred therein with the the complacency of an immortal who will see all the things which do not matter pass away. When we left England we were tense, and sometimes white (though there were others who went red) about a Great Crisis in our Country’s History. The Doctor and I arrived on board, detached from the opposing armies in the impending conflict, and at first put our hands swiftly to our swords every ten minutes or so during meals. Of that crisis only one small gull now was left, and he was following us astern with a melancholy cry at intervals, of which we took no more notice.
from pages 72 and 73 after the huge storm and into the calm part of the ocean voyage
We were told to go aft, where the Doctor would give each of us five grains of quinine. This is to be a daily rite. To encourage the men to take the quinine it is to be given to them in gin. As they were foreigners they did not understand the advice about the quinine, but they caught the word gin quite well, and they were outside the saloon alley-way, a smiling queue, at the stroke of eleven. I went along to see the harsh truth dawn on them. The first man was a big German deck-hand. He took the glass from the Doctor. His shy and puzzled smile at this unexpected charity from the Skipper dissolved instantly when the quinine got behind it. His eyes opened and stared at nothing. To the surprise of his fellows he turned violently to the ship’s side, rested his hands upon it, and spat; spat carefully, continuously, and with grave deliberation.
from pages 98 and 99
I began to see what I had done. I had changed the murk of winter in London for the discomforts of the Dog Days. I had come thousands of miles to see the thermometer rise. Where are the Spanish Main, the Guianas, and the Brazils? At last I had discovered where. I found their true bearings. They are in Raleigh’s Golden City of the Manoa, in Burney’s Buccaneers of America, with Drake, Humboldt, Bates, and Wallace; and I had left them all at home. We borrow the light of an observant and imaginative traveller, and see the foreign land bright with his aura; and we think it is the country which shines.
from page 107
Presently we saw light, as you would from the interior of a tunnel. Some beams of sunshine slanted from a break in the roof to where a tree had fallen, making a bridge for us across an igaripe, a stream, that is, large enough to be a way for a canoe. The sundered, buttressed roots of the tree formed a steep climb to begin with, but the buttresses going straight along the trunk as handrails made crossing the bridge an easy matter. Raising my hand to a root which was hot in the sun, and watching a helicon butterfly, a black and yellow fellow, which settled near us, slowly open and shut his wings, I jumped, because a lighted match had dropped down my sleeve. but I couldn’t douse it. It burned in ten places at once. It was a first lesson in constant watchfulness in this new world. I had placed my hand in a swarm of inconspicuous fire ants. The dead tree was alive with them, and our passage quickened. We rubbed ourselves hysterically, for the Doctor had got some too; and there was no professional reserve about him that time.
from page 143 when he and the Doctor are exploring the jungle and get bit by fire ants
If I could sing, I would sing the banana. It has the loveliest leaf I know. I feel intemperate about it, because I came upon it after our passage through a wood which could have been underground, a tangle of bare roots joining floor and ceiling in limitless caverns. We stood looking at the banana plant till our mind was fed with grace and light.
from page 144
They were as proper with their brown and satiny limbs and bodies in the secluded and sunny arbour where the water ran, framed in exuberant tropical foliage, as a herd of deer. I had never seen primitive man in his native place till then. There he was, as at the beginning, and I saw with a new respect from what a splendid creature we are derived. It was, I am glad to say, to cheer the existence of these people that I had put money in a church plate at Poplar. Poplar, you may have heard, is a parish in civilisation where an organised community is able, through its heritage of the best of two thousand years of religion, science, commerce, and politics, to eke out to a finish the lives of its members (warped as they so often are by arid dispensations of Providence) with the humane Poor Law. The Poor Law is the civilised man’s ironic rebuke to a parsimonious Creator. It is a jest which will ruin the solemnity of the Judgment Day. Only the man of long culture could think of such a shattering insult to the All Wise who made this earth too small for the children He continues to send to it, trailing their clouds of glory which prove a sad hindrance and get so fouled in the fight for standing room on their arrival. But these savages of the Brazilian forest know nothing of the immortal joke conceived by their clever brothers. They have all they want. Experience has not taught them to devise such a mockery of God as a Poor Law.
from page 146 when they come upon bathing beauties in the jungle of Brazil
There the earth is a warm and luscious body. The lazy paths are cool with groves, and in the middle hours of the sun, when only a few butterflies are abroad, and the grasshoppers are shrilling in the quiet, you swing in a hammock under a thatch–the air has been through some tree in blossom–and gossip, and drink coffee.
