Magnetic Traveler

JOURNEY TO MANAOS--Earl P. Hanson --Reynal & Hitchcock ($3).

Not so romantic as its title, neither is this travel book so ponderous as the official title of the one-man expedition it tells about--the Carnegie Institution's Expedition for Study of the Earth's Magnetic Behavior. A mixture of guidebook, adventure story, anthropological study, social & political commentary, covering a 2,000-mile trip through the jungles of Venezuela and Brazil, Journey to Manaos tells next to nothing about terrestrial magnetism. Author Hanson dutifully did the job he went to do, but he records more magnetic attractions above ground than underneath it.

Scare stories prepared him for a bad trip. He was told of inland revolts, the murder of a governor, the blood thirst of Indians for a white man. But it was just talk. Author Hanson hardly realized he had been through savage country until he came out and heard the same scare stories all over again. Venezuela officials were touchy hysterics, but no worse than nuisances; the Indians were merely poor. He grew a beard, however, since without one, said other explorers, his trip would impress no one and he would never get his picture in the rotogravure sections at home.

But if Author Hanson had few adventures of his own, he found plenty second hand. An insatiable inquirer and a lively storyteller, he tells his best story about Gomez' notorious killer Funes, governor of the Amazonas territory, who exterminated half the native population, still held the other half's troubled affection for his "made" work program.

Charmed by the Indians, Author Hanson was pleased to see that, as Depression (1931) forced whites out of the country, the natives were going back to their primitive ways again. Their remaining link with civilization, declares Hanson, is their reluctance to give up pants.

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