A thoroughly endearing book, written in a style for which many of us no longer have the patience but which works very well in the context.
For a well written review, see: https://nowheremag.com/2020/05/h-m-tomlinsons-the-sea-and-the-jungle/ ( )

A great travelogue recounting a sea voyage from Britain to Porto Velho on the Amazon river system in 1909 - 1910. I found it through James Mustich’s 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die. It was published in 1912 and is free as an e-book. As much as I liked it, be warned that I sometimes struggled with the author’s florid Edwardian prose. He can wax poetical when describing the Amazon, but also when discussing not much at all. His sentences may run on and sometimes run backward. There are scattered words that are no longer used much, if they were then, and a few are not in the dictionaries I have access to. You may need to bear with him until he is well at sea. Here is a suggestive example:
From our narrow and weltering security, where the wind searched through us like the judgment eye, I know, looking out upon the wilderness in turmoil where was no help, and no witness of our undoing, where the gleams were fleeting as though the very day were riven and tumbling, that I saw the filmy shapes of those things which darken the minds of primitives.
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Watch out for the story within the story that reads like a miniature version of Heart of Darkness. ( )

The narrative of a voyage of the tramp steamer, Capella. to South America and deep into the Amazon basin, in 1909-10. ( )

time reading program special edition. SOME PARTS really boring and some parts really interesting. ( )

In the fall of 1909, Tomlinson "chucked" his job at a London newspaper and signed on to the crew of the steamship Capella as purser. The ship was bound for the upper Amazon bearing a load of coal to the men building a railroad in the interior of the continent. This is his account of that journey, first published in 1912. In the beginning, I found The Sea and the Jungle a bit slow but once I became accustomed to Tomlinson's style the book picked up and I enjoyed the journey. He sprinkles his account with tales (some of the tall variety) told by his shipmates and later those told by some of the people he met after reaching the Amazon. This was worth reading for both his descriptions of life at sea and of the Amazon region as it was a hundred years ago.