Word: belem
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...Belem, mouth of the Amazon, the trekkers were treated to pep talks on the romance of the jungle, shown how to cut the bark of the hevea (rubber tree), and then pushed into the jungle. Disillusion came fast. The hevea did not grow in stands; sometimes the trees were miles apart. Dwellings were mostly mud huts which the men built themselves in tall forests through which the sunlight never entered. Flesh-eating piranha fish kept them from river baths. Snakes bit them. The atabrine that the U.S. sent down to combat malaria was stolen by middlemen...
Death & Slavery. Of the 18,000 men who went to Amazonia, only a few were ever seen again. Most of these, ragged derelicts, now beg in the streets of Manaus and Belem. Others have staggered home to tell bitter stories of slavery and death. Said one: "The thieving rubber buyers and the mosquitoes were our worst enemies. Those of us who tried to escape were captured and beaten senseless. Those who really escaped were imprisoned in the mysteries of the jungle...
...threatened the trade of better than three-fourths of Brazil's 40,000,000 people. Up and down Brazil's 5,800-mile coastline, wallowing and pitching coastwise steamers provide shuttle service. For dozens of towns and villages, from Rio Grande Do Sul in the south to Belem, north of the bulge, these ships are the sole means of commerce, with the exception of airlines. Last year they carried over 150,000 passengers, nearly two million tons of freight, thousands of sacks of mail. To Brazil, 248,700 square miles larger than the U.S. but with only...
Brazil's army of a maximum of 285,000 men is ill-equipped and, by European standards, poorly trained. Its wartime task is well-nigh insuperable, for it has the responsibility of guarding the longest Atlantic coastline of any Pan-American nation. For 2,000 miles, from Belem to Rio de Janeiro, there is not a single inch of railroad track, and highway facilities are very poorly developed. All traffic of any large dimensions must move either by coast-wise steamer or by slow portage over inland rivers...
...route will go from New York City (with Baltimore as alter nate) to San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Port of Spain, Trinidad, to Belem and Natal, Brazil. Then it will hop 1,800 miles - not quite the span from Newfoundland to Ireland - across the Atlantic to Monrovia, Liberia (Bathurst, Gambia and Freetown, Sierra Leone as alternates), will hug the hump of Africa as far as Nigeria, then cut across to Khartoum and perhaps eventually to Cairo. Across Africa, Pan Am planned direction finders, hangars, fields, communications and weather stations, resthouses. Priorities for the necessary materials are expected to be granted...