Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of

Re: Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions

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CHAPTER 2.22. SAN FERNANDO DE ATABAPO. SAN BALTHASAR. THE RIVERS TEMI AND TUAMINI. JAVITA. PORTAGE FROM THE TUAMINI TO THE RIO NEGRO.

During the night, we had left, almost unperceived, the waters of the Orinoco; and at sunrise found ourselves as if transported to a new country, on the banks of a river the name of which we had scarcely ever heard pronounced, and which was to conduct us, by the portage of Pimichin, to the Rio Negro, on the frontiers of Brazil. "You will go up," said the president of the missions, who resides at San Fernando, "first the Atabapo, then the Temi, and finally, the Tuamini. When the force of the current of black waters hinders you from advancing, you will be conducted out of the bed of the river through forests, which you will find inundated. Two monks only are settled in those desert places, between the Orinoco and the Rio Negro; but at Javita you will be furnished with the means of having your canoe drawn over land in the course of four days to Cano Pimichin. If it be not broken to pieces you will descend the Rio Negro without any obstacle (from north-west to south-east) as far as the little fort of San Carlos; you will go up the Cassiquiare (from south to north), and then return to San Fernando in a month, descending the Upper Orinoco from east to west." Such was the plan traced for our passage, and we carried it into effect without danger, though not without some suffering, in the space of thirty-three days. The Orinoco runs from its source, or at least from Esmeralda, as far as San Fernando de Atabapo, from east to west; from San Fernando, (where the junction of the Guaviare and the Atabapo takes place,) as far as the mouth of the Rio Apure, it flows from south to north, forming the Great Cataracts; and from the mouth of the Apure as far as Angostura and the coast of the Atlantic its direction is from west to east. In the first part of its course, where the river flows from east to west, it forms that celebrated bifurcation so often disputed by geographers, of which I was the first enabled to determine the situation by astronomical observations. One arm of the Orinoco, (the Cassiquiare,) running from north to south, falls into the Guainia, or Rio Negro, which, in its turn, joins the Maranon, or river Amazon. The most natural way, therefore, to go from Angostura to Grand Para, would be to ascend the Orinoco as far as Esmeralda, and then to go down the Cassiquiare, the Rio Negro, and the Amazon; but, as the Rio Negro in the upper part of its course approaches very near the sources of some rivers that fall into the Orinoco near San Fernando de Atabapo (where the Orinoco abruptly changes its direction from east to west to take that from south to north), the passage up that part of the river between San Fernando and Esmeralda, in order to reach the Rio Negro, may be avoided. Leaving the Orinoco near the mission of San Fernando, the traveller proceeds up the little black rivers (the Atabapo, the Temi, and the Tuamini), and the boats are carried across an isthmus six thousand toises broad, to the banks of a stream (the Cano Pimichin) which flows into the Rio Negro. This was the course which we took.

The road from San Carlos to San Fernando de Atabapo is far more disagreeable, and is half as long again by the Cassiquiare as by Javita and the Cano Pimichin. In this region I determined, by means of a chronometer by Berthoud, and by the meridional heights of stars, the situation of San Balthasar de Atabapo, Javita, San Carlos del Rio Negro, the rock Culimacavi, and Esmeralda. When no roads exist save tortuous and intertwining rivers, when little villages are hidden amid thick forests, and when, in a country entirely flat, no mountain, no elevated object is visible from two points at once, it is only in the sky that we can read where we are upon the earth.

San Fernando de Atabapo stands near the confluence of three great rivers; the Orinoco, the Guaviare, and the Atabapo. Its situation is similar to that of Saint Louis or of New Madrid, at the junction of the Mississippi with the Missouri and the Ohio. In proportion as the activity of commerce increases in these countries traversed by immense rivers, the towns situated at their confluence will necessarily become bustling ports, depots of merchandise, and centre points of civilization. Father Gumilla confesses, that in his time no person had any knowledge of the course of the Orinoco above the mouth of the Guaviare.

D'Anville, in the first edition of his great map of South America, laid down the Rio Negro as an arm of the Orinoco, that branched off from the principal body of the river between the mouths of the Meta and the Vichada, near the cataract of Atures. That great geographer was entirely ignorant of the existence of the Cassiquiare and the Atabapo; and he makes the Orinoco or Rio Paragua, the Japura, and the Putumayo, take their rise from three branchings of the Caqueta. The expedition of the boundaries, commanded by Iturriaga and Solano, corrected these errors. Solano, who was the geographical engineer of this expedition, advanced in 1756 as far as the mouth of the Guaviare, after having passed the Great Cataracts. He found that, to continue to go up the Orinoco, he must direct his course towards the east; and that the river received, at the point of its great inflection, in latitude 4 degrees 4 minutes, the waters of the Guaviare, which two miles higher had received those of the Atabapo. Interested in approaching the Portuguese possessions as near as possible, Solano resolved to proceed onward to the south. At the confluence of the Atabapo and the Guaviare he found an Indian settlement of the warlike nation of the Guaypunaves. He gained their favour by presents, and with their aid founded the mission of San Fernando, to which he gave the appellation of villa, or town.

To make known the political importance of this Mission, we must recollect what was at that period the balance of power between the petty Indian tribes of Guiana. The banks of the Lower Orinoco had been long ensanguined by the obstinate struggle between two powerful nations, the Cabres and the Caribs. The latter, whose principal abode since the close of the seventeenth century has been between the sources of the Carony, the Essequibo, the Orinoco, and the Rio Parima, once not only held sway as far as the Great Cataracts, but made incursions also into the Upper Orinoco, employing portages between the Paruspa* (* The Rio Paruspa falls into the Rio Paragua, and the latter into the Rio Carony, which is one of the tributary streams of the Lower Orinoco. There is also an ancient portage of the Caribs between the Paruspa and the Rio Chavaro, which flows into the Rio Caura above the mouth of the Erevato. In going up the Erevato you reach the savannahs that are traversed by the Rio Manipiare above the tributary streams of the Ventuari. The Caribs in their distant excursions sometimes passed from the Rio Caura to the Ventuari, thence to the Padamo, and then by the Upper Orinoco to the Atacavi, which, westward of Manuteso, takes the name of the Atabapo.) and the Caura, the Erevato and the Ventuari, the Conorichite and the Atacavi. None knew better than the Caribs the intertwinings of the rivers, the proximity of the tributary streams, and the roads by which distances might be diminished. The Caribs had vanquished and almost exterminated the Cabres. Having made themselves masters of the Lower Orinoco, they met with resistance from the Guaypunaves, who had founded their dominion on the Upper Orinoco; and who, together with the Cabres, the Manitivitanos, and the Parenis, are the greatest cannibals of these countries. They originally inhabited the banks of the great river Inirida, at its confluence with the Chamochiquini, and the hilly country of Mabicore. About the year 1744, their chief, or as the natives call him, their king (apoto), was named Macapu. He was a man no less distinguished by his intelligence than his valour; had led a part of the nation to the banks of the Atabapo; and when the Jesuit Roman made his memorable expedition from the Orinoco to the Rio Negro, Macapu suffered that missionary to take with him some families of the Guaypunaves to settle them at Uruana, and near the cataract of Maypures. This people are connected by their language with the great branch of the Maypure nations. They are more industrious, we might also say more civilized, than the other nations of the Upper Orinoco. The missionaries relate, that the Guaypunaves, at the time of their sway in those countries, were generally clothed, and had considerable villages. After the death of Macapu, the command devolved on another warrior, Cuseru, called by the Spaniards El capitan Cusero. He established lines of defence on the banks of the Inirida, with a kind of little fort, constructed of earth and timber. The piles were more than sixteen feet high, and surrounded both the house of the apoto and a magazine of bows and arrows. These structures, remarkable in a country in other respects so wild, have been described by Father Forneri.

The Marepizanas and the Manitivitanos were the preponderant nations on the banks of the Rio Negro. The former had for its chiefs, about the year 1750, two warriors called Imu and Cajamu. The king of the Manitivitanos was Cocuy, famous for his cruelty. The chiefs of the Guaypunaves and the Manitivitanos fought with small bodies of two or three hundred men; but in their protracted struggles they destroyed the missions, in some of which the poor monks had only fifteen or twenty Spanish soldiers at their disposal. When the expedition of Iturriaga and Solano arrived at the Orinoco, the missions had no longer to fear the incursions of the Caribs. Cuseru, the chief of the Guaypunaves, had fixed his dwelling behind the granitic mountains of Sipapo. He was the friend of the Jesuits; but other nations of the Upper Orinoco and the Rio Negro, led by Imu, Cajamu, and Cocuy, penetrated from time to time to the north of the Great Cataracts. They had other motives for fighting than that of hatred; they hunted men, as was formerly the custom of the Caribs, and is still the practice in Africa. Sometimes they furnished slaves (poitos) to the Dutch (in their language, Paranaquiri—inhabitants of the sea); sometimes they sold them to the Portuguese (Iaranavi—sons of musicians).* (* The savage tribes designate every commercial nation of Europe by surnames, the origin of which appears altogether accidental. The Spaniards were called clothed men, Pongheme or Uavemi, by way of distinction.) In America, as in Africa, the cupidity of the Europeans has produced the same evils, by exciting the natives to make war, in order to procure slaves. Everywhere the contact of nations, widely different from each other in the scale of civilization, leads to the abuse of physical strength, and of intellectual preponderance. The Phoenicians and Carthaginians formerly sought slaves in Europe. Europe now presses in her turn both on the countries whence she gathered the first germs of science, and on those where she now almost involuntarily spreads them by carrying thither the produce of her industry.

I have faithfully recorded what I could collect on the state of these countries, where the vanquished nations have become gradually extinct, leaving no other signs of their existence than a few words of their language, mixed with that of the conquerors. In the north, beyond the cataracts, the preponderant nations were at first the Caribs and the Cabres; towards the south, on the Upper Orinoco, the Guaypunaves; and on the Rio Negro, the Marepizanos and the Manitivitanos. The long resistance which the Cabres, united under a valiant chief, had made to the Caribs, became fatal to the latter subsequently to the year 1720. They at first vanquished their enemies near the mouth of the Rio Caura; and a great number of Caribs perished in a precipitate flight, between the rapids of Torno and the Isla del Infierno. The prisoners were devoured; and, by one of those refinements of cunning and cruelty which are common to the savage nations of both North and South America, the Cabres spared the life of one Carib, whom they forced to climb up a tree to witness this barbarous spectacle, and carry back the tidings to the vanquished. The triumph of Tep, the chief of the Cabres, was but of short duration. The Caribs returned in such great numbers that only a feeble remnant of the Cabres was left on the banks of the Cuchivero.

Cocuy and Cuseru were carrying on a war of extermination on the Upper Orinoco when Solano arrived at the mouth of the Guaviare. The former had embraced the cause of the Portuguese; the latter was a friend of the Jesuits, and gave them warning whenever the Manitivitanos were marching against the christian establishments of Atures and Carichana. Cuseru became a christian only a few days before his death; but in battle he had for some time worn on his left hip a crucifix, given him by the missionaries, and which he believed rendered him invulnerable. We were told an anecdote that paints the violence of his character. He had married the daughter of an Indian chief of the Rio Temi. In a paroxysm of rage against his father-in-law, he declared to his wife that he was going to fight against him. She reminded him of the courage and singular strength of her father; when Cuseru, without uttering a single word, took a poisoned arrow, and plunged it into her bosom. The arrival of a small body of Spaniards in 1756, under the order of Solano, awakened suspicion in this chief of the Guaypunaves. He was on the point of attempting a contest with them, when the Jesuits made him sensible that it would be his interest to remain at peace with the Christians. Whilst dining at the table of the Spanish general, Cuseru was allured by promises, and the prediction of the approaching fall of his enemies. From being a king he became the mayor of a village; and consented to settle with his people at the new mission of San Fernando de Atabapo. Such is most frequently the end of those chiefs whom travellers and missionaries style Indian princes. "In my mission," says the honest father Gili "I had five reyecillos, or petty kings, those of the Tamanacs, the Avarigotes, the Parecas, the Quaquas, and the Maypures. At church I placed them in file on the same bench; but I took care to give the first place to Monaiti, king of the Tamanacs, because he had helped me to found the village; and he seemed quite proud of this precedency."

When Cuseru, the chief of the Guaypunaves, saw the Spanish troops pass the cataracts, he advised Don Jose Solano to wait a whole year before he formed a settlement on the Atabapo; predicting the misfortunes which were not slow to arrive. "Let me labour with my people in clearing the ground," said Cuseru to the Jesuits; I will plant cassava, and you will find hereafter wherewith to feed all these men." Solano, impatient to advance, refused to listen to the counsel of the Indian chief, and the new inhabitants of San Fernando had to suffer all the evils of scarcity. Canoes were sent at a great expense to New Grenada, by the Meta and the Vichada, in search of flour. The provision arrived too late, and many Spaniards and Indians perished of those diseases which are produced in every climate by want and moral dejection.

Some traces of cultivation are still found at San Fernando. Every Indian has a small plantation of cacao-trees, which produce abundantly in the fifth year; but they cease to bear fruit sooner than in the valleys of Aragua. There are some savannahs and good pasturage round San Fernando, but hardly seven or eight cows are to be found, the remains of a considerable herd which was brought into these countries at the expedition for settling the boundaries. The Indians are a little more civilized here than in the rest of the missions, and we found to our surprise a blacksmith of the native race.

In the mission of San Fernando, a tree which gives a peculiar physiognomy to the landscape, is the piritu or pirijao palm. Its trunk, armed with thorns, is more than sixty feet high; its leaves are pinnated, very thin, undulated, and frizzled towards the points. The fruits of this tree are very extraordinary; every cluster contains from fifty to eighty; they are yellow like apples, grow purple in proportion as they ripen, two or three inches thick, and generally, from abortion, without a kernel. Among the eighty or ninety species of palm-trees peculiar to the New Continent, which I have enumerated in the Nova Genera Plantarum Aequinoctialum, there are none in which the sarcocarp is developed in a manner so extraordinary. The fruit of the pirijao furnishes a farinaceous substance, as yellow as the yolk of an egg, slightly saccharine, and extremely nutritious. It is eaten like plantains or potatoes, boiled or roasted in the ashes, and affords a wholesome and agreeable aliment. The Indians and the missionaries are unwearied in their praises of this noble palm-tree, which might be called the peach-palm. We found it cultivated in abundance at San Fernando, San Balthasar, Santa Barbara, and wherever we advanced towards the south or the east along the banks of the Atabapo and the Upper Orinoco. In those wild regions we are involuntarily reminded of the assertion of Linnaeus, that the country of palm-trees was the first abode of our species, and that man is essentially palmivorous.* (* Homo HABITAT intra tropicos, vescitur palmis, lotophagus; HOSPITATUR extra tropicos sub novercante Cerere, carnivorus. Man DWELLS NATURALLY within the tropics, and lives on the fruits of the palm-tree; he EXISTS in other parts of the world, and there makes shift to feed on corn and flesh. Syst. Nat. volume 1 page 24.) On examining the provision accumulated in the huts of the Indians, we perceive that their subsistence during several months of the year depends as much on the farinaceous fruit of the pirijao, as on the cassava and plantain. The tree bears fruit but once a year, but to the amount of three clusters, consequently from one hundred and fifty to two hundred fruits.

San Fernando de Atabapo, San Carlos, and San Francisco Solano, are the most considerable settlements among the missions of the Upper Orinoco. At San Fernando, as well as in the neighbouring villages of San Balthasar and Javita, the abodes of the priests are neatly-built houses, covered by lianas, and surrounded by gardens. The tall trunks of the pirijao palms were the most beautiful ornaments of these plantations. In our walks, the president of the mission gave us an animated account of his incursions on the Rio Guaviare. He related to us how much these journeys, undertaken "for the conquest of souls;" are desired by the Indians of the missions. All, even women and old men, take part in them. Under the pretext of recovering neophytes who have deserted the village, children above eight or ten years of age are carried off, and distributed among the Indians of the missions as serfs, or poitos. According to the astronomical observations I took on the banks of the Atabapo, and on the western declivity of the Cordillera of the Andes, near the Paramo de la suma Paz, the distance is one hundred and seven leagues only from San Fernando to the first villages of the provinces of Caguan and San Juan de los Llanos. I was assured also by some Indians, who dwelt formerly to the west of the island of Amanaveni, beyond the confluence of the Rio Supavi, that going in a boat on the Guaviare (in the manner of the savages) beyond the strait (angostura) and the principal cataract, they met, at three days' distance, bearded and clothed men, who came in search of the eggs of the terekay turtle. This meeting alarmed the Indians so much, that they fled precipitately, redescending the Guaviare. It is probable, that these bearded white men came from the villages of Aroma and San Martin, the Rio Guaviare being formed by the union of the rivers Ariari and Guayavero. We must not be surprised that the missionaries of the Orinoco and the Atabapo little suspect how near they live to the missionaries of Mocoa, Rio Fragua, and Caguan. In these desert countries, the real distances can be known only by observations of the longitude. It was in consequence of astronomical data, and the information I gathered in the convents of Popayan and of Pasto, to the west of the Cordillera of the Andes, that I formed an accurate idea of the respective situations of the christian settlements on the Atabapo, the Guayavero, and the Caqueta.* (* The Caqueta bears, lower down, the name of the Yupura.)

Everything changes on entering the Rio Atabapo; the constitution of the atmosphere, the colour of the waters, and the form of the trees that cover the shore. You no longer suffer during the day the torment of mosquitos; and the long-legged gnats (zancudos) become rare during the night. Beyond the mission of San Fernando these nocturnal insects disappear altogether. The water of the Orinoco is turbid, and loaded with earthy matter; and in the coves, from the accumulation of dead crocodiles and other putrescent substances, it diffuses a musky and faint smell. We were sometimes obliged to strain this water through a linen cloth before we drank it. The water of the Atabapo, on the contrary, is pure, agreeable to the taste, without any trace of smell, brownish by reflected, and of a pale yellow by transmitted light. The people call it light, in opposition to the heavy and turbid waters of the Orinoco. Its temperature is generally two degrees, and when you approach the mouth of the Rio Temi, three degrees, cooler than the temperature of the Upper Orinoco. After having been compelled during a whole year to drink water at 27 or 28 degrees, a lowering of a few degrees in the temperature produces a very agreeable sensation. I think this lowering of the temperature may be attributed to the river being less broad, and without the sandy beach, the heat of which, at the Orinoco, is by day more than 50 degrees, and also to the thick shade of the forests which are traversed by the Atabapo, the Temi, the Tuamini, and the Guainia, or Rio Negro.

The extreme purity of the black waters is proved by their limpidity, their transparency, and the clearness with which they reflect the images and colours of surrounding objects. The smallest fish are visible in them at a depth of twenty or thirty feet; and most commonly the bottom of the river may be distinguished, which is not a yellowish or brownish mud, like the colour of the water, but a quartzose and granitic sand of dazzling whiteness. Nothing can be compared to the beauty of the banks of the Atabapo. Loaded with plants, among which rise the palms with feathery leaves; the banks are reflected in the waters, and this reflex verdure seems to have the same vivid hue as that which clothes the real vegetation. The surface of the fluid is homogeneous, smooth, and destitute of that mixture of suspended sand and decomposed organic matter, which roughens and streaks the surface of less limpid rivers.

On quitting the Orinoco, several small rapids must be passed, but without any appearance of danger. Amid these raudalitos, according to the opinion of the missionaries, the Rio Atabapo falls into the Orinoco. I am however disposed to think that the Atabapo falls into the Guaviare. The Rio Guaviare, which is much wider than the Atabapo, has white waters, and in the aspect of its banks, its fishing-birds, its fish, and the great crocodiles which live in it, resembles the Orinoco much more than that part of the Atabapo which comes from the Esmeralda. When a river springs from the junction of two other rivers, nearly alike in size, it is difficult to judge which of the two confluent streams must be regarded as its source. The Indians of San Fernando affirm that the Orinoco rises from two rivers, the Guaviare and the Rio Paragua. They give this latter name to the Upper Orinoco, from San Fernando and Santa Barbara to beyond the Esmeralda, and they say that the Cassiquiare is not an arm of the Orinoco, but of the Rio Paragua. It matters but little whether or not the name of Orinoco be given to the Rio Paragua, provided we trace the course of these rivers as it is in nature, and do not separate by a chain of mountains, (as was done previously to my travels,) rivers that communicate together, and form one system. When we would give the name of a large river to one of the two branches by which it is formed, it should be applied to that branch which furnishes most water. Now, at the two seasons of the year when I saw the Guaviare and the Upper Orinoco or Rio Paragua (between the Esmeralda and San Fernando), it appeared to me that the latter was not so large as the Guaviare. Similar doubts have been entertained by geographers respecting the junction of the Upper Mississippi with the Missouri and the Ohio, the junction of the Maranon with the Guallaga and the Ucayale, and the junction of the Indus with the Chunab (Hydaspes of Cashmere) and the Gurra, or Sutlej.* (* The Hydaspes is properly a tributary stream of the Chunab or Acesines. The Sutlej or Hysudrus forms, together with the Beyah or *** Gurra. These are the beautiful regions of the *** celebrated from the time of Alexander to the ***) To avoid embroiling farther a nomenclature of rivers so arbitrarily fixed, I will not propose new denominations. I shall continue, with Father Caulin and the Spanish geographers, to call the river Esmeralda the Orinoco, or Upper Orinoco; but I must observe that if the Orinoco, from San Fernando de Atabapo as far as the delta which it forms opposite the island of Trinidad, were regarded as the continuance of the Rio Guaviare, and if that part of the Upper Orinoco between the Esmeralda and the mission of San Fernando were considered a tributary stream, the Orinoco would preserve, from the savannahs of San Juan de los Llanos and the eastern declivity of the Andes to its mouth, a more uniform and natural direction, that from south-west to north-east.

The Rio Paragua, or that part of the Orinoco east of the mouth of the Guaviare, has clearer, more transparent, and purer water than the part of the Orinoco below San Fernando. The waters of the Guaviare, on the contrary, are white and turbid; they have the same taste, according to the Indians (whose organs of sense are extremely delicate and well practised), as the waters of the Orinoco near the Great Cataracts. "Bring me the waters of three or four great rivers of these countries," an old Indian of the mission of Javita said to us; "on tasting each of them I will tell you, without fear of mistake, whence it was taken; whether it comes from a white or black river; the Orinoco or the Atabapo, the Paragua or the Guaviare." The great crocodiles and porpoises (toninas) which are alike common in the Rio Guaviare and the Lower Orinoco, are entirely wanting, as we were told, in the Rio Paragua (or Upper Orinoco, between San Fernando and the Esmeralda). These are very remarkable differences in the nature of the waters, and the distribution of animals. The Indians do not fail to mention them, when they would prove to travellers that the Upper Orinoco, to the east of San Fernando, is a distinct river which falls into the Orinoco, and that the real origin of the latter must be sought in the sources of the Guaviare.

The astronomical observations made in the night of the 25th of April did not give me the latitude with satisfactory precision. The latitude of the mission of San Fernando appeared to me to be 4 degrees 2 minutes 48 seconds. In Father Caulin's map, founded on the observations of Solano made in 1756, it is 4 degrees 1 minute. This agreement proves the justness of a result which, however, I could only deduce from altitudes considerably distant from the meridian. A good observation of the stars at Guapasoso gave me 4 degrees 2 minutes for San Fernando de Atabapo. I was able to fix the longitude with much more precision in my way to the Rio Negro, and in returning from that river. It is 70 degrees 30 minutes 46 seconds (or 4 degrees 0 minutes west of the meridian of Cumana).

On the 26th of April we advanced only two or three leagues, and passed the night on a rock near the Indian plantations or conucos of Guapasoso. The river losing itself by its inundations in the forests, and its real banks being unseen, the traveller can venture to land only where a rock or a small table-land rises above the water. The granite of those countries, owing to the position of the thin laminae of black mica, sometimes resembles graphic granite; but most frequently (and this determines the age of its formation) it passes into a real gneiss. Its beds, very regularly stratified, run from south-west to north-east, as in the Cordillera on the shore of Caracas. The dip of the granite-gneiss is 70 degrees north-west. It is traversed by an infinite number of veins of quartz, which are singularly transparent, and three or four, and sometimes fifteen inches thick. I found no cavity (druse), no crystallized substance, not even rock-crystal; and no trace of pyrites, or any other metallic substance. I enter into these particulars on account of the chimerical ideas that have been spread ever since the sixteenth century, after the voyages of Berreo and Raleigh,* "on the immense riches of the great and fine empire of Guiana." (* Raleigh's work bears the high sounding title of The Discovery of the large, rich, and beautiful Empire of Guiana, London 1596. See also Raleghi admiranda Descriptio Regni Guianae, auri abundantissimi, Hondius Noribergae 1599.)

The river Atabapo presents throughout a peculiar aspect; you see nothing of its real banks formed by flat lands eight or ten feet high; they are concealed by a row of palms, and small trees with slender trunks, the roots of which are bathed by the waters. There are many crocodiles from the point where you quit the Orinoco to the mission of San Fernando, and their presence indicates that this part of the river belongs to the Rio Guaviare and not to the Atabapo. In the real bed of the latter river, above the mission of San Fernando, there are no crocodiles: we find there some bavas, a great many fresh-water dolphins, but no manatees. We also seek in vain on these banks for the thick-nosed tapir, the araguato, or great howling monkey, the zamuro, or Vultur aura, and the crested pheasant, known by the name of guacharaca. Enormous water-snakes, in shape resembling the boa, are unfortunately very common, and are dangerous to Indians who bathe. We saw them almost from the first day we embarked, swimming by the side of our canoe; they were at most twelve or fourteen feet long. The jaguars of the banks of the Atabapo and the Temi are large and well fed; they are said, however, to be less daring than the jaguars of the Orinoco.

The night of the 27th was beautiful; dark clouds passed from time to time over the zenith with extreme rapidity. Not a breath of wind was felt in the lower strata of the atmosphere; the breeze was at the height of a thousand toises. I dwell upon this peculiarity; for the movement we saw was not produced by the counter-currents (from west to east) which are sometimes thought to be observed in the torrid zone on the loftiest mountains of the Cordilleras; it was the effect of a real breeze, an east wind. We left the conucos of Guapasoso at two o'clock; and continued to ascend the river toward the south, finding it (or rather that part of its bed which is free from trees) growing more and more narrow. It began to rain toward sunrise. In these forests, which are less inhabited by animals than those of the Orinoco, we no longer heard the howlings of the monkeys. The dolphins, or toninas, sported by the side of our boat. According to the relation of Mr. Colebrooke, the Delphinus gangeticus, which is the fresh-water porpoise of the Old World, in like manner accompanies the boats that go up towards Benares; but from Benares to the point where the Ganges receives the salt waters is only two hundred leagues, while from the Atabapo to the mouth of the Orinoco is more than three hundred and twenty.

About noon we passed the mouth of the little river Ipurichapano on the east, and afterwards the granitic rock, known by the name of Piedra del Tigre. Between the fourth and fifth degrees of latitude, a little to the south of the mountains of Sipapo, we reach the southern extremity of that chain of cataracts, which I proposed, in a memoir published in 1800, to call the Chain of Parima. At 4 degrees 20 minutes it stretches from the right bank of the Orinoco toward the east and east-south-east. The whole of the land extending from the mountains of the Parima towards the river Amazon, which is traversed by the Atabapo, the Cassiquiare, and the Rio Negro, is an immense plain, covered partly with forests, and partly with grass. Small rocks rise here and there like castles. We regretted that we had not stopped to rest near the Piedra del Tigre; for on going up the Atabapo we had great difficulty to find a spot of dry ground, open and spacious enough to light a fire, and place our instrument and our hammocks.

On the 28th of April, it rained hard after sunset, and we were afraid that our collections would be damaged. The poor missionary had his fit of tertian fever, and besought us to re-embark immediately after midnight. We passed at day-break the Piedra and the Raudalitos* (* The rock and little cascades.) of Guarinuma. The rock is on the east bank; it is a shelf of granite, covered with psora, cladonia, and other lichens. I could have fancied myself transported to the north of Europe, to the ridge of the mountains of gneiss and granite between Freiberg and Marienberg in Saxony. The cladonias appeared to me to be identical with the Lichen rangiferinus, the L. pixidatus, and the L. polymorphus of Linnaeus. After having passed the rapids of Guarinuma, the Indians showed us in the middle of the forest, on our right, the ruins of the mission of Mendaxari, which has been long abandoned. On the east bank of the river, near the little rock of Kemarumo, in the midst of Indian plantations, a gigantic bombax* (* Bombax ceiba.) attracted our curiosity. We landed to measure it; the height was nearly one hundred and twenty feet, and the diameter between fourteen and fifteen. This enormous specimen of vegetation surprised us the more, as we had till then seen on the banks of the Atabapo only small trees with slender trunks, which from afar resembled young cherry-trees. The Indians assured that these small trees do not form a very extensive group. They are checked in their growth by the inundations of the river; while the dry grounds near the Atabapo, the Temi, and the Tuamini, furnish excellent timber for building. These forests do not stretch indefinitely to the east and west, toward the Cassiquiare and the Guaviare; they are bounded by the open savannahs of Manuteso, and the Rio Inirida. We found it difficult in the evening to stem the current, and we passed the night in a wood a little above Mendaxari; which is another granitic rock traversed by a stratum of quartz. We found in it a group of fine crystals of black schorl.

On the 29th, the air was cooler. We had no zancudos, but the sky was constantly clouded, and without stars. I began to regret the Lower Orinoco. We still advanced but slowly from the force of the current, and we stopped a great part of the day to seek for plants. It was night when we arrived at the mission of San Balthasar, or, as the monks style it, the mission of la divina Pastora de Balthasar de Atabapo. We were lodged with a Catalonian missionary, a lively and agreeable man, who displayed in these wild countries the activity that characterises his nation. He had planted a garden, where the fig-tree of Europe was found in company with the persea, and the lemon-tree with the mammee. The village was built with that regularity which, in the north of Germany, and in protestant America, we find in the hamlets of the Moravian brethren; and the Indian plantations seemed better cultivated than elsewhere. Here we saw for the first time that white and fungous substance which I have made known by the name of dapicho and zapis.* (* These two words belong to the Poimisano and Paragini tongues.) We immediately perceived that it was analogous to india-rubber; but, as the Indians made us understand by signs, that it was found underground, we were inclined to think, till we arrived at the mission of Javita, that the dapicho was a fossil caoutchouc, though different from the elastic bitumen of Derbyshire. A Pomisano Indian, seated by the fire in the hut of the missionary, was employed in reducing the dapicho into black caoutchouc. He had spitted several bits on a slender stick, and was roasting them like meat. The dapicho blackens in proportion as it grows soft, and becomes elastic. The resinous and aromatic smell which filled the hut, seemed to indicate that this coloration is the effect of the decomposition of a carburet of hydrogen, and that the carbon appears in proportion as the hydrogen burns at a low heat. The Indian beat the softened and blackened mass with a piece of brazil-wood, formed at one end like a club; he then kneaded the dapicho into balls of three or four inches in diameter, and let it cool. These balls exactly resemble the caoutchouc of the shops, but their surface remains in general slightly viscous. They are used at San Balthasar in the Indian game of tennis, which is celebrated among the inhabitants of Uruana and Encaramada; they are also cut into cylinders, to be used as corks, and are far preferable to those made of the bark of the cork-tree.

This use of caoutchouc appeared to us the more worthy notice, as we had been often embarrassed by the want of European corks. The great utility of cork is fully understood in countries where trade has not supplied this bark in plenty. Equinoctial America nowhere produces, not even on the back of the Andes, an oak resembling the Quercus suber; and neither the light wood of the bombax, the ochroma, and other malvaceous plants, nor the rhachis of maize, of which the natives make use, can well supply the place of our corks. The missionary showed us, before the Casa de los Solteros (the house where the young unmarried men reside), a drum, which was a hollow cylinder of wood, two feet long and eighteen inches thick. This drum was beaten with great masses of dapicho, which served as drumsticks; it had openings which could be stopped by the hand at will, to vary the sounds, and was fixed on two light supports. Savage notions love noisy music; the drum and the botuto, or trumpet of baked earth, in which a tube of three or four feet long communicates with several barrels, are indispensable instruments among the Indians for their grand pieces of music.

The night of the 30th of April was sufficiently fine for observing the meridian heights of x of the Southern Cross, and the two large stars in the feet of the Centaur. I found the latitude of San Balthasar 3 degrees 14 minutes 23 seconds. Horary angles of the sun gave 70 degrees 14 minutes 21 seconds for the longitude by the chronometer. The dip of the magnetic needle was 27.8 degrees (cent div). We left the mission at a late hour in the morning, and continued to go up the Atabapo for five miles; then, instead of following that river to its source in the east, where it bears the name of Atacavi, we entered the Rio Temi. Before we reached its confluence, a granitic eminence on the western bank, near the mouth of the Guasacavi, fixed our attention: it is called Piedra de la Guahiba (Rock of the Guahiba woman), or the Piedra de la Madre (Mother's Rock.) We inquired the cause of so singular a denomination. Father Zea could not satisfy our curiosity; but some weeks after, another missionary, one of the predecessors of that ecclesiastic, whom we found settled at San Fernando as president of the missions, related to us an event which excited in our minds the most painful feelings. If, in these solitary scenes, man scarcely leaves behind him any trace of his existence, it is doubly humiliating for a European to see perpetuated by so imperishable a monument of nature as a rock, the remembrance of the moral degradation of our species, and the contrast between the virtue of a savage, and the barbarism of civilized man!

In 1797 the missionary of San Fernando had led his Indians to the banks of the Rio Guaviare, on one of those hostile incursions which are prohibited alike by religion and the Spanish laws. They found in an Indian hut a Guahiba woman with her three children (two of whom were still infants), occupied in preparing the flour of cassava. Resistance was impossible; the father was gone to fish, and the mother tried in vain to flee with her children. Scarcely had she reached the savannah when she was seized by the Indians of the mission, who hunt human beings, like the Whites and the Negroes in Africa. The mother and her children were bound, and dragged to the bank of the river. The monk, seated in his boat, waited the issue of an expedition of which he shared not the danger. Had the mother made too violent a resistance the Indians would have killed her, for everything is permitted for the sake of the conquest of souls (la conquista espirituel), and it is particularly desirable to capture children, who may be treated in the Mission as poitos, or slaves of the Christians. The prisoners were carried to San Fernando, in the hope that the mother would be unable to find her way back to her home by land. Separated from her other children who had accompanied their father on the day in which she had been carried off, the unhappy woman showed signs of the deepest despair. She attempted to take back to her home the children who had been seized by the missionary; and she fled with them repeatedly from the village of San Fernando. But the Indians never failed to recapture her; and the missionary, after having caused her to be mercilessly beaten, took the cruel resolution of separating the mother from the two children who had been carried off with her. She was conveyed alone to the missions of the Rio Negro, going up the Atabapo. Slightly bound, she was seated at the bow of the boat, ignorant of the fate that awaited her; but she judged by the direction of the sun, that she was removing farther and farther from her hut and her native country. She succeeded in breaking her bonds, threw herself into the water, and swam to the left bank of the Atabapo. The current carried her to a shelf of rock, which bears her name to this day. She landed and took shelter in the woods, but the president of the missions ordered the Indians to row to the shore, and follow the traces of the Guahiba. In the evening she was brought back. Stretched upon the rock (la Piedra de la Madre) a cruel punishment was inflicted on her with those straps of manatee leather, which serve for whips in that country, and with which the alcaldes are always furnished. This unhappy woman, her hands tied behind her back with strong stalks of mavacure, was then dragged to the mission of Javita.