in a jungle village called Serpa, from page 152
But to me the illumination, the heat, the odour, and the quiethood of those noons made life a great prize. I will say that my comrade, the Doctor, did much to make it so, with his gentle fun, and his wide knowledge of earthlore. There was so much, wherever we went, to keep me on the magic side of time, and out of its shadow. On the west of the town were some huts, with plantations of bananas, pineapples, papaws, and maize, where blossomed cannas, mimosas, passion-flowers, and where other unseen booms, especially after rain, made breathing a sensuous pleasure. There we tried to intercept the swallow-like flight of big sulphur and orange butterflies, though never with success. We had more success with the butterflies in the clearings, where some new huts stood, beyond the village. Over the stagnant pools in those open spaces dragonflies hovered, fellows that moved, when we approached, like lines of red light. The butterflies, particularly a vermilion beauty with black bars on his wings, and a swift flier, used to settle and gem the mud about these pools.
from page 154
The day before we left for the Madeira we took aboard sixty head of cattle. They were wild things, which had been collected in the campo with great difficulty, and driven into lighters.
from page 157
One of the live creatures found in his room the Chief retains and cherishes, and hopes to tame, though the object does not yet answer to his name of Edwin. This creature is a green mantid or praying insect, about four inches long, which the Chief found on the gauze of his door-cover, holding a fly in its hands.
from page 190
Our pilots have much to say of these stations, and of all the rubber men on the river and their wealth. But away with their rubber! I am tired of it, and will keep it out of this book if I can. For it is blasphemous that in such a potentially opulent land the juice of one of its wild trees should be dwelt upon–as it is in the states of Amazonas and Para–as though it were the sole act of Providence. The Brazilians can see nothing here but rubber. The generative qualities of this land through fierce sun and warm showers–for rarely a day passes without rain, whatever the season–a land of constant high summer with a free fecundity which has buried the earth everywhere under a wild growth nearly two hundred feet deep, is insignificant to them. They see nothing in it at all but the damnable commodity which is its ruin.
from page 193
I begin to think the usual commercial mind is the most dull, wasteful, and ignorant of all the sad wonders in the pageant of humanity.
from page 194
For a while before sunset the sky was scenic with great clouds, and glowed with the usual bright colours. The wilderness was transformed. Each evening we seem to anchor in a region different, in nature and appearance, under these extraordinary sunset skies, from the country in which we have been travelling since daylight. Transfiguration at even-time we know in England. Yet sunset there but exalts our homeland till it seems more intimately ours than ever, as though there came a luminous revelation of its rare intrinsic goodness. We see, for some brief moments, its aura. But this tropical jungle, at day-fall, is not the earth we know. It is a celestial vision, beyond attainment, beyond knowledge. It is ulterior, glorious, transient, fading before our surprise and wonder fade. We of the Capella are its only witnesses, except those pale ghosts, the egrets about the dim aqueous base of the forest.
from page 196 writing about the sunsets in the Amazon River basin
There was one young bearded Englishman among them who was more than a friendly figure to me. All were friendly; but the Americans bore themselves with the easy assurance of the favoured heirs of Adam; though their successful work in that tropical swamp perhaps justified them. The Englishman had less of that assurance of a divine favour which was so completely bestowed that irresolution never shook the aplomb of its lucky inheritors.
from page 222
It never ceased to be remarkable that so little that was green was there. The few aroids, their shapely parasitic foliage witting like decorative nests in some boughs halfway to the sky, would be strangely conspicuous and bright. The only leaves of the forest near us were on the ground, brown parchments all of one simple shape, that of the leaf of the laurel.
from page 247
It was along the railway track towards the hospital, with the woods to the left, and a short margin of scrub and forest, and then the river, on the right hand, that I saw one morning in sauntering a few miles as many butterflies as there are flowers in an English garden in June. They were the blossoms of the place. The track was bright with them. They settled on the hot metals and ties, clustered thickly round muddy pools, a plantation as vivid and alive, in the quick movements of their wings, as though a wind shook the petals of a bed of flowers. They flashed by like birds. One would soar slowly, wings outspread and rigid, a living plane of metallic green and black. There was a large and insolent beauty–he did not move from his drink at a puddle though my boot almost touched him–his wings a velvety black with crimson eyes on the underwings; and I caught him; but I was so astonished by the strength of his convulsive body in the net that I let him go.
