Adventure Magazine Cover, October 1911 — page 88: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

FOREWORD* ITH cross on high and bright Toledo blade flashing to the fore, Francisco Pizarro alternately prayed and hacked his way into the heart of Peru—four hundred years ago. To-day that wondrous land is being con- quered a second time, but the blade that hews the path is an engineer’s machete and the Te Deum is temporarily abandoned for the invigorating cry, ‘‘Rod up!” The unexplored spots on the map of the world are growing fewer. One by one men find them out and draw crooked black lines across them, which mean railways, and shake a pepper-box over them and call the dots “Santa Maria,” and ‘Taft,’ and “Georgetown,” and presently you wake up to find that while you twiddled your thumbs at home one more of the few ‘‘big things”’ has been invaded and promoted and com- mercialized. Between the Peruvian Andes and the sources of the Amazon lies an unknown ex- panse of 500,000 square miles, unmapped by geographers save for the water-courses, and crudely bounded by doubtful surveys. Here—where ‘tributary rivers are a mile wide 3,000 miles frora the mouth of the Amazon, and a single cedar tree cuts up *See Page 950. into 10,000 feet board measure—are the last of the “big things,” the last of the virgin rubber forests, the unclaimed placers eroded from the mother lode, the vast stretches of mahogany. Into a part of this shadowy wonderland which no white man had ever traversed an American firm sent their engineer on a reconnaissance. They wanted a link forged between the Atlantic and the Pacific— “Lima to Liverpool”—the Peruvian capi- tal tied to the eastern ocean by 300 miles of steel laid in the heart of the jungle. This road will place Peru closely in touch with the United States and Europe, for— and this makes you realize the size of the river and the continent—sea-going vessels of ten thousand tons burden can then unload cargo for Peru at Iquitos on the Amazon, three thousand miles into the heart of the South American continent, and the cargo, after transfer by lighter draught boats to the terminus of the railroad, can reach Lima on the West Coast in two days and a half. This, in effect, would be similar to entering the mouth of an imaginary river in the vicinity of Boston and sailing across the United States to Nevada to unload goods for San Francisco! : The work first necessary was the engi- neering reconnaissance of a line some three 1034 COMmicloo © S|