After a plentiful meal, consisting of fried fish and roast loin of tapir, which tasted very good, we drank black coffee and conversed as well as my limited knowledge of the Portuguese language permitted.  After this, naturally, feeling very tired from my travels and the heat of the day, I arranged my future room, strung my hammock, and slept until a servant announced that supper was served.  This meal consisted of jerked beef, farinha, rice, black beans, turtle soup, and the national Goiabada marmalade.  The cook, who was nothing but a sick rubber-worker, had spoiled the principal part of the meal by disregarding the juices of the meat, and cooking it without salt, besides mixing the inevitable farinha with everything.  But it was a part of the custom of the country and could not be helped. De gustibus non est disputandum.

When this meal was over, I was invited to go with the secretary, Mr. da Marinha, the man who had first greeted me in the morning, to see a sick person.  At some distance from the house was a small barracao, where we were received by a seringueiro named Marques.  This remarkable man was destined to figure prominently in experiences that I had to undergo later.  He pulled aside a large mosquito-net which guarded the entrance of the inner room of this hut.  In the hammock we found a middle-aged woman; a native of Ceara.  Her face was not unattractive but terribly emaciated, and she was evidently very sick.  She showed us an arm bound up in rags, and the part exposed was wasted and dark red.  It was explained that three weeks before, an accident had forced a wooden splinter into her thumb and she had neglected the inflammation that followed.  I asked her to undo the wrappings, a thing which I should never have done, and the sight we saw was most discouraging.  The hand was swollen until it would not have been recognised as a hand, and there was an immense lesion extending from the palm to the middle of the forearm.  The latter was in a terrible condition, the flesh having been eaten away to the bone.  It was plainly a case of gangrene of a particularly vicious character.

Suddenly it dawned upon me that they all took me for a doctor; and the questions they asked as to what should be done, plainly indicated that they looked to me for assistance.  I explained that I had no knowledge of surgery, but that in spite of this I was sure that if something were not done immediately the woman would have little time to live.

I asked if there was not a doctor that could be reached within a few days’ journey.  We discussed sending the woman to Remate de Males by canoe, but this idea was abandoned, for the journey even undertaken by the most skilful paddlers could not be made in less than eighteen days, and by that time the gangrene would surely have killed the patient.

Coronel da Silva was called in.  He said that the woman was the wife of the chief of the caucheros and that her life must be saved if possible.  I explained my own incapacity in this field once more, but insisted that we would be justified in undertaking an amputation as the only chance of preventing her death.