She was there thrown into one of the caravanserais, called las Casas del Rey. It was the rainy season, and the night was profoundly dark. Forests till then believed to be impenetrable separated the mission of Javita from that of San Fernando, which was twenty-five leagues distant in a straight line. No other route is known than that by the rivers; no man ever attempted to go by land from one village to another. But such difficulties could not deter a mother, separated from her children. The Guahiba was carelessly guarded in the caravanserai. Her arms being wounded, the Indians of Javita had loosened her bonds, unknown to the missionary and the alcaldes. Having succeeded by the help of her teeth in breaking them entirely, she disappeared during the night; and at the fourth sunrise was seen at the mission of San Fernando, hovering around the hut where her children were confined. "What that woman performed," added the missionary, who gave us this sad narrative, "the most robust Indian would not have ventured to undertake!" She traversed the woods at a season when the sky is constantly covered with clouds, and the sun during whole days appears but for a few minutes. Did the course of the waters direct her way? The inundations of the rivers forced her to go far from the banks of the main stream, through the midst of woods where the movement of the water is almost imperceptible. How often must she have been stopped by the thorny lianas, that form a network around the trunks they entwine! How often must she have swum across the rivulets that run into the Atabapo! This unfortunate woman was asked how she had sustained herself during four days. She said that, exhausted with fatigue, she could find no other nourishment than those great black ants called vachacos, which climb the trees in long bands, to suspend on them their resinous nests. We pressed the missionary to tell us whether the Guahiba had peacefully enjoyed the happiness of remaining with her children; and if any repentance had followed this excess of cruelty. He would not satisfy our curiosity; but at our return from the Rio Negro we learned that the Indian mother was again separated from her children, and sent to one of the missions of the Upper Orinoco. There she died, refusing all kind of nourishment, as savages frequently do in great calamities.

Such is the remembrance annexed to this fatal rock, the Piedra de la Madre. In this relation of my travels I feel no desire to dwell on pictures of individual suffering—evils which are frequent wherever there are masters and slaves, civilized Europeans living with people in a state of barbarism, and priests exercising the plenitude of arbitrary power over men ignorant and without defence. In describing the countries through which I passed, I generally confine myself to pointing out what is imperfect, or fatal to humanity, in their civil or religious institutions. If I have dwelt longer on the Rock of the Guahiba, it was to record an affecting instance of maternal tenderness in a race of people so long calumniated; and because I thought some benefit might accrue from publishing a fact, which I had from the monks of San Francisco, and which proves how much the system of the missions calls for the care of the legislator.

Above the mouth of the Guasucavi we entered the Rio Temi, the course of which is from south to north. Had we continued to ascend the Atabapo, we should have turned to east-south-east, going farther from the banks of the Guainia or Rio Negro. The Temi is only eighty or ninety toises broad, but in any other country than Guiana it would be a considerable river. The country exhibits the uniform aspect of forests covering ground perfectly flat. The fine pirijao palm, with its fruit like peaches, and a new species of bache, or mauritia, its trunk bristled with thorns, rise amid smaller trees, the vegetation of which appears to be retarded by the continuance of the inundations. The Mauritia aculeata is called by the Indians juria or cauvaja; its leaves are in the form of a fan, and they bend towards the ground. At the centre of every leaf, no doubt from the effect of some disease of the parenchyma, concentric circles of alternate blue and yellow appear, the yellow prevailing towards the middle. We were singularly struck by this appearance; the leaves, coloured like the peacock's tail, are supported by short and very thick trunks. The thorns are not slender and long like those of the corozo and other thorny palm-trees; but on the contrary, very woody, short, and broad at the base, like the thorns of the Hura crepitans. On the banks of the Atabapo and the Temi, this palm-tree is distributed in groups of twelve or fifteen stems, close together, and looking as if they rose from the same root. These trees resemble in their appearance, form, and scarcity of leaves, the fan-palms and palmettos of the Old World. We remarked that some plants of the juria were entirely destitute of fruit, and others exhibited a considerable quantity; this circumstance seems to indicate a palm-tree of separate sexes.
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Re: Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions

Postby admin » Mon Jun 04, 2018 6:58 am

Part 2 of 2

Wherever the Rio Temi forms coves, the forest is inundated to the extent of more than half a square league. To avoid the sinuosities of the river and shorten the passage, the navigation is here performed in a very extraordinary manner. The Indians made us leave the bed of the river; and we proceeded southward across the forest, through paths (sendas), that is, through open channels of four or five feet broad. The depth of the water seldom exceeds half a fathom. These sendas are formed in the inundated forest like paths on dry ground. The Indians, in going from one mission to another, pass with their boats as much as possible by the same way; but the communications not being frequent, the force of vegetation sometimes produces unexpected obstacles. An Indian, furnished with a machete (a great knife, the blade of which is fourteen inches long), stood at the head of our boat, employed continually in chopping off the branches that crossed each other from the two sides of the channel. In the thickest part of the forest we were astonished by an extraordinary noise. On beating the bushes, a shoal of toninas (fresh-water dolphins) four feet long, surrounded our boat. These animals had concealed themselves beneath the branches of a fromager, or Bombax ceiba. They fled across the forest, throwing out those spouts of compressed air and water which have given them in every language the name of blowers. How singular was this spectacle in an inland spot, three or four hundred leagues from the mouths of the Orinoco and the Amazon! I am aware that the pleuronectes (dabs) of the Atlantic go up the Loire as far as Orleans; but I am, nevertheless, of opinion that the dolphins of the Temi, like those of the Ganges, and like the skate (raia) of the Orinoco, are of a species essentially different from the dolphins and skates of the ocean. In the immense rivers of South America, and the great lakes of North America, nature seems to repeat several pelagic forms. The Nile has no porpoises:* those of the sea go up the Delta no farther than Biana and Metonbis towards Selamoun. (* Those dolphins that enter the mouth of the Nile, did not escape the observation of the ancients. In a bust in syenite, preserved in the museum at Paris, the sculptor has represented them half concealed in the undulatory beard of the god of the river.)

At five in the evening we regained with some difficulty the bed of the river. Our canoe remained fast for some minutes between two trunks of trees; and it was no sooner disengaged than we reached a spot where several paths, or small channels, crossed each other, so that the pilot was puzzled to distinguish the most open path. We navigated through a forest so thick that we could guide ourselves neither by the sun nor by the stars. We were again struck during this day by the want of arborescent ferns in that country; they diminish visibly from the sixth degree of north latitude, while the palm-trees augment prodigiously towards the equator. Fern-trees belong to a climate less hot, and a soil but little mountainous. It is only where there are mountains that these majestic plants descend towards the plains; they seem to avoid perfectly flat grounds, as those through which run the Cassiquiare, the Temi, Inirida, and the Rio Negro. We passed in the night near a rock, called the Piedra de Astor by the missionaries. The ground from the mouth of the Guaviare constantly displays the same geological formation. It is a vast granitic plain, in which from league to league the rock pierces the soil, and forms, not hillocks, but small masses, that resemble pillars or ruined buildings.

On the 1st of May the Indians chose to depart long before sunrise. We were stirring before them, however, because I waited (though vainly) for a star ready to pass the meridian. In those humid regions covered with forests, the nights became more obscure in proportion as we drew nearer to the Rio Negro and the interior of Brazil. We remained in the bed of the river till daybreak, being afraid of losing ourselves among the trees. At sunrise we again entered the inundated forest, to avoid the force of the current. On reaching the junction of the Temi with another little river, the Tuamini, the waters of which are equally black, we proceeded along the latter to the south-west. This direction led us near the mission of Javita, which is founded on the banks of the Tuamini; and at this christian settlement we were to find the aid necessary for transporting our canoe by land to the Rio Negro. We did not arrive at San Antonio de Javita till near eleven in the morning. An accident, unimportant in itself, but which shows the excessive timidity of the little sagoins detained us some time at the mouth of the Tuamini. The noise of the blowers had frightened our monkeys, and one of them fell into the water. Animals of this species, perhaps on account of their extreme meagreness, swim badly; and consequently it was saved with some difficulty.

At Javita we had the pleasure of finding a very intelligent and obliging monk, at whose mission we were forced to remain four or five days, the time required for transporting our boat across the portage of Pimichin. This delay enabled us to visit the surrounding country, as also to relieve ourselves from an annoyance which we had suffered for two days. We felt an extraordinary irritation on the joints of our fingers, and on the backs of our hands. The missionary told us it was caused by the aradores,* (* Literally the ploughers.) which get under the skin. We could distinguish with a lens nothing but streaks, or parallel and whitish furrows. It is the form of these furrows, that has obtained for the insect the name of ploughman. A mulatto woman was sent for, who professed to be thoroughly acquainted with all the little insects that burrow in the human skin; the chego, the nuche, the coya, and the arador; she was the curandera, or surgeon of the place. She promised to extirpate, one by one, the insects which caused this smarting irritation. Having heated at a lamp the point a little bit of hard wood, she dug with it into the furrows that marked the skin. After long examination, she announced with the pedantic gravity peculiar to the mulatto race, that an arador was found. I saw a little round bag, which I suspected to be the egg of an acarus. I was to find relief when the mulatto woman had succeeded in taking out three or four of these aradores. Having the skin of both hands filled with acari, I had not the patience to wait the end of an operation, which had already lasted till late at night. The next day an Indian of Javita cured us radically, and with surprising promptitude. He brought us the branch of a shrub, called uzao, with small leaves like those of cassia, very coriaceous and glossy. He made a cold infusion of the bark of this shrub, which had a bluish colour, and the taste of liquorice. When beaten, it yields a great deal of froth. The irritation of the aradores ceased by using simple lotions of this uzao-water. We could not find this shrub in flower, or bearing fruit; it appears to belong to the family of the leguminous plants, the chemical properties of which are singularly varied. We dreaded so much the sufferings to which we had been exposed, that we constantly kept some branches of the uzao in our boat, till we reached San Carlos. This shrub grows in abundance on the banks of the Pimichin. Why has no remedy been discovered for the irritation produced by the sting of the zancudos, as well as for that occasioned by the aradores or microscopic acari?

In 1755, before the expedition for fixing the boundaries, better known by the name of the expedition of Solano, the whole country between the missions of Javita and San Balthasar was regarded as dependent on Brazil. The Portuguese had advanced from the Rio Negro, by the portage of the Cano Pimichin, as far as the banks of the Temi. An Indian chief of the name of Javita, celebrated for his courage and his spirit of enterprise, was the ally of the Portuguese. He pushed his hostile incursions from the Rio Jupura, or Caqueta, one of the great tributary streams of the Amazon, by the rivers Uaupe and Xie, as far as the black waters of the Temi and the Tuamini, a distance of more than a hundred leagues. He was furnished with letters patent, which authorised him to bring the Indians from the forest, for the conquest of souls. He availed himself amply of this permission; but his incursions had an object which was not altogether spiritual, that of making slaves to sell to the Portuguese. When Solano, the second chief of the expedition of the boundaries, arrived at San Fernando de Atabapo, he had Javita seized, in one of his incursions to the banks of the Temi. He treated him with gentleness, and succeeded in gaining him over to the interests of the Spanish government by promises that were not fulfilled. The Portuguese, who had already formed some stable settlements in these countries, were driven back as far as the lower part of the Rio Negro; and the mission of San Antonio, of which the more usual name is Javita, so called after its Indian founder, was removed farther north of the sources of the Tuamini, to the spot where it is now established. This captain, Javita, was still living, at an advanced age, when we proceeded to the Rio Negro. He was an Indian of great vigour of mind and body. He spoke Spanish with facility, and preserved a certain influence over the neighbouring nations. As he attended us in all our herborizations, we obtained from his own mouth information so much the more useful, as the missionaries have great confidence in his veracity. He assured us that in his youth he had seen almost all the Indian tribes that inhabit the vast regions between the Upper Orinoco, the Rio Negro, the Inirida, and the Jupura, eat human flesh. The Daricavanas, the Puchirinavis, and the Manitivitanos, appeared to him to be the greatest cannibals among them. He believes that this abominable practice is with them the effect of a system of vengeance; they eat only enemies who are made prisoners in battle. The instances where, by a refinement of cruelty, the Indian eats his nearest relations, his wife, or an unfaithful mistress, are extremely rare. The strange custom of the Scythians and Massagetes, the Capanaguas of the Rio Ucayale, and the ancient inhabitants of the West Indian Islands, of honouring the dead by eating a part of their remains, is unknown on the banks of the Orinoco. In both continents this trait of manners belongs only to nations that hold in horror the flesh of a prisoner. The Indian of Hayti (Saint Domingo) would think himself wanting in regard to the memory of a relation, if he did not throw into his drink a small portion of the body of the deceased, after having dried it like one of the mummies of the Guanches, and reduced it to powder. This gives us just occasion to repeat with an eastern poet, "of all animals man is the most fantastic in his manners, and the most disorderly in his propensities."

The climate of the mission of San Antonio de Javita is extremely rainy. When you have passed the latitude of three degrees north, and approach the equator, you have seldom an opportunity of observing the sun or the stars. It rains almost the whole year, and the sky is constantly cloudy. As the breeze is not felt in these immense forests of Guiana, and the refluent polar currents do not penetrate them, the column of air which reposes on this wooded zone is not renewed by dryer strata. It is saturated with vapours which are condensed into equatorial rains. The missionary assured us that it often rains here four or five months without cessation.

The temperature of Javita is cooler than that of Maypures, but considerably hotter than that of the Guainia or Rio Negro. The centigrade thermometer kept up in the day to twenty-six or twenty-seven degrees; and in the night to twenty-one degrees.

From the 30th of April to the 11th of May, I had not been able to see any star in the meridian so as to determine the latitude of places. I watched whole nights in order to make use of the method of double altitudes; but all my efforts were useless. The fogs of the north of Europe are not more constant than those of the equatorial regions of Guiana. On the 4th of May, I saw the sun for some minutes; and found by the chronometer and the horary angles the longitude of Javita to be 70 degrees 22 minutes, or 1 degree 15 minutes farther west than the longitude of the junction of the Apure with the Orinoco. This result is interesting for laying down on our maps the unknown country lying between the Xie and the sources of the Issana, situated on the same meridian with the mission of Javita.

The Indians of Javita, whose number amounts to one hundred and sixty, now belong for the most part to the nations of the Poimisanos, the Echinavis, and the Paraganis. They are employed in the construction of boats, formed of the trunks of sassafras, a large species of laurel, hollowed by means of fire and the hatchet. These trees are more than one hundred feet high; the wood is yellow, resinous, almost incorruptible in water, and has a very agreeable smell. We saw them at San Fernando, at Javita, and more particularly at Esmeralda, where most of the canoes of the Orinoco are constructed, because the adjacent forests furnish the largest trunks of sassafras.

The forest between Javita and the Cano Pimichin, contains an immense quantity of gigantic trees, ocoteas, and laurels, the Amasonia arborea,* (* This is a new species of the genus taligalea of Aublet. On the same spot grow the Bignonia magnoliaefolia, B. jasminifolia, Solanum topiro, Justicia pectoralis, Faramea cymosa, Piper javitense, Scleria hirtella, Echites javitensis, Lindsea javitensis, and that curious plant of the family of the verbenaceae, which I have dedicated to the illustrious Leopold von Buch, in whose early labours I participated.) the Retiniphyllum secundiflorum, the curvana, the jacio, the iacifate, of which the wood is red like the brazilletto, the guamufate, with its fine leaves of calophyllum from seven to eight inches long, the Amyris carana, and the mani. All these trees (with the exception of our new genus Retiniphyllum) were more than one hundred or one hundred and ten feet high. As their trunks throw out branches only toward the summit, we had some trouble in procuring both leaves and flowers. The latter were frequently strewed upon the ground at the foot of the trees; but, the plants of different families being grouped together in these forests, and every tree being covered with lianas, we could not, with any degree of confidence, rely on the authority of the natives, when they assured us that a flower belonged to such or such a tree. Amid these riches of nature heborizations caused us more chagrin than satisfaction. What we could gather appeared to us of little interest, compared to what we could not reach. It rained unceasingly during several months, and M. Bonpland lost the greater part of the specimens which he had been compelled to dry by artificial heat. Our Indians distinguished the leaves better than the corollae or the fruit. Occupied in seeking timber for canoes, they are inattentive to flowers. "All those great trees bear neither flowers nor fruits," they repeated unceasingly. Like the botanists of antiquity, they denied what they had not taken the trouble to observe. They were tired with our questions, and exhausted our patience in return.

We have already mentioned that the same chemical properties being sometimes found in the same organs of different families of plants, these families supply each other's places in various climates. Several species of palms* furnish the inhabitants of equinoctial America and Africa with the oil which we derive from the olive. (* In Africa, the elais or maba; in America the cocoa-tree. In the cocoa-tree it is the perisperm; and in the elais (as in the olive, and the oleineae in general) it is the sarcocarp, or the pulp of the pericarp, that yields oil. This difference, observed in the same family, appears to me very remarkable, though it is in no way contradictory to the results obtained by De Candolle in his ingenious researches on the chemical properties of plants. If our Alfonsia oleifera belong to the genus Elais (as Brown, with great reason believes), it follows, that in the same genus the oil is found in the sarcocarp and in the perisperm.) What the coniferae are to the temperate zone, the terebinthaceae and the guttiferae are to the torrid. In the forests of those burning climates, (where there is neither pine, thuya, taxodium, nor even a podocarpus,) resins, balsams, and aromatic gums, are furnished by the maronobea, the icica, and the amyris. The collecting of these gummy and resinous substances is a trade in the village of Javita. The most celebrated resin bears the name of mani; and of this we saw masses of several hundred-weight, resembling colophony and mastic. The tree called mani by the Paraginis, which M. Bonpland believes to be the Moronobaea coccinea, furnishes but a small quantity of the substance employed in the trade with Angostura. The greatest part comes from the mararo or caragna, which is an amyris. It is remarkable enough, that the name mani, which Aublet heard among the Galibis* of Cayenne, was again heard by us at Javita, three hundred leagues distant from French Guiana. (* The Galibis or Caribis (the r has been changed into l, as often happens) are of the great stock of the Carib nations. The products useful in commerce and in domestic life have received the same denomination in every part of America which this warlike and commercial people have overrun.) The moronobaea or symphonia of Javita yields a yellow resin; the caragna, a resin strongly odoriferous, and white as snow; the latter becomes yellow where it is adherent to the internal part of old bark.

We went every day to see how our canoe advanced on the portages. Twenty-three Indians were employed in dragging it by land, placing branches of trees to serve as rollers. In this manner a small boat proceeds in a day or a day and a half, from the waters of the Tuamini to those of the Cano Pimichin, which flow into the Rio Negro. Our canoe being very large, and having to pass the cataracts a second time, it was necessary to avoid with particular care any friction on the bottom; consequently the passage occupied more than four days. It is only since 1795 that a road has been traced through the forest. By substituting a canal for this portage, as I proposed to the ministry of king Charles IV, the communication between the Rio Negro and Angostura, between the Spanish Orinoco and the Portuguese possessions on the Amazon, would be singularly facilitated.

In this forest we at length obtained precise information respecting the pretended fossil caoutchouc, called dapicho by the Indians. The old chief Javita led us to the brink of a rivulet which runs into the Tuamini; and showed us that, after digging two or three feet deep, in a marshy soil, this substance was found between the roots of two trees known by the name of the jacio and the curvana. The first is the hevea of Aublet, or siphonia of the modern botanists, known to furnish the caoutchouc of commerce in Cayenne and Grand Para; the second has pinnate leaves, and its juice is milky, but very thin, and almost destitute of viscosity. The dapicho appears to be the result of an extravasation of the sap from the roots. This extravasation takes place more especially when the trees have attained a great age, and the interior of the trunk begins to decay. The bark and alburnum crack; and thus is effected naturally, what the art of man performs for the purpose of collecting the milky juices of the hevea, the castilloa, and the caoutchouc fig-tree. Aublet relates, that the Galibis and the Garipons of Cayenne begin by making a deep incision at the foot of the trunk, so as to penetrate into the wood; soon after they join with this horizontal notch others both perpendicular and oblique, reaching from the top of the trunk nearly to the roots. All these incisions conduct the milky juice towards one point, where the vase of clay is placed, in which the caoutchouc is to be deposited. We saw the Indians of Carichana operate nearly in the same manner.

If, as I suppose, the accumulation and overflowing of the milk in the jacio and the curvana be a pathological phenomenon, it must sometimes take place at the extremity of the longest roots, for we found masses of dapicho two feet in diameter and four inches thick, eight feet distant from the trunks. Sometimes the Indians dig in vain at the foot of dead trees; at other times the dapicho is found beneath the hevea or jacio still green. The substance is white, corky, fragile, and resembles by its laminated structure and undulating edge, the Boletus ignarius. The dapicho perhaps takes a long time to form; it is probably a juice thickened by a particular disposition of the vegetable organs, diffused and coagulated in a humid soil secluded from the contact of light; it is caoutchouc in a particular state, I may almost say an etiolated caoutchouc. The humidity of the soil seems to account for the undulating form of the edges of the dapicho, and its division into layers.

I often observed in Peru, that on pouring slowly the milky juice of the hevea, or the sap of the carica, into a large quantity of water, the coagulum forms undulating outlines. The dapicho is certainly not peculiar to the forest that extends from Javita to Pimichin, although that is the only spot where it has hitherto been found. I have no doubt, that on digging in French Guiana beneath the roots and the old trunks of the hevea, those enormous masses of corky caoutchouc,* which I have just described, would from time to time be found. (* Thus, at five or six inches depth, between the roots of the Hymenea courbaril, masses of the resin anime (erroneously called copal) are discovered, and are sometimes mistaken for amber in inland places. This phenomenon seems to throw some light on the origin of those large masses of amber which are picked up from time to time on the coast of Prussia.) As it is observed in Europe, that at the fall of the leaf the sap is conveyed towards the root, it would be curious to examine whether, within the tropics, the milky juices of the urticeae, the euphorbiaceae, and the apocyneae, descend also at certain seasons. Notwithstanding a great equality of temperature, the trees of the torrid zone follow a cycle of vegetation; they undergo changes periodically returning. The existence of the dapicho is more interesting to physiology than to vegetable chemistry. A yellowish-white caoutchouc is now to be found in the shops, which may be easily distinguished from the dapicho, because it is neither dry like cork, nor friable, but extremely elastic, glossy, and soapy. I lately saw considerable quantities of it in London. This caoutchouc, white, and greasy to the touch, is prepared in the East Indies. It exhales that animal and fetid smell which I have attributed in another place to a mixture of caseum and albumen.* (* The pellicles deposited by the milk of hevea, in contact with the atmospheric oxygen, become brown on exposure to the sun. If the dapicho grow black as it is softened before the fire, it is owing to a slight combustion, to a change in the proportion of its elements. I am surprised that some chemists consider the black caoutchouc of commerce, as being mixed with soot, blackened by the smoke to which it has been exposed.) When we reflect on the immense variety of plants in the equinoctial regions that are capable of furnishing caoutchouc, it is to be regretted that this substance, so eminently useful, is not found among us at a lower price. Without cultivating trees with a milky sap, a sufficient quantity of caoutchouc might be collected in the missions of the Orinoco alone for the consumption of civilized Europe.* (* We saw in Guiana, besides the jacio and the curvana, two other trees that yield caoutchouc in abundance; on the banks of the Atabapo the guamaqui with jatropha leaves, and at Maypures the cime.) In the kingdom of New Grenada some successful attempts have been made to make boots and shoes of this substance without a seam. Among the American nations, the Omaguas of the Amazon best understand how to manufacture caoutchouc.

Four days had passed, and our canoe had not yet arrived at the landing-place of the Rio Pimichin. "You want for nothing in my mission," said Father Cereso; "you have plantains and fish; at night you are not stung by mosquitos; and the longer you stay, the better chance you will have of seeing the stars of my country. If your boat be destroyed in the portage, we will give you another; and I shall have had the satisfaction of passing some weeks con gente blanca y de razon." ("With white and rational people." European self-love usually opposes the gente de razon to the gente parda, or coloured people.) Notwithstanding our impatience, we listened with interest to the information given us by the worthy missionary. It confirmed all we had already heard of the moral state of the natives of those countries. They live, distributed in hordes of forty or fifty, under a family government; and they recognise a common chief (apoto, sibierene) only at times when they make war against their neighbours. The mistrust of these hordes towards one another is increased by the circumstance that those who live in the nearest neighbourhood speak languages altogether different. In the open plains, in the countries with savannahs, the tribes are fond of choosing their habitations from an affinity of origin, and a resemblance of manners and idioms. On the table-land of Tartary, as in North America, great families of nations have been seen, formed into several columns, extending their migrations across countries thinly-wooded, and easily traversed. Such were the journeys of the Toltec and Aztec race in the high plains of Mexico, from the sixth to the eleventh century of our era; such probably was also the movement of nations by which the petty tribes of Canada were grouped together. As the immense country between the equator and the eighth degree of north latitude forms one continuous forest, the hordes were there dispersed by following the branchings of the rivers, and the nature of the land compelled them to become more or less agriculturists. Such is the labyrinth of these rivers, that families settled themselves without knowing what race of men lived nearest the spot. In Spanish Guiana a mountain, or a forest half a league broad, sometimes separates hordes who could not meet in less than two days by navigating rivers. In open countries, or in a state of advanced civilization, communication by rivers contributes powerfully to generalize languages, manners, and political institutions; but in the impenetrable forests of the torrid zone, as in the first rude condition of our species, rivers increase the dismemberment of great nations, favour the transition of dialects into languages that appear to us radically distinct, and keep up national hatred and mistrust. Between the banks of the Caura and the Padamo everything bears the stamp of disunion and weakness. Men avoid, because they do not understand, each other; they mutually hate, because they mutually fear.

When we examine attentively this wild part of America, we fancy ourselves transported to those primitive times when the earth was peopled by degrees, and we seem to be present at the birth of human societies. In the old world we see that pastoral life has prepared the hunting nations for agriculture. In the New World we seek in vain these progressive developments of civilization, these intervals of repose, these stages in the life of nations. The luxury of vegetation embarrasses the Indians in the chase; and in their rivers, resembling arms of the sea, the depth of the waters prevents fishing during whole months. Those species of ruminating animals, that constitute the wealth of the nations of the Old World, are wanting in the New. The bison and the musk-ox have never been reduced to a domestic state; the breeding of llamas and guanacos has not created the habits of pastoral life. In the temperate zone, on the banks of the Missouri, as well as on the tableland of New Mexico, the American is a hunter; but in the torrid zone, in the forests of Guiana, he cultivates cassava, plantains, and sometimes maize. Such is the admirable fertility of nature, that the field of the native is a little spot of land, to clear which requires only setting fire to the brambles; and putting a few seeds or slips into the ground is all the husbandry it demands. If we go back in thought to the most remote ages, in these thick forests we must always figure to ourselves nations deriving the greater part of their nourishment from the earth; but, as this earth produces abundance in a small space, and almost without toil, we may also imagine these nations often changing their dwellings along the banks of the same river. Even now the native of the Orinoco travels with his seeds; and transports his farm (conuco) as the Arab transports his tent, and changes his pasturage. The number of cultivated plants found wild amid the woods, proves the nomad habits of an agricultural people. Can we be surprised, that by these habits they lose almost all the advantages that result in the temperate zone from stationary culture, from the growth of corn, which requires extensive lands and the most assiduous labour?

The nations of the Upper Orinoco, the Atabapo, and the Inirida, like the ancient Germans and the Persians, have no other worship than that of the powers of nature. They call the good principle Cachimana; it is the Manitou, the Great Spirit, that regulates the seasons, and favours the harvests. Along with Cachimana there is an evil principle, Iolokiamo, less powerful, but more artful, and in particular more active. The Indians of the forest, when they occasionally visit the missions, conceive with difficulty the idea of a temple or an image. "These good people," said the missionary, "like only processions in the open air. When I last celebrated the festival of San Antonio, the patron of my village, the Indians of Inirida were present at mass. 'Your God,' said they to me, 'keeps himself shut up in a house, as if he were old and infirm; ours is in the forest, in the fields, and on the mountains of Sipapu, whence the rains come.'" Among the more numerous, and on this account less barbarous tribes, religious societies of a singular kind are formed. Some old Indians pretend to be better instructed than others on points regarding divinity; and to them is confided the famous botuto, of which I have spoken, and which is sounded under the palm-trees that they may bear abundance of fruit. On the banks of the Orinoco there exists no idol, as among all the nations who have remained faithful to the first worship of nature, but the botuto, the sacred trumpet, is an object of veneration. To be initiated into the mysteries of the botuto, it is requisite to be of pure morals, and to have lived single. The initiated are subjected to flagellations, fastings, and other painful exercises. There are but a small number of these sacred trumpets. The most anciently celebrated is that upon a hill near the confluence of the Tomo and the Guainia. It is pretended, that it is heard at once on the banks of the Tuamini, and at the mission of San Miguel de Davipe, a distance of ten leagues. Father Cereso assured us, that the Indians speak of the botuto of Tomo as an object of worship common to many surrounding tribes. Fruit and intoxicating liquors are placed beside the sacred trumpet. Sometimes the Great Spirit himself makes the botuto resound; sometimes he is content to manifest his will through him to whom the keeping of the instrument is entrusted. These juggleries being very ancient (from the fathers of our fathers, say the Indians), we must not be surprised that some unbelievers are already to be found; but they express their disbelief of the mysteries of the botuto only in whispers. Women are not permitted to see this marvellous instrument; and are excluded from all the ceremonies of this worship. If a woman have the misfortune to see the trumpet, she is put to death without mercy. The missionary related to us, that in 1798 he was happy enough to save a young girl, whom a jealous and vindictive lover accused of having followed, from a motive of curiosity, the Indians who sounded the botuto in the plantations. "They would not have murdered her publicly," said father Cesero, "but how was she to be protected from the fanaticism of the natives, in a country where it is so easy to give poison? The young girl told me of her fears, and I sent her to one of the missions of the Lower Orinoco." If the people of Guiana had remained masters of that vast country; if, without having been impeded by Christian settlements, they could follow freely the development of their barbarous institutions; the worship of the botuto would no doubt become of some political importance. That mysterious society of the initiated, those guardians of the sacred trumpet, would be transformed into a ruling caste of priests, and the oracle of Tomo would gradually form a link between the bordering nations.

In the evening of the 4th of May we were informed, that an Indian, who had assisted in dragging our bark over the portage of Pimichin, had been stung by a viper. He was a tall strong man, and was brought to the mission in a very alarming state. He had dropped down senseless; and nausea, vertigo, and congestions in the head, had succeeded the fainting. The liana called vejeco de guaco,* which M. Mutis has rendered so celebrated, and which is the most certain remedy for the bite of venomous serpents, is yet unknown in these countries. (* This is a mikania, which was confounded for some time in Europe with the ayapana. De Candolle thinks that the guaco may be the Eupatorium satureiaefolium of Lamarck; but this Eupatorium differs by its lineary leaves, while the Mikania guaco has triangular, oval, and very large leaves.) A number of Indians hastened to the hut of the sick man, and he was cured by an infusion of raiz de mato. We cannot indicate with certainty what plant furnishes this antidote; but I am inclined to think, that the raiz de mato is an apocynea, perhaps the Cerbera thevetia, called by the inhabitants of Cumana lingua de mato or contra-culebra, and which they also use against the bite of serpents. A genus nearly allied to the cerbera* (* Ophioxylon serpentinum.) is employed in India for the same purpose. It is common enough to find in the same family of plants vegetable poisons, and antidotes against the venom of reptiles. Many tonics and narcotics are antidotes more or less active; and we find these in families very different* from each other, in the aristolochiae, the apocyneae, the gentianae, the polygalae, the solaneae, the compositae, the malvaceae, the drymyrhizeae, and, which is still more surprising, even in the palm-trees. (* I shall mention as examples of these nine families; Aristolochia anguicida, Cerbera thevetia, Ophoiorhiza mungos, Polygala senega, Nicotiana tabacum, (One of the remedies most used in Spanish America). Mikanua guaco, Hibiscus abelmoschus (the seeds of which are very active), Lanpujum rumphii, and Kunthia montana (Cana de la Vibora).)

In the hut of the Indian who had been so dangerously bitten by the viper, we found balls two or three inches in diameter, of an earthy and impure salt called chivi, which is prepared with great care by the natives. At Maypures a conferva is burnt, which is left by the Orinoco on the neighbouring rocks, when, after high swellings, it again enters its bed. At Javita a salt is fabricated by the incineration of the spadix and fruit of the palm-tree seje or chimu. This fine palm-tree, which abounds on the banks of the Auvana, near the cataract of Guarinumo, and between Javita and the Cano Pimichin, appears to be a new species of cocoa-tree. It may be recollected, that the fluid contained in the fruit of the common cocoa-tree is often saline, even when the tree grows far from the sea shore. At Madagascar salt is extracted from the sap of a palm-tree called ciro. Besides the spadix and the fruit of the seje palm, the Indians of Javita lixiviate also the ashes of the famous liana called cupana, which is a new species of the genus paullinia, consequently a very different plant from the cupania of Linnaeus. I may here mention, that a missionary seldom travels without being provided with some prepared seeds of the cupana. This preparation requires great care. The Indians scrape the seeds, mix them with flour of cassava, envelope the mass in plantain leaves, and set it to ferment in water, till it acquires a saffron-yellow colour. This yellow paste dried in the sun, and diluted in water, is taken in the morning as a kind of tea. The beverage is bitter and stomachic, but it appeared to me to have a very disagreeable taste.

On the banks of the Niger, and in a great part of the interior of Africa, where salt is extremely rare, it is said of a rich man, "he is so fortunate as to eat salt at his meals." This good fortune is not too common in the interior of Guiana. The whites only, particularly the soldiers of the little fort of San Carlos, know how to procure pure salt, either from the coast of Caracas, or from Chita* by the Rio Meta. (* North of Morocote, at the eastern declivity of the Cordillera of New Grenada. The salt of the coasts, which the Indians call yuquira, costs two piastres the almuda at San Carlos.) Here, as throughout America, the Indians eat little meat, and consume scarcely any salt. The chivi of Javita is a mixture of muriate of potash and of soda, of caustic lime, and of several other earthy salts. The Indians dissolve a few particles in water, fill with this solution a leaf of heliconia folded in a conical form, and let drop a little, as from the extremity of a filter, on their food.