from page 251
So the doctor was a busy man that evening. The floor of his surgery was made of unequal boughs; the walls and roof were of dried fronds. A lamp was slung on a door-post. He was a young American, and he did not grumble at his bumpy floor, the bad light, the appliances and remedies which were all one should expect in the jungle, nor the number of his patients, except comically. He told me he was rather keen on the diseases of the tropics. He liked them. (I should think he must have liked them.) He was merrily insolent with those swarthy and melancholy men, and they smiled back sadly at the clever, handsome, and lively youngster. He was quick in his decisions, deft, insistent, kind, and thorough, working down that file of pitiable humanity, as careful with the last of the long row as with the first; telling me, as he went along, much that I had never heard before, with demonstrations. “Don’t go,” he cried, when I would have left him; for I thought it might be he was as kind with this stranger as he was with the others. “Ah! don’t go. Let me hear a true word or two.” He said he would give me a treat if I stayed. He finished, put his materials away deliberately, accurately, his back to me, while I saluted him as a fine representative of ours. He turned, free of his task and jolly, and produced that treat of his, two bottles of treasured and precious ginger ale. It was like a miracle performed. We talked till the light went out.
from page 272 at an American doctor’s hut in the jungle
You in settled lands, unless you have been very poor indeed and know what trouble is and what friends are, have never seen the face of your brother, nor the serenity of evening when you have found, without expecting it, shelter for the night; you don’t know what the taste of bread and meat is, nor the savour of tobacco, nor what comfortable security is the whispering of a comrade unseen in the shadows of a resting-place, nor what it is to sleep. I found those gifts are not means to life only, but reasons for living too; something to live for.
from page 284
He drove us along coral roads, under coco-nut palms, and there were golden hills (hills once more!) one way, and on the other hand was a beach glowing like white fire, with a sea beyond of a blue that was ultimate, deep, and as tense and as still as rapture. We came to a hotel where there was stiff napery, with creases in it, on a breakfast table. There was a silver coffee-pot. There was sweet-smelling and crusty bread, butter in ice, and new milk. There was a plate heaped with fruit. There was a crystal jug filled with cold water and sunshine, and it threw a wavering light on the damask.
from page 322 in Bridgetown, Barbados
The fourth morning at breakfast-time was a burning day, with a sky almost cloudless, and a slow sea which had the surface of its rich blue deeps shot with turquoise lights, while fields of saffron gulf-weed stained it; and we had, close over our port bow, the most beautiful island in the world. It is useless to deny it, and to declare you know a better island. Can’t I see Jamaica now? I see it most plain. It descends abruptly from the meridian, pinnacles and escarpments trembling in the upper air with distance and delicate poise, and comes down in rolling forests and steep verdant slopes, where facets of bare rock glitter, to more leisurely open glades and knolls; and then, being not far from the sea, it drops in sheer cliffs to where the white combers pulse. It is a jewel which smells like a flower.
from pages 325 and 326 describing the island of Jamaica
Beautiful book. I loved it! I loved being with this man who loved nature and was so smart. He described nature and people and took me far, far away with him to a beguiling world. Thank you, Mr. H. M. Tomlinson. When he returns to England, it is to a wife and two children, I think: The Boy, Miss Muffet and Curly Nob.
England to-morrow! The things went into his trunks in the lump, with a compressing foot after each. It did not matter. All the clothes were in ruins. The only care he took was with the toucans’ brilliant skins, the bundle of arrows, the biscuit tins full of butterflies–they would excite The Boy–and the barbaric Indian ornaments for Miss Muffet and Curly Nob; how their eyes would shine!
from page 331 nearing Plymouth, England
The colours were faint enough to be but tinted mists. The biggest of the trees were manageable; looked like toys. The orderly hedges, the clean roads, the geometrical patterns of the fields, gave him assurance once more of order and security. Here was law again, and the permanence of affairs long decided upon. He closed his eyes, sinking into the cushions of the carriage as though the arms under him were proved friendly and could be trusted. …
The slowing of the train woke him. They were running into Paddington. He got his feet fair and solid on London before the train stopped, and looked into the crowd waiting there. A flushed youngster ran towards him out of a group, then stopped shyly. He caught The Boy, and held him up. …Here again was the centre of the world.
the last paragraph and a half of the book – page 333
Here is how the book-a-day calendar described this book:
A Commuter Escapes to the Amazon
H.M. Tomlinson’s The Sea and the Jungle begins on a rainy winter morning in 1909. The author makes his regular morning commute to work at the London Morning Leader, the common man repeating his common day. Next thing he knows he is on a train to Swansea in Wales, ready to board a freighter bound for the Amazon, off the treadmill for the next two years: “I saw an open door. I got out. It was as though the world had been suddenly lighted, and I could see a great distance.” The rest of the book tells the story of his adventure on sea and land: It is both exciting and hilarious, and brilliantly written.