Adventure on Land & Sea

JOURNEY TO THE FAR AMAZON (353 pp.) -- Alain Gheerbrant -- Simon & Schusfer ($5).

THE VOYAGE OF THE HERETIQUE (214 pp.)--Alain Bombard--Simon & Schusfer ($3.50).

One of the hallmarks of a Frenchman supposedly is le bon sens--common sense. But two Frenchmen have put out books about experiences that belie the national characteristic. One decided to penetrate the Amazonian jungle and make friends with cannibals. The other proposed crossing the Atlantic alone in a 15-ft. dinghy fitted with a single tiny sail. Both were displaying uncommon sense, which is the kind that turns the key on adventure and opens doors to discovery.

Pants in the Ants. In Journey to the Far Amazon, Explorer Alain Gheerbrant tells how, with one Colombian and two Frenchmen, he plunged into the "green hell" of the Sierra Parima between Venezuela and Brazil. That vast sea of vegetation, never before crossed by a white man, was filled with reptiles, insects and maiir eating fish, all unfriendly. One night in a grotto a scraping noise awakened Gheerbrant. It was an advancing column, 16 inches wide, of red ants. They had already devoured his belt, half his trousers and were starting on his leather camera case.

To get through the seemingly impenetrable Sierra, Gheerbrant needed the help of local Indians. His principle was nonviolence, his method diplomacy. Sometimes negotiations began with a bow and arrow aimed at a white man's heart and ended with Gheerbrant allowing savages to tug his beard and strip him of his possessions. But his supreme instrument of diplomacy was a Mozart symphony. Military marches left the Indians impassive; Louis Armstrong's trumpeting failed to send them; but Mozart always soothed the savage breast. "Such music." Gheerbrant writes, "did not . . . clamp down a mask of fear on [their] faces ... It opened up the secret places of the heart."

Men in the Dark. The most primitive of these barbarians were the Guaharibos. They lived in the depths of the forest, and Gheerbrant concluded that they "had remained on earth by an anthropological anachronism." They had no implements of iron or stone, not even a hatchet or a knife. They did not know how to build huts or make canoes, did no farming and went about naked. Sometimes they practiced cannibalism. Mostly they ate what was easily come upon: "wild berries, marsh flowers full of earthworms, caterpillars and insects, and even earth." About all that distinguished them from animals was that they could make fire and stand upright. In the filth of their gloomy forest village, Gheerbrant saw that the Guaha-ribo "still sleeps in his dark, damp haven, curled in on himself like a foetus. He is as yet immune to those feelings which make a man shiver and inspire him to go forth into the outer light ... He flees from the light at once, hiding himself in the thickest part of the forest . . ."

Yet they were men. As Gheerbrant came to know them, he noted in their skeletal figures and leprous faces "gentle curves, tender gestures, naive curiosity and strange wishes and desires," and realized that despite the thousands of years that separated him from them they were linked by the common bond of humanity.

The expedition lasted more than a year, and at times it seemed impossible to penetrate the jungle over river highways cratered with vicious rapids and broken by precipitous waterfalls. Once it took the explorers a week to advance a mile overland. But finally, with muddy, lifeless faces, they emerged to the "civilization [that] awaited us, with its haste and its rapacity, but also with its power and its glory." Through all the mishaps of his trip, Gheerbrant managed to hold onto his notes. He is a poet and has transformed them into a fascinating and noble book.

Food in the Sea. Author Alain Bombard's Atlantic adventure, set down in The Voyage of the Heretique, was even more primitive than Gheerbrant's Amazonian hardships. For 65 days and nights, from the Canaries to the West Indies, he was alone on the vast waters of the ocean (TIME. Jan. 5. 1953), living only on the fish and birds he could catch and eat raw and the liquid he could get from the sea and the sky.

To save some of the "50,000 people who die each year in lifeboats," Dr. Bombard wanted to give a dramatic demonstration of three unlikely propositions: 1) sea water is drinkable in small quantities for a limited time without ill effects, 2) it is possible to live on the resources of the sea, 3) small craft normally considered unnavigable can be made to reach a predetermined point.

Thirst will.kill a man faster than hunger, but when he had nothing else, Bombard drank small amounts of sea water and felt fine. Apart from rain, however, his basic drink was the juice he squeezed out of the fish he caught. Bombard proved his thesis but not without tremendous suffering. Never did he underestimate the hostility of the sea. He knew that at any moment a single wave could have ended his life, but his frail craft never capsized although mountainous waves sometimes flooded it. He fished and ruminated and read Aeschylus and Spinoza. He was never bored, but perhaps the worst times were those hours of unfathomable despair when it seemed "as if the immense and absolute solitude of the ocean's expanse were concentrated right on top of me, as if my beating heart were the center of gravity of a mass which was at the same time nothingness."

What Authors Bombard and Gheerbrant suggest, each in his own way. is that there is hardly a greater menace to the adventure of expanding knowledge than ordinary bonsens.

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