On the 5th of May we set off, to follow on foot our canoe, which had at length arrived, by the portage, at the Cano Pimichin. We had to ford a great number of streams; and these passages require some caution on account of the vipers with which the marshes abound. The Indians pointed out to us on the moist clay the traces of the little black bears so common on the banks of the Temi. They differ at least in size from the Ursus americanus. The missionaries call them osso carnicero, to distinguish them from the osso palmero or tamanoir (Myrmecophaga jubata), and from the osso hormigero, or anteater (tamandua). The flesh of these animals is good to eat; the first two defend themselves by rising on their hind feet. The tamanoir of Buffon is called uaraca by the Indians; it is irascible and courageous, which is extraordinary in an animal without teeth. We found, as we advanced, some vistas in the forest, which appeared to us the richer, as it became more accessible. We here gathered some new species of coffee (the American tribe, with flowers in panicles, forms probably a particular genus); the Galega piscatorum, of which the Indians make use, as they do of jacquinia, and of a composite plant of the Rio Temi, as a kind of barbasco, to intoxicate fish; and finally, the liana, known in those countries by the name of vejuco de mavacure, which yields the famous curare poison. It is neither a phyllanthus, nor a coriaria, as M. Willdenouw conjectured, but, as M. Kunth's researches show, very probably a strychnos. We shall have occasion, farther on, to speak of this venomous substance, which is an important object of trade among the savages.

The trees of the forest of Pimichin have the gigantic height of from eighty to a hundred and twenty feet. In these burning climates the laurineae and amyris* (* The great white and red cedars of these countries are not the Cedrela odorata, but the Amyris altissima, which is an icica of Aublet.) furnish that fine timber for building, which, on the north-west coast of America, on mountains where the thermometer falls in winter to 20 degrees centigrade below zero, we find in the family of the coniferae. Such, in every zone, and in all the families of American plants, is the prodigious force of vegetation, that, in the latitude of fifty-seven degrees north, on the same isothermal line with St. Petersburgh and the Orkneys, the Pinus canadensis displays trunks one hundred and fifty feet high, and six feet in diameter.* (* Langsdorf informs us that the inhabitants of Norfolk Sound make boats of a single trunk, fifty feet long, four feet and a half broad, and three high at the sides. They contain thirty persons. These boats remind us of the canoes of the Rio Chagres in the isthmus of Panama, in the torrid zone. The Populus balsamifera also attains an immense height, on the mountains that border Norfolk Sound.) Towards night we arrived at a small farm, in the puerto or landing place of Pimichin. We were shown a cross near the road, which marked the spot where a poor capuchin missionary had been killed by wasps. I state this on the authority of the monks of Javita and the Indians. They talk much in these countries of wasps and venomous ants, but we saw neither one nor the other of these insects. It is well known that in the torrid zone slight stings often cause fits of fever almost as violent as those that with us accompany severe organic injuries. The death of this poor monk was probably the effect of fatigue and damp, rather than of the venom contained in the stings of wasps, which the Indians dread extremely. We must not confound the wasps of Javita with the melipones bees, called by the Spaniards angelitos (little angels) which covered our faces and hands on the summit of the Silla de Caracas.

The landing place of Pimichin is surrounded by a small plantation of cacao-trees; they are very vigorous, and here, as on the banks of the Atabapo and the Guainia, they are loaded with flowers and fruits at all seasons. They begin to bear from the fourth year; on the coast of Caracas they do not bear till the sixth or eighth year. The soil of these countries is sandy, wherever it is not marshy; but the light lands of the Tuamini and Pimichin are extremely productive.* (* At Javita, an extent of fifty feet square, planted with Jatropha manihot (yucca) yields in two years, in the worst soil, a harvest of six tortas of cassava: the same extent on a middling soil yields in fourteen months a produce of nine tortas. In an excellent soil, around clumps of mauritia, there is every year from fifty feet square a produce of thirteen or fourteen tortas. A torta weighs three quarters of a pound, and three tortas cost generally in the province of Caracas one silver rial, or one-eighth of a piastre. These statements appear to me to be of some importance, when we wish to compare the nutritive matter which man can obtain from the same extent of soil, by covering it, in different climates, with bread-trees, plantains, jatropha, maize, potatoes, rice, and corn. The tardiness of the harvest of jatropha has, I believe, a beneficial influence on the manners of the natives, by fixing them to the soil, and compelling them to sojourn long on the same spot.) Around the conucos of Pimichin grows, in its wild state, the igua, a tree resembling the Caryocar nuciferum which is cultivated in Dutch and French Guiana, and which, with the almendron of Mariquita (Caryocar amygdaliferum), the juvia of the Esmeralda (Bertholletia excelsa), and the Geoffroea of the Amazon, yields the finest almonds of all South America. No commercial advantage is here made of the igua; but I saw vessels arrive on the coast of Terra Firma, that came from Demerara laden with the fruit of the Caryocar tomentosum, which is the Pekea tuberculosa of Aublet. These trees reach a hundred feet in height, and present, by the beauty of their corolla, and the multitude of their stamens, a magnificent appearance. I should weary the reader by continuing the enumeration of the vegetable wonders which these vast forests contain. Their variety depends on the coexistence of such a great number of families in a small space of ground, on the stimulating power of light and heat, and on the perfect elaboration of the juices that circulate in these gigantic plants.

We passed the night in a hut lately abandoned by an Indian family, who had left behind them their fishing-tackle, pottery, nets made of the petioles of palm-trees; in short, all that composes the household furniture of that careless race of men, little attached to property. A great store of mani (a mixture of the resin of the moronoboea and the Amyris carana) was accumulated round the house. This is used by the Indians here, as at Cayenne, to pitch their canoes, and fix the bony spines of the ray at the points of their arrows. We found in the same place jars filled with a vegetable milk, which serves as a varnish, and is celebrated in the missions by the name of leche para pintar (milk for painting). They coat with this viscous juice those articles of furniture to which they wish to give a fine white colour. It thickens by the contact of the air, without growing yellow, and it appears singularly glossy. We have already mentioned that the caoutchouc is the oily part, the butter of all vegetable milk. It is, no doubt, a particular modification of caoutchouc that forms this coagulum, this white and glossy skin, that seems as if covered with copal varnish. If different colours could be given to this milky varnish, a very expeditious method would be found of painting and varnishing our carriages by one process. The more we study vegetable chemistry in the torrid zone, the more we shall discover, in remote spots, and half-prepared in the organs of plants, products which we believe belong only to the animal kingdom, or which we obtain by processes which are often tedious and difficult. Already we have found the wax that coats the palm-tree of the Andes of Quindiu, the silk of the palm-tree of Mocoa, the nourishing milk of the palo de vaca, the butter-tree of Africa, and the caseous substances obtained from the almost animalized sap of the Carica papaya. These discoveries will be multiplied, when, as the political state of the world seems now to indicate, European civilization shall flow in a great measure toward the equinoctial regions of the New Continent.

The marshy tract between Javita and the embarcadero of Pimichin is infested with great numbers of vipers. Before we took possession of the deserted hut, the Indians killed two great mapanare serpents.* (* This name is given in the Spanish colonies to very different species. The Coluber mapanare of the province of Caracas has one hundred and forty-two ventral plates, and thirty-eight double caudal scales. The Coluber mapanare of the Rio Magdalena has two hundred and eight ventral plates, and sixty-four double caudal scales.) These grow to four or five feet long. They appeared to me to be the same species as those I saw in the Rio Magdalena. This serpent is a beautiful animal, but extremely venomous, white on the belly, and spotted with brown and red on the back. As the inside of the hut was filled with grass, and we were lying on the ground, there being no means of suspending our hammocks, we were not without inquietude during the night. In the morning a large viper was found on lifting the jaguar-skin upon which one of our domestics had slept. The Indians say that these reptiles, slow in their movements when they are not pursued, creep near a man because they are fond of heat. In fact, on the banks of the Magdalena a serpent entered the bed of one of our fellow-travellers, and remained there a part of the night, without injuring him. Without wishing to take up the defence of vipers and rattlesnakes, I believe it may be affirmed that, if these venomous animals had such a disposition for offence as is supposed, the human species would certainly not have withstood their numbers in some parts of America; for instance, on the banks of the Orinoco and the humid mountains of Choco.

We embarked on the 8th of May at sunrise, after having carefully examined the bottom of our canoe. It had become thinner, but had received no crack in the portage. We reckoned that it would still bear the voyage of three hundred leagues, which we had yet to perform, in going down the Rio Negro, ascending the Cassiquiare, and redescending the Orinoco as far as Angostura. The Pimichin, which is called a rivulet (cano) is tolerably broad; but small trees that love the water narrow the bed so much that there remains open a channel of only fifteen or twenty toises. Next to the Rio Chagres this river is one of the most celebrated in America for the number of its windings: it is said to have eighty-five, which greatly lengthen it. They often form right angles, and occur every two or three leagues. To determine the difference of longitude between the landing-place and the point where we were to enter the Rio Negro, I took by the compass the course of the Cano Pimichin, and noted the time during which we followed the same direction. The velocity of the current was only 2.4 feet in a second; but our canoe made by rowing 4.6 feet. The embarcadero of the Pimichin appeared to me to be eleven thousand toises west of its mouth, and 0 degrees 2 minutes west of the mission of Javita. This Cano is navigable during the whole year, and has but one raudal, which is somewhat difficult to go up; its banks are low, but rocky. After having followed the windings of the Pimichin for four hours and a half we at length entered the Rio Negro.

The morning was cool and beautiful. We had now been confined thirty-six days in a narrow boat, so unsteady that it would have been overset by any person rising imprudently from his seat, without warning the rowers. We had suffered severely from the sting of insects, but we had withstood the insalubrity of the climate; we had passed without accident the great number of waterfalls and bars, which impede the navigation of the rivers, and often render it more dangerous than long voyages by sea. After all we had endured, it may be conceived that we felt no little satisfaction in having reached the tributary streams of the Amazon, having passed the isthmus that separates two great systems of rivers, and in being sure of having fulfilled the most important object of our journey, namely, to determine astronomically the course of that arm of the Orinoco which falls into the Rio Negro, and of which the existence has been alternately proved and denied during half a century. In proportion as we draw near to an object we have long had in view, its interest seems to augment. The uninhabited banks of the Cassiquiare, covered with forests, without memorials of times past, then occupied my imagination, as do now the banks of the Euphrates, or the Oxus, celebrated in the annals of civilized nations. In that interior part of the New Continent one may almost accustom oneself to regard men as not being essential to the order of nature. The earth is loaded with plants, and nothing impedes their free development. An immense layer of mould manifests the uninterrupted action of organic powers. Crocodiles and boas are masters of the river; the jaguar, the peccary, the dante, and the monkeys traverse the forest without fear and without danger; there they dwell as in an ancient inheritance. This aspect of animated nature, in which man is nothing, has something in it strange and sad. To this we reconcile ourselves with difficulty on the ocean, and amid the sands of Africa; though in scenes where nothing recalls to mind our fields, our woods, and our streams, we are less astonished at the vast solitude through which we pass. Here, in a fertile country, adorned with eternal verdure, we seek in vain the traces of the power of man; we seem to be transported into a world different from that which gave us birth. These impressions are the more powerful in proportion as they are of long duration. A soldier, who had spent his whole life in the missions of the Upper Orinoco, slept with us on the bank of the river. He was an intelligent man, who, during a calm and serene night, pressed me with questions on the magnitude of the stars, on the inhabitants of the moon, on a thousand subjects of which I was as ignorant as himself. Being unable by my answers to satisfy his curiosity, he said to me in a firm tone of the most positive conviction: "with respect to men, I believe there are no more up there than you would have found if you had gone by land from Javita to Cassiquiare. I think I see in the stars, as here, a plain covered with grass, and a forest (mucho monte) traversed by a river." In citing these words I paint the impression produced by the monotonous aspect of those solitary regions. May this monotony not be found to extend to the journal of our navigation, and weary the reader accustomed to the description of the scenes and historical memorials of the old continent!
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Re: Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions

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Part 1 of 3

CHAPTER 2.23. THE RIO NEGRO. BOUNDARIES OF BRAZIL. THE CASSIQUIARE. BIFURCATION OF THE ORINOCO.

The Rio Negro, compared to the Amazon, the Rio de la Plata, or the Orinoco, is but a river of the second order. Its possession has been for ages of great political importance to the Spanish Government, because it is capable of furnishing a rival power, Portugal, with an easy passage into the missions of Guiana, and thereby disturbing the Capitania general of Caracas in its southern limits. Three hundred years have been spent in vain territorial disputes. According to the difference of times, and the degree of civilization among the natives, resource has been had sometimes to the authority of the Pope, and sometimes the support of astronomy; and the disputants being generally more interested in prolonging than in terminating the struggle, the nautical sciences and the geography of the New Continent, have alone gained by this interminable litigation. When the affairs of Paraguay, and the possession of the colony of Del Sacramento, became of great importance to the courts of Madrid and Lisbon, commissioners of the boundaries were sent to the Orinoco, the Amazon, and the Rio Plata.

The little that was known, up to the end of the last century, of the astronomical geography of the interior of the New Continent, was owing to these estimable and laborious men, the French and Spanish academicians, who measured a meridian line at Quito, and to officers who went from Valparaiso to Buenos Ayres to join the expedition of Malaspina. Those persons who know the inaccuracy of the maps of South America, and have seen those uncultivated lands between the Jupura and the Rio Negro, the Madeira and the Ucayale, the Rio Branco and the coasts of Cayenne, which up to our own days have been gravely disputed in Europe, can be not a little surprised at the perseverance with which the possession of a few square leagues is litigated. These disputed grounds are generally separated from the cultivated part of the colonies by deserts, the extent of which is unknown. In the celebrated conferences of Puente de Caya the question was agitated, whether, in fixing the line of demarcation three hundred and seventy Spanish leagues to the west of the Cape Verde Islands, the pope meant that the first meridian should be reckoned from the centre of the island of St. Nicholas, or (as the court of Portugal asserted) from the western extremity of the little island of St. Antonio. In the year 1754, the time of the expedition of Iturriaga and Solano, negociations were entered into respecting the possession of the then desert banks of the Tuamini, and of a marshy tract which we crossed in one evening going from Javita to Cano Pimichin. The Spanish commissioners very recently would have placed the divisional line at the point where the Apoporis falls into the Jupura, while the Portuguese astronomers carried it back as far as Salto Grande.

The Rio Negro and the Jupuro are two tributary streams of the Amazon, and may be compared in length to the Danube. The upper parts belong to the Spaniards, while the lower are occupied by the Portuguese. The Christian settlements are very numerous from Mocoa to the mouth of the Caguan; while on the Lower Jupura the Portuguese have founded only a few villages. On the Rio Negro, on the contrary, the Spaniards have not been able to rival their neighbours. Steppes and forests nearly desert separate, at a distance of one hundred and sixty leagues, the cultivated part of the coast from the four missions of Marsa, Tomo, Davipe, and San Carlos, which are all that the Spanish Franciscans could establish along the Rio Negro. Among the Portuguese of Brazil the military system, that of presides and capitanes pobladores, has prevailed over the government of the missionaries. Grand Para is no doubt far distant from the mouth of the Rio Negro: but the facility of navigation on the Amazon, which runs like an immense canal in one direction from west to east, has enabled the Portuguese population to extend itself rapidly along the river. The banks of the Lower Maranon, from Vistoza as far as Serpa, as well as those of the Rio Negro from Fort da Bara to San Jose da Maravitanos, are embellished by rich cultivation, and by a great number of large villages and towns.

These local considerations are combined with others, suggested by the moral position of nations. The north-west coast of America furnishes to this day no other stable settlements but Russian and Spanish colonies. Before the inhabitants of the United States, in their progressive movement from east to west, could reach the shore between the latitude 41 and 50 degrees, which long separated the Spanish monks and the Siberian hunters,* the latter had established themselves south of the Columbia River. (* The hunters connected with military posts, and dependent on the Russian Company, of which the principal shareholders live at Irkutsk. In 1804 the little fortress (krepost) at the bay of Jakutal was still six hundred leagues distant from the most northern Mexican possessions.) Thus in New California the Franciscan missionaries, men estimable for their morals, and their agricultural activity, learnt with astonishment, that Greek priests had arrived in their neighbourhood; and that two nations, who inhabit the eastern and western extremities of Europe, were become neighbours on a coast of America opposite to China. In Guiana circumstances were very different: the Spaniards found on their frontiers those very Portuguese, who, by their language, and their municipal institutions, form with them one of the most noble remains of Roman Europe; but whom mistrust, founded on unequal strength, and too great proximity, has converted into an often hostile, and always rival power.

If two nations adjacent to each other in Europe, the Spaniards and the Portuguese, have alike become neighbours in the New Continent, they are indebted for that circumstance to the spirit of enterprise and active courage which both displayed at the period of their military glory and political greatness. The Castilian language is now spoken in North and South America throughout an extent of more than one thousand nine hundred leagues in length; if, however, we consider South America apart, we there find the Portuguese language spread over a larger space of ground, and spoken by a smaller number of individuals than the Castilian. It would seem as if the bond that so closely connects the fine languages of Camoens and Lope de Vega, had served only to separate two nations, who have become neighbours against their will. National hatred is not modified solely by a diversity of origin, of manners, and of progress in civilization; whenever it is powerful, it must be considered as the effect of geographical situation, and the conflicting interests thence resulting. Nations detest each other the less, in proportion as they are distant; and when, their languages being radically different, they do not even attempt to combine together. Travellers who have passed through New California, the interior provinces of Mexico, and the northern frontiers of Brazil, have been struck by these shades in the moral dispositions of bordering nations.

When I was in the Spanish Rio Negro, the divergent politics of the courts of Lisbon and Madrid had augmented that system of mistrust which, even in calmer times, the commanders of petty neighbouring forts love to encourage. Boats went up from Barcelos as far as the Spanish missions, but the communications were of rare occurrence. A commandant with sixteen or eighteen soldiers wearied the garrison by measures of safety, which were dictated by the important state of affairs; if he were attacked, he hoped to surround the enemy. When we spoke of the indifference with which the Portuguese government doubtless regarded the four little villages founded by the monks of Saint Francisco, on the Upper Guainia, the inhabitants were hurt by the motives which we alleged with the view to give them confidence. A people who have preserved in vigour, through the revolutions of ages, a national hatred, like occasions of giving it vent. The mind delights in everything impassioned, in the consciousness of an energetic feeling, in the affections, and in rival hatreds that are founded on antiquated prejudices. Whatever constitutes the individuality of nations flows from the mother-country to the most remote colonies; and national antipathies are not effaced where the influence of the same languages ceases. We know, from the interesting narrative of Krusenstern's voyage, that the hatred of two fugitive sailors, one a Frenchman and the other an Englishman, was the cause of a long war between the inhabitants of the Marquesas Islands. On the banks of the Amazon and the Rio Negro, the Indians of the neighbouring Portuguese and Spanish villages detest each other. These poor people speak only the native tongues; they are ignorant of what passes on the other bank of the ocean, beyond the great salt-pool; but the gowns of their missionaries are of a different colour, and this displeases them extremely.

I have stopped to paint the effects of national animosities, which wise statesmen have endeavoured to calm, but have been unable entirely to set at rest. This rivalry has contributed to the imperfection of the geographical knowledge hitherto obtained respecting the tributary rivers of the Amazon. When the communications of the natives are impeded, and one nation is established near the mouth, and another in the upper part of the same river, it is difficult for persons who attempt to construct maps to acquire precise information. The periodical inundations, and still more the portages, by which boats are passed from one stream to another, the sources of which are in the same neighbourhood, have led to erroneous ideas of the bifurcations and branchings of rivers. The Indians of the Portuguese missions, for instance, enter (as I was informed upon the spot) the Spanish Rio Negro on one side by the Rio Guainia and the Rio Tomo; and the Upper Orinoco on the other, by the portages between the Cababuri, the Pacimoni, the Idapa, and the Macava, to gather the aromatic seeds of the puchero laurel beyond the Esmeralda. The Indians, I repeat, are excellent geographers; they outflank the enemy, notwithstanding the limits traced upon the maps, in spite of the forts and the estacamentos; and when the missionaries see them arrive from such distances, and in different seasons, they begin to frame hypotheses of supposed communications of rivers. Each party has an interest in concealing what it knows with certainty; and that love of the mysterious, so general among the ignorant, contributes to perpetuate the doubt. It may also be observed that the various Indian nations, who frequent this labyrinth of rivers, give them names entirely different; and that these names are disguised and lengthened by terminations that signify water, great water, and current. How often have I been perplexed by the necessity of settling the synonyms of rivers, when I have sent for the most intelligent natives, to interrogate them, through an interpreter, respecting the number of tributary streams, the sources of the rivers, and the portages. Three or four languages being spoken in the same mission, it is difficult to make the witnesses agree. Our maps are loaded with names arbitrarily shortened or perverted. To examine how far they may be accurate, we must be guided by the geographical situation of the confluent rivers, I might almost say by a certain etymological tact. The Rio Uaupe, or Uapes of the Portuguese maps, is the Guapue of the Spanish maps, and the Ucayari of the natives. The Anava of the old geographers is the Anauahu of Arrowsmith, and the Uanauhau or Guanauhu of the Indians. The desire of leaving no void in the maps, in order to give them an appearance of accuracy, has caused rivers to be created, to which names have been applied that have not been recognized as synonymous. It is only lately that travellers in America, in Persia, and in the Indies, have felt the importance of being correct in the denomination of places. When we read the travels of Sir Walter Raleigh, it is difficult indeed to recognise in the lake of Mrecabo, the laguna of Maracaybo, and in the Marquis Paraco the name of Pizarro, the destroyer of the empire of the Incas.

The great tributary streams of the Amazon are designated by the missionaries by different names in their upper and lower course. The Iza is called, higher up, Putumayo, the Jupura towards its source bears the name of Caqueta. The researches made in the missions of the Andaquies on the real origin of the Rio Negro have been the more fruitless because the Indian name of the river was unknown. I heard it called Guainia at Javita, Maroa, and San Carlos. Southey, in his history of Brazil, says expressly that the Rio Negro, in the lower part of its course, is called Guiani, or Curana, by the natives; in the upper part, Ueneya. It is the word Gueneya, instead of Guainia; for the Indians of those countries say indifferently Guaranacua or Ouaranacua, Guarapo or Uarapo.

The sources of the Rio Negro have long been an object of contention among geographers. The interest we feel in this question is not merely that which attaches to the origin of all great rivers, but is connected with a crowd of other questions, that comprehend the supposed bifurcations of the Caqueta, the communications between the Rio Negro and the Orinoco, and the local fable of El Dorado, formerly called Enim, or the empire of the Grand Paytiti. When we study with care the ancient maps of these countries, and the history of their geographical errors, we see how by degrees the fable of El Dorado has been transported towards the west with the sources of the Orinoco. It was at first fixed on the eastern declivity of the Andes, to the south-west of the Rio Negro. The valiant Philip de Urre sought for the great city of Manoa by traversing the Guaviare. Even now the Indians of San Jose de Maravitanos relate that, on sailing to the north-east for fifteen days, on the Guape or Uaupe, you reach a famous laguna de oro, surrounded by mountains, and so large that the opposite shore cannot be discerned. A ferocious nation, the Guanes, do not permit the collecting of the gold of a sandy plain that surrounds the lake. Father Acunha places the lake Manoa, or Yenefiti, between the Jupura and the Rio Negro. Some Manoa Indians brought Father Fritz, in 1687, several slips of beaten gold. This nation, the name of which is still known on the banks of the Urarira, between Lamalongo and Moreira, dwelt on the Yurubesh. La Condamine is right in saying that this Mesopotamia, between the Caqueta, the Rio Negro, the Yurubesh, and the Iquiare, was the first scene of El Dorado. But where shall we find the names of Yurubesh and Iquiare, given by the Fathers Acunha and Fritz? I think I recognise them in the rivers Urubaxi and Iguari,* on some manuscript Portuguese maps which I possess. (* It may be written Urubaji. The j and the x were the same as the German ch to Father Fritz. The Urubaxi, or Hyurubaxi (Yurubesh), falls into the Rio Negro near Santa Isabella; the Iguari (Iquiare?) runs into the Issana, which is also a tributary of the Rio Negro.) I have long and assiduously studied the geography of South America, north of the Amazon, from ancient maps and unpublished materials. Desirous that my work should preserve the character of a scientific performance, I ought not to hesitate about treating of subjects on which I flatter myself that I can throw some light; namely, on the questions respecting the sources of the Rio Negro and the Orinoco, the communication between these rivers and the Amazon, and the problem of the auriferous soil, which has cost the inhabitants of the New World so much suffering and so much blood.

In the distribution of the waters circulating on the surface of the globe, as well as in the structure of organic bodies, nature has pursued a much less complicated plan than has been believed by those who have suffered themselves to be guided by vague conceptions and a taste for the marvellous. We find, too, that all anomalies, all the exceptions to the laws of hydrography, which the interior of America displays, are merely apparent; that the course of running waters furnishes phenomena equally extraordinary in the old world, but that these phenomena, from their littleness, have less struck the imagination of travellers. When immense rivers may be considered as composed of several parallel furrows of unequal depth; when these rivers are not enclosed in valleys; and when the interior of the great continent is as flat as the shores of the sea with us; the ramifications, the bifurcations, and the interlacings in the form of net-work, must be infinitely multiplied. From what we know of the equilibrium of the seas, I cannot think that the New World issued from the waters later than the Old, and that organic life is there younger, or more recent; but without admitting oppositions between the two hemispheres of the same planet, we may conceive that in the hemisphere most abundant in waters the different systems of rivers required more time to separate themselves from one another, and establish their complete independence. The deposits of mud, which are formed wherever the running waters lose somewhat of their swiftness, contribute, no doubt, to raise the beds of the great confluent streams, and augment their inundations; but at length these deposits entirely obstruct the branches of the rivers and the narrow channels that connect the neighbouring streams. The substances washed down by rain-waters form by their accumulation new bars, isthmuses of deposited earth, and points of division that did not before exist. It hence results that these natural channels of communication are by degrees divided into two tributary streams, and from the effect of a transverse rising, acquire two opposite slopes; a part of their waters is turned back towards the principal recipient, and a buttress rises between the two parallel basins, which occasions all traces of their ancient communication to disappear. From this period the bifurcations no longer connect different systems of rivers; and, where they continue to take place at the time of great inundations, we see that the waters diverge from the principal recipient only to enter it again after a longer or shorter circuit. The limits, which at first appeared vague and uncertain, begin to be fixed; and in the lapse of ages, from the action of whatever is moveable on the surface of the globe, from that of the waters, the deposits, and the sands, the basins of rivers separate, as great lakes are subdivided, and as inland seas lose their ancient communications.* (* The geological constitution of the soil seems to indicate that, notwithstanding the actual difference of level in their waters, the Black Sea, the Caspian, and lake Aral, communicated with each other in an era anterior to historic times. The overflowing of the Aral into the Caspian Sea seems even to be partly of a more recent date, and independent of the bifurcation of the Gihon (Oxus), on which one of the most learned geographers of our day, M. Ritter, has thrown new light.)

The certainty acquired by geographers since the sixteenth century, of the existence of several bifurcations, and the mutual dependence of various systems of rivers in South America, have led them to admit an intimate connection between the five great tributary streams of the Orinoco and the Amazon; the Guaviare, the Inirida, the Rio Negro, the Caqueta or Hyapura, and the Putumayo or Iza.

The Meta, the Guaviare, the Caqueta, and the Putumayo, are the only great rivers that rise immediately from the eastern declivity of the Andes of Santa Fe, Popayan, and Pasto. The Vichada, the Zama, the Inirida, the Rio Negro, the Uaupe, and the Apoporis, which are marked in our maps as extending westward as far as the mountains, take rise at a great distance from them, either in the savannahs between the Meta and the Guaviare, or in the mountainous country which, according to the information given me by the natives, begins at four or five days' journey westward of the missions of Javita and Maroa, and extends through the Sierra Tuhuny, beyond the Xie, towards the banks of the Issana.

It is remarkable that this ridge of the Cordilleras, which contains the sources of so many majestic rivers (the Meta, the Guaviare, the Caqueta, and the Putumayo), is as little covered with snow as the mountains of Abyssinia from which flow the waters of the Blue Nile; but, on the contrary, on going up the tributary streams which furrow the plains, a volcano as found still in activity, before you reach the Cordillera of the Andes. This phenomenon was discovered by the Franciscan monks, who go down from Ceja by the Rio Fragua to Caqueta. A solitary hill, emitting smoke night and day, is found on the north-east of the mission of Santa Rosa, and west of the Puerto del Pescado. This is the effect of a lateral action of the volcanoes of Popayan and Pasto; as Guacamayo and Sangay, situated also at the foot of the eastern declivity of the Andes, are the effect of a lateral action produced by the system of the volcanoes of Quito. After having closely inspected the banks of the Orinoco and the Rio Negro, where the granite everywhere pierces the soil; when we reflect on the total absence of volcanoes in Brazil, Guiana, on the coast of Venezuela, and perhaps in all that part of the continent lying eastward of the Andes; we contemplate with interest the three burning volcanoes situated near the sources of the Caqueta, the Napo, and the Rio de Macas or Morona.

The little group of mountains with which we became acquainted at the sources of the Guainia, is remarkable from its being isolated in the plain that extends to the south-west of the Orinoco. Its situation with regard to longitude might lead to the belief that it stretches into a ridge, which forms first the strait (angostura) of the Guaviare, and then the great cataracts (saltos, cachoeiras) of the Uaupe and the Jupura. Does this ground, composed probably of primitive rocks, like that which I examined more to the east, contain disseminated gold? Are there any gold-washings more to the south, toward the Uaupe, on the Iquiare (Iguiari, Iguari), and on the Yurubesh (Yurubach, Urubaxi)? It was there that Philip von Huten first sought El Dorado, and with a handful of men fought the battle of Omaguas, so celebrated in the sixteenth century. In separating what is fabulous from the narratives of the Conquistadores, we cannot fail to recognize in the names preserved on the same spots a certain basis of historic truth. We follow the expedition of Huten beyond the Guaviare and the Caqeta; we find in the Guaypes, governed by the cacique of Macatoa, the inhabitants of the river of Uaupe, which also bears the name of Guape, or Guapue; we call to mind, that Father Acunha calls the Iquiari (Quiquiare) a gold river; and that fifty years later Father Fritz, a missionary of great veracity, received, in the mission of Yurimaguas, the Manaos (Manoas), adorned with plates of beaten gold, coming from the country between the Uaupe and the Caqueta, or Jupura. The rivers that rise on the eastern declivity of the Andes (for instance the Napo) carry along with them a great deal of gold, even when their sources are found in trachytic soils. Why may there not be an alluvial auriferous soil to the east of the Cordilleras, as there is to the west, in the Sonoro, at Choco, and at Barbacoas? I am far from wishing to exaggerate the riches of this soil; but I do not think myself authorized to deny the existence of precious metals in the primitive mountains of Guiana, merely because in our journey through that country we saw no metallic veins. It is somewhat remarkable that the natives of the Orinoco have a name in their languages for gold (carucuru in Caribbee, caricuri in Tamanac, cavitta in Maypure), while the word they use to denote silver, prata, is manifestly borrowed from the Spanish.* (* The Parecas say, instead of prata, rata. It is the Castilian word plata ill-pronounced. Near the Yurubesh there is another inconsiderable tributary stream of the Rio Negro, the Curicur-iari. It is easy to recognize in this name the Caribbee word carucur, gold. The Caribs extended their incursions from the mouth of the Orinoco south-west toward the Rio Negro; and it was this restless people who carried the fable of El Dorado, by the same way, but in an opposite direction (from south-west to north-east), from the Mesopotamia between the Rio Negro and the Jupura to the sources of the Rio Branco.) The notions collected by Acunha, Father Fritz, and La Condamine, on the gold-washings south and north of the river Uaupe, agree with what I learnt of the auriferous soil of those countries. However great we may suppose the communications that took place between the nations of the Orinoco before the arrival of Europeans, they certainly did not draw their gold from the eastern declivity of the Cordilleras. This declivity is poor in mines, particularly in mines anciently worked; it is almost entirely composed of volcanic rocks in the provinces of Popayan, Pasto, and Quito. The gold of Guiana probably came from the country east of the Andes. In our days a lump of gold has been found in a ravine near the mission of Encaramada, and we must not be surprised if, since Europeans settled in these wild spots, we hear less of the plates of gold, gold-dust, and amulets of jade-stone, which could heretofore be obtained from the Caribs and other wandering nations by barter. The precious metals, never very abundant on the banks of the Orinoco, the Rio Negro, and the Amazon, disappeared almost entirely when the system of the missions caused the distant communications between the natives to cease.

The banks of the Upper Guainia in general abound much less in fishing-birds than those of Cassiquiare, the Meta, and the Arauca, where ornithologists would find sufficient to enrich immensely the collections of Europe. This scarcity of animals arises, no doubt, from the want of shoals and flat shores, as well as from the quality of the black waters, which (on account of their very purity) furnish less aliment to aquatic insects and fish. However, the Indians of these countries, during two periods of the year, feed on birds of passage, which repose in their long migrations on the waters of the Rio Negro. When the Orinoco begins to swell* after the vernal equinox, an innumerable quantity of ducks (patos careteros) remove from the eighth to the third degree of north latitude, to the first and fourth degree of south latitude, towards the south-south-east. (* The swellings of the Nile take place much later than those of the Orinoco; after the summer solstice, below Syene; and at Cairo in the beginning of July. The Nile begins to sink near that city generally about the 15th of October, and continues sinking till the 20th of May.) These animals then abandon the valley of the Orinoco, no doubt because the increasing depth of waters, and the inundations of the shores, prevent them from catching fish, insects, and aquatic worms. They are killed by thousands in their passage across the Rio Negro. When they go towards the equator they are very fat and savoury; but in the month of September, when the Orinoco decreases and returns into its bed, the ducks, warned either by the voices of the most experienced birds of passage, or by that internal feeling which, not knowing how to define, we call instinct, return from the Amazon and the Rio Branco towards the north. At this period they are too lean to tempt the appetite of the Indians of the Rio Negro, and escape pursuit more easily from being accompanied by a species of herons (gavanes) which are excellent eating. Thus the Indians eat ducks in March, and herons in September. We could not learn what becomes of the gavanes during the swellings of the Orinoco, and why they do not accompany the patos careteros in their migration from the Orinoco to the Rio Branco. These regular migrations of birds from one part of the tropics towards another, in a zone which is during the whole year of the same temperature, are very extraordinary phenomena. The southern coasts of the West India Islands receive also every year, at the period of the inundations of the great rivers of Terra Firma, numerous flights of the fishing-birds of the Orinoco, and of its tributary streams. We must presume that the variations of drought and humidity in the equinoctial zone have the same influence as the great changes of temperature in our climates, on the habits of animals. The heat of summer, and the pursuit of insects, call the humming-birds into the northern parts of the United States, and into Canada as far as the parallels of Paris and Berlin: in the same manner a greater facility for fishing draws the web-footed and long-legged birds from the north to the south, from the Orinoco towards the Amazon. Nothing is more marvellous, and nothing is yet known less clearly in a geographical point of view, than the direction, extent, and term of the migrations of birds.

