Of course, the surveying canoes could not travel at this rapid pace, so the two parties became separated. In the very beginning Captain Amilcar’s party had suffered an accident which came near ending fatally for several of the men in his canoe. Their work necessitated frequent halts, and to bring the dugouts to a stop while racing down-stream was no easy task; so they had adopted the method of driving them into the vegetation and then holding on to the branches while a sight was taken with the telemeter. On one of these occasions a bushmaster fully seven feet long was shaken from the overhanging brush and fell into the canoe; the panic-stricken crew leaped into the water. Captain Amilcar retained his presence of mind and shot the snake, but in the meantime several of the men had been swept down-stream and were on the verge of drowning before he could reach them; the geologist had gone to the bottom, but was rescued and revived with some difficulty; thereafter he travelled with us in the _batelão_. There were numbers of small alligators in the river, not over four feet long, called _jacaretinga_; later on we had the cook prepare one, as they were said to be good to eat. The flesh was of a white color when cooked, and tender, but it possessed an objectionable muddy flavor, so that we could eat but little of it; however, the natives liked it. The next day we covered a distance of one hundred and eight kilometres. The current in the Gy-Paraná is not so strong as in the Commemoração, but, the weather being fair, the men pulled at the oars steadily during the twelve hours’ travel, with only short periods for rest and refreshment. All meals were cooked aboard, on a fire built on a box of sand in the prow. Insects were not particularly troublesome, as we kept to the middle of the stream, which, receiving the water of numerous good-sized tributaries, was constantly growing wider. There were abundant signs of the close proximity of Indians on both sides of the river. We saw some palm-leaf lean-tos used for overnight stops, with the charred sticks of a camp-fire in front; where the water eddied slowly against a crumbling bank, bamboo stakes protruded above the muddy stream--remnants of an ancient fish-trap--and occasionally we passed a small cleared spot, now overgrown with rank weeds and second-growth sprouts, which marked the site of an old plantation.