Remate de Males lies just where a step farther would plunge one into an unmapped country.  It is a little village built on poles; the last “blaze” of civilisation on the trail of the upper river.  When the rainy winter season drives out of the forests every living creature that can not take refuge in the trees, the rubber-workers abandon the crude stages of the manufacture that they carry on there and gather in the village to make the best of what life has to offer them in this region.  At such times the population rises to the number of some 500 souls, for the most part Brazilians and domesticated Indians or caboclos.

Nothing could better summarise the attractions (!) of the place than the name which has become fixed upon it.  Translated into English this means “Culmination of Evils,” Remate de Males.

Some thirty years ago, a prospector with his family and servants, in all about a score, arrived at this spot near the junction of the Javary and the Itecoahy rivers, close to the equator.  They came by the only possible highway, the river, and decided to settle.  Soon the infinite variety of destroyers of human life that abound on the upper Amazon began their work on the little household, reducing its number to four and threatening to wipe it out altogether.  But the prospector stuck to it and eventually succeeded in giving mankind a firm hold on this wilderness.  In memory of what he and succeeding settlers went through, the village received its cynically descriptive name.

Remate de Males, separated by weeks and weeks of journey by boat from the nearest spot of comparative civilisation down the river, has grown wonderfully since its pioneer days.  Dismal as one finds it to be, if I can give an adequate description in these pages, it will be pronounced a monument to man’s nature-conquering instincts, and ability.  Surely no pioneers ever had a harder battle than these Brazilians, standing with one foot in “the white man’s grave,” as the Javary region is called in South America, while they faced innumerable dangers.  The markets of the world need rubber, and the supplying of this gives them each year a few months’ work in the forests at very high wages.  I always try to remember these facts when I am tempted to harshly judge Remate de Males according to our standards; moreover, I can never look upon the place quite as an outsider.  I formed pleasant friendships there and entered into the lives of many of its people, so I shall always think of it with affection.  The village is placed where the Itecoahy runs at right angles into the Javary, the right-hand bank of the Itecoahy forming at once its main and its only street.  The houses stand facing this street, all very primitive and all elevated on palm-trunk poles as far as possible above the usual high-water mark of the river.  Everything, from the little sheet-iron church to the pig-sty, is built on poles.  Indeed, if there is anything in the theory of evolution, it will not be many generations before the inhabitants and domestic animals are born equipped with stilts.