After having entered the Rio Negro by the Pimichin, and passed the small cataract at the confluence of the two rivers, we discovered, at the distance of a quarter of a league, the mission of Maroa. This village, containing one hundred and fifty Indians, presented an appearance of ease and prosperity. We purchased some fine specimens of the toucan alive; a courageous bird, the intelligence of which is developed like that of our domestic ravens. We passed on the right, above Maroa, first the mouth of the Aquio* (Aqui, Aaqui, Ake, of the most recent maps.), then that of the Tomo.* (* Tomui, Temujo, Tomon.) On the banks of the latter river dwell the Cheruvichahenas, some families of whom I have seen at San Francisco Solano. The Tomo lies near the Rio Guaicia (Xie), and the mission of Tomo receives by that way fugitive Indians from the Lower Guainia. We did not enter the mission, but Father Zea related to us with a smile, that the Indians of Tomo and Maroa had been one day in full insurrection, because an attempt was made to force them to dance the famous dance of the devils. The missionary had taken a fancy to have the ceremonies by which the piaches (who are at once priests, physicians, and conjurors) evoke the evil spirit Iolokiamo, represented in a burlesque manner. He thought that the dance of the devils would be an excellent means of proving to the neophytes that Iolokiamo had no longer any power over them. Some young Indians, confiding in the promises of the missionary, consented to act the devils, and were already decorated with black and yellow plumes, and jaguar-skins with long sweeping tails. The place where the church stands was surrounded by the soldiers who are distributed in the missions, in order to add more effect to the counsels of the monks; and those Indians who were not entirely satisfied with respect to the consequences of the dance, and the impotency of the evil spirit, were brought to the festivity. The oldest and most timid of the Indians, however, imbued all the rest with a superstitious dread; all resolved to flee al monte, and the missionary adjourned his project of turning into derision the demon of the natives. What extravagant ideas may sometimes enter the imagination of an idle monk, who passes his life in the forests, far from everything that can recall human civilization to his mind. The violence with which the attempt was made to execute in public at Tomo the mysterious dance of the devils is the more strange, as all the books written by the missionaries relate the efforts they have used to prevent the funereal dances, the dances of the sacred trumpet, and that ancient dance of serpents, the Queti, in which these wily animals are represented as issuing from the forests, and coming to drink with the men in order to deceive them, and carry off the women.

After two hours' navigation from the mouth of the Tomo we arrived at the little mission of San Miguel de Davipe, founded in 1775, not by monks, but by a lieutenant of militia, Don Francisco Bobadilla. The missionary of the place, Father Morillo, with whom we spent some hours, received us with great hospitality. He even offered us Madeira wine, but, as an object of luxury, we should have preferred wheaten bread. The want of bread becomes more sensibly felt in length of time than that of a strong liquor. The Portuguese of the Amazon carry small quantities of Madeira wine, from time to time, to the Rio Negro; and the word madera, signifying wood in the Castilian language, the monks, who are not much versed in the study of geography, had a scruple of celebrating mass with Madeira wine, which they took for a fermented liquor extracted from the trunk of some tree, like palm-wine; and requested the guardian of the missions to decide, whether the vino de madera were wine from grapes, or the juice of a tree. At the beginning of the conquest, the question was agitated, whether it were allowable for the priests, in celebrating mass, to use any fermented liquor analogous to grape-wine. The question, as might have been foreseen, was decided in the negative.

At Davipe we bought some provisions, among which were fowls and a pig. This purchase greatly interested our Indians, who had been a long while deprived of meat. They pressed us to depart, in order to reach the island of Dapa, where the pig was to be killed and roasted during the night. We had scarcely time to examine in the convent (convento) the great stores of mani resin, and cordage of the chiquichiqui palm, which deserves to be more known in Europe. This cordage is extremely light; it floats upon the water, and is more durable in the navigation of rivers than ropes of hemp. It must be preserved at sea by being often wetted, and little exposed to the heat of the tropical sun. Don Antonio Santos, celebrated in the country for his journey in search of lake Parima, taught the Indians of the Spanish Rio Negro to make use of the petioles of the chiquichiqui, a palm-tree with pinnate leaves, of which we saw neither the flowers nor the fruit. This officer is the only white man who ever came from Angostura to Grand Para, passing by land from the sources of the Rio Carony to those of the Rio Branco. He had studied the mode of fabricating ropes from the chiquichiqui in the Portuguese colonies; and, on his return from the Amazon, he introduced this branch of industry into the missions of Guiana. It were to be wished that extensive rope-walks could be established on the banks of the Rio Negro and the Cassiquiare, in order to make these cables an article of trade with Europe. A small quantity is already exported from Angostura to the West Indies; and it costs from fifty to sixty per cent less than cordage of hemp. Young palm-trees only being employed, they must be planted and carefully cultivated.

A little above the mission of Davipe, the Rio Negro receives a branch of the Cassiquiare, the existence of which is a very remarkable phenomenon in the history of the branchings of rivers. This branch issues from the Cassiquiare, north of Vasiva, bearing the name of the Itinivini; and, after flowing for the length of twenty-five leagues through a flat and almost uninhabited country, it falls into the Rio Negro under the name of the Rio Conorichite. It appeared to me to be more than one hundred and twenty toises broad near its mouth. Although the current of the Conorichite is very rapid, this natural canal abridges by three days the passage from Davipe to Esmeralda. We cannot be surprised at a double communication between the Cassiquiare and the Rio Negro when we recollect that so many of the rivers of America form, as it were, deltas at their confluence with other rivers. Thus the Rio Branco and the Rio Jupura enter by a great number of branches into the Rio Negro and the Amazon. At the confluence of the Jupura there is a much more extraordinary phenomenon. Before this river joins the Amazon, the latter, which is the principal recipient, sends off three branches called Uaranapu, Manhama, and Avateparana, to the Jupura, which is but a tributary stream. The Portuguese astronomer, Ribeiro, has proved this important fact. The Amazon gives waters to the Jupura itself, before it receives that tributary stream.

The Rio Conorichite, or Itinivini, formerly facilitated the trade in slaves carried on by the Portuguese in the Spanish territory. The slave-traders went up by the Cassiquiare and the Cano Mee to Conorichite; and thence dragged their canoes by a portage to the rochelas of Manuteso, in order to enter the Atabapo. This abominable trade lasted till about the year 1756; when the expedition of Solano, and the establishment of the missions on the banks of the Rio Negro, put an end to it. Old laws of Charles V and Philip III* (* 26 January 1523 and 10 October 1618.) had forbidden under the most severe penalties (such as the being rendered incapable of civil employment, and a fine of two thousand piastres), the conversion of the natives to the faith by violent means, and sending armed men against them; but notwithstanding these wise and humane laws, the Rio Negro, in the middle of the last century, was no further interesting in European politics, than as it facilitated the entradas, or hostile incursions, and favoured the purchase of slaves. The Caribs, a trading and warlike people, received from the Portuguese and the Dutch, knives, fish-hooks, small mirrors, and all sorts of glass beads. They excited the Indian chiefs to make war against each other, bought their prisoners, and carried off, themselves, by stratagem or force, all whom they found in their way. These incursions of the Caribs comprehended an immense extent of land; they went from the banks of the Essequibo and the Carony, by the Rupunuri and the Paraguamuzi on one side, directly south towards the Rio Branco; and on the other, to the south-west, following the portages between the Rio Paragua, the Caura, and the Ventuario. The Caribs, when they arrived amid the numerous tribes of the Upper Orinoco, divided themselves into several bands, in order to reach, by the Cassiquiare, the Cababury, the Itinivini, and the Atabapo, on a great many points at once, the banks of the Guiainia or Rio Negro, and carry on the slave-trade with the Portuguese. Thus the unhappy natives, before they came into immediate contact with the Europeans, suffered from their proximity. The same causes produce everywhere the same effects. The barbarous trade which civilized nations have carried on, and still partially continue, on the coast of Africa, extends its fatal influence even to regions where the existence of white men is unknown.

Having quitted the mouth of the Conorichite and the mission of Davipe, we reached at sunset the island of Dapa, lying in the middle of the river, and very picturesquely situated. We were astonished to find on this spot some cultivated ground, and on the top of a small hill an Indian hut. Four natives were seated round a fire of brushwood, and they were eating a sort of white paste with black spots, which much excited our curiosity. These black spots proved to be vachacos, large ants, the hinder parts of which resemble a lump of grease. They had been dried, and blackened by smoke. We saw several bags of them suspended above the fire. These good people paid but little attention to us; yet there were more than fourteen persons in this confined hut, lying naked in hammocks hung one above another. When Father Zea arrived, he was received with great demonstrations of joy. The military are in greater numbers on the banks of the Rio Negro than on those of the Orinoco, owing to the necessity of guarding the frontiers; and wherever soldiers and monks dispute for power over the Indians, the latter are most attached to the monks. Two young women came down from their hammocks, to prepare for us cakes of cassava. In answer to some enquiries which we put to them through an interpreter, they answered that cassava grew poorly on the island, but that it was a good land for ants, and food was not wanting. In fact, these vachacos furnish subsistence to the Indians of the Rio Negro and the Guainia. They do not eat the ants as a luxury, but because, according to the expression of the missionaries, the fat of ants (the white part of the abdomen) is a very substantial food. When the cakes of cassava were prepared, Father Zea, whose fever seemed rather to sharpen than to enfeeble his appetite, ordered a little bag to be brought to him filled with smoked vachacos. He mixed these bruised insects with flour of cassava, which he pressed us to taste. It somewhat resembled rancid butter mixed with crumb of bread. The cassava had not an acid taste, but some remains of European prejudices prevented our joining in the praises bestowed by the good missionary on what he called an excellent ant paste.

The violence of the rain obliged us to sleep in this crowded hut. The Indians slept only from eight till two in the morning; the rest of the time they employed in conversing in their hammocks, and preparing their bitter beverage of cupana. They threw fresh fuel on the fire, and complained of cold, although the temperature of the air was at 21 degrees. This custom of being awake, and even on foot, four or five hours before sunrise, is general among the Indians of Guiana. When, in the entradas, an attempt is made to surprise the natives, the hours chosen are those of the first sleep, from nine till midnight.

We left the island of Dapa long before daybreak; and notwithstanding the rapidity of the current, and the activity of our rowers, our passage to the fort of San Carlos del Rio Negro occupied twelve hours. We passed, on the left, the mouth of the Cassiquiare, and, on the right, the small island of Cumarai. The fort is believed in the country to be on the equatorial line; but, according to the observations which I made at the rocks of Culimacari, it is in 1 degree 54 minutes 11 seconds.

We lodged at San Carlos with the commander of the fort, a lieutenant of militia. From a gallery in the upper part of the house we enjoyed a delightful view of three islands of great length, and covered with thick vegetation. The river runs in a straight line from north to south, as if its bed had been dug by the hand of man. The sky being constantly cloudy gives these countries a solemn and gloomy character. We found in the village a few juvia-trees which furnish the triangular nuts called in Europe the almonds of the Amazon, or Brazil-nuts. We have made it known by the name of Bertholletia excelsa. The trees attain after eight years' growth the height of thirty feet.

The military establishment of this frontier consisted of seventeen soldiers, ten of whom were detached for the security of the neighbouring missions. Owing to the extreme humidity of the air there are not four muskets in a condition to be fired. The Portuguese have from twenty-five to thirty men, better clothed and armed, at the little fort of San Jose de Maravitanos. We found in the mission of San Carlos but one garita,* a square house, constructed with unbaked bricks, and containing six field-pieces. (* This word literally signifies a sentry-box; but it is here employed in the sense of store-house or arsenal.) The little fort, or, as they think proper to call it here, the Castillo de San Felipe, is situated opposite San Carlos, on the western bank of the Rio Negro.

The banks of the Upper Guainia will be more productive when, by the destruction of the forests, the excessive humidity of the air and the soil shall be diminished. In their present state of culture maize scarcely grows, and the tobacco, which is of the finest quality, and much celebrated on the coast of Caracas, is well cultivated only on spots amid old ruins, remains of the huts of the pueblo viejo (old town). Indigo grows wild near the villages of Maroa, Davipe, and Tomo. Under a different system from that which we found existing in these countries, the Rio Negro will produce indigo, coffee, cacao, maize, and rice, in abundance.

The passage from the mouth of the Rio Negro to Grand Para occupying only twenty or twenty-five days, it would not have taken us much more time to have gone down the Amazon as far as the coast of Brazil, than to return by the Cassiquiare and the Orinoco to the northern coast of Caracas. We were informed at San Carlos that, on account of political circumstances, it was difficult at that moment to pass from the Spanish to the Portuguese settlements; but we did not know till after our return to Europe the extent of the danger to which we should have been exposed in proceeding as far as Barcellos. It was known at Brazil, possibly through the medium of the newspapers, that I was going to visit the missions of the Rio Negro, and examine the natural canal which unites two great systems of rivers. In those desert forests instruments had been seen only in the hands of the commissioners of the boundaries; and at that time the subaltern agents of the Portuguese government could not conceive how a man of sense could expose himself to the fatigues of a long journey, to measure lands that did not belong to him. Orders had been issued to seize my person, my instruments, and, above all, those registers of astronomical observations, so dangerous to the safety of states. We were to be conducted by way of the Amazon to Grand Para, and thence sent back to Lisbon. But fortunately for me, the government at Lisbon, on being informed of the zeal of its subaltern agents, instantly gave orders that I should not be disturbed in my operations; but that on the contrary they should be encouraged, if I traversed any part of the Portuguese possessions.

In going down the Guainia, or Rio Negro, you pass on the right the Cano Maliapo, and on the left the Canos Dariba and Eny. At five leagues distance, nearly in 1 degree 38 minutes of north latitude, is the island of San Josef. A little below that island, in a spot where there are a great number of orange-trees now growing wild, the traveller is shown a small rock, two hundred feet high, with a cavern called by the missionaries the Glorieta de Cocuy. This summer-house (for such is the signification of the word glorieta in Spanish) recalls remembrances that are not the most agreeable. It was here that Cocuy, the chief of the Manitivitanos,* had his harem of women, and where he devoured the finest and fattest. (* At San Carlos there is still preserved an instrument of music, a kind of large drum, ornamented with very rude Indian paintings, which relate to the exploits of Cocuy.) The tradition of the harem and the orgies of Cocuy is more current in the Lower Orinoco than on the banks of the Guainia. At San Carlos the very idea that the chief of the Manitivitanos could be guilty of cannibalism is indignantly rejected.
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Re: Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions

Postby admin » Mon Jun 04, 2018 6:59 am

Part 2 of 3

The Portuguese government has established many settlements even in this remote part of Brazil. Below the Glorieta, in the Portuguese territory, there are eleven villages in an extent of twenty-five leagues. I know of nineteen more as far as the mouth of the Rio Negro, beside the six towns of Thomare, Moreira (near the Rio Demenene, or Uaraca, where dwelt anciently the Guiana Indians), Barcellos, San Miguel del Rio Branco, near the river of the same name (so well known in the fictions of El Dorado), Moura, and Villa de Rio Negro. The banks of this tributary stream of the Amazon alone are consequently ten times more thickly peopled than all the shores of the Upper and Lower Orinoco, the Cassiquiare, the Atabapo, and the Spanish Rio Negro.

Among the tributary streams which the Rio Negro receives from the north, three are particularly deserving of attention, because on account of their branchings, their portages, and the situation of their sources, they are connected with the often-discussed problem of the origin of the Orinoco. The most southern of these tributary streams are the Rio Branco,* which was long believed to issue conjointly with the Orinoco from lake Parime (* The Portuguese name, Rio Branco, signifies White Water. Rio Parime is a Caribbean name, signifying Great Water. These names having also been applied to different tributary streams, have caused many errors in geography. The great Rio Branco, or Parime, often mentioned in this work, is formed by the Urariquera and the Tacutu, and flows, between Carvoeyro and Villa de Moura, into the Rio Negro. It is the Quecuene of the natives; and forms at its confluence with the Rio Negro a very narrow delta, between the principal trunk and the Amayauhau, which is a little branch more to the west.), and the Rio Padaviri, which communicates by a portage with the Mavaca, and consequently with the Upper Orinoco, to the east of the mission of Esmeralda. We shall have occasion to speak of the Rio Branco and the Padaviri, when we arrive in that mission; it suffices here to pause at the third tributary stream of the Rio Negro, the Cababury, the interbranchings of which with the Cassiquiare are alike important in their connexion with hydrography, and with the trade in sarsaparilla.

The lofty mountains of the Parime, which border the northern bank of the Orinoco in the upper part of its course above Esmeralda, send off a chain towards the south, of which the Cerro de Unturan forms one of the principal summits. This mountainous country, of small extent but rich in vegetable productions, above all, in the mavacure liana, employed in preparing the wourali poison, in almond-trees (the juvia, or Bertholletia excelsa), in aromatic pucheries, and in wild cacao-trees, forms a point of division between the waters that flow to the Orinoco, the Cassiquiare, and the Rio Negro. The tributary streams on the north, or those of the Orinoco, are the Mavaca and the Daracapo; those on the west, or of the Cassiquiare, are the Idapa and the Pacimoni; and those on the south, or of the Rio Negro, are the Padaviri and the Cababuri. The latter is divided near its source into two branches, the westernmost of which is known by the name of Baria. The Indians of the mission of San Francisco Solano gave us the most minute description of its course. It affords the very rare example of a branch by which an inferior tributary stream, instead of receiving the waters of the superior stream, sends to it a part of its own waters in a direction opposite to that of the principal recipient.

The Cababuri runs into the Rio Negro near the mission of Nossa Senhora das Caldas; but the rivers Ya and Dimity, which are higher tributary streams, communicate also with the Cababuri; so that, from the little fort of San Gabriel de Cachoeiras as far as San Antonio de Castanheira the Indians of the Portuguese possessions can enter the territory of the Spanish missions by the Baria and the Pacimoni.

The chief object of these incursions is the collection of sarsaparilla and the aromatic seeds of the puchery-laurel (Laurus pichurim). The sarsaparilla of these countries is celebrated at Grand Para, Angostura, Cumana, Nueva Barcelona, and in other parts of Terra Firma, by the name of zarza del Rio Negro. It is much preferred to the zarza of the Province of Caracas, or of the mountains of Merida; it is dried with great care, and exposed purposely to smoke, in order that it may become blacker. This liana grows in profusion on the humid declivities of the mountains of Unturan and Achivaquery. Decandolle is right in suspecting that different species of smilax are gathered under the name of sarsaparilla. We found twelve new species, among which the Smilax siphylitica of the Cassiquaire, and the Smilax officinalis of the river Magdalena, are most esteemed on account of their diuretic properties. The quantity of sarsaparilla employed in the Spanish colonies as a domestic medicine is very considerable. We see by the works of Clusius, that at the beginning of the Conquista, Europe obtained this salutary medicament from the Mexican coast of Honduras and the port of Guayaquil. The trade in zarza is now more active in those ports which have interior communications with the Orinoco, the Rio Negro, and the Amazon.

The trials made in several botanical gardens of Europe prove that the Smilax glauca of Virginia, which it is pretended is the S. sarsaparilla of Linnaeus, may be cultivated in the open air, wherever the mean winter temperature rises above six or seven degrees of the centigrade thermometer*: but those species that possess the most active virtues belong exclusively to the torrid zone, and require a much higher degree of heat. (* The winter temperature at London and Paris is 4.2 and 3.7; at Montpelier, 6.7; at Rome, 7.7 degrees. In that part of Mexico, and the Terra Firma, where we saw the most active species of the sarsaparilla growing (that which supplies the trade of the Spanish and Portuguese colonies), the temperature is from twenty to twenty-six degrees. The roots of another family of monocotyledons (of some cyperaceae) possess also diaphoretic and resolvent properties. The Carex arenaria, the C. hirta, etc. furnish the German sarsaparilla of druggists. According to Clusius, Europe received the first sarsaparilla from Yucatan, and the island of Puna, opposite Guayaquil.) In reading the works of Clusius, it can scarcely be conceived why our writers on the Materia Medica persist in considering a plant of the United States as the most ancient type of the officinal species of the genus smilax.

We found in the possession of the Indians of the Rio Negro some of those green stones, known by the name of Amazon stones, because the natives pretend, according to an ancient tradition, that they come from the country of the women without husbands (Cougnantainsecouima), or women living alone (Aikeambenano*). (* This word is of the Tamanac language; these women are the sole Donne of the Italian missionaries.) We were told at San Carlos, and in the neighbouring villages, that the sources of the Orinoco, which we found east of the Esmeralda, and in the missions of the Carony and at Angostura, that the sources of the Rio Branco are the native spots of the green stones. These statements confirm the report of an old soldier of the garrison of Cayenne (mentioned by La Condamine), who affirmed that those mineral substances were obtained from the country of women, west of the rapids of the Oyapoc. The Indians who inhabit the fort of Topayos on the Amazon five degrees east of the mouth of the Rio Negro, possessed formerly a great number of these stones. Had they received them from the north, that is, from the country pointed out by the Indians of the Rio Negro, which extends from the mountains of Cayenne towards the sources of the Essequibo, the Carony, the Orinoco, the Parime, and the Rio Trombetas? or did they come from the south by the Rio Topayos, which descends from the vast table-land of the Campos Parecis? Superstition attaches great importance to these mineral substances: they are worn suspended from the neck as amulets, because, according to popular belief, they preserve the wearer from nervous complaints, fevers, and the stings of venomous serpents. They have consequently been for ages an article of trade among the natives, both north and south of the Orinoco. The Caribs, who may be considered as the Bucharians of the New World, made them known along the coasts of Guiana; and the same stones, like money in circulation, passed successively from nation to nation in opposite directions: their quantity is perhaps not augmented, and the spot which produces them is probably unknown rather than concealed. In the midst of enlightened Europe, on occasion of a warm contest respecting native bark, a few years ago, the green stones of the Orinoco were gravely proposed as a powerful febrifuge. After this appeal to the credulity of Europeans, we cannot be surprised to learn that the Spanish planters share the predilection of the Indians for these amulets, and that they are sold at a very considerable price. The form given to them most frequently is that of the Babylonian cylinders,* longitudinally perforated, and loaded with inscriptions and figures. (The price of a cylinder two inches long is from twelve to fifteen piastres.) But this is not the work of the Indians of our days, the natives of the Orinoco and the Amazon, whom we find in the last degree of barbarism. The Amazon stones, like the perforated and sculptured emeralds, found in the Cordilleras of New Grenada and Quito, are vestiges of anterior civilization. The present inhabitants of those countries, particularly in the hot region, so little comprehend the possibility of cutting hard stones (the emerald, jade, compact feldspar and rock-crystal), that they imagine the green stone is soft when taken out of the earth, and that it hardens after having been moulded by the hand.

The natural soil of the Amazon-stone is not in the valley of the river Amazon. It does not derive its name from the river, but like the river itself, the stone has been named after a nation of warlike women, whom Father Acunha, and Oviedo, in his letter to cardinal Bembo, compare to the Amazons of the ancient world. What we see in our cabinets under the false denomination of Amazon-stone, is neither jade, nor compact feldspar, but a common feldspar of an apple-green colour, that comes from the Ural mountains and on lake Onega in Russia, but which I never saw in the granitic mountains of Guiana. Sometimes also this very rare and hard Amazon-stone is confounded with the hatchet-nephrite (beilstein)* of Werner, which has much less tenacity. (* Punamustein (jade axinien). The stone hatchets found in America, for instance in Mexico, are not of beilstein, but of compact feldspar.) The substance which I obtained from the hands of the Indians, belongs to the saussurite,* (* Jade of Saussure, according to the system of Brongniart; tenacious jade, and compact tenacious feldspar of Hauy; some varieties of the variolithe of Werner.) to the real jade, which resembles compact feldspar, and which forms one of the constituent parts of the verde de Corsica, or gabbro.* (* Euphotide of Hauy, or schillerfels, of Raumer.) It takes a fine polish, and passes from apple-green to emerald-green; it is translucent at the edges, extremely tenacious, and in a high degree sonorous. These Amazon stones were formerly cut by the natives into very thin plates, perforated at the centre, and suspended by a thread, and these plates yield an almost metallic sound if struck by another hard body.* (* M. Brongniart, to whom I showed these plates on my return to Europe, very justly compared these jades of Parime to the sonorous stones employed by the Chinese in their musical instruments called king.) This fact confirms the connection which we find, notwithstanding the difference of fracture and of specific gravity between the saussurite and the siliceous basis of the porphyrschiefer, which is the phonolite (klingstein). I have already observed, that, as it is very rare to find in America nephrite, jade, or compact feldspar, in its native place, we may well be astonished at the quantity of hatchets which are everywhere discovered in digging the earth, from the banks of the Ohio as far as Chile. We saw in the mountains of Upper Orinoco, or of Parime, only granular granites containing a little hornblende, granites passing into gneiss, and schistoid hornblendes. Has nature repeated on the east of Esmeralda, between the sources of the Carony, the Essequibo, the Orinoco, and the Rio Branco, the transition-formation of Tucutunemo reposing on mica-schist? Does the Amazon-stone come from the rocks of euphotide, which form the last member of the series of primitive rocks?

We find among the inhabitants of both hemispheres, at the first dawn of civilization, a peculiar predilection for certain stones; not only those which, from their hardness, may be useful to man as cutting instruments, but also for mineral substances, which, on account of their colour and their natural form, are believed to bear some relation to the organic functions, and even to the propensities of the soul. This ancient worship of stones, these benign virtues attributed to jade and haematite, belong to the savages of America as well as to the inhabitants of the forests of Thrace. The human race, when in an uncultivated state, believes itself to have sprung from the ground; and feels as if it were enchained to the earth, and the substances contained in her bosom. The powers of nature, and still more those which destroy than those which preserve, are the first objects of its worship. It is not solely in the tempest, in the sound that precedes the earthquake, in the fire that feeds the volcano, that these powers are manifested; the inanimate rock; stones, by their lustre and hardness; mountains, by their mass and their solitude; act upon the untaught mind with a force which, in a state of advanced civilization, can no longer be conceived. This worship of stones, when once established, is preserved amidst more modern forms of worship; and what was at first the object of religious homage, becomes a source of superstitious confidence. Divine stones are transformed into amulets, which are believed to preserve the wearer from every ill, mental and corporeal. Although a distance of five hundred leagues separates the banks of the Amazon and the Orinoco from the Mexican table-land; although history records no fact that connects the savage nations of Guiana with the civilized nations of Anahuac, the monk Bernard de Sahagun, at the beginning of the conquest, found preserved as relics at Cholula, certain green stones which had belonged to Quetzalcohuatl. This mysterious personage is the Mexican Buddha; he appeared in the time of the Toltecs, founded the first religious associations, and established a government similar to that of Meroe and of Japan.

The history of the jade, or the green stones of Guiana, is intimately connected with that of the warlike women whom the travellers of the sixteenth century named the Amazons of the New World. La Condamine has produced many testimonies in favour of this tradition. Since my return from the Orinoco and the river Amazon, I have often been asked, at Paris, whether I embraced the opinion of that learned man, or believed, like several of his contemporaries, that he undertook the defence of the Cougnantainsecouima (the independent women who received men into their society only in the month of April), merely to fix, in a public sitting of the Academy, the attention of an audience somewhat eager for novelties. I may take this opportunity of expressing my opinion on a tradition which has so romantic an appearance; and I am farther led to do this as La Condamine asserts that the Amazons of the Rio Cayame* crossed the Maranon to establish themselves on the Rio Negro. (* Orellana, arriving at the Maranon by the Rio Coca and the Napo, fought with the Amazons, as it appears, between the mouth of the Rio Negro and that of the Xingu. La Condamine asserts that in the seventeenth century they passed the Maranon between Tefe and the mouth of the Rio Puruz, near the Cano Cuchivara, which is a western branch of the Puruz. These women therefore came from the banks of the Rio Cayame, or Cayambe, consequently from the unknown country which extends south of the Maranon, between the Ucayale and the Madeira. Raleigh also places them on the south of the Maranon, but in the province of Topayos, and on the river of the same name. He says they were rich in golden vessels, which they had acquired in exchange for the famous green stones, or piedras hijadas. (Raleigh means, no doubt, piedros del higado, stones that cure diseases of the liver.) It is remarkable enough that, one hundred and forty-eight years after, La Condamine still found those green stones (divine stones), which differ neither in colour nor in hardness from oriental jade, in greater numbers among the Indians who live near the mouth of the Rio Topayos, than elsewhere. The Indians said that they inherited these stones, which cure the nephritic colic and epilepsy, from their fathers, who received them from the women without husbands.) A taste for the marvellous, and a wish to invest the descriptions of the New Continent with some of the colouring of classic antiquity, no doubt contributed to give great importance to the first narratives of Orellana. In perusing the works of Vespucci, Fernando Columbus, Geraldini, Oviedo, and Pietro Martyr, we recognize this tendency of the writers of the sixteenth century to find among the newly discovered nations all that the Greeks have related to us of the first age of the world, and of the manners of the barbarous Scythians and Africans. But if Oviedo, in addressing his letters to cardinal Bembo, thought fit to flatter the taste of a man so familiar with the study of antiquity, Sir Walter Raleigh had a less poetic aim. He sought to fix the attention of Queen Elizabeth on the great empire of Guiana, the conquest of which he proposed. He gave a description of the rising of that gilded king (el dorado),* whose chamberlains, furnished with long tubes, blew powdered gold every morning over his body, after having rubbed it over with aromatic oils: but nothing could be better adapted to strike the imagination of queen Elizabeth, than the warlike republic of women without husbands, who resisted the Castilian heroes. (* The term el dorado, which signifies the gilded, was not originally the name of the country. The territory subsequently distinguished by that appellation was at first known as the country of el Rey Dorado, the Gilded King.) Such were the motives which prompted exaggeration on the part of those writers who have given most reputation to the Amazons of America; but these motives do not, I think, suffice for entirely rejecting a tradition, which is spread among various nations having no communications one with another.

Thirty years after La Condamine visited Quito, a Portuguese astronomer, Ribeiro, who has traversed the Amazon, and the tributary streams which run into that river on the northern side, has confirmed on the spot all that the learned Frenchman had advanced. He found the same traditions among the Indians; and he collected them with the greater impartiality as he did not himself believe that the Amazons formed a separate horde. Not knowing any of the tongues spoken on the Orinoco and the Rio Negro, I could learn nothing certain respecting the popular traditions of the women without husbands, or the origin of the green stones, which are believed to be intimately connected with them. I shall, however, quote a modern testimony of some weight, that of Father Gili. "Upon inquiring," says this well-informed missionary, "of a Quaqua Indian, what nations inhabited the Rio Cuchivero, he named to me the Achirigotos, the Pajuros, and the Aikeambenanos.* (* In Italian, Acchirecolti, Pajuri, and Aicheam-benano.) Being well acquainted," pursues he, "with the Tamanac tongue, I instantly comprehended the sense of this last word, which is a compound, and signifies women living alone. The Indian confirmed my observation, and related that the Aikeambenanos were a community of women, who manufactured blow-tubes* (* Long tubes made from a hollow cane, which the natives use to propel their poisoned arrows.), and other weapons of war. They admit, once a year, the men of the neighbouring nation of Vokearos into their society, and send them back with presents. All the male children born in this horde of women are killed in their infancy." This history seems framed on the traditions which circulate among the Indians of the Maranon, and among the Caribs; yet the Quaqua Indian, of whom Father Gili speaks, was ignorant of the Castilian language; he had never had any communication with white men; and certainly knew not, that south of the Orinoco there existed another river, called the river of the Aikeambenanos, or Amazons.

What must we conclude from this narration of the old missionary of Encaramada? Not that there are Amazons on the banks of the Cuchivero, but that women in different parts of America, wearied of the state of slavery in which they were held by the men, united themselves together; that the desire of preserving their independence rendered them warriors; and that they received visits from a neighbouring and friendly horde. This society of women may have acquired some power in one part of Guiana. The Caribs of the continent held intercourse with those of the islands; and no doubt in this way the traditions of the Maranon and the Orinoco were propagated toward the north. Before the voyage of Orellana, Christopher Columbus imagined he had found the Amazons in the Caribbee Islands. This great man was told, that the small island of Madanino (Montserrat) was inhabited by warlike women, who lived the greater part of the year separate from men. At other times also, the conquistadores imagined that the women, who defended their huts in the absence of their husbands, were republics of Amazons; and, by an error less excusable, formed a like supposition respecting the religious congregations, the convents of Mexican virgins, who, far from admitting men at any season of the year into their society, lived according to the austere rule of Quetzalcohuatl. Such was the disposition of men's minds, that in the long succession of travellers, who crowded on each other in their discoveries and in narrations of the marvels of the New World, every one readily declared he had seen what his predecessors had announced.

We passed three nights at San Carlos del Rio Negro. I count the nights, because I watched during the greater part of them, in the hope of seizing the moment of the passage of some star over the meridian. That I might have nothing to reproach myself with, I kept the instruments always ready for an observation. I could not even obtain double altitudes, to calculate the latitude by the method of Douwes. What a contrast between two parts of the same zone; between the sky of Cumana, where the air is constantly pure as in Persia and Arabia, and the sky of the Rio Negro, veiled like that of the Feroe islands, without sun, or moon or stars!

On the 10th of May, our canoe being ready before sunrise, we embarked to go up the Rio Negro as far as the mouth of the Cassiquiare, and to devote ourselves to researches on the real course of that river, which unites the Orinoco to the Amazon. The morning was fine; but, in proportion as the heat augmented, the sky became obscured. The air is so saturated by water in these forests, that the vesicular vapours become visible on the least increase of evaporation at the surface of the earth. The breeze being never felt, the humid strata are not displaced and renewed by dryer air. We were every day more grieved at the aspect of the cloudy sky. M. Bonpland was losing by this excessive humidity the plants he had collected; and I, for my part, was afraid lest I should again find the fogs of the Rio Negro in the valley of the Cassiquiare. No one in these missions for half a century past had doubted the existence of communication between two great systems of rivers; the important point of our voyage was confined therefore to fixing by astronomical observations the course of the Cassiquiare, and particularly the point of its entrance into the Rio Negro, and that of the bifurcation of the Orinoco. Without a sight of the sun and the stars this object would be frustrated, and we should have exposed ourselves in vain to long and painful privations. Our fellow travellers would have returned by the shortest way, that of the Pimichin and the small rivers; but M. Bonpland preferred, like me, persisting in the plan of the voyage, which we had traced for ourselves in passing the Great Cataracts. We had already travelled one hundred and eighty leagues in a boat from San Fernando de Apure to San Carlos, on the Rio Apure, the Orinoco, the Atabapo, the Temi, the Tuamini, and the Rio Negro. In again entering the Orinoco by the Cassiquiare we had to navigate three hundred and twenty leagues, from San Carlos to Angostura. By this way we had to struggle against the currents during ten days; the rest was to be performed by going down the stream of the Orinoco. It would have been blamable to have suffered ourselves to be discouraged by the fear of a cloudy sky, and by the mosquitos of the Cassiquiare. Our Indian pilot, who had been recently at Mandavaca, promised us the sun, and those great stars that eat the clouds, as soon as we should have left the black waters of the Guaviare. We therefore carried out our first project of returning to San Fernando de Atabapo by the Cassiquiare; and, fortunately for our researches, the prediction of the Indian was verified. The white waters brought us by degrees a more serene sky, stars, mosquitos, and crocodiles.

