Wonder Boats in the Jungle

Venezuela was agog last week over tales of marvelous amphibian boat-trucks that will open up the heretofore impenetrable reaches of the Orinoco and Amazon rivers.

These specially designed combination carriers can operate in shallow water, climb over rocks and rapids, slither up & down river banks to take cargo. They are expected to bring the jungles within quick and easy distance of civilization by utilizing South America's unrivaled network of tropical rivers instead of expensive highways and railroads.

Prophet and high priest of this new vision is Dudley P. South, research engineer of Higgins Industries Inc., whose torpedo boats and tank-carrying invasion boats are already important United Nations weapons (TIME, May 4). Within four or five weeks Dudley South expects to have a few experimental models of Higgins' new boat-trucks to play with up & down the Orinoco, in the hope of developing them for big-time passenger and freight use when peace comes.

But Texan South's immediate wartime job is to get rubber out of the dense forests of the Orinoco valley. For this he will use a new version of Higgins' famed Eureka boat especially built for jungle rivers. Already he has 25 of these boats ready to go. They will cut down the time from Puerto Ayacucho to Ciudad Bolivar from a hazardous ten days by canoe to 24 hours by Eureka--and carry a hundred times as much each trip.

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