April 21, 1957
Dakar, Senegal
Dear Eddie and Alice --
The plane from Recife arrived at the airport here smoothly
enough after a seven hour crossing of the South Atlantic and it deposited me
abruptly amid more than the usual confusion.
It was three a.m. I was the only passenger disembarking
here. The customs man was gone. My hotel reservation was a matter of mystery. I
left my French back in M. Cousin's class, it seems; and my attempts to speak
Spanish to a six-foot seven inch Negro in a red turban and white burnoose
simply led to more misunderstanding. Finally after being told I was in the
country illegally I was put in an airline bus driven by a man who looked like
Joe Louis wearing a sheet and was driven for some distance through the moonlight
until we came to a big concrete building rearing up from the sands. It was the
hotel where I was supposed to have a reservation. They had never heard of me
but they had a room for a Mr. Cornwall of Pan-American, and there I spent the
night. Nice room too -- full of wicker furniture and Swedish furniture and
flying beetles that sound like a 707 but do no harm.
I woke this morning, Easter morning -- about eleven, opened
the Venetian blinds and found myself staring down into the Atlantic Ocean,
which I had not realized was so close. Actually, it is a small, circular bay,
very sheltered, with a spread of tawny beach lined with striped umbrellas and
white pads. And that is where I am at this moment. The sun is very hot, the
water warm, the sky clear. There are no sea gulls. About a mile out the waves
are breaking beautifully white over the points of the protecting capes.
There is a volleyball game in progress behind me and I keep
twisting around to watch it. Girls playing volleyball in bikinis is an act Minsky
overlooked. The girls here look lean and rather aristocratic after the lush
types in Brazil.
I don't know if I wrote to tell you that Rosa and Lane are
going to Italy on the Italian ship "Anna C." It stops at
Bahia-Salvador (in Brazil), Las Palmas in the Canaries, Lisbon, Barcelona,
Cannes, and Genoa. They plan to go to Genoa although it is possible they will
get off in Cannes and go over to see if the pictures of the cave paintings in
the book you gave me are even better than the real thing. We get back together
in Genoa around the end of May. It is improbably that a letter would reach me
in Africa but Rosa and Lane are lonesome for mail and a letter to them at the
American Consulate in Genoa, Italy, would bring them much pleasure. They will
be there for a couple of days around the fourth and fifth of May. I had an interesting boat trip myself last week up the
Amazon in a government launch. We went four hours up the broad, yellow-brown
stream, past shores that were walls of dull green on the shady side and bright
green where the sun in the palm fronds and the woven tapestry of creepers.
I was with Dr. and Mrs. Causey, a pleasant pair of Americans
who are in charge of the Rockefeller Foundation's virus laboratory at Belem.
The Foundation has set up labs in San Francisco, Trinidad, Uganda, and India as
well as Brazil to study viruses.
There is a central lab in New York which runs tests on the
material sent in from the other.
The Belem lab has discovered a considerable number of
previously unknown viruses in the jungle and has also detected the presence of
several familiar viruses which were not known to be present in the Amazon
valley.
 |
| Calista and Ottis Causey with one of their caged monkeys. Credit: Rockefeller Archives |
The research is of course "pure" but the Causeys
are willing to speculate on the importance of their work. They think it
possible that the jungle serves as a great reservoir for viruses (this has been
proved in the case of yellow fever and dengue) and that it is probably that
many of these viruses are carried around the world by birds. While I was in
Belem, Dr. C received word from Washington that a banded tern which had been
shot with a bow and arrow by a native hunter at the mouth of the Amazon in
February had been tagged by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife people in Massachusetts
the previous March. And Dr. Casals (a relation of Pablo's) who runs the NY lab
and who happened at the time to be in Belem, immediately pointed out that the
line of flight of the tern coincided with the areas most often struck by
outbreaks of encephiamytis (spelling questioned), the virus of which the
Causeys have located in the jungle. Incidentally they find the viruses in a
very simple way, by bleeding people, and monkeys, who have gone into the jungle
and come down with a fever. If the patients recover, the Causeys bleed them
again. Then if an injection of the original blood and an injection of their
later blood with the antibodies fails to kill at least half of a batch of baby
mice, the Causeys know they have a virus in the 1st lot, and its antibody in
the second. It is up to the NY lab to determine which virus.
The Causeys are fortunate in that lots of exotic types are
being sent into the forest to clear ground for rubber plantations or farming
colonies. Causey visits them regularly at the camps in the forest and takes
blood from any fever victims, then treats them as best he can.
 |
| Harry Watt |
As for monkeys he has found an island off the coast of
Brazil which is protected from the mainland by the on-shore winds. The monkeys
there have no antibodies against the viruses of the Amazon. So Dr. C traps
them, takes them to Belem and hangs them in cages in the jungle, where the
mosquitos can get at them but the cats and snakes cannot. A satisfactory number
get sick.
Well, as you can see, I'm going to be an awful bore when I
get back and soak up a number of martinis.
I should tell you about having tea at the leper colony and
about spending a week in Rio with Harry Watt, [Harry Watt was a British director and screenwriter. He was a friend and colleague of Brazilian director Alberto Cavalcanti] who made The Overlanders and
Ivory Hunter, and Target for Tonight. But instead I'm going for a swim and then
I'll engage in a bit of intensive girl watching.
Remember the letter to Rosa and Lane at the consulate in
Genoa.
Love,
Murray
What
I remember from Brazil was throwing up into the topiary at the airport
after a wild flight from Paraguay, and later being spanked for misbehaving at
some grownup occasion in Rio, maybe including Harry Watt. What I learned
later was that my parents were on the brink of divorce. Their letters to each other while Murray was in Africa were very different from the ones for more public consumption.
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