We passed between the islands of Zaruma and Mini, or Mibita, covered with thick vegetation; and, after having ascended the rapids of the Piedra de Uinumane, we entered the Rio Cassiquiare at the distance of eight miles from the small fort of San Carlos. The Piedra, or granitic rock which forms the little cataract, attracted our attention on account of the numerous veins of quartz by which it is traversed. These veins are several inches broad, and their masses proved that their date and formation are very different. I saw distinctly that, wherever they crossed each other, the veins containing mica and black schorl traversed and drove out of their direction those which contained only white quartz and feldspar. According to the theory of Werner, the black veins were consequently of a more recent formation than the white. Being a disciple of the school of Freyberg, I could not but pause with satisfaction at the rock of Uinumane, to observe the same phenomena near the equator, which I had so often seen in the mountains of my own country. I confess that the theory which considers veins as clefts filled from above with various substances, pleases me somewhat less now than it did at that period; but these modes of intersection and driving aside, observed in the stony and metallic veins, do not the less merit the attention of travellers as being one of the most general and constant of geological phenomena. On the east of Javita, all along the Cassiquiare, and particularly in the mountains of Duida, the number of veins in the granite increases. These veins are full of holes and druses; and their frequency seems to indicate that the granite of these countries is not of very ancient formation.

We found some lichens on the rock Uinumane, opposite the island of Chamanare, at the edge of the rapids; and as the Cassiquiare near its mouth turns abruptly from east to south-west, we saw for the first time this majestic branch of the Orinoco in all its breadth. It much resembles the Rio Negro in the general aspect of the landscape. The trees of the forest, as in the basin of the latter river, advance as far as the beach, and there form a thick coppice; but the Cassiquiare has white waters, and more frequently changes its direction. Its breadth, near the rapids of Uinumane, almost surpasses that of the Rio Negro. I found it everywhere from two hundred and fifty to two hundred and eighty toises, as far as above Vasiva. Before we passed the island of Garigave, we perceived to the north-east, almost at the horizon, a little hill with a hemispheric summit; the form which in every zone characterises mountains of granite. Continually surrounded by vast plains, the solitary rocks and hills excite the attention of the traveller. Contiguous mountains are only found more to the east, towards the sources of the Pacimoni, Siapa, and Mavaca. Having arrived on the south of the Raudal of Caravine, we perceived that the Cassiquiare, by the windings of its course, again approached San Carlos. The distance from this fort to the mission of San Francisco Solano, where we slept, is only two leagues and a half by land, but it is reckoned seven or eight by the river. I passed a part of the night in the open air, waiting vainly for stars. The air was misty, notwithstanding the aguas blancas, which were to lead us beneath an ever-starry sky.

The mission of San Francisco Solano, situated on the left bank of the Cassiquiare, was founded, as were most of the Christian settlements south of the Great Cataracts of the Orinoco, not by monks, but by military authority. At the time of the expedition of the boundaries, villages were built in proportion as a subteniente, or a corporal, advanced with his troops. Part of the natives, in order to preserve their independence, retired without a struggle; others, of whom the most powerful chiefs had been gained, joined the missions. Where there was no church, they contented themselves with erecting a great cross of red wood, close to which they constructed a casa fuerte, or block-house, the walls of which were formed of large beams resting horizontally upon each other. This house had two stories; in the upper story two cannon of small calibre were placed; and two soldiers lived on the ground-floor, and were served by an Indian family. Those of the natives with whom they were at peace cultivated spots of land round the casa fuerte. The soldiers called them together by the sound of the horn, or a botuto of baked earth, whenever any hostile attack was dreaded. Such were the pretended nineteen Christian settlements founded by Don Antonio Santos in the way from Esmeralda to the Erevato. Military posts, which had no influence on the civilization of the natives, figured on the maps, and in the works of the missionaries, as villages (pueblos) and reducciones apostolicas.* (* Signifying apostolic conquests or conversions.) The preponderance of the military was maintained on the banks of the Orinoco till 1785, when the system of the monks of San Francisco began. The small number of missions founded, or rather re-established, since that period, owe their existence to the Fathers of the Observance; for the soldiers now distributed among the missions are dependent on the missionaries, or at least are reputed to be so, according to the pretensions of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

The Indians whom we found at San Francisco Solano were of two nations; Pacimonales and Cheruvichahenas. The latter being descended from a considerable tribe settled on the Rio Tomo, near the Manivas of the Upper Guainia, I tried to gather from them some ideas respecting the upper course and the sources of the Rio Negro; but the interpreter whom I employed could not make them comprehend my questions. Their continually-repeated answer was, that the sources of the Rio Negro and the Inirida were as near to each other as "two fingers of the hand." In one of the huts of the Pacimonales we purchased two fine large birds, a toucan (piapoco) and an ana, a species of macaw, seventeen inches long, having the whole body of a purple colour. We had already in our canoe seven parrots, two manakins (pipa), a motmot, two guans, or pavas de monte, two manaviris (cercoleptes or Viverra caudivolvula), and eight monkeys, namely, two ateles,* (* Marimonda of the Great Cataracts, Simia belzebuth, Brisson.) two titis,* (* Simia sciurea, the saimiri of Buffon.) one viudita,* (* Simia lugens.) two douroucoulis or nocturnal monkeys,* (* Cusiensi, or Simia trivirgata.) and a short-tailed cacajao. (* Simia melanocephala, mono feo. These last three species are new.) Father Zea whispered some complaints at the daily augmentation of this ambulatory collection. The toucan resembles the raven in manners and intelligence. It is a courageous animal, but easily tamed. Its long and stout beak serves to defend it at a distance. It makes itself master of the house, steals whatever it can come at, and loves to bathe often and fish on the banks of the river. The toucan we had bought was very young; yet it took delight, during the whole voyage, in teasing the cusicusis, or nocturnal monkeys, which are melancholy and irritable. I did not observe what has been related in some works of natural history, that the toucan is forced, from the structure of its beak, to swallow its food by throwing it up into the air. It raises it indeed with some difficulty from the ground, but, having once seized it with the point of its enormous beak, it has only to lift it up by throwing back its head, and holding it perpendicularly whilst in the act of swallowing. This bird makes extraordinary gestures when preparing to drink. The monks say that it makes the sign of the cross upon the water; and this popular belief has obtained for the toucan, from the creoles, the singular name of diostede.* (* Dios te de, God gives it thee.)

Most of our animals were confined in small wicker cages; others ran at full liberty in all parts of the boat. At the approach of rain the macaws sent forth noisy cries, the toucan wanted to reach the shore to fish, and the little monkeys (the titis) went in search of Father Zea, to take shelter in the large sleeves of his Franciscan habit. These incidents sometimes amused us so much that we forgot the torment of the mosquitos. At night we placed a leather case (petaca), containing our provisions, in the centre; then our instruments, and the cages of our animals; our hammocks were suspended around the cages, and beyond were those of the Indians. The exterior circle was formed by the fires which are lighted to keep off the jaguars. Such was the order of our encampment on the banks of the Cassiquiare. The Indians often spoke to us of a little nocturnal animal, with a long nose, which surprises the young parrots in their nests, and in eating makes use of its hands like the monkeys and the maniveris, or kinkajous. They call it the guachi; it is, no doubt, a coati, perhaps the Viverra nasua, which I saw wild in Mexico. The missionaries gravely prohibit the natives from eating the flesh of the guachi, to which, according to far-spread superstitious ideas, they attribute the same stimulating qualities which the people of the East believe to exist in the skink, and the Americans in the flesh of the alligator.

On the 11th of May, we left the mission of San Francisco Solano at a late hour, to make but a short day's journey. The uniform stratum of vapours began to be divided into clouds with distinct outlines: and there was a light east wind in the upper regions of the air. We recognized in these signs an approaching change of the weather; and were unwilling to go far from the mouth of the Cassiquiare, in the hope of observing during the following night the passage of some star over the meridian. We descried the Cano Daquiapo to the south, the Guachaparu to the north, and a few miles further, the rapids of Cananivacari. The velocity of the current being 6.3 feet in a second, we had to struggle against the turbulent waves of the Raudal. We went on shore, and M. Bonpland discovered within a few steps of the beach a majestic almendron, or Bertholletia excelsa. The Indians assured us, that the existence of this valuable plant of the banks of the Cassiquiare was unknown at San Francisco Solano, Vasiva, and Esmeralda. They did not think that the tree we saw, which was more than sixty feet high, had been sown by some passing traveller. Experiments made at San Carlos have shown how rare it is to succeed in causing the bertholletia to germinate, on account of its ligneous pericarp, and the oil contained in its nut which so readily becomes rancid. Perhaps this tree denoted the existence of a forest of bertholletia in the inland country on the east and north-east. We know, at least, with certainty, that this fine tree grows wild in the third degree of latitude, in the Cerro de Guanaya. The plants that live in society have seldom marked limits, and it happens, that before we reach a palmar or a pinar,* (* Two Spanish words, which, according to a Latin form, denote a forest of palm-trees, palmetum, and of pines, pinetum.) we find solitary palm-trees and pines. They are somewhat like colonists that have advanced in the midst of a country peopled with different vegetable productions.

Four miles distant from the rapids of Cunanivacari, rocks of the strangest form rise in the plains. First appears a narrow wall eighty feet high, and perpendicular; and at the southern extremity of this wall are two turrets, the courses of which are of granite, and nearly horizontal. The grouping of the rocks of Guanari is so symmetrical that they might be taken for the ruins of an ancient edifice. Are they the remains of islets in the midst of an inland sea, that covered the flat ground between the Sierra Parime and the Parecis mountains?* (* The Sierra de la Parime, or of the Upper Orinoco, and the Sierra (or Campos) dos Parecis, are part of the mountains of Matto Grosso, and form the northern back of the Sierra de Chiquitos. I here name the two chains of mountains running from east to west, and bordering the plains or basins of the Cassiquiare, the Rio Negro, and the Amazon, between 5 degrees 30 minutes north, and 14 degrees south latitude.) or have these walls of rock, these turrets of granite, been upheaved by the elastic forces that still act in the interior of our planet? We may be permitted to meditate a little on the origin of mountains, after having seen the position of the Mexican volcanoes, and of trachyte summits on an elongated crevice; having found in the Andes of South America primitive and volcanic rocks in a straight line in the same chain; and when we recollect the island, three miles in circumference, and of a great height, which in modern times issued from the depths of the ocean near Oonalaska.

The banks of the Cassiquiare are adorned with the chiriva palm-tree with pinnate leaves, silvery on the under part. The rest of the forest furnishes only trees with large, coriaceous, glossy leaves, that have plain edges. This peculiar physiognomy* of the vegetation of the Guainia, the Tuamini, and the Cassiquiare, is owing to the preponderance of the families of the guttiferae, the sapotae, and the laurineae, in the equatorial regions. (* This physiognomy struck us forcibly, in the vast forests of Spanish Guiana, only between the second and third degrees of north latitude.) The serenity of the sky promising us a fine night, we resolved, at five in the evening, to rest near the Piedra de Culimacari, a solitary granite rock, like all those which I have described between the Atabapo and the Cassiquiare. We found by the bearings of the sinuosities of the river, that this rock is nearly in the latitude of the mission of San Francisco Solano. In those desert countries, where man has hitherto left only fugitive traces of his existence, I constantly endeavoured to make my observations near the mouth of a river, or at the foot of a rock distinguishable by its form. Such points only as are immutable by their nature can serve for the basis of geographical maps. I obtained, in the night of the 10th of May, a good observation of latitude by alpha of the Southern Cross; the longitude was determined, but with less precision, by the chronometer, taking the altitudes of the two beautiful stars which shine in the feet of the Centaur. This observation made known to us at the same time, with sufficient precision for the purposes of geography, the positions of the mouth of the Pacimoni, of the fortress of San Carlos, and of the junction of the Cassiquiare with the Rio Negro. The rock of Culimacari is precisely in latitude 2 degrees 0 minutes 42 seconds, and probably in longitude 69 degrees 33 minutes 50 seconds.

Satisfied with our observations, we left the rock of Culimacari at half past one on the morning of the 12th. The torment of mosquitos, to which we were exposed, augmented in proportion as we withdrew from the Rio Negro. There are no zancudos in the valley of Cassiquiare, but the simulia, and all the other insects of the tipulary family, are the more numerous and venomous. Having still eight nights to pass in the open air in this damp and unhealthy climate, before we could reach the mission of Esmeralda, our pilot sought to arrange our passage in such a manner as might enable us to enjoy the hospitality of the missionary of Mandavaca, and some shelter in the village of Vasiva. We went up with difficulty against the current, which was nine feet, and in some places (where I measured it with precision) eleven feet eight inches in a second, that is, almost eight miles an hour. Our resting-place was probably not farther than three leagues in a right line from the mission of Mandavaca; yet, though we had no reason to complain of inactivity on the part of our rowers, we were fourteen hours in making this short passage.

Towards sunrise we passed the mouth of the Rio Pacimoni, a river which I mentioned when speaking of the trade in sarsaparilla, and which (by means of the Baria) intertwines in so remarkable a way with the Cababuri. The Pacimoni rises in a hilly ground, from the confluence of three small rivers,* not marked on the maps of the missionaries. (* The Rios Guajavaca, Moreje, and Cachevaynery.) Its waters are black, but less so than those of the lake of Vasiva, which also communicates with the Cassiquiare. Between those two tributary streams coming from the east, lies the mouth of the Rio Idapa, the waters of which are white. I shall not recur again to the difficulty of explaining this coexistence of rivers differently coloured, within a small extent of territory, but shall merely observe, that at the mouth of the Pacimoni, and on the borders of the lake Vasiva, we were again struck with the purity and extreme transparency of the brown waters. Ancient Arabian travellers have observed, that the Alpine branch of the Nile, which joins the Bahr el Abiad near Halfaja, has green waters, which are so transparent, that the fish may be seen at the bottom of the river.

We passed some turbulent rapids before we reached the mission of Mandavaca. The village, which bears also the name of Quirabuena, contains only sixty natives. The state of the Christian settlements is in general so miserable that, in the whole course of the Cassiquiare, on a length of fifty leagues, not two hundred inhabitants are found. The banks of this river were indeed more peopled before the arrival of the missionaries; the Indians have withdrawn into the woods, toward the east; for the western plains are almost deserted. The natives subsist during a part of the year on those large ants of which I have spoken above. These insects are much esteemed here, as spiders are in the southern hemisphere, where the savages of Australia deem them delicious. We found at Mandavaca the good old missionary, who had already spent twenty years of mosquitos in the bosques del Cassiquiare, and whose legs were so spotted by the stings of insects, that the colour of the skin could scarcely be perceived. He talked to us of his solitude, and of the sad necessity which often compelled him to leave the most atrocious crimes unpunished in the two missions of Mandavaca and Vasiva. In the latter place, an Indian alcalde had, a few years before, eaten one of his wives, after having taken her to his conuco,* (* A hut surrounded with cultivated ground; a sort of country-house, which the natives prefer to residing in the missions.) and fattened her by good feeding. The cannibalism of the nations of Guiana is never caused by the want of subsistence, or by the superstitions of their religion, as in the islands of the South Sea; but is generally the effect of the vengeance of a conqueror, and (as the missionaries say) "of a vitiated appetite." Victory over a hostile tribe is celebrated by a repast, in which some parts of the body of a prisoner are devoured. Sometimes a defenceless family is surprised in the night; or an enemy, who is met with by chance in the woods, is killed by a poisoned arrow. The body is cut to pieces, and carried as a trophy to the hut. It is civilization only, that has made man feel the unity of the human race; which has revealed to him, as we may say, the ties of consanguinity, by which he is linked to beings to whose language and manners he is a stranger. Savages know only their own family; and a tribe appears to them but a more numerous assemblage of relations. When those who inhabit the missions see Indians of the forest, who are unknown to them, arrive, they make use of an expression, which has struck us by its simple candour: they are, no doubt, my relations; I understand them when they speak to me. But these very savages detest all who are not of their family, or their tribe; and hunt the Indians of a neighbouring tribe, who live at war with their own, as we hunt game. They know the duties of family ties and of relationship, but not those of humanity, which require the feeling of a common tie with beings framed like ourselves. No emotion of pity prompts them to spare the wives or children of a hostile race; and the latter are devoured in preference, at the repast given at the conclusion of a battle or warlike incursion.
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Re: Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions

Postby admin » Mon Jun 04, 2018 7:00 am

Part 3 of 3

The hatred which savages for the most part feel for men who speak another idiom, and appear to them to be of an inferior race, is sometimes rekindled in the missions, after having long slumbered. A short time before our arrival at Esmeralda, an Indian, born in the forest* behind the Duida, travelled alone with another Indian, who, after having been made prisoner by the Spaniards on the banks of the Ventuario, lived peaceably in the village, or, as it is expressed here, within the sound of the bell (debaxo de la campana.) (* En el monte. The Indians born in the missions are distinguished from those born in the woods. The word monte signifies more frequently, in the colonies, a forest (bosque) than a mountain, and this circumstance has led to great errors in our maps, on which chains of mountains (sierras) are figured, where there are only thick forests, (monte espeso.)) The latter could only walk slowly, because he was suffering from one of those fevers to which the natives are subject, when they arrive in the missions, and abruptly change their diet. Wearied by his delay, his fellow-traveller killed him, and hid the body behind a copse of thick trees, near Esmeralda. This crime, like many others among the Indians, would have remained unknown, if the murderer had not made preparations for a feast on the following day. He tried to induce his children, born in the mission and become Christians, to go with him for some parts of the dead body. They had much difficulty in persuading him to desist from his purpose; and the soldier who was posted at Esmeralda, learned from the domestic squabble caused by this event, what the Indians would have concealed from his knowledge.

It is known that cannibalism and the practice of human sacrifices, with which it is often connected, are found to exist in all parts of the globe, and among people of very different races;* but what strikes us more in the study of history is to see human sacrifices retained in a state of civilization somewhat advanced; and that the nations who hold it a point of honour to devour their prisoners are not always the rudest and most ferocious. (* Some casual instances of children carried off by the negroes in the island of Cuba have led to the belief, in the Spanish colonies, that there are tribes of cannibals in Africa. This opinion, though supported by some travellers, is not borne out by the researches of Mr. Barrow on the interior of that country. Superstitious practices may have given rise to imputations perhaps as unjust as those of which Jewish families were the victims in the ages of intolerance and persecution.) The painful facts have not escaped the observation of those missionaries who are sufficiently enlightened to reflect on the manners of the surrounding tribes. The Cabres, the Guipunaves, and the Caribs, have always been more powerful and more civilized than the other hordes of the Orinoco; and yet the two former are as much addicted to anthropophagy as the latter are repugnant to it. We must carefully distinguish the different branches into which the great family of the Caribbee nations is divided. These branches are as numerous as those of the Mongols, and the western Tartars, or Turcomans. The Caribs of the continent, those who inhabit the plains between the Lower Orinoco, the Rio Branco, the Essequibo, and the sources of the Oyapoc, hold in horror the practice of devouring their enemies. This barbarous custom,* at the first discovery of America, existed only among the Caribs of the West Indies. (* See Geraldini Itinerarium page 186 and the eloquent tract of cardinal Bembo on the discoveries of Columbus. "Insularum partem homines incolebant feri trucesque, qui puerorum et virorum carnibus, quos aliis in insulus bello aut latrociniis cepissent, vescebantur; a feminis abstinebant; Canibales appellati." "Some of the islands are inhabited by a cruel and savage race, called cannibals, who eat the flesh of men and boys, and captives and slaves of the male sex, abstaining from that of females." Hist. Venet. 1551. The custom of sparing the lives of female prisoners confirms what I have previously said of the language of the women. Does the word cannibal, applied to the Caribs of the West India Islands, belong to the language of this archipelago (that of Haiti)? or must we seek for it in an idiom of Florida, which some traditions indicate as the first country of the Caribs?) It is they who have rendered the names of cannibals, Caribbees, and anthropophagi, synonymous; it was their cruelties that prompted the law promulgated in 1504, by which the Spaniards were permitted to make a slave of every individual of an American nation which could be proved to be of Caribbee origin. I believe, however, that the anthropophagy of the inhabitants of the West India Islands was much exaggerated by early travellers, whose stories Herrera, a grave and judicious historian, has not disdained to repeat in his Decades historicas. He has even credited that extraordinary event which led the Caribs to renounce this barbarous custom. The natives of a little island devoured a Dominican monk whom they had carried off from the coast of Porto Rico; they all fell sick, and would never again eat monk or layman.

If the Caribs of the Orinoco, since the commencement of the sixteenth century, have differed in their manners from those of the West India Islands; if they are unjustly accused of anthropophagy; it is difficult to attribute this difference to any superiority of their social state. The strangest contrasts are found blended in this mixture of nations, some of whom live only upon fish, monkeys, and ants; while others are more or less cultivators of the ground, more or less occupied in making and painting pottery, or weaving hammocks or cotton cloth. Several of the latter tribes have preserved inhuman customs altogether unknown to the former. "You cannot imagine," said the old missionary of Mandavaca, "the perversity of this Indian race (familia de Indios). You receive men of a new tribe into the village; they appear to be mild, good, and laborious; but suffer them to take part in an incursion (entrada) to bring in the natives, and you can scarcely prevent them from murdering all they meet, and hiding some portions of the dead bodies." In reflecting on the manners of these Indians, we are almost horrified at that combination of sentiments which seem to exclude each other; that faculty of nations to become but partially humanized; that preponderance of customs, prejudices, and traditions, over the natural affections of the heart. We had a fugitive Indian from the Guaisia in our canoe, who had become sufficiently civilized in a few weeks to be useful to us in placing the instruments necessary for our observations at night. He was no less mild than intelligent, and we had some desire of taking him into our service. What was our horror when, talking to him by means of an interpreter, we learned, that the flesh of the marimonde monkeys, though blacker, appeared to him to have the taste of human flesh. He told us that his relations (that is, the people of his tribe) preferred the inside of the hands in man, as in bears. This assertion was accompanied with gestures of savage gratification. We inquired of this young man, so calm and so affectionate in the little services which he rendered us, whether he still felt sometimes a desire to eat of a Cheruvichahena. He answered, without discomposure, that, living in the mission, he would only eat what he saw was eaten by the Padres. Reproaches addressed to the natives on the abominable practice which we here discuss, produce no effect; it is as if a Brahmin, travelling in Europe, were to reproach us with the habit of feeding on the flesh of animals. In the eyes of the Indian of the Guaisia, the Cheruvichahena was a being entirely different from himself; and one whom he thought it was no more unjust to kill than the jaguars of the forest. It was merely from a sense of propriety that, whilst he remained in the mission, he would only eat the same food as the Fathers. The natives, if they return to their tribe (al monte), or find themselves pressed by hunger, soon resume their old habits of anthropophagy. And why should we be so much astonished at this inconstancy in the tribes of the Orinoco, when we are reminded, by terrible and well-ascertained examples, of what has passed among civilized nations in times of great scarcity? In Egypt, in the thirteenth century, the habit of eating human flesh pervaded all classes of society; extraordinary snares were spread for physicians in particular. They were called to attend persons who pretended to be sick, but who were only hungry; and it was not in order to be consulted, but devoured. An historian of great veracity, Abd-allatif, has related how a practice, which at first inspired dread and horror, soon occasioned not even the slightest surprise.* (* "When the poor began to eat human flesh, the horror and astonishment caused by repasts so dreadful were such that these crimes furnished the never-ceasing subject of every conversation. But at length the people became so accustomed to it, and conceived such a taste for this detestable food, that people of wealth and respectability were found to use it as their ordinary food, to eat it by way of a treat, and even to lay in a stock of it. This flesh was prepared in different ways, and the practice being once introduced, spread into the provinces, so that instances of it were found in every part of Egypt. It then no longer caused any surprise; the horror it had at first inspired vanished; and it was mentioned as an indifferent and ordinary thing. This mania of devouring one another became so common among the poor, that the greater part perished in this manner. These wretches employed all sorts of artifices, to seize men by surprise, or decoy them into their houses under false pretences. This happened to three physicians among those who visited me; and a bookseller who sold me books, an old and very corpulent man, fell into their snares, and escaped with great difficulty. All the facts which we relate as eye-witnesses fell under our observation accidentally, for we generally avoided witnessing spectacles which inspired us with so much horror." Account of Egypt by Abd-allatif, physician of Bagdad, translated into French by De Sacy pages 360 to 374.)

Although the Indians of the Cassiquiare readily return to their barbarous habits, they evince, whilst in the missions, intelligence, some love of labour, and, in particular, a great facility in learning the Spanish language. The villages being, for the most part, inhabited by three or four tribes, who do not understand each other, a foreign idiom, which is at the same time that of the civil power, the language of the missionary, affords the advantage of more general means of communication. I heard a Poinave Indian conversing in Spanish with a Guahibo, though both had come from their forests within three months. They uttered a phrase every quarter of an hour, prepared with difficulty, and in which the gerund of the verb, no doubt according to the grammatical turn of their own languages, was constantly employed. "When I seeing Padre, Padre to me saying;"* (* "Quando io mirando Padre, Padre me diciendo.") instead of, "when I saw the missionary, he said to me." I have mentioned in another place, how wise it appeared to me in the Jesuits to generalize one of the languages of civilized America, for instance that of the Peruvians,* (* The Quichua or Inca language, Lengua del Inga.) and instruct the Indians in an idiom which is foreign to them in its roots, but not in its structure and grammatical forms. This was following the system which the Incas, or king-priests of Peru had employed for ages, in order to humanize the barbarous nations of the Upper Maranon, and maintain them under their domination; a system somewhat more reasonable than that of making the natives of America speak Latin, as was gravely proposed in a provincial concilio at Mexico.

We were told that the Indians of the Cassiquiare and the Rio Negro are preferred on the Lower Orinoco, and especially at Angostura, to the inhabitants of the other missions, on account of their intelligence and activity. Those of Mandavaca are celebrated among the tribes of their own race for the preparation of the curare poison, which does not yield in strength to the curare of Esmeralda. Unhappily the natives devote themselves to this employment more than to agriculture. Yet the soil on the banks of the Cassiquiare is excellent. We find there a granitic sand, of a blackish-brown colour, which is covered in the forests with thick layers of rich earth, and on the banks of the river with clay almost impermeable to water. The soil of the Cassiquiare appears more fertile than that of the valley of the Rio Negro, where maize does not prosper. Rice, beans, cotton, sugar, and indigo yield rich harvests, wherever their cultivation has been tried.* (* M. Bonpland found at Mandavaca, in the huts of the natives, a plant with tuberous roots, exactly like cassava (yucca). It is called cumapana, and is cooked by being baked on the ashes. It grows spontaneously on the banks of the Cassiquiare.) We saw wild indigo around the missions of San Miguel de Davipe, San Carlos, and Mandavaca. No doubt can exist that several nations of America, particularly the Mexicans, long before the conquest, employed real indigo in their hieroglyphic paintings; and that small cakes of this substance were sold at the great market of Tenochtitlan. But a colouring matter, chemically identical, may be extracted from plants belonging to neighbouring genera; and I should not at present venture to affirm that the native indigoferae of America do not furnish some generic difference from the Indigofera anil, and the Indigofera argentea of the Old World. In the coffee-trees of both hemispheres this difference has been observed.

Here, as at the Rio Negro, the humidity of the air, and the consequent abundance of insects, are obstacles almost invincible to new cultivation. Everywhere you meet with those large ants that march in close bands, and direct their attacks the more readily on cultivated plants, because they are herbaceous and succulent, whilst the forests of these countries afford only plants with woody stalks. If a missionary wishes to cultivate salad, or any culinary plant of Europe, he is compelled as it were to suspend his garden in the air. He fills an old boat with good mould, and, having sown the seed, suspends it four feet above the ground with cords of the chiquichiqui palm-tree; but most frequently places it on a slight scaffolding. This protects the young plants from weeds, worms, and those ants which pursue their migration in a right line, and, not knowing what vegetates above them, seldom turn from their course to climb up stakes that are stripped of their bark. I mention this circumstance to prove how difficult, within the tropics, on the banks of great rivers, are the first attempts of man to appropriate to himself a little spot of earth in that vast domain of nature, invaded by animals, and covered by spontaneous plants.

During the night of the 13th of May, I obtained some observations of the stars, unfortunately the last at the Cassiquiare. The latitude of Mandavaca is 2 degrees 4 minutes 7 seconds; its longitude, according to the chronometer, 69 degrees 27 minutes. I found the magnetic dip 25.25 degrees (cent div), showing that it had increased considerably from the fort of San Carlos. Yet the surrounding rocks are of the same granite, mixed with a little hornblende, which we had found at Javita, and which assumes a syenitic aspect. We left Mandavaca at half-past two in the morning. After six hours' voyage, we passed on the east the mouth of the Idapa, or Siapa, which rises on the mountain of Uuturan, and furnishes near its sources a portage to the Rio Mavaca, one of the tributary streams of the Orinoco. This river has white waters, and is not more than half as broad as the Pacimoni, the waters of which are black. Its upper course has been strangely misrepresented on maps. I shall have occasion hereafter to mention the hypotheses that have given rise to these errors, in speaking of the source of the Orinoco.

We stopped near the raudal of Cunuri. The noise of the little cataract augmented sensibly during the night, and our Indians asserted that it was a certain presage of rain. I recollected that the mountaineers of the Alps have great confidence in the same prognostic.* (* "It is going to rain, because we hear the murmur of the torrents nearer," say the mountaineers of the Alps, like those of the Andes. The cause of the phenomenon is a modification of the atmosphere, which has an influence at once on the sonorous and on the luminous undulations. The prognostic drawn from the increase and the intensity of sound is intimately connected with the prognostic drawn from a less extinction of light. The mountaineers predict a change of weather, when, the air being calm, the Alps covered with perpetual snow seem on a sudden to be nearer the observer, and their outlines are marked with great distinctness on the azure sky. What is it that causes the want of homogeneity in the vertical strata of the atmosphere to disappear instantaneously?) It fell before sunrise, and the araguato monkeys had warned us, by their lengthened howlings, of the approaching rain, long before the noise of the cataract increased.

On the 14th, the mosquitos, and especially the ants, drove us from the shore before two in the morning. We had hitherto been of opinion that the ants did not crawl along the cords by which the hammocks are usually suspended: whether we were correct in this supposition, or whether the ants fell on us from the tops of the trees, I cannot say; but certain it is that we had great difficulty to keep ourselves free from these troublesome insects. The river became narrower as we advanced, and the banks were so marshy, that it was not without much labour M. Bonpland could get to a Carolinea princeps loaded with large purple flowers. This tree is the most beautiful ornament of these forests, and of those of the Rio Negro. We examined repeatedly, during this day, the temperature of the Cassiquiare. The water at the surface of the river was only 24 degrees (when the air was at 25.6 degrees.) This is nearly the temperature of the Rio Negro, but four or five degrees below that of the Orinoco. After having passed on the west the mouth of the Cano Caterico, which has black waters of extraordinary transparency, we left the bed of the river, to land at an island on which the mission of Vasiva is established. The lake which surrounds this mission is a league broad, and communicates by three outlets with the Cassiquiare. The surrounding country abounds in marshes which generate fever. The lake, the waters of which appear yellow by transmitted light, is dry in the season of great heat, and the Indians themselves are unable to resist the miasmata rising from the mud. The complete absence of wind contributes to render the climate of this country more pernicious.

From the 14th to the 21st of May we slept constantly in the open air; but I cannot indicate the spots where we halted. These regions are so wild, and so little frequented, that with the exception of a few rivers, the Indians were ignorant of the names of all the objects which I set by the compass. No observation of a star helped me to fix the latitude within the space of a degree. After having passed the point where the Itinivini separates from the Cassiquiare, to take its course to the west towards the granitic hills of Daripabo, we found the marshy banks of the river covered with bamboos. These arborescent gramina rise to the height of twenty feet; their stem is constantly arched towards the summit. It is a new species of Bambusa with very broad leaves. M. Bonpland fortunately found one in flower; a circumstance I mention, because the genera Nastus and Bambusa had before been very imperfectly distinguished, and nothing is more rare in the New World, than to see these gigantic gramina in flower. N. Mutis herborised during twenty years in a country where the Bambusa guadua forms marshy forests several leagues broad, without having ever been able to procure the flowers. We sent that learned naturalist the first ears of Bambusa from the temperate valleys of Popayan. It is strange that the parts of fructification should develop themselves so rarely in a plant which is indigenous, and which vegetates with such extraordinary rigour, from the level of the sea to the height of nine hundred toises, that is, to a subalpine region the climate of which, between the tropics, resembles that of the south of Spain. The Bambusa latifolia seems to be peculiar to the basins of the Upper Orinoco, the Cassiquiare, and the Amazon; it is a social plant, like all the gramina of the family of the nastoides; but in that part of Spanish Guiana which we traversed it does not grow in those large masses which the Spanish Americans call guadales, or forests of bamboos.

Our first resting-place above Vasiva was easily arranged. We found a little nook of dry ground, free from shrubs, to the south of the Cano Curamuni, in a spot where we saw some capuchin monkeys.* (* Simia chiropotes.) They were recognizable by their black beards and their gloomy and sullen air, and were walking slowly on the horizontal branches of a genipa. During the five following nights our passage was the more troublesome in proportion as we approached the bifurcation of the Orinoco. The luxuriance of the vegetation increases in a manner of which it is difficult even for those acquainted with the aspect of the forests between the tropics, to form an idea. There is no longer a bank: a palisade of tufted trees forms the margin of the river. You see a canal two hundred toises broad, bordered by two enormous walls, clothed with lianas and foliage. We often tried to land, but without success. Towards sunset we sailed along for an hour seeking to discover, not an opening (since none exists), but a spot less wooded, where our Indians by means of the hatchet and manual labour, could clear space enough for a resting-place for twelve or thirteen persons. It was impossible to pass the night in the canoe; the mosquitos, which tormented us during the day, accumulated toward evening beneath the toldo covered with palm-leaves, which served to shelter us from the rain. Our hands and faces had never before been so much swelled. Father Zea, who had till then boasted of having in his missions of the cataracts the largest and fiercest (las mas feroces) mosquitos, at length gradually acknowledged that the sting of the insects of the Cassiquiare was the most painful he had ever felt. We experienced great difficulty, amid a thick forest, in finding wood to make a fire, the branches of the trees in those equatorial regions where it always rains, being so full of sap, that they will scarcely burn. There being no bare shore, it is hardly possible to procure old wood, which the Indians call wood baked in the sun. However, fire was necessary to us only as a defence against the beasts of the forest; for we had such a scarcity of provision that we had little need of fuel for the purpose of preparing our food.

On the 18th of May, towards evening, we discovered a spot where wild cacao-trees were growing on the bank of the river. The nut of these cacaos is small and bitter; the Indians of the forest suck the pulp, and throw away the nut, which is picked up by the Indians of the missions, and sold to persons who are not very nice in the preparation of their chocolate. "This is the Puerto del Cacao" (Cacao Port), said the pilot; "it is here our Padres sleep, when they go to Esmeralda to buy sarbacans* (* The bamboo tubes furnished by the Arundinaria, used for projecting the poisoned arrows of the natives. See Views of Nature page 180.) and juvias ( Brazil nuts). Not five boats, however, pass annually by the Cassiquiare; and since we left Maypures (a whole month previously), we had not met one living soul on the rivers we navigated, except in the immediate neighbourhood of the missions. To the south of lake Duractumuni we slept in a forest of palm-trees. It rained violently, but the pothoses, arums, and lianas, furnished so thick a natural trellis, that we were sheltered as under a vault of foliage. The Indians whose hammocks were placed on the edge of the river, interwove the heliconias and other musaceae, so as to form a kind of roof over them. Our fires lighted up, to the height of fifty or sixty feet, the palm-trees, the lianas loaded with flowers, and the columns of white smoke, which ascended in a straight line toward the sky. The whole exhibited a magnificent spectacle; but to have enjoyed it fully, we should have breathed an air clear of insects.

The most depressing of all physical sufferings are those which are uniform in their duration, and can be combated only by long patience. It is probable, that in the exhalations of the forests of the Cassiquiare M. Bonpland imbibed the seeds of a severe malady, under which he nearly sunk on our arrival at Angostura. Happily for him and for me, nothing led us to presage the danger with which he was menaced. The view of the river, and the hum of the insects, were a little monotonous; but some remains of our natural cheerfulness enabled us to find sources of relief during our wearisome passage. We discovered, that by eating small portions of dry cacao ground without sugar, and drinking a large quantity of the river water, we succeeded in appeasing our appetite for several hours. The ants and the mosquitos troubled us more than the humidity and the want of food. Notwithstanding the privations to which we were exposed during our excursions in the Cordilleras, the navigation from Mandavaca to Esmeralda has always appeared to us the most painful part of our travels in America. I advise those who are not very desirous of seeing the great bifurcation of the Orinoco, to take the way of the Atabapo in preference to that of the Cassiquiare.

Above the Cano Duractumuni, the Cassiquiare pursues a uniform direction from north-east to south-west. We were surprised to see how much the high steep banks of the Cassiquiare had been undermined on each side by the sudden risings of the water. Uprooted trees formed as it were natural rafts; and being half-buried in the mud, they were extremely dangerous for canoes. We passed the night of the 20th of May, the last of our passage on the Cassiquiare, near the point of the bifurcation of the Orinoco. We had some hope of being able to make an astronomical observation, as falling-stars of remarkable magnitude were visible through the vapours that veiled the sky; whence we concluded that the stratum of vapours must be very thin, since meteors of this kind have scarcely ever been seen below a cloud. Those we now beheld shot towards the north, and succeeded each other at almost equal intervals. The Indians, who seldom ennoble by their expressions the wanderings of the imagination, name the falling-stars the urine; and the dew the spittle of the stars. The clouds thickened anew, and we discerned neither the meteors, nor the real stars, for which we had impatiently waited during several days.

We had been told, that we should find the insects at Esmeralda still more cruel and voracious than in the branch of the Orinoco which we were going up; nevertheless we indulged the hope of at length sleeping in a spot that was inhabited, and of taking some exercise in herbalizing. This anticipation was, however, disturbed at our last resting-place on the Cassiquiare. Whilst we were sleeping on the edge of the forest, we were warned by the Indians, in the middle of the night, that they heard very near us the cries of a jaguar. These cries, they alleged, came from the top of some neighbouring trees. Such is the thickness of the forests in these regions, that scarcely any animals are to be found there but such as climb trees; as, for instance, the monkeys, animals of the weasel tribe, jaguars, and other species of the genus Felis.

As our fires burnt brightly, we paid little attention to the cries of the jaguars. They had been attracted by the smell and noise of our dog. This animal (which was of the mastiff breed) began at first to bark; and when the tiger drew nearer, to howl, hiding himself below our hammocks. how great was our grief, when in the morning, at the moment of re-embarking, the Indians informed us that the dog had disappeared! There could be no doubt that it had been carried off by the jaguars.* (* See Views of Nature page 195.) Perhaps, when their cries had ceased, it had wandered from the fires on the side of the beach; and possibly we had not heard its moans, as we were in a profound sleep. We have often heard the inhabitants of the banks of the Orinoco and the Rio Magdalena affirm, that the oldest jaguars will carry off animals from the midst of a halting-place, cunningly grasping them by the neck so as to prevent their cries. We waited part of the morning, in the hope that our dog had only strayed. Three days after we came back to the same place; we heard again the cries of the jaguars, for these animals have a predilection for particular spots; but all our search was vain. The dog, which had accompanied us from Caracas, and had so often in swimming escaped the pursuit of the crocodiles,* had been devoured in the forest. (* Ibid page 198.)

On the 21st May, we again entered the bed of the Orinoco, three leagues below the mission of Esmeralda. It was now a month since we had left that river near the mouth of the Guaviare. We had still to proceed seven hundred and fifty miles* (* Of nine hundred and fifty toises each, or two hundred and fifty nautical leagues.) before reaching Angostura, but we should go with the stream; and this consideration lessened our discouragement. In descending great rivers, the rowers take the middle of the current, where there are few mosquitos; but in ascending, they are obliged, in order to avail themselves of the dead waters and counter-currents, to sail near the shore, where the proximity of the forests, and the remains of organic substances accumulated on the beach, harbour the tipulary insects. The point of the celebrated bifurcation of the Orinoco has a very imposing aspect. Lofty granitic mountains rise on the northern bank; and amidst them are discovered at a distance the Maraguaca and the Duida. There are no mountains on the left bank of the Orinoco, west or east of the bifurcation, till opposite the mouth of the Tamatama. On that spot stands the rock Guaraco, which is said to throw out flames from time to time in the rainy season. When the Orinoco is no longer bounded by mountains towards the south, and when it reaches the opening of a valley, or rather a depression of the ground, which terminates at the Rio Negro, it divides itself into two branches. The principal branch (the Rio Paragua of the Indians) continues its course west-north-west, turning round the group of the mountains of Parime; the other branch forming the communication with the Amazon runs into plains, the general slope of which is southward, but of which the partial planes incline, in the Cassiquiare, to south-west, and in the basin of the Rio Negro, south-east. A phenomenon so strange in appearance, which I verified on the spot, merits particular attention; the more especially as it may throw some light on analogous facts, which are supposed to have been observed in the interior of Africa.

The existence of a communication of the Orinoco with the Amazon by the Rio Negro, and a bifurcation of the Caqueta, was believed by Sanson, and rejected by Father Fritz and by Blaeuw: it was marked in the first maps of De l'Isle, but abandoned by that celebrated geographer towards the end of his days. Those who had mistaken the mode of this communication hastened to deny the communication itself. It is in fact well worthy of remark that, at the time when the Portuguese went up most frequently by the Amazon, the Rio Negro, and the Cassiquiare, and when Father Gumilla's letters were carried (by the natural interbranching of the rivers) from the lower Orinoco to Grand Para, that very missionary made every effort to spread the opinion through Europe that the basins of the Orinoco and the Amazon are perfectly separate. He asserts that, having several times gone up the former of these rivers as far as the Raudal of Tabaje, situate in the latitude of 1 degree 4 minutes, he never saw a river flow in or out that could be taken for the Rio Negro. He adds further, that a great Cordillera, which stretches from east to west, prevents the mingling of the waters, and renders all discussion on the supposed communication of the two rivers useless. The errors of Father Gumilla arose from his firm persuasion that he had reached the parallel of 1 degree 4 minutes on the Orinoco. He was in error by more than 5 degrees 10 minutes of latitude; for I found, by observation, at the mission of Atures, thirteen leagues south of the rapids of Tabaje, the latitude to be 5 degrees 37 minutes 34 seconds. Gumilla having gone but little above the confluence of the Meta, it is not surprising that he had no knowledge of the bifurcation of the Orinoco, which is found by the sinuosities of the river to be one hundred and twenty leagues distant from the Raudal of Tabaje.

La Condamine, during his memorable navigation on the river Amazon in 1743, carefully collected a great number of proofs of this communication of the rivers, denied by the Spanish Jesuit. The most decisive proof then appeared to him to be the unsuspected testimony of a Cauriacani Indian woman with whom he had conversed, and who had come in a boat from the banks of the Orinoco (from the mission of Pararuma) to Grand Para. Before the return of La Condamine to his own country, the voyage of Father Manuel Roman, and the fortuitous meeting of the missionaries of the Orinoco and the Amazon, left no doubt of this fact, the knowledge of which was first obtained by Acunha.

The incursions undertaken from the middle of the seventeenth century, to procure slaves, had gradually led the Portuguese from the Rio Negro, by the Cassiquiare, to the bed of a great river, which they did not know to be the Upper Orinoco. A flying camp, composed of the troop of ransomers,* favoured this inhuman commerce. (* Tropa de rescate; from rescatar, to redeem.) After having excited the natives to make war, they ransomed the prisoners; and, to give an appearance of equity to the traffic, monks accompanied the troop of ransomers to examine whether those who sold the slaves had a right to do so, by having made them prisoners in open war. From the year 1737 these visits of the Portuguese to the Upper Orinoco became very frequent. The desire of exchanging slaves (poitos) for hatchets, fish-hooks, and glass trinkets, induced the Indian tribes to make war upon one another. The Guipunaves, led on by their valiant and cruel chief Macapu, descended from the banks of the Inirida towards the confluence of the Atabapo and the Orinoco. "They sold," says the missionary Gili, "the slaves whom they did not eat."* (* "I Guipunavi avventizj abitatori dell' Alto Orinoco, recavan de' danni incredibili alle vicine mansuete nazioni; altre mangiondone, altre conducendone schiave ne' Portoghesi dominj." "The Guipunaves, at their first arrival on the Upper Orinoco, inflicted incredible injuries on the other peaceable tribes who dwelt near them, devouring some, and selling others as slaves to the Portuguese." Gili tome 1 page 31.) The Jesuits of the Lower Orinoco became uneasy at this state of things, and the superior of the Spanish missions, Father Roman, the intimate friend of Gumilla, took the courageous resolution of crossing the Great Cataracts, and visiting the Guipunaves, without being escorted by Spanish soldiers. He left Carichana the 4th of February, 1744; and having arrived at the confluence of the Guaviare, the Atabapo, and the Orinoco, where the last mentioned river suddenly changes its previous course from east to west, to a direction from south to north, he saw from afar a canoe as large as his own, and filled with men in European dresses. He caused a crucifix to be placed at the bow of his boat in sign of peace, according to the custom of the missionaries when they navigate in a country unknown to them. The whites, who were Portuguese slave-traders of the Rio Negro, recognized with marks of joy the habit of the order of St. Ignatius. They heard with astonishment that the river on which this meeting took place was the Orinoco; and they brought Father Roman by the Cassiquiare to the Brazilian settlements on the Rio Negro. The superior of the Spanish missions was forced to remain near the flying camp of the troop of ransomers till the arrival of the Portuguese Jesuit Avogadri, who had gone upon business to Grand Para. Father Manuel Roman returned with his Salive Indians by the same way, that of the Cassiquiare and the Upper Orinoco, to Pararuma,* a little to the north of Carichana, after an absence of seven months. (* On the 15th of October, 1774. La Condamine quitted the town of Grand Para December the 29th, 1743; it follows, from a comparison of the dates, that the Indian woman of Pararuma, carried off by the Portuguese, and to whom the French traveller had spoken, had not come with Father Roman, as was erroneously affirmed. The appearance of this woman on the banks of the Amazon is interesting with respect to the researches lately made on the mixture of races and languages: it proves the enormous distances through which the individuals of one tribe are compelled to carry on intercourse with those of another.) He was the first white man who went from the Rio Negro, consequently from the basin of the Amazon, without passing his boats over any portage, to the basin of the Lower Orinoco.

The tidings of this extraordinary passage spread with such rapidity that La Condamine was able to announce it* at a public sitting of the Academy, seven months after the return of Father Roman to Pararuma. (* The intelligence was communicated to him by Father John Ferreyro, rector of the college of Jesuits at Para. Voyage a l'Amazone page 120. Mem. de l'Acad. 1745 page 450. Caulin page 79. See also, in the work of Gili, the fifth chapter of the first book, published in 1780, with the title: Della scoperta delle communicazione dell' Orinoco col Maragnone.) "The communication between the Orinoco and the Amazon," said he, "recently averred, may pass so much the more for a discovery in geography, as, although the junction of these two rivers is marked on the old maps (according to the information given by Acunha), it had been suppressed by all the modern geographers in their new maps, as if in concert. This is not the first time that what is positive fact has been thought fabulous, that the spirit of criticism has been pushed too far, and that this communication has been treated as chimerical by those who ought to have been better informed." Since the voyage of Father Roman in 1774, no person in Spanish Guiana, or on the coasts of Cumana and Caracas, has admitted a doubt of the existence of the Cassiquiare and the bifurcation of the Orinoco. Father Gumilla himself; whom Bouguer met at Carthagena, confessed that he had been deceived; and he read to Father Gili, a short time before his death, a supplement to his history of the Orinoco, intended for a new edition, in which he recounts pleasantly the manner in which he had been undeceived. The expedition of the boundaries, under Iturriaga and Solano, completed in detail the knowledge of the geography of the Upper Orinoco, and the intertwinings of this river with the Rio Negro. Solano established himself in 1756 at the confluence of the Atabapo; and from that time the Spanish and Portuguese commissioners often passed in their canoes, by the Cassiquiare, from the Lower Orinoco to the Rio Negro, to visit each other at their head-quarters of Cabruta* and Mariva. (* General Iturriaga, confined by illness, first at Muitaco, or Real Corona, and afterward at Cabruta, received a visit in 1760 from the Portuguese colonel Don Gabriel de Souza y Figueira, who came from Grand Para, having made a voyage of nearly nine hundred leagues in his boat. The Swedish botanist, Loefling, who was chosen to accompany the expedition of the boundaries at the expense of the Spanish government, so greatly multiplied in his ardent imagination the branchings of the great rivers of South America, that he appeared well persuaded of being able to navigate, by the Rio Negro and the Amazon, to the Rio de la Plata. (Iter page 131.)) Since the year 1767, two or three canoes come annually from the fort of San Carlos, by the bifurcation of the Orinoco to Angostura, to fetch salt and the pay of the troops. These passages, from one basin of a river to another, by the natural canal of the Cassiquiare, excite no more attention in the colonists at present than the arrival of boats that descend the Loire by the canal of Orleans, awakens on the banks of the Seine.

Although, since the journey of Father Roman, in 1744, precise notions have been acquired in the Spanish possessions in America, both of the direction of the Upper Orinoco from east to west, and of the manner of its communication with the Rio Negro, this knowledge did not reach Europe till a much later period. In 1750, La Condamine and D'Anville* were still of opinion that the Orinoco was a branch of the Caqueta coming from the south-east, and that the Rio Negro issued immediately from it. (* See the classical memoir of this great geographer in the Journal des Savans, March 1750 page 184. "One fact," says D'Anville, "which cannot be considered as equivocal, after the proofs with which we have been recently furnished, is the communication of the Rio Negro with the Orinoco; but we must not hesitate to admit, that we are not yet sufficiently informed of the manner in which this communication takes place." I was surprised to see in a very rare map, which I found at Rome (Provincia Quitensis Soc. Jesu in America, auctore Carolo Brentano et Nicolao de la Torre; Romae 1745) that seven years after the discovery of Father Roman, the Jesuits of Quito were ignorant of the existence of the Cassiquiare. The Rio Negro is figured in this map as a branch of the Orinoco.) It was only in the second edition of his South America, that D'Anville (without renouncing that intercommunication of the Caqueta, by means of the Iniricha (Inirida), with the Orinoco and the Rio Negro) describes the Orinoco as taking its rise at the east, near the sources of the Rio Branco, and marks the Rio Cassiquiare as bearing the waters of the Upper Orinoco to the Rio Negro. It is probable that this indefatigable and learned writer had obtained information on the manner of the bifurcation from his frequent communications with the missionaries,* who were then the only geographers of the most inland parts of the continents. (* According to the Annals of Berredo, it would appear, that as early as the year 1739, the military incursions from the Rio Negro to the Cassiquiare had confirmed the Portuguese Jesuits in the opinion that there was a communication between the Amazon and the Orinoco. Southey's Brazils volume 1 page 658.)

Had the nations of the lower region of equinoctial America participated in the civilization spread over the cold and alpine region, that immense Mesopotamia between the Orinoco and the Amazon would have favoured the development of their industry, animated their commerce, and accelerated the progress of social order. We see everywhere in the old world the influence of locality on the dawning civilization of nations. The island of Meroe between the Astaboras and the Nile, the Punjab of the Indus, the Douab of the Ganges, and the Mesopotamia of the Euphrates, furnish examples that are justly celebrated in the annals of the human race. But the feeble tribes that wander in the savannahs and the woods of eastern America, have profited little by the advantages of their soil, and the interbranchings of their rivers. The distant incursions of the Caribs, who went up the Orinoco, the Cassiquiare, and the Rio Negro, to carry off slaves and exercise pillage, compelled some rude tribes to rouse themselves from their indolence, and form associations for their common defence; the little good, however, which these wars with the Caribs (the Bedouins of the rivers of Guiana) produced, was but slight compensation for the evils that followed in their train, by rendering the tribes more ferocious, and diminishing their population. We cannot doubt, that the physical aspect of Greece, intersected by small chains of mountains, and mediterranean gulfs, contributed, at the dawn of civilization, to the intellectual development of the Greeks. But the operation of this influence of climate, and of the configuration of the soil, is felt in all its force only among a race of men who, endowed with a happy organization of the mental faculties, are susceptible of exterior impulse. In studying the history of our species, we see, at certain distances, these foci of ancient civilization dispersed over the globe like luminous points; and we are struck by the inequality of improvement in nations inhabiting analogous climates, and whose native soil appears equally favoured by the most precious gifts of nature.

Since my departure from the banks of the Orinoco and the Amazon, a new era has unfolded itself in the social state of the nations of the West. The fury of civil discussions has been succeeded by the blessings of peace, and a freer development of the arts of industry. The bifurcations of the Orinoco, the isthmus of Tuamini, so easy to be made passable by an artificial canal, will ere long fix the attention of commercial Europe. The Cassiquiare, as broad as the Rhine, and the course of which is one hundred and eighty miles in length, will no longer form uselessly a navigable canal between two basins of rivers which have a surface of one hundred and ninety thousand square leagues. The grain of New Grenada will be carried to the banks of the Rio Negro; boats will descend from the sources of the Napo and the Ucuyabe, from the Andes of Quito and of Upper Peru, to the mouths of the Orinoco, a distance which equals that from Timbuctoo to Marseilles. A country nine or ten times larger than Spain, and enriched with the most varied productions, is navigable in every direction by the medium of the natural canal of the Cassiquiare, and the bifurcation of the rivers. This phenomenon, which will one day be so important for the political connections of nations, unquestionably deserves to be carefully examined.
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Re: Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions

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Part 1 of 4

CHAPTER 2.24. THE UPPER ORINOCO, FROM THE ESMERALDA TO THE CONFLUENCE OF THE GUAVIARE. SECOND PASSAGE ACROSS THE CATARACTS OF ATURES AND MAYPURES. THE LOWER ORINOCO, BETWEEN THE MOUTH OF THE RIO APURE, AND ANGOSTURA THE CAPITAL OF SPANISH GUIANA.

Opposite to the point where the Orinoco forms its bifurcation, the granitic group of Duida rises in an amphitheatre on the right bank of the river. This mountain, which the missionaries call a volcano, is nearly eight thousand feet high. It is perpendicular on the south and west, and has an aspect of solemn grandeur. Its summit is bare and stony, but, wherever its less steep declivities are covered with mould vast forests appear suspended on its flanks. At the foot of Duida is the mission of Esmeralda, a little hamlet with eighty inhabitants, surrounded by a lovely plain, intersected by rills of black but limpid water. This plain is adorned with clumps of the mauritia palm, the sago-tree of America. Nearer the mountain, the distance of which from the cross of the mission I found to be seven thousand three hundred toises, the marshy plain changes to a savannah, and spends itself along the lower region of the Cordillera. Large pine-apples are there found of a delicious flavour; that species of bromelia always grows solitary among the gramina, like our Colchicum autumnale, while the B. karatas, another species of the same genus, is a social plant, like our whortleberries and heaths. The pine-apples of Esmeralda are cultivated throughout Guiana. There are certain spots in America, as in Europe, where different fruits attain their highest perfection. The sapota-plum (achra) should be eaten at the Island of Margareta or at Cumana: the chirimoya (very different from the custard-apple and sweet-sop of the West India Islands) at Loxa in Peru; the grenadilla, or parcha, at Caracas; and the pine-apple at Esmeralda, or in the island of Cuba. The pine-apple forms the ornament of the fields near the Havannah, where it is planted in parallel rows; on the sides of the Duida it embellishes the turf of the savannahs, lifting its yellow fruit, crowned with a tuft of silvery leaves, above the setaria, the paspalum, and a few cyperaceae. This plant, which the Indians of the Orinoco call ana-curua, has been propagated since the sixteenth century in the interior of China,* and some English travellers found it recently, together with other plants indubitably American (maize, cassava, tobacco, and pimento), on the banks of the River Congo, in Africa. (* No doubt remains of the American origin of the Bromelia ananas. See Cayley's Life of Raleigh volume 1 page 61. Gili volume 1 pages 210 and 336. Robert Brown, Geogr. Observ. on the Plants of the River Congo 1818 page 50.)

There is no missionary at Esmeralda; the monk appointed to celebrate mass in that hamlet is settled at Santa Barbara, more than fifty leagues distant; and he visits this spot but five or six times in a year. We were cordially received by an old officer, who took us for Catalonian shopkeepers, and who supposed that trade had led to the missions. On seeing packages of paper intended for drying our plants, he smiled at our simple ignorance. "You come," said he, "to a country where this kind of merchandise has no sale; we write little here; and the dried leaves of maize, the platano (plantain-tree), and the vijaho (heliconia), serve us, like paper in Europe, to wrap up needles, fish-hooks, and other little articles of which we are careful." This old officer united in his person the civil and ecclesiastical authority. He taught the children, I will not say the Catechism, but the Rosary; he rang the bells to amuse himself; and impelled by ardent zeal for the service of the church, he sometimes used his chorister's wand in a manner not very agreeable to the natives.

Notwithstanding the small extent of the mission, three Indian languages are spoken at Esmeralda; the Idapimanare, the Catarapenno, and the Maquiritan. The last of these prevails on the Upper Orinoco, from the confluence of the Ventuari as far as that of the Padamo (* The Arivirianos of the banks of the Ventuari speak a dialect of the language of the Maquiritares. The latter live, jointly with a tribe of the Macos, in the savannahs that are by the Padamo. They are so numerous, that they have even given their name to this tributary stream of the Orinoco.); the Caribbee prevails on the Lower Orinoco; the Ottomac, near the confluence of the Apure, at the Great Cataracts; and the Maravitan, on the banks of the Rio Negro. These are the five or six languages most generally spoken. We were surprised to find at Esmeralda many zambos, mulattos, and copper-coloured people, who called themselves Spaniards (Espanoles) and who fancy they are white, because they are not so red as the Indians. These people live in the most absolute misery; they have for the most part been sent hither in banishment (desterrados). Solano, in his haste to found colonies in the interior of the country, in order to guard its entrance against the Portuguese, assembled in the Llanos, and as far as the island of Margareta, vagabonds and malefactors, whom justice had vainly pursued, and made them go up the Orinoco to join the unhappy Indians who had been carried off from the woods. A mineralogical error gave celebrity to Esmeralda. The granites of Duida and Maraguaca contain in open veins fine rock-crystals, some of them of great transparency, others coloured by chlorite or blended with actonite; these were mistaken for diamonds and emeralds.

So near the sources of the Orinoco we heard of nothing in these mountains but the proximity of El Dorado, the lake Parima, and the ruins of the great city of Manoa. A man, still known in the country for his credulity and his love of exaggeration, Don Apollinario Diez de la Fuente, assumed the pompous title of capitan poblador, and cabo militar (military commander) of the fort of Cassiquiare. This fort consisted of a few trunks of trees, joined together by planks; and to complete the deception, a demand was made at Madrid for the privileges of a villa for the mission of Esmeralda, which but a hamlet with twelve or fifteen huts. A colony composed of elements altogether heterogeneous perished by degrees. The vagabonds of the Llanos had as little taste for labour as the natives, who were compelled to live within the sound of the bell. The former found a motive in their pride to justify their indolence. In the missions, every mulatto who is not decidedly black as an African, or copper-coloured as an Indian, calls himself a Spaniard; he belongs to the gente de razon—the race endued with reason; and that reason (sometimes, it must be admitted, arrogant and indolent) persuaded the whites, and those who fancy they are so, that to till the ground is a task fit only for slaves (poitos) and the native neophytes. The colony of Esmeralda had been founded on the principles of that of Australia; but it was far from being governed with the same wisdom. The American colonists, being separated from their native soil, not by seas, but by forests and savannahs, dispersed; some taking the road northward, towards the Caura and the Carony; others proceeding southward to the Portuguese possessions. Thus the celebrity of this villa, and of the emerald-mines of Duida, vanished in a few years; and Esmeralda, on account of the immense number of insects that obscure the air at all seasons of the year, was regarded by the monks as a place of banishment. The superior of the missions, when he would make the lay-brothers mindful of their duty, threatens sometimes to send them to Esmeralda; that is, say the monks, to be condemned to the mosquitos; to be devoured by those buzzing flies (zancudos gritones) which God appears to have created for the torment and chastisement of man.* (* "Estos mosquitos que llaman zancudos gritones los parece cria la naturaleza para castigo y tormento de los hombres." "Those mosquitos which are called buzzing zancudos, Nature seems to have created for the especial punishment and torture of man." Fray Pedro Simon.) These strange punishments have not always been confined to the lay-brothers. There happened in 1788 one of those monastic revolutions, of which it is difficult to form a conception in Europe, according to the ideas that prevail of the peaceful state of the Christian settlements in the New World. For a long period the Franciscan monks settled in Guiana had been desirous of forming a separate republic, and rendering themselves independent of the college of Piritu at Nueva Barcelona. Discontented with the election of Fray Gutierez de Aguilera, chosen by a general chapter, and confirmed by the king in the important office of president of the missions, five or six monks of the Upper Orinoco, the Cassiquiare, and the Rio Negro, assembled together at San Fernando de Atabapo; chose hastily a new superior from their own body; and caused the old one, who, unfortunately for himself, had come to visit those parts, to be arrested. They put him in irons, threw him into a boat, and conducted him to Esmeralda, as to a place of proscription. This great distance of the coast from the scene of this revolution led the monks to hope that their crime would remain long unknown beyond the Great Cataracts. They wished to gain time to intrigue, to negotiate, to frame acts of accusation, and employ the little artifices by which, in every country, the invalidity of a first election may be proved. Fray Gutierez do Aguilera languished in his prison at Esmeralda, and fell dangerously ill from the double influence of the excessive heat, and the continual irritation of the mosquitos. Happily for the fallen power the monks did not remain united. A missionary of the Cassiquiare conceived serious alarms respecting the issue of this affair; he dreaded being sent a prisoner to Cadiz, or, as they say in the colonies, having his name on the list (baxo partido de registro). Fear overcame his resolution, and he suddenly disappeared. Indians were placed on the watch at the mouth of the Atabapo, at the Great Cataracts, and wherever the fugitive was likely to pass on his way to the Lower Orinoco. Notwithstanding these precautions, he arrived at Angostura, and then reached the college of the missions of Piritu, denounced his colleagues, and was appointed, in recompense of this information, to arrest those with whom he had conspired against the president of the missions.* (* Two of the missionaries, considered as the leaders of the insurrection, were embarked at Angostura, in order to be tried in Spain. The vessel in which they were conveyed became leaky, and put into Spanish Harbour in the island of Trinidad. The governor Chacon intereated himself in the fate of the monks; they were pardoned a violent proceeding somewhat inconsistent with monastic discipline, and were again employed in the missions. I was acquainted with them both during my abode in South America.) At Esmeralda, where the political events that have agitated Europe for thirty years past have not yet been heard of, lively interest is still felt in an event which is called the sedition of the monks, (el alboroto de los frailes.) In this country, as in the East, no conception is formed of any other revolutions than those that are made by rulers themselves; and we have just seen that the effects are not very alarming.

If the villa of Esmeralda, with a population of twelve or fifteen families, be at present considered as a frightful place of abode, this must be attributed to the want of cultivation, the distance from every other inhabited country, and the excessive quantity of mosquitos. The site of the mission is highly picturesque; the surrounding country is lovely, and of great fertility. I never saw plantains of so large a size as these: and indigo, sugar, and cacao might be produced in abundance, if any trouble were taken for their cultivation. The Cerro Duida is surrounded with fine pasturage; and if the Observantins of the college of Piritu partook a little of the industry of the Catalonian Capuchins settled on the banks of the Carony, numerous herds would be seen wandering between the Cunucunumo and the Padamo. At present, not a cow or a horse is to be found; and the inhabitants, victims of their own indolence, are often reduced to eat the flesh of alouate monkeys, and flour made from the bones of fish, of which I shall have occasion to speak hereafter. A little cassava and a few plantains only are cultivated; and when the fishery is not abundant, the natives of a country so favoured by nature are exposed to the most cruel privations.

The pilots of the small number of boats that go from the Rio Negro to Angostura by the Cassiquiare are afraid to ascend as far as Esmeralda, and therefore that mission would have been much better placed at the point of the bifurcation of the Orinoco. It is probable that this vast country will not always be doomed to the desertion in which it has hitherto been left, owing to the errors of monkish administration and the spirit of monopoly that characterises corporations. We may even predict on what points of the Orinoco industry and commerce will become most active. In every zone, population is concentred at the mouth of tributary streams. The Rio Apure, by which the productions of the provinces of Varinas and Merida are exported, will give great importance to the little town of Cabruta, which will then be in rivalship with San Fernando de Apure, where all commerce has hitherto centred. Higher up, a new settlement will be formed at the confluence of the Meta, which communicates with New Grenada by the Llanos of Casanare. The two missions of the Cataracts will increase, from the activity to which the transport of boats at those points will give rise; for an unhealthy and damp climate, and the swarming of mosquitos, will as little impede the progress of cultivation at the Orinoco as at the Rio Magdalena, whenever a powerful mercantile interest shall call new settlers thither. Habitual evils are those which are least felt; and men born in America do not suffer the same intensity of pain as Europeans recently arrived. Perhaps, also, the destruction of forests round the inhabited places, although slow, will somewhat tend to diminish the torment of the tipulary insects. San Fernando de Atabapo, Javita, San Carlos, and Esmeralda, appear (from their situation at the mouth of the Guaviare, the portage between Tuamini and the Rio Negro, the confluence of the Cassiquiare, and the point of bifurcation of the Upper Orinoco) to promise a considerable increase of population and prosperity. The same improvement will take place in the fertile but uncultivated countries through which flow the Guallaga, the Amazon, and the Orinoco; as well as at the isthmus of Panama, the lake of Nicaragua, and the Rio Huasacualco, which furnish a communication between the two oceans. The imperfection of political institutions may for ages have converted into deserts places where the commerce of the world should be found concentred; but the time approaches when these obstacles shall exist no longer. A vicious administration cannot always struggle against the united interest of men; and civilization will be carried insensibly into those countries, the great destinies of which nature itself proclaims, by the physical configuration of the soil, the immense windings of the rivers, and the proximity of two seas, that bathe the shores of Europe and of India.

Esmeralda is the most celebrated spot on the Orinoco for the preparation of that active poison, which is employed in war, in the chase, and, singularly enough, as a remedy for gastric derangements. The poison of the ticunas of the Amazon, the upas-tieute of Java, and the curare of Guiana, are the most deleterious substances that are known. Raleigh, about the end of the sixteenth century, had heard of urari* as being a vegetable substance with which arrows were envenomed (* In Tamanac marana, in Maypure macuri.); yet no fixed notions of this poison had reached Europe. The missionaries Gumilla and Gili had not been able to penetrate into the country where the curare is manufactured. Gumilla asserts that this preparation was enveloped in great mystery; that its principal ingredient was furnished by a subterranean plant with a tuberous root, which never puts forth leaves, and which is called specially the root (raiz de si misma); that the venomous exhalations which arise from the manufacture are fatal to the lives of the old women who (being otherwise useless) are chosen to watch over this operation; finally, that these vegetable juices are never thought to be sufficiently concentrated till a few drops produce at a distance a repulsive action on the blood. An Indian wounds himself slightly; and a dart dipped in the liquid curare is held near the wound. If it make the blood return to the vessels without having been brought into contact with them, the poison is judged to be sufficiently concentrated.

When we arrived at Esmeralda, the greater part of the Indians were returning from an excursion which they had made to the east, beyond the Rio Padamo, to gather juvias, or the fruit of the bertholletia, and the liana which yields the curare. Their return was celebrated by a festival, which is called in the mission la fiesta de las juvias, and which resembles our harvest-homes and vintage-feasts. The women had prepared a quantity of fermented liquor; and during two days the Indians were in a state of intoxication. Among nations who attach great importance to the fruit of the palm, and of some other trees useful for the nourishment of man, the period when these fruits are gathered is marked by public rejoicings, and time is divided according to these festivals, which succeed one another in a course invariably regular. We were fortunate enough to find an old Indian more temperate than the rest, who was employed in preparing the curare poison from freshly-gathered plants. He was the chemist of the place. We found at his dwelling large earthen pots for boiling the vegetable juice, shallower vessels to favour the evaporation by a larger surface, and leaves of the plantain-tree rolled up in the shape of our filters, and used to filtrate the liquids, more or less loaded with fibrous matter. The greatest order and neatness prevailed in this hut, which was transformed into a chemical laboratory. The old Indian was known throughout the mission by the name of the poison-master (amo del curare). He had that self-sufficient air and tone of pedantry of which the pharmacopolists of Europe were formerly accused. "I know," said he, "that the whites have the secret of making soap, and manufacturing that black powder which has the defect of making a noise when used in killing animals. The curare, which we prepare from father to son, is superior to anything you can make down yonder (beyond sea). It is the juice of an herb which kills silently, without any one knowing whence the stroke comes."

This chemical operation, to which the old man attached so much importance, appeared to us extremely simple. The liana (bejuco) used at Esmeralda for the preparation of the poison, bears the same name as in the forests of Javita. It is the bejuco de Mavacure, which is gathered in abundance east of the mission, on the left bank of the Orinoco, beyond the Rio Amaguaca, in the mountainous and rocky tracts of Guanaya and Yumariquin. Although the bundles of bejuco which we found in the hut of the Indian were entirely bare of leaves, we had no doubt of their being produced by the same plant of the strychnos family (nearly allied to the rouhamon of Aublet) which we had examined in the forest of Pimichin.* (* I may here insert the description of the curare or bejuco de Mavacure, taken from a manuscript, yet unpublished, of my learned fellow-labourer M. Kunth, corresponding member of the Institute. "Ramuli lignosi, oppositi, ramulo altero abortivo, teretiusculi, fuscescenti-tomentosi, inter petiolos lineola pilosa notati, gemmula aut processu filiformi (pedunculo?) terminati. FOLIA opposita, bereviter petiolata, ovato-oblonga, acuminata, intergerrima, reticulato-triplinervia, nervo medio subtus prominente, membranacea, ciliata, utrinque glabra, nervo medio fuscescente-tomentoso, lacte viridia, subtus pallidiora, 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 pollices longa, 8 to 9 lineas lata. PETIOLI lineam longi, tomentosi, inarticulati.") The mavacure is employed fresh or dried indifferently during several weeks. The juice of the liana, when it has been recently gathered, is not regarded as poisonous; possibly it is so only when strongly concentrated. It is the bark and a part of the alburnum which contain this terrible poison. Branches of the mavacure four or five lines in diameter are scraped with a knife, and the bark that comes off is bruised, and reduced into very thin filaments on the stone employed for grinding cassava. The venomous juice being yellow, the whole fibrous mass takes that colour. It is thrown into a funnel nine inches high, with an opening four inches wide. This funnel was of all the instruments of the Indian laboratory that of which the poison-master seemed to be most proud. He asked us repeatedly if, por alla (out yonder, meaning in Europe) we had ever seen anything to be compared to this funnel (embudo). It was a leaf of the plantain-tree rolled up in the form of a cone, and placed within another stronger cone made of the leaves of the palm-tree. The whole of this apparatus was supported by slight frame-work made of the petioles and ribs of palm-leaves. A cold infusion is first prepared by pouring water on the fibrous matter which is the ground bark of the mavacure. A yellowish water filters during several hours, drop by drop, through the leafy funnel. This filtered water is the poisonous liquor, but it acquires strength only when concentrated by evaporation, like molasses, in a large earthen pot. The Indian from time to time invited us to taste the liquid; its taste, more or less bitter, decides when the concentration by fire has been carried sufficiently far. There is no danger in tasting it, the curare being deleterious only when it comes into immediate contact with the blood. The vapours, therefore, which are disengaged from the pans are not hurtful, notwithstanding all that has been asserted on this point by the missionaries of the Orinoco. Fontana, in his experiments on the poison of the ticuna of the Amazon, long since proved that the vapours arising from this poison, when thrown on burning charcoal, may be inhaled without danger and that the statement of La Condamine, that Indian women, when condemned to death, have been killed by the vapours of the poison of the ticuna, is incorrect.

The most concentrated juice of the mavacure is not thick enough to stick to the darts; and therefore, to give a body to the poison, another vegetable juice, extremely glutinous, drawn from a tree with large leaves, called kiracaguero, is poured into the concentrated infusion. As this tree grows at a great distance from Esmeralda, and was at that period as destitute of flowers and fruits as the bejuco de mavacure, we could not determine it botanically. I have several times mentioned that kind of fatality which withholds the most interesting plants from the examination of travellers, while thousands of others, of the chemical properties of which we are ignorant, are found loaded with flowers and fruits. In travelling rapidly, even within the tropics, where the flowering of the ligneous plants is of such long duration, scarcely one-eighth of the trees can be seen furnishing the essential parts of fructification. The chances of being able to determine, I do not say the family, but the genus and species, is consequently as one to eight; and it may be conceived that this unfavourable chance is felt most powerfully when it deprives us of the intimate knowledge of objects which afford a higher interest than that of descriptive botany.

At the instant when the glutinous juice of the kiracaguero-tree is poured into the venomous liquor well concentrated, and kept in a state of ebullition, it blackens, and coagulates into a mass of the consistence of tar, or of a thick syrup. This mass is the curare of commerce. When we hear the Indians say that the kiracaguero is as necessary as the bejuco do mavacure in the manufacture of the poison, we may be led into error by the supposition that the former also contains some deleterious principle, while it only serves (as the algarrobo, or any other gummy substance would do) to give more body to the concentrated juice of the curare. The change of colour which the mixture undergoes is owing to the decomposition of a hydruret of carbon; the hydrogen is burned, and the carbon is set free. The curare is sold in little calabashes; but its preparation being in the hands of a few families, and the quantity of poison attached to each dart being extremely small, the best curare, that of Esmeralda and Mandavaca, is sold at a very high price. This substance, when dried, resembles opium; but it strongly absorbs moisture when exposed to the air. Its taste is an agreeable bitter, and M. Bonpland and myself have often swallowed small portions of it. There is no danger in so doing, if it be certain that neither lips nor gums bleed. In experiments made by Mangili on the venom of the viper, one of his assistants swallowed all the poison that could be extracted from four large vipers of Italy, without being affected by it. The Indians consider the curare, taken internally, as an excellent stomachic. The same poison prepared by the Piraoas and Salives, though it has some celebrity, is not so much esteemed as that of Esmeralda. The process of this preparation appears to be everywhere nearly the same; but there is no proof that the different poisons sold by the same name at the Orinoco and the Amazon are identical, and derived from the same plants. Orfila, therefore, in his excellent work On Poisons, has very judiciously separated the wourali of Dutch Guiana, the curare of the Orinoco, the ticuna of the Amazon, and all those substances which have been too vaguely united under the name of American poisons. Possibly at some future day, one and the same alkaline principle, similar to morphine and strychnia, will be found in poisonous plants belonging to different genera.

At the Orinoco the curare de raiz (of the root) is distinguished from the curare de bejuco (of lianas, or of the bark of branches). We saw only the latter prepared; the former is weaker, and much less esteemed. At the river Amazon we learned to distinguish the poisons of the Ticuna, Yagua, Peva, and Xibaro Indians, which being all obtained from the same plant, perhaps differ only by a more or less careful preparation. The Ticuna poison, to which La Condamine has given so much celebrity in Europe, and which somewhat improperly begins to bear the name of ticuna, is extracted from a liana which grows in the island of Mormorote, on the Upper Maranon. This poison is employed partly by the Ticunas, who remain independent on the Spanish territory near the sources of the Yacarique; and partly by Indians of the same tribe, inhabiting the Portuguese mission of Loreto. The poisons we have just named differ totally from that of La Peca, and from the poison of Lamas and of Moyobamba. I enter into these details because the vestiges of plants which we were able to examine, proved to us (contrary to the common opinion) that the three poisons of the Ticunas, of La Peca, and of Moyobamba are not obtained from the same species, probably not even from congeneric plants. In proportion as the preparation of the curare is simple, that of the poison of Moyobamba is a long and complicated process. With the juice of the bejuco de ambihuasca, which is the principal ingredient, are mixed pimento, tobacco, barbasco (Jacquinia armillaris), sanango (Tabernae montana), and the milk of some other apocyneae. The fresh juice of the ambihuasca has a deleterious action when in contact with the blood; the juice of the mavacure is a mortal poison only when it is concentrated by fire; and ebullition deprives the juice of the root of Jatropha manihot (the manioc) of all its baneful qualities. In rubbing a long time between my fingers the liana which yields the potent poison of La Peca, when the weather was excessively hot, my hands were benumbed; and a person who was employed with me felt the same effects from this rapid absorption by the uninjured integuments.

I shall not here enter into any detail on the physiological properties of those poisons of the New World which kill with the same promptitude as the strychneae of Asia,* (* The nux vomica, the upas tieute, and the bean of St. Ignatius, Strychnos Ignatia.) but without producing vomiting when they are received into the stomach, and without denoting the approach of death by the violent excitement of the spinal marrow. Scarcely a fowl is eaten on the banks of the Orinoco which has not been killed with a poisoned arrow; and the missionaries allege that the flesh of animals is never so good as when this method is employed. Father Zea, who accompanied us, though ill of a tertian fever, every morning had the live fowls allotted for our food brought to his hammock together with an arrow, and he killed them himself; for he would not confide this operation, to which he attached great importance, to any other person. Large birds, a guan (pava de monte) for instance, or a curassao (alector), when wounded in the thigh, die in two or three minutes; but it is often ten or twelve minutes before life is extinct in a pig or a peccary. M. Bonpland found that the same poison, bought in different villages, varied much. We had procured at the river Amazon some real Ticuna poison which was less potent than any of the varieties of the curare of the Orinoco. Travellers, on arriving in the missions, frequently testify their apprehension on learning that the fowls, monkeys, guanas, and even the fish which they eat, have been killed with poisoned arrows. But these fears are groundless. Majendie has proved by his ingenious experiments on transfusion, that the blood of animals on which the bitter strychnos of India has produced a deleterious effect, has no fatal action on other animals. A dog received a considerable quantity of poisoned blood into his veins without any trace of irritation being perceived in the spinal marrow.

I placed the most active curare in contact with the crural nerves of a frog, without perceiving any sensible change in measuring the degree of irritability of the organs, by means of an arc formed of heterogeneous metals. Galvanic experiments succeeded upon birds, some minutes after I had killed them with a poisoned arrow. These observations are not uninteresting, when we recollect that a solution of the upas-poison poured upon the sciatic nerve, or insinuated into the texture of the nerve, produces also a sensible effect on the irritability of the organs by immediate contact with the medullary substance. The danger of the curare, as of most of the other strychneae (for we continue to believe that the mavacure belongs to a neighbouring family), results only from the action of the poison on the vascular system. At Maypures, a zambo descended from an Indian and a negro, prepared for M. Bonpland some of those poisoned arrows, that are shot from blowing-tubes to kill small monkeys or birds. He was a man of remarkable muscular strength. Having had the imprudence to rub the curare between his fingers after being slightly wounded, he fell on the ground seized with a vertigo, that lasted nearly half an hour. Happily the poison was of that diluted kind which is used for very small animals, that is, for those which it is believed can be recalled to life by putting muriate of soda into the wound. During our passage in returning from Esmeralda to Atures, I myself narrowly escaped an imminent danger. The curare, having imbibed the humidity of the air, had become fluid, and was spilt from an imperfectly closed jar upon our linen. The person who washed the linen had neglected to examine the inside of a stocking, which was filled with curare; and it was only on touching this glutinous matter with my hand, that I was warned not to draw on the poisoned stocking. The danger was so much the greater, as my feet at that time were bleeding from the wounds made by chegoes (Pulex penetrans), which had not been well extirpated. This circumstance may warn travellers of the caution requisite in the conveyance of poisons.

An interesting chemical and physiological investigation remains to be accomplished in Europe on the poisons of the New World, when, by more frequent communications, the curare de bejuco, the curare de raiz, and the various poisons of the Amazon, Guallaga, and Brazil, can be procured, without being confounded together, from the places where they are prepared. Since the discovery of prussic acid,* (* First obtained by Scheele in the year 1782. Gay-Lussac (to whom we are indebted for the complete analysis of this acid) observes that it can never become very dangerous to society, because its peculiar smell (that of bitter almonds) betrays its presence, and the facility with which it is decomposed makes it difficult to preserve.) and many other new substances eminently deleterious, the introduction of poisons prepared by savage nations is less feared in Europe; we cannot however appeal too strongly to the vigilance of those who keep such noxious substances in the midst of populous cities, the centres of civilization, misery, and depravity. Our botanical knowledge of the plants employed in making poison can be but very slowly acquired. Most of the Indians who make poisoned arrows, are totally ignorant of the nature of the venomous substances they use, and which they obtain from other people. A mysterious veil everywhere covers the history of poisons and of their antidotes. Their preparation among savages is the monopoly of the piaches, who are at once priests, jugglers, and physicians; it is only from the natives who are transplanted to the missions, that any certain notions can be acquired on matters so problematical. Ages elapsed before Europeans became acquainted through the investigation of M. Mutis, with the bejuco del guaco (Mikania guaco), which is the most powerful of all antidotes against the bite of serpents, and of which we were fortunate enough to give the first botanical description.

The opinion is very general in the missions that no cure is possible, if the curare be fresh, well concentrated, and have stayed long in the wound, to have entered freely into the circulation. Among the specifics employed on the banks of the Orinoco, and in the Indian Archipelago, the most celebrated is muriate of soda.* (* Oviedo, Sommario delle Indie Orientali, recommends sea-water as an antidote against vegetable poisons. The people in the missions never fail to assure European travellers, that they have no more to fear from arrows dipped in curare, if they have a little salt in their mouths, than from the electric shocks of the gymnoti, when chewing tobacco. Raleigh recommends as an antidote to the ourari (curare) the juice of garlick. [But later experiments have completely proved that if the poison has once fairly entered into combination with the blood there is no remedy, either for man or any of the inferior animals. The wourali and other poisons mentioned by Humboldt have, since the publication of this work, been carefully analysed by the first chemists of Europe, and experiments made on their symptoms and supposed remedies. Artificial inflation of the lungs was found the most successful, but in very few instances was any cure effected.]) The wound is rubbed with this salt, which is also taken internally. I had myself no direct and sufficiently convincing proof of the action of this specific; and the experiments of Delille and Majendie rather tend to disprove its efficacy. On the banks of the Amazon, the preference among the antidotes is given to sugar; and muriate of soda being a substance almost unknown to the Indians of the forests, it is probable that the honey of bees, and that farinaceous sugar which oozes from plantains dried in the sun, were anciently employed throughout Guiana. In vain have ammonia and eau-de-luce been tried against the curare; it is now known that these specifics are uncertain, even when applied to wounds caused by the bite of serpents. Sir Everard Home has shown that a cure is often attributed to a remedy, when it is owing only to the slightness of the wound, and to a very circumscribed action of the poison. Animals may with impunity be wounded with poisoned arrows, if the wound be well laid open, and the point imbued with poison be withdrawn immediately after the wound is made. If salt or sugar be employed in these cases, people are tempted to regard them as excellent specifics. Indians, who had been wounded in battle by weapons dipped in the curare, described to us the symptoms they experienced, which were entirely similar to those observed in the bite of serpents. The wounded person feels congestion in the head, vertigo, and nausea. He is tormented by a raging thirst, and numbness pervades all the parts that are near the wound.

The old Indian, who was called the poison-master, seemed flattered by the interest we took in his chemical processes. He found us sufficiently intelligent to lead him to the belief that we knew how to make soap, an art which, next to the preparation of curare, appeared to him one of the finest of human inventions. When the liquid poison had been poured into the vessels prepared for their reception, we accompanied the Indian to the festival of the juvias. The harvest of juvias, or fruits of the Bertholletia excelsa,* (* The Brazil-nut.) was celebrated by dancing, and by excesses of wild intoxication. The hut where the natives were assembled, displayed during several days a very singular aspect. There was neither table nor bench; but large roasted monkeys, blackened by smoke, were ranged in regular order against the wall. These were the marimondes (Ateles belzebuth), and those bearded monkeys called capuchins, which must not be confounded with the weeper, or sai (Simia capucina of Buffon). The manner of roasting these anthropomorphous animals contributes to render their appearance extremely disagreeable in the eyes of civilized man. A little grating or lattice of very hard wood is formed, and raised one foot from the ground. The monkey is skinned, and bent into a sitting posture; the head generally resting on the arms, which are meagre and long; but sometimes these are crossed behind the back. When it is tied on the grating, a very clear fire is kindled below. The monkey, enveloped in smoke and flame, is broiled and blackened at the same time. On seeing the natives devour the arm or leg of a roasted monkey, it is difficult not to believe that this habit of eating animals so closely resembling man in their physical organization, has, to a certain degree, contributed to diminish the horror of cannibalism among these people. Roasted monkeys, particularly those which have very round heads, display a hideous resemblance to a child; and consequently Europeans who are obliged to feed on them prefer separating the head and the hands, and serve up only the rest of the animal at their tables. The flesh of monkeys is so lean and dry, that M. Bonpland has preserved in his collections at Paris an arm and hand, which had been broiled over the fire at Esmeralda; and no smell has arisen from them after the lapse of a great number of years.

We saw the Indians dance. The monotony of their dancing is increased by the women not daring to take part in it. The men, young and old, form a circle, holding each others' hands; and turn sometimes to the right, sometimes to the left, for whole hours, with silent gravity. Most frequently the dancers themselves are the musicians. Feeble sounds, drawn from a series of reeds of different lengths, form a slow and plaintive accompaniment. The first dancer, to mark the time, bends both knees in a kind of cadence. Sometimes they all make a pause in their places, and execute little oscillatory movements, bending the body from one side to the other. The reeds ranged in a line, and fastened together, resemble the Pan's pipes, as we find them represented in the bacchanalian processions on Grecian vases. To unite reeds of different lengths, and make them sound in succession by passing them before the lips, is a simple idea, and has naturally presented itself to every nation. We were surprised to see with what promptitude the young Indians constructed and tuned these pipes, when they found reeds on the bank of the river. Uncivilized men, in every zone, make great use of these gramina with high stalks. The Greeks, with truth, said that reeds had contributed to subjugate nations by furnishing arrows, to soften men's manners by the charm of music, and to unfold their understanding by affording the first instruments for tracing letters. These different uses of reeds mark in some sort three different periods in the life of nations. We must admit that the tribes of the Orinoco are in the first stage of dawning civilization. The reed serves them only as an instrument of war and of hunting; and the Pan's pipes, of which we have spoken, have not yet, on those distant shores, yielded sounds capable of awakening mild and humane feelings.

We found in the hut allotted for the festival, several vegetable productions which the Indians had brought from the mountains of Guanaya, and which engaged our attention. I shall only here mention the fruit of the juvia, reeds of a prodigious length, and shirts made of the bark of marima. The almendron, or juvia, one of the most majestic trees of the forests of the New World, was almost unknown before our visit to the Rio Negro. It begins to be found after a journey of four days east of Esmeralda, between the Padamo and Ocamo, at the foot of the Cerro Mapaya, on the right bank of the Orinoco. It is still more abundant on the left bank, at the Cerro Guanaja, between the Rio Amaguaca and the Gehette. The inhabitants of Esmeralda assured us, that in advancing above the Gehette and the Chiguire, the juvia and cacao-trees become so common that the wild Indians (the Guaicas and Guaharibos) do not disturb the Indians of the missions when gathering in their harvests. They do not envy them the productions with which nature has enriched their own soil. Scarcely any attempt has been made to propagate the almendrones in the settlements of the Upper Orinoco. To this the indolence of the inhabitants is a greater obstacle than the rapidity with which the oil becomes rancid in the amygdaliform seeds. We found only three trees of the kind at the mission of San Carlos, and two at Esmeralda. These majestic trees were eight or ten years old, and had not yet borne flowers.

As early as the sixteenth century, the seeds with ligneous and triangular teguments (but not the great drupe like a cocoa-nut, which contains the almonds,) were known in Europe. I recognise them in an imperfect engraving of Clusius.* (* Clusius distinguishes very properly the almendras del Peru, our Bertholletia excelsa, or juvia, (fructus amygdalae-nucleo, triangularis, dorso lato, in bina latera angulosa desinente, rugosus, paululum cuneiformis) from the pekea, or Amygdala guayanica. Raleigh, who knew none of the productions of the Upper Orinoco, does not speak of the juvia; but it appears that he first brought to Europe the fruit of the mauritia palm, of which we have so often spoken. (Fructus elegantissimus, squamosus, similis palmae-pini.) This botanist designates them under the name of almendras del Peru. They had no doubt been carried, as a very rare fruit, to the Upper Maranon, and thence, by the Cordilleras, to Quito and Peru. The Novus Orbis of Laet, in which I found the first account of the cow-tree, furnishes also a description and a figure singularly exact of the fruit of the bertholletia. Laet calls the tree totocke, and mentions the drupe of the size of the human head, which contains the almonds. The weight of these fruits, he says, is so enormous, that the savages dare not enter the forests without covering their heads and shoulders with a buckler of very hard wood. These bucklers are unknown to the natives of Esmeralda, but they told us of the danger incurred when the fruit ripens and falls from a height of fifty or sixty feet. The triangular seeds of the juvia are sold in Portugal under the vague appellation of chesnuts (castanas) of the Amazon, and in England under the name of Brazil-nuts; and it was long believed that, like the fruit of the pekea, they grew on separate stalks. They have furnished an article of trade for a century past to the inhabitants of Grand Para, by whom they are sent either directly to Europe, or to Cayenne, where they are called touka. The celebrated botanist, Correa de Serra, told us that this tree abounds in the forests in the neighbourhood of Macapa, at the mouth of the Amazon; that it there bears the name of capucaya, and that the inhabitants gather the almonds, like those of the lecythis, to express the oil. A cargo of almonds of the juvia, bought into Havre, captured by a privateer, in 1807, was employed for the same purpose.

The tree that yields the Brazil-nuts is generally not more than two or three feet in diameter, but attains one hundred or one hundred and twenty feet in height. It does not resemble the mammee-tree, the star-apple, and several other trees of the tropics, the branches of which (as in the laurel-trees of the temperate zone) rise almost straight towards the sky. The branches of the bertholletia are open, very long, almost entirely bare towards the base, and loaded at their summits with tufts of very close foliage. This disposition of the semicoriaceous leaves, which are a little silvery on their under part, and more than two feet long, makes the branches bend down toward the ground, like the fronds of the palm-tree. We did not see this majestic tree in blossom: it is not loaded with flowers* till in its fifteenth year, and they appear about the end of March and the beginning of April. (* According to accounts somewhat vague, they are yellow, very large, and have some similitude to those of the Bombax ceiba. M. Bonpland says, however, in his botanical journal written on the banks of the Rio Negro, flos violaceus. It was thus the Indians of the river had described to him the colour of the corolla.) The fruits ripen towards the end of May, and some trees retain them till the end of August. These fruits, which are as large as the head of a child, often twelve or thirteen inches in diameter, make a very loud noise in falling from the tops of the trees. Nothing is more fitted to fill the mind with admiration of the force of organic action in the equinoctial zone than the aspect of those great igneous pericarps, for instance, the cocoa-tree (lodoicea) of the Maldives among the monocotyledons, and the bertholletia and the lecythis among the dicotyledons. In our climates only the cucurbitaceae produce in the space of a few months fruits of an extraordinary size; but these fruits are pulpy and succulent. Within the tropics, the bertholletia forms in less than fifty or sixty days a pericarp, the ligneous part of which is half an inch thick, and which it is difficult to saw with the sharpest instruments. A great naturalist has observed, that the wood of fruits attains in general a hardness which is scarcely to be found in the wood of the trunks of trees. The pericarp of the bertholletia has traces of four cells, and I have sometimes found even five. The seeds have two very distinct coverings, and this circumstance renders the structure of the fruit more complicated than in the lecythis, the pekea or caryocar, and the saouvari. The first tegument is osseous or ligneous, triangular, tuberculated on its exterior surface, and of the colour of cinnamon. Four or five, and sometimes eight of these triangular nuts, are attached to a central partition. As they are loosened in time, they move freely in the large spherical pericarp. The capuchin monkeys (Simia chiropotes) are singularly fond of the Brazil nuts; and the noise made by the seeds, when the fruit is shaken as it falls from the tree, excites the appetites of these animals in the highest degree. I have most frequently found only from fifteen to twenty-two nuts in each fruit. The second tegument of the almonds is membranaceous, and of a brown-yellow. Their taste is extremely agreeable when they are fresh; but the oil, with which they abound, and which is so useful in the arts, becomes easily rancid. Although at the Upper Orinoco we often ate considerable quantities of these almonds for want of other food, we never felt any bad effects from so doing. The spherical pericarp of the bertholletia, perforated at the summit, is not dehiscent; the upper and swelled part of the columella forms (according to M. Kunth) a sort of inner cover, as in the fruit of the lecythis, but it seldom opens of itself. Many seeds, from the decomposition of the oil contained in the cotyledons, lose the faculty of germination before the rainy season, in which the ligneous integument of the pericarp opens by the effect of putrefaction. A tale is very current on the banks of the Lower Orinoco, that the capuchin and cacajao monkeys (Simia chiropotes, and Simia melanocephala) place themselves in a circle, and, by striking the shell with a stone, succeed in opening it, so as to take out the triangular nuts. This operation must, however, be impossible, on account of the extreme hardness and thickness of the pericarp. Monkeys may have been seen rolling along the fruit of the bertholletia, but though this fruit has a small hole closed by the upper extremity of the columella, nature has not furnished monkeys with the means of opening the ligneous pericarp, as it has of opening the covercle of the lecythis, called in the missions the covercle of the monkeys' cocoa.* (* La tapa del coco de monos.) According to the report of several Indians, only the smaller rodentia, particularly the cavies (the acuri and the lapa), by the structure of their teeth, and the inconceivable perseverance with which they pursue their destructive operations, succeed in perforating the fruit of the juvia. As soon as the triangular nuts are spread on the ground, all the animals of the forest, the monkeys, the manaviris, the squirrels, the cavies, the parrots, and the macaws, hastily assemble to dispute the prey. They have all strength enough to break the ligneous tegument of the seed; they get out the kernel, and carry it to the tops of the trees. "It is their festival also," said the Indians who had returned from the harvest; and on hearing their complaints of the animals, one may perceive that they think themselves alone the lawful masters of the forest.

One of the four canoes, which had taken the Indians to the gathering of the Juvias, was filled in great part with that species of reeds (carices) of which the blow-tubes are made. These reeds were from fifteen to seventeen feet long, yet no trace of a knot for the insertion of leaves and branches was perceived. They were quite straight, smooth externally, and perfectly cylindrical. These carices come from the foot of the mountains of Yumariquin and Guanaja. They are much sought after, even beyond the Orinoco, by the name of reeds of Esmeralda. A hunter preserves the same blow-tube during his whole life, and boasts of its lightness and precision, as we boast of the same qualities in our fire-arms. What is the monocotyledonous plant* that furnishes these admirable reeds? (* The smooth surface of these tubes sufficiently proves that they are not furnished by a plant of the family of umbelliferae.) Did we see in fact the internodes (parts between the knots) of a gramen of the tribe of nastoides? or may this carex be perhaps a cyperaceous plant* destitute of knots? (* The caricillo del manati, which grows abundantly on the banks of the Orinoco, attains from eight to ten feet in height.) I cannot solve this question, or determine to what genus another plant belongs, which furnishes the shirts of marima. We saw on the slope of the Cerra Duida shirt-trees fifty feet high. The Indians cut off cylindrical pieces two feet in diameter, from which they peel the red and fibrous bark, without making any longitudinal incision. This bark affords them a sort of garment, which resembles sacks of a very coarse texture, and without a seam. The upper opening serves for the head; and two lateral holes are cut for the arms to pass through. The natives wear these shirts of marima in the rainy season: they have the form of the ponchos and ruanas of cotton, which are so common in New Grenada, at Quito, and in Peru. In these climates the riches and beneficence of nature being regarded as the primary causes of the indolence of the inhabitants, the missionaries say in showing the shirts of marima, in the forests of the Orinoco garments are found ready-made on the trees. We may also mention the pointed caps, which the spathes of certain palm-trees furnish, and which resemble coarse network.

At the festival of which we were the spectators, the women, who were excluded from the dance, and every sort of public rejoicing, were daily occupied in serving the men with roasted monkey, fermented liquors, and palm-cabbage. This last production has the taste of our cauliflowers, and in no other country had we seen specimens of such an immense size. The leaves that are not unfolded are united with the young stem, and we measured cylinders of six feet long and five inches in diameter. Another substance, which is much more nutritive, is obtained from the animal kingdom: this is fish-flour (manioc de pescado). The Indians throughout the Upper Orinoco fry fish, dry them in the sun, and reduce them to powder without separating the bones. I have seen masses of fifty or sixty pounds of this flour, which resembles that of cassava. When it is wanted for eating, it is mixed with water, and reduced to a paste. In every climate the abundance of fish has led to the invention of the same means of preserving them. Pliny and Diodorus Siculus have described the fish-bread of the ichthyophagous nations, that dwelt on the Persian Gulf and the shores of the Red Sea.* (* These nations, in a still ruder state than the natives of the Orinoco, contented themselves with drying the raw fish in the sun. They made up the fish-paste in the form of bricks, and sometimes mixed with it the aromatic seed of paliurus (rhamnus), as in Germany, and some other countries, cummin and fennel-seed are mixed with wheaten bread.)
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Re: Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions

Postby admin » Mon Jun 04, 2018 7:02 am

Part 2 of 4

At Esmeralda, as everywhere else throughout the missions, the Indians who will not be baptized, and who are merely aggregated in the community, live in a state of polygamy. The number of wives differs much in different tribes. It is most considerable among the Caribs, and all the nations that have preserved the custom of carrying off young girls from the neighbouring tribes. How can we imagine domestic happiness in so unequal an association? The women live in a sort of slavery, as they do in most nations which are in a state of barbarism. The husbands being in the full enjoyment of absolute power, no complaint is heard in their presence. An apparent tranquillity prevails in the household; the women are eager to anticipate the wishes of an imperious and sullen master; and they attend without distinction to their own children and those of their rivals. The missionaries assert, what may easily be believed, that this domestic peace, the effect of fear, is singularly disturbed when the husband is long absent. The wife who contracted the first ties then applies to the others the names of concubines and servants. The quarrels continue till the return of the master, who knows how to calm their passions by the sound of his voice, by a mere gesticulation, or, if he thinks it necessary, by means a little more violent. A certain inequality in the rights of the women is sanctioned by the language of the Tamanacs. The husband calls the second and third wife the companions of the first; and the first treats these companions as rivals and enemies (ipucjatoje), a term which truly expresses their position. The whole weight of labour being supported by these unhappy women, we must not be surprised if, in some nations, their number is extremely small. Where this happens, a kind of polyandry is formed, which we find more fully displayed in Thibet, and on the lofty mountains at the extremity of the Indian peninsula. Among the Avanos and Maypures, brothers have often but one wife. When an Indian, who lives in polygamy, becomes a christian, he is compelled by the missionaries, to choose among his wives her whom he prefers, and to reject the others. At the moment of separation the new convert sometimes discovers the most valuable qualities in the wives he is obliged to abandon. One understands gardening perfectly; another knows how to prepare chiza, an intoxicating beverage extracted from the root of cassava; all appear to him alike clever and useful. Sometimes the desire of preserving his wives overcomes in the Indian his inclination to christianity; but most frequently, in his perplexity, the husband prefers submitting to the choice of the missionary, as to a blind fatality.

The Indians, who from May to August take journeys to the east of Esmeralda, to gather the vegetable productions of the mountains of Yumariquin, gave us precise notions of the course of the Orinoco to the east of the mission. This part of my itinerary may differ entirely from the maps that preceded it. I shall begin the description of this country with the granitic group of Duida, at the foot of which we sojourned. This group is bounded on the west by the Rio Tamatama, and on the east by the Rio Guapo. Between these two tributary streams of the Orinoco, amid the morichales, or clumps of mauritia palm-trees, which surround Esmeralda, the Rio Sodomoni flows, celebrated for the excellence of the pine-apples that grow upon its banks. I measured, on the 22nd of May, in the savannah at the foot of Duida, a base of four hundred and seventy-five metres in length; the angle, under which the summit of the mountain appeared at the distance of thirteen thousand three hundred and twenty-seven metres, was still nine degrees. A trigonometric measurement, made with great care, gave me for Duida (that is, for the most elevated peak, which is south-west of the Cerro Maraguaca) two thousand one hundred and seventy-nine metres, or one thousand one hundred and eighteen toises, above the plain of Esmeralda. The Cerro Duida thus yields but little in height (scarcely eighty or one hundred toises) to the summit of St. Gothard, or the Silla of Caracas on the shore of Venezuela. It is indeed considered as a colossal mountain in those countries; and this celebrity gives a precise idea of the mean height of Parima and of all the mountains of eastern America. To the east of the Sierra Nevada de Merida, as well as to the south-east of the Paramo de las Rosas, none of the chains that extend in the same parallel line reach the height of the central ridge of the Pyrenees.

The granitic summit of Duida is so nearly perpendicular that the Indians have vainly attempted the ascent. It is a well-known fact that mountains not remarkable for elevation are sometimes the most inaccessible. At the beginning and end of the rainy season, small flames, which seem to change their place, are seen on the top of Duida. This phenomenon, the existence of which is borne out by concurrent testimony, has caused this mountain to be improperly called a volcano. As it stands nearly alone, it might be supposed that lightning from time to time sets fire to the brushwood; but this supposition loses its probability when we reflect on the extreme difficulty with which plants are ignited in these damp climates. It must be observed also that these flames are said to appear often where the rock seems scarcely covered with turf, and that the same igneous phenomena are visible, on days entirely exempt from storms, on the summit of Guaraco or Murcielago, a hill opposite the mouth of the Rio Tamatama, on the southern bank of the Orinoco. This hill is scarcely elevated one hundred toises above the neighbouring plains. If the statements of the natives be correct, it is probable that some subterraneous cause produces these flames on the Duida and the Guaraco; for they never appear on the lofty neighbouring mountains of Jao and Maraguaca, so often wrapped in electric storms. The granite of the Cerro Duida is full of veins, partly open, and partly filled with crystals of quartz and pyrites. Gaseous and inflammable emanations, either of hydrogen or of naphtha, may pass through these veins. Of this the mountains of Caramania, of Hindookho, and of Himalaya, furnish frequent examples. We saw the appearance of flames in many parts of eastern America subject to earthquakes, even from secondary rocks, as at Cuchivero, near Cumanacoa. The fire shows itself when the ground, strongly heated by the sun, receives the first rains; or when, after violent showers, the earth begins to dry. The first cause of these igneous phenomena lies at immense depths below the secondary rocks, in the primitive formations: the rains and the decomposition of atmospheric water act only a secondary part. The hottest springs of the globe issue immediately from granite. Petroleum gushes from mica-schist; and frightful detonations are heard at Encaramada, between the rivers Arauca and Cuchivero, in the midst of the granitic soil of the Orinoco and the Sierra Parima. Here, as everywhere else on the globe, the focus of volcanoes is in the most ancient soils; and it appears that an intimate connection exists between the great phenomena that heave up and liquify the crust of our planet, and those igneous meteors which are seen from time to time on its surface, and which from their littleness we are tempted to attribute solely to the influence of the atmosphere.

Duida, though lower than the height assigned to it by popular belief, is however the most prominent point of the whole group of mountains that separate the basin of the Lower Orinoco from that of the Amazon. These mountains lower still more rapidly on the north-east, toward the Purunama, than on the east, toward the Padamo and the Rio Ocamo. In the former direction the most elevated summits next to Duida are Cuneva, at the sources of the Rio Paru (one of the tributary streams of the Ventuari), Sipapo, Calitamini, which forms one group with Cunavami and the peak of Umiana. East of Duida, on the right bank of the Orinoco, Maravaca, or Sierra Maraguaca, is distinguished by its elevation, between the Rio Caurimoni and the Padamo; and on the left bank of the Orinoco rise the mountains of Guanaja and Yumariquin, between the Rios Amaguaca and Gehette. It is almost superfluous to repeat that the line which passes through these lofty summits (like those of the Pyrenees, the Carpathian mountains, and so many other chains of the old continent) is very distinct from the line that marks the partition of the waters. This latter line, which separates the tributary streams of the Lower and Upper Orinoco, intersects the meridian of 64 degrees in latitude 4 degrees. After having separated the sources of the Rio Branco and the Carony, it runs north-west, sending off the waters of the Padamo, the Jao, and the Ventuari towards the south, and the waters of the Arui, the Caura, and the Cuchivero towards the north.

The Orinoco may be ascended without danger from Esmeralda as far as the cataracts occupied by the Guaica Indians, who prevent all farther progress of the Spaniards. This is a voyage of six days and a half. In the first two days you arrive at the mouth of the Rio Padamo, or Patamo, having passed, on the north, the little rivers of Tamatama, Sodomoni, Guapo, Caurimoni, and Simirimoni; and on the south the Cuca, situate between the rock of Guaraco, which is said to throw out flames, and the Cerro Canclilla. Throughout this course the Orinoco continues to be three or four hundred toises broad. The tributary streams are most frequent on the right bank, because on that side the river is bounded by the lofty cloud-capped mountains of Duida and Maraguaca, while the left bank on the contrary is low and contiguous to a plain, the general slope of which inclines to the south-west. The northern Cordilleras are covered with fine timber. The growth of plants is so enormous in this hot and constantly humid climate, that the trunks of the Bombax ceiba are sixteen feet in diameter. From the mouth of the Rio Padamo, which is of considerable breadth, the Indians arrive, in a day and a half, at the Rio Mavaca. The latter takes its rise in the lofty mountains of Unturan, and communicates with a lake, on the banks of which the Portuguese* of the Rio Negro gather the aromatic seeds of the Laurus pucheri, known in trade by the names of the pichurim bean, and toda specie. (* The pichurim bean is the puchiri of La Condamine, which abounds at the Rio Xingu, a tributary stream of the Amazon, and on the banks of the Hyurubaxy, or Yurubesh, which runs into the Rio Negro. The puchery, or pichurim, which is grated like nutmeg, differs from another aromatic fruit (a laurel?) known in trade at Grand Para by the names of cucheri, cuchiri, or cravo (clavus) do Maranhao, and which, on account of its odour, is compared with cloves.) Between the confluence of the Padamo and that of the Mavaca, the Orinoco receives on the north the Ocamo, into which the Rio Matacona falls. At the sources of the latter live the Guainares, who are much less copper-coloured, or tawny, than the other inhabitants of those countries. This is one of the tribes called by the missionaries fair Indians (Indios blancos). Near the mouth of the Ocamo, travellers are shown a rock, which is the wonder of the country. It is a granite passing into gneiss, and remarkable for the peculiar distribution of the black mica, which forms little ramified veins. The Spaniards call this rock Piedra Mapaya (the map-stone). The little fragment which I procured indicated a stratified rock, rich in white feldspar, and containing, together with spangles of mica, grouped in streaks, and variously twisted, some crystals of hornblende. It is not a syenite, but probably a granite of new formation, analogous to those to which the stanniferous granites (hyalomictes) and the pegmatites, or graphic granites, belong.

Beyond the confluence of the Macava, the Orinoco suddenly diminishes in breadth and depth, becoming extremely sinuous, like an Alpine torrent. Its banks are surrounded by mountains, and the number of its tributary streams on the south augments considerably, yet the Cordillera on the north remains the most elevated. It requires two days to go from the mouth of the Macava, to the Rio Gehette, the navigation being very difficult, and the boats, on account of the want of water, being often dragged along the shore. The tributary streams along this distance are, on the south, the Daracapo and the Amaguaca; which skirt on the west and east the mountains of Guanaya and Yumariquin, where the bertholletias are gathered. The Rio Manaviche flows down from the mountains on the north, the elevation of which diminishes progressively from the Cerro Maraguaca. As we advance further up the Orinoco, the whirlpools and little rapids (chorros y remolinos) become more and more frequent; on the north lies the Cano Chiquire, inhabited by the Guaicas, another tribe of white Indians; and two leagues distant is the mouth of the Gehette, where there is a great cataract. A dyke of granitic rocks crosses the Orinoco these rocks are, as it were, the columns of Hercules, beyond which no white man has been able to penetrate. It appears that this point, known by the name of the great Raudal de Guaharibos, is three-quarters of a degree west of Esmeralda, consequently in longitude 67 degrees 38 minutes. A military expedition, undertaken by the commander of the fort of San Carlos, Don Francisco Bovadilla, to discover the sources of the Orinoco, led to some information respecting the cataracts of the Guaharibos. Bovadilla had heard that some fugitive negroes from Dutch Guiana, proceeding towards the west (beyond the isthmus between the sources of the Rio Carony and the Rio Branco) had joined the independent Indians. He attempted an entrada (hostile incursion) without having obtained the permission of the governor; the desire of procuring African slaves, better fitted for labour than the copper-coloured race, was a far more powerful motive than that of zeal for the progress of geography. Bovadilla arrived without difficulty as far as the little Raudal* opposite the Gehette (* It is called Raudal de abaxo (Low Cataract) in opposition to the great Raudal de Guaharibos, which is situated higher up toward the east.); but having advanced to the foot of the rocky dike that forms the great cataract, he was suddenly attacked, while he was breakfasting, by the Guaharibos and Guaycas, two warlike tribes, celebrated for the virulence of the curare with which their arrows are empoisoned. The Indians occupied the rocks that rise in the middle of the river, and seeing the Spaniards without bows, and having no knowledge of firearms, they provoked the whites, whom they believed to be without defence. Several of the latter were dangerously wounded, and Bovadilla found himself forced to give the signal for battle. A fearful carnage ensued among the natives, but none of the Dutch negroes, who, as was believed, had taken refuge in those parts, were found. Notwithstanding a victory so easily won, the Spaniards did not dare to advance eastward in a mountainous country, and along a river inclosed by very high banks.

These white Guaharibos have constructed a bridge of lianas above the cataract, supported on rocks that rise, as generally happens in the pongos of the Upper Maranon, in the middle of the river. The existence of this bridge, which is known to all the inhabitants of Esmeralda,* seems to indicate that the Orinoco must be very narrow at this point. (* The Amazon also is crossed twice on bridges of wood near its source in the lake Lauricocha; first north of Chavin, and then below the confluence of the Rio Aguamiras. These, the only two bridges that have been thrown over the largest river we yet know, are called Puente de Quivilla, and Puente de Guancaybamba.) It is generally estimated by the Indians to be only two or three hundred feet broad. They say that the Orinoco, above the Raudal of the Guaharibos, is no longer a river, but a brook (riachuelo); while a well informed ecclesiastic, Fray Juan Gonzales, who had visited those countries, assured me that the Orinoco, in the part where its farther course is no longer known, is two-thirds of the breadth of the Rio Negro near San Carlos. This opinion appears to me hardly probable; but I relate what I have collected, and affirm nothing positively.

In the rocky dike that crosses the Orinoco, forming the Raudal of the Guaharibos, Spanish soldiers pretend to have found the fine kind of saussurite (Amazon-stone), of which we have spoken. This tradition however is very uncertain; and the Indians, whom I interrogated on the subject, assured me that the green stones, called piedras de Macagua* at Esmeralda, were purchased from the Guaicas and Guaharibos, who traffic with hordes much farther to the east. (* The etymology of this name, which is unknown to me, might lead to the knowledge of the spot where these stones are found. I have sought in vain the name of Macagua among the numerous tributary streams of the Tacutu, the Mahu, the Rupunury, and the Rio Trombetas.) The same uncertainty prevails respecting these stones, as that which attaches to many other valuable productions of the Indies. On the coast, at the distance of some hundred leagues, the country where they are found is positively named; but when the traveller with difficulty penetrates into that country, he discovers that the natives are ignorant even of the name of the object of his research. It might be supposed that the amulets of saussurite found in the possession of the Indians of the Rio Negro, come from the Lower Maranon, while those that are received by the missions of the Upper Orinoco and the Rio Carony come from a country situated between the sources of the Essequibo and the Rio Branco. The opinion that this stone is taken in a soft state like paste from the little lake Amucu, though very prevalent at Angostura, is wholly without foundation. A curious geognostic discovery remains to be made in the eastern part of America, that of finding in a primitive soil a rock of euphotide containing the piedra de Macagua.

I shall here proceed to give some information respecting the tribes of dwarf and fair Indians, which ancient traditions have placed near the sources of the Orinoco. I had an opportunity of seeing some of these Indians at Esmeralda, and can affirm that the short stature of the Guaicas, and the fair complexion of the Guaharibos, whom Father Caulin calls Guaribos blancos, have been alike exaggerated. The Guaicas, whom I measured, were in general from four feet seven inches to four feet eight inches high (old measure of France).* (* About five feet three inches English measure.) We were assured that the whole tribe were of this diminutive size; but we must not forget that what is called a tribe constitutes, properly speaking, but one family, owing to the exclusion of all foreign connections. The Indians of the lowest stature next to the Guaicas are the Guainares and the Poignaves. It is singular, that all these nations are found in near proximity to the Caribs, who are remarkably tall. They all inhabit the same climate, and subsist on the same aliments. They are varieties in the race, which no doubt existed previously to the settlement of these tribes (tall and short, fair and dark brown) in the same country. The four nations of the Upper Orinoco, which appeared to me to be the fairest, are the Guaharibos of the Rio Gehette, the Guainares of the Ocamo, the Guaicas of Cano Chiguire, and the Maquiritares of the sources of the Padamo, the Jao, and the Ventuari. It being very extraordinary to see natives with a fair skin beneath a burning sky, and amid nations of a very dark hue, the Spaniards have attempted to explain this phenomenon by the following hypotheses. Some assert, that the Dutch of Surinam and the Rio Essequibo may have intermingled with the Guaharibos and the Guainares; others insist, from hatred to the Capuchins of the Carony, and the Observantins of the Orinoco, that the fair Indians are what are called in Dalmatia muso di frate, children whose legitimacy is somewhat doubtful. In either case the Indios blancos would be mestizos, that is to say, children of an Indian woman and a white man. Now, having seen thousands of mestizos, I can assert that this supposition is altogether inaccurate. The individuals of the fair tribes whom we examined, have the features, the stature, and the smooth, straight, black hair which characterises other Indians. It would be impossible to take them for a mixed race, like the descendants of natives and Europeans. Some of these people are very little, others are of the ordinary stature of the copper-coloured Indians. They are neither feeble nor sickly, nor are they albinos; and they differ from the copper-coloured races only by a much less tawny skin. It would be useless, after these considerations, to insist on the distance of the mountains of the Upper Orinoco from the shores inhabited by the Dutch. I will not deny that descendants of fugitive negroes may have been seen among the Caribs, at the sources of the Essequibo; but no white man ever went from the eastern coast to the Rio Gehette and the Ocamo, in the interior of Guiana. It must also be observed, although we may be struck with the singularity of several fair tribes being found at one point to the east of Esmeralda, it is no less certain, that tribes have been found in other parts of America, distinguished from the neighbouring tribes by the less tawny colour of their skin. Such are the Arivirianos and Maquiritares of the Rio Ventuario and the Padamo, the Paudacotos and Paravenas of the Erevato, the Viras and Araguas of the Caura, the Mologagos of Brazil, and the Guayanas of the Uruguay.* (* The Cumanagotos, the Maypures, the Mapojos, and some hordes of the Tamanacs, are also fair, but in a less degree than the tribes I have just named. We may add to this list (which the researches of Sommering, Blumenbach, and Pritchard, on the varieties of the human species, have rendered so interesting) the Ojes of the Cuchivero, the Boanes (now almost destroyed) of the interior of Brazil, and in the north of America, far from the north-west coast, the Mandans and the Akanas (Walkenaer, Geogr. page 645. Gili volume 2 page 34. Vater, Amerikan. Sprachen page 81. Southey volume 1 page 603.) The most tawny, we might almost say the blackest of the American race, are the Otomacs and the Guamos. These have perhaps given rise to the confused notions of American negroes, spread through Europe in the early times of the conquest. (Herrera Dec 1 lib 3 cap 9, volume 1 page 79. Garcia, Origen de los Americanos page 259.) Who are those Negros de Quereca, placed by Gomara page 277, in that very isthmus of Panama, whence we received the first absurd tales of an albino American people? In reading with attention the authors of the beginning of the 16th century, we see that the discovery of America and of a new race of men, had singularly awakened the interest of travellers respecting the varieties of our species. Now, if a black race had been mingled with copper-colored men, as in the South-sea Islands, the conquistadores would not have failed to speak of it in a precise manner. Besides, the religious traditions of the Americans relate the appearance, in the heroic times, of white and bearded men as priests and legislators; but none of these traditions make mention of a black race.)

These phenomena are so much the more worthy of attention as they are observed in that great branch of the American nations generally ranked in a class totally opposite to that circumpolar branch, namely the Tschougaz-Esquimaux,* whose children are fair, and who acquire the Mongol or yellowish tint only from the influence of the air and the humidity. (* The Chevalier Gieseke has recently confirmed all that Krantz related of the colour of the skin of the Esquimaux. That race (even in the latitude of seventy-five and seventy-six degrees, where the climate is so rigorous) is not in general so diminutive as it was long believed to be. Ross' Voyage to the North.) In Guiana, the hordes who live in the midst of the thickest forests are generally less tawny than those who inhabit the shores of the Orinoco, and are employed in fishing. But this slight difference, which is alike found in Europe between the artisans of towns and the cultivators of the fields or the fishermen on the coasts, in no way explains the problem of the Indios blancos. They are surrounded by other Indians of the woods (Indios del monte) who are of a reddish-brown, although now exposed to the same physical influences. The causes of these phenomena are very ancient, and we may repeat with Tacitus, "est durans originis vis."

The fair-complexioned tribes, which we had an opportunity of seeing at the mission of Esmeralda, inhabit part of a mountainous country lying between the sources of six tributaries of the Orinoco; that is to say, between the Padamo, the Jao, the Ventuari, the Erevato, the Aruy, and the Paraguay.* (* They are six tributary streams on the right bank of the Orinoco; the first three run towards the south, or the Upper Orinoco; the three others towards the north, or the Lower Orinoco.) The Spanish and Portuguese missionaries are accustomed to designate this country more particularly by the name of Parima.* (* The name Parima, which signifies water, great water, is applied sometimes, and more especially, to the land washed by the Rio Parima, or Rio Branco (Rio de Aguas Blancas), a stream running into the Rio Negro; sometimes to the mountains (Sierra Parima), which divide the Upper and Lower Orinoco.) Here, as in several other countries of Spanish America, the savages have reconquered what had been wrested from them by civilization, or rather by its precursors, the missionaries. The expedition of the boundaries under Solano, and the extravagant zeal displayed by a governor of Guiana for the discovery of El Dorado, partially revived in the latter half of the eighteenth century that spirit of enterprise which characterised the Spaniards at the period of the discovery of America. In going along the Rio Padamo, a road was observed across the forests and savannahs (the length of ten days' journey), from Esmeralda to the sources of the Ventuari; and in two days more, from those sources, by the Erevato, the missions on the Rio Caura were reached. Two intelligent and enterprising men, Don Antonio Santos and Captain Bareto, had established, with the aid of the Miquiritares, a chain of military posts on this line from Esmeralda to the Rio Erevato. These posts consisted of block-houses (casas fuertes), mounted with swivels, such as I have already mentioned. The soldiers, left to themselves, exercised all kinds of vexations on the natives (Indians of peace), who had cultivated pieces of ground around the casas fuertes; and the consequence was that, in 1776, several tribes formed a league against the Spaniards. All the military posts were attacked on the same night, on a line of nearly fifty leagues in length. The houses were burnt, and many soldiers massacred; a very small number only owing their preservation to the pity of the Indian women. This nocturnal expedition is still mentioned with horror. It was concerted in the most profound secrecy, and executed with that spirit of unity which the natives of America, skilled in concealing their hostile passions, well know how to practise in whatever concerns their common interests. Since 1776 no attempt has been made to re-establish the road which leads by land from the Upper to the Lower Orinoco, and no white man has been able to pass from Esmeralda to the Erevato. It is certain, however, that in the mountainous lands, between the sources of the Padamo and the Ventuari (near the sites called by the Indians Aurichapa, Ichuana, and Irique) there are many spots where the climate is temperate, and where there are pasturages capable of feeding numerous herds of cattle. The military posts were very useful in preventing the incursions of the Caribs, who, from time to time carried off slaves, though in very small numbers, between the Erevato and the Padamo. They would have resisted the attacks of the natives, if, instead of leaving them isolated and solely to the control of the soldiery, they had been formed into communities, and governed like the villages of neophyte Indians.

We left the mission of Esmeralda on the 23rd of May. Without being positively ill, we felt ourselves in a state of languor and weakness, caused by the torment of insects, bad food, and a long voyage, in narrow and damp boats. We did not go up the Orinoco beyond the mouth of the Rio Guapo, which we should have done, if we could have attempted to reach the sources of the river. There remains a distance of fifteen leagues from the Guapo to the Raudal of the Guaharibos. At this cataract, which is passed on a bridge of lianas, Indians are posted armed with bows and arrows to prevent the whites, or those who come from their territory from advancing westward. How could we hope to pass a point where the commander of the Rio Negro, Don Francisco Bovadilla, was stopped when, accompanied by his soldiers, he tried to penetrate beyond the Gehette?* (* See above.) The carnage then made among the natives has rendered them more distrustful, and more averse to the inhabitants of the missions. It must be remembered that the Orinoco had hitherto offered to geographers two distinct problems, alike important, the situation of its sources, and the mode of its communication with the Amazon. The latter problem formed the object of the journey which I have described; with respect to the discovery of its sources, that remains to be done by the Spanish and Portuguese governments.

Our canoe was not ready to receive us till near three o'clock in the afternoon. It had been filled with innumerable swarms of ants during the navigation of the Cassiquiare; and the toldo, or roof of palm-leaves, beneath which we were again doomed to remain stretched out during twenty-two days, was with difficulty cleared of these insects. We employed part of the morning in repeating to the inhabitants of Esmeralda the questions we had already put to them, respecting the existence of a lake towards the east. We showed copies of the maps of Surville and La Cruz to old soldiers, who had been posted in the mission ever since its first establishment. They laughed at the supposed communication of the Orinoco with the Rio Idapa, and at the White Sea, which the former river was represented to cross. What we politely call geographical fictions they termed lies of the old world (mentiras de por alla). These good people could not comprehend how men, in making the map of a country which they had never visited, could pretend to know things in minute detail, of which persons who lived on the spot were ignorant. The lake Parima, the Sierra Mey, and the springs which separate at the point where they issue from the earth, were entirely unknown at Esmeralda. We were repeatedly assured that no one had ever been to the east of the Raudal of the Guaharibos; and that beyond that point, according to the opinion of some of the natives, the Orinoco descends like a small torrent from a group of mountains, inhabited by the Coroto Indians. Father Gili, who was living on the banks of the Orinoco when the expedition of the boundaries arrived, says expressly that Don Apollinario Diez was sent in 1765 to attempt the discovery of the source of the Orinoco; that he found the river, east of Esmeralda, full of shoals; that he returned for want of provision; and that he learned nothing, absolutely nothing, of the existence of a lake. This statement perfectly accords with what I heard myself thirty-five years later at Esmeralda. The probability of a fact is powerfully shaken when it can be proved to be totally unknown on the very spot where it ought to be known best; and when those by whom the existence of the lake is affirmed contradict each other, not in the least essential circumstances, but in all that are the most important.

When travellers judge only by their own sensations they differ from each other respecting the abundance of the mosquitos as they do respecting the progressive increase or diminution of the temperature. The state of our organs, the motion of the air, its degree of humidity or dryness, its electric intensity, a thousand circumstances contribute at once to make us suffer more or less from the heat and the insects. My fellow travellers were unanimously of opinion that Esmeralda was more tormented by mosquitos than the banks of the Cassiquiare, and even more than the two missions of the Great Cataracts; whilst I, less sensible than they of the high temperature of the air, thought that the irritation produced by the insects was somewhat less at Esmeralda than at the entrance of the Upper Orinoco. On hearing the complaints that are made of these tormenting insects in hot countries it is difficult to believe that their absence, or rather their sudden disappearance, could become a subject of inquietude; yet such is the fact. The inhabitants of Esmeralda related to us, that in the year 1795, an hour before sunset, when the mosquitos usually form a very thick cloud, the air was observed to be suddenly free from them. During the space of twenty minutes, not one insect was perceived, although the sky was cloudless, and no wind announced rain. It is necessary to have lived in those countries to comprehend the degree of surprise which the sudden disappearance of the insects must have produced. The inhabitants congratulated each other, and inquired whether this state of happiness, this relief from pain (feicidad y alivio), could be of any duration. But soon, instead of enjoying the present, they yielded to chimerical fears, and imagined that the order of nature was perverted. Some old Indians, the sages of the place, asserted that the disappearance of the insects must be the precursor of a great earthquake. Warm discussions arose; the least noise amid the foliage of the trees was listened to with an attentive ear; and when the air was again filled with mosquitos they were almost hailed with pleasure. We could not guess what modification of the atmosphere had caused this phenomenon, which must not be confounded with the periodical replacing of one species of insects by another.

After four hours' navigation down the Orinoco we arrived at the point of the bifurcation. Our resting place was on the same beach of the Cassiquiare, where a few days previously our great dog had, as we believe, been carried off by the jaguars. All the endeavours of the Indians to discover any traces of the animal were fruitless. The cries of the jaguars were heard during the whole night.* (* This frequency of large jaguars is somewhat remarkable in a country destitute of cattle. The tigers of the Upper Orinoco are far less bountifully supplied with prey than those of the Pampas of Buenos Ayres and the Llanos of Caracas, which are covered with herds of cattle. More than four thousand jaguars are killed annually in the Spanish colonies, several of them equalling the mean size of the royal tiger of Asia. Two thousand skins of jaguars were formerly exported annually from Buenos Ayres alone.) These animals are very frequent in the tracts situated between the Cerro Maraguaca, the Unturan, and the banks of the Pamoni. There also is found that black species of tiger* of which I saw some fine skins at Esmeralda. (* Gmelin, in his Synonyma, seems to confound this animal, under the name of Felis discolor, with the great American lion (Felis concolor) which is very different from the puma of the Andes of Quito.) This animal is celebrated for its strength and ferocity; it appears to be still larger than the common jaguar. The black spots are scarcely visible on the dark-brown ground of its skin. The Indians assert, that these tigers are very rare, that they never mingle with the common jaguars, and that they form another race. I believe that Prince Maximilian of Neuwied, who has enriched American zoology by so many important observations, acquired the same information farther to the south, in the hot part of Brazil. Albino varieties of the jaguar have been seen in Paraguay: for the spots of these animals, which may be called the beautiful panthers of America, are sometimes so pale as to be scarcely distinguishable on a very white ground. In the black jaguars, on the contrary, it is the colour of the ground which renders the spots indistinct. It requires to reside long in those countries, and to accompany the Indians of Esmeralda in the perilous chase of the tiger, to decide with certainty upon the varieties and the species. In all the mammiferae, and particularly in the numerous family of the apes, we ought, I believe, to fix our attention less on the transition from one colour to another in individuals, than on their habit of separating themselves, and forming distinct bands.

We left our resting place before sunrise on the 24th of May. In a rocky cove, which had been the dwelling of some Durimundi Indians, the aromatic odour of the plants was so powerful, that although sleeping in the open air, and the irritability of our nervous system being allayed by the habits of a life of fatigue, we were nevertheless incommoded by it. We could not ascertain the flowers which diffused this perfume. The forest was impenetrable; but M. Bonpland believed that large clumps of pancratium and other liliaceous plants were concealed in the neighbouring marshes. Descending the Orinoco by favour of the current, we passed first the mouth of the Rio Cunucunumo, and then the Guanami and the Puriname. The two banks of the principal river are entirely desert; lofty mountains rise on the north, and on the south a vast plain extends far as the eye can reach beyond the sources of the Atacavi, which lower down takes the name of the Atabapo. There is something gloomy and desolate in this aspect of a river, on which not even a fisherman's canoe is seen. Some independent tribes, the Abirianos and the Maquiritares, dwell in the mountainous country; but in the neighbouring savannahs,* bounded by the Cassiquiare, the Atabapo, the Orinoco, and the Rio Negro, there is now scarcely any trace of a human habitation. (* They form a quadrilateral plot of a thousand square leagues, the opposite sides of which have contrary slopes, the Cassiquiare flowing towards the south, the Atabapo towards the north, the Orinoco towards the north-west, and the Rio Negro towards the south-east.) I say now; for here, as in other parts of Guiana, rude figures representing the sun, the moon, and different animals, traced on the hardest rocks of granite, attest the anterior existence of a people, very different from those who became known to us on the banks of the Orinoco. According to the accounts of the natives, and of the most intelligent missionaries, these symbolic signs resemble perfectly the characters we saw a hundred leagues more to the north, near Caycara, opposite the mouth of the Rio Apure. (See Chapter 2.18 above.)

In advancing from the plains of the Cassiquiare and the Conorichite, one hundred and forty leagues further eastward, between the sources of the Rio Blanco and the Rio Essequibo, we also meet with rocks and symbolical figures. I have lately verified this curious fact, which is recorded in the journal of the traveller Hortsman, who went up the Rupunuvini, one of the tributary streams of the Essequibo. Where this river, full of small cascades, winds between the mountains of Macarana, he found, before he reached lake Amucu, rocks covered with figures, or (as he says in Portuguese) with varias letras. We must not take this word letters in its real signification. We were also shewn, near the rock Culimacari, on the banks of the Cassiquiare, and at the port of Caycara in the Lower Orinoco, traces which were believed to be regular characters. They were however only misshapen figures, representing the heavenly bodies, together with tigers, crocodiles, boas, and instruments used for making the flour of cassava. It was impossible to recognize in these painted rocks* (the name by which the natives denote those masses loaded with figures) any symmetrical arrangement, or characters with regular spaces. (* In Tamanac tepumereme. (Tepu, a stone, rock; as in Mexican, tetl, a stone, and tepetl, a mountain; in Turco-Tatarian, tepe.) The Spanish Americans also call the rock covered with sculptured figures, piedras pintadas; those for instance, which are found on the summit of the Paramo of Guanacas, in New Grenada, and which recall to mind the tepumereme of the Orinoco, the Cassiquiare, and the Rupunuvini.) The traces discovered in the mountains of Uruana, by the missionary Fray Ramon Bueno, approach nearer to alphabetical writing; but are nevertheless very doubtful.

Whatever may be the meaning of these figures, and with whatever view they were traced upon granite, they merit the examination of those who direct their attention to the philosophic history of our species. In travelling from the coast of Caracas towards the equator, we are at first led to believe that monuments of this kind are peculiar to the mountain-chain of Encaramada; they are found at the port of Sedeno, near Caycara,* (* In the Mountains of the Tyrant, Cerros del Tirano.) at San Rafael del Capuchino, opposite Cabruta, and in almost every place where the granitic rock pierces the soil, in the savannah which extends from the Cerro Curiquima towards the banks of the Caura. The nations of the Tamanac race, the ancient inhabitants of those countries, have a local mythology, and traditions connected with these sculptured rocks. Amalivaca, the father of the Tamanacs, that is, the creator of the human race (for every nation regards itself as the root of all other nations), arrived in a bark, at the time of the great inundation, which is called the age of water,* when the billows of the ocean broke against the mountains of Encaramada in the interior of the land. (* The Atonatiuh of the Mexicans, the fourth age, the fourth regeneration of the world.) All mankind, or, to speak more correctly, all the Tamanacs, were drowned, with the exception of one man and one woman, who saved themselves on a mountain near the banks of the Asiveru, called Cuchivero by the Spaniards. This mountain is the Ararat of the Aramean or Semitic nations, and the Tlaloc or Colhuacan of the Mexicans. Amalivaca, sailing in his bark, engraved the figures of the moon and the sun on the Painted Rock (Tepumereme) of Encaramada. Some blocks of granite piled upon one another, and forming a kind of cavern, are still called the house or dwelling of the great forefather of the Tamanacs. The natives show also a large stone near this cavern, in the plains of Maita, which they say was an instrument of music, the drum of Amalivaca. We must here observe, that this heroic personage had a brother, Vochi, who helped him to give the surface of the earth its present form. The Tamanacs relate that the two brothers, in their system of perfectibility, sought, at first, to arrange the Orinoco in such a manner, that the current of the water could always be followed either going down or going up the river. They hoped by this means to spare men trouble in navigating rivers; but, however great the power of these regenerators of the world, they could never contrive to give a double slope to the Orinoco, and were compelled to relinquish this singular plan. Amalivaca had daughters, who had a decided taste for travelling. The tradition states, doubtless with a figurative meaning, that he broke their legs, to render them sedentary, and force them to people the land of the Tamanacs. After having regulated everything in America, on that side of the great water, Amalivaca again embarked, and returned to the other shore, to the same place from whence he came. Since the natives have seen the missionaries arrive, they imagine that Europe is this other shore; and one of them inquired with great simplicity of Father Gili, whether he had there seen the great Amalivaca, the father of the Tamanacs, who had covered the rocks with symbolic figures.

These notions of a great convulsion of nature; of two human beings saved on the summit of a mountain, and casting behind them the fruits of the mauritia palm-tree, to repeople the earth; of that national divinity, Amalivaca, who arrived by water from a distant land, who prescribed laws to nature, and forced the nations to renounce their migrations; these various features of a very ancient system of belief, are well worthy of attention. What the Tamanacs, and the tribes whose languages are analogous to the Tamanac tongue, now relate to us, they have no doubt learned from other people, who inhabited before them the same regions. The name of Amalivaca is spread over a region of more than five thousand square leagues; he is found designated as the father of mankind, or our great grandfather, as far as to the Caribbee nations, whose idiom approaches the Tamanac only in the same degree as the German approaches the Greek, the Persian, and the Sanscrit. Amalivaca is not originally the Great Spirit, the Aged of Heaven, the invisible being, whose worship springs from that of the powers of nature, when nations rise insensibly to the consciousness of the unity of these powers; he is rather a personage of the heroic times, a man, who, coming from afar, lived in the land of the Tamanacs and the Caribs, sculptured symbolic figures upon the rocks, and disappeared by going back to the country he had previously inhabited beyond the ocean. The anthropomorphism of the divinity has two sources diametrically opposite; and this opposition seems to arise less from the various degrees of intellectual culture, than from the different dispositions of nations, some of which are more inclined to mysticism, and others more governed by the senses, and by external impressions. Sometimes man makes the divinities descend upon earth, charging them with the care of ruling nations, and giving them laws, as in the fables of the East; sometimes, as among the Greeks and other nations of the West, they are the first monarchs, priest-kings, who are stripped of what is human in their nature, to be raised to the rank of national divinities. Amalivaca was a stranger, like Manco-Capac, Bochica, and Quetzalcohuatl; those extraordinary men, who, in the alpine or civilized part of America, on the tablelands of Peru, New Grenada, and Anahuac, organized civil society, regulated the order of sacrifices, and founded religious congregations. The Mexican Quetzalcohuatl, whose descendants Montezuma* (* The second king of this name, of the race of Acamapitzin, properly called Montezuma-Ilhuicamina.) thought he recognized in the companions of Cortez, displays an additional resemblance to Amalivaca, the mythologic personage of savage America or the plains of the torrid zone. When advanced in age, the high-priest of Tula left the country of Anahuac, which he had filled with his miracles, to return to an unknown region, called Tlalpallan. When the monk Bernard de Sahagun arrived in Mexico, the same questions were put to him, as those which were addressed to Father Gili two hundred years later, in the forests of the Orinoco; he was asked whether he came from the other shore (del otro lado), from the countries to which Quetzalcohuatl had retired.

The region of sculptured rocks, or of painted stones, extends far beyond the Lower Orinoco, beyond the country (latitude 7 degrees 5 minutes to 7 degrees 40 minutes, longitude 68 degrees 50 minutes to 69 degrees 45 minutes) to which belongs what may be called the local fables of the Tamanacs. We again find these same sculptured rocks between the Cassiquiare and the Atabapo (latitude 2 degrees 5 minutes to 3 degrees 20 minutes; longitude 69 to 70 degrees); and between the sources of the Essequibo and the Rio Branco (latitude 3 degrees 50 minutes; longitude 62 degrees 32 minutes). I do not assert that these figures prove the knowledge of the use of iron, or that they denote a very advanced degree of culture; but even on the supposition that, instead of being symbolical, they are the fruits of the idleness of hunting nations, we must still admit an anterior race of men, very different from those who now inhabit the banks of the Orinoco and the Rupunuri. The more a country is destitute of remembrances of generations that are extinct, the more important it becomes to follow the least traces of what appears to be monumental. The eastern plains of North America display only those extraordinary circumvallations that remind us of the fortified camps (the pretended cities of vast extent) of the ancient and modern nomad tribes of Asia. In the oriental plains of South America, the force of vegetation, the heat of the climate, and the too lavish gifts of nature, have opposed obstacles still more powerful to the progress of human civilization. Between the Orinoco and the Amazon I heard no mention of any wall of earth, vestige of a dyke, or sepulchral tumulus; the rocks alone show us (and this through a great extent of country), rude sketches which the hand of man has traced in times unknown, and which are connected with religious traditions.
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Re: Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions

Postby admin » Mon Jun 04, 2018 7:02 am

Part 3 of 4

Before I quitted the wildest part of the Upper Orinoco, I thought it desirable to mention facts which are important only when they are considered in their connection with each other. All I could relate of our navigation from Esmeralda to the mouth of the Atabapo would be merely an enumeration of rivers and uninhabited places. From the 24th to the 27th of May, we slept but twice on land; our first resting-place was at the confluence of the Rio Jao, and our second below the mission of Santa Barbara, in the island of Minisi. The Orinoco being free from shoals, the Indian pilot pursued his course all night, abandoning the boat to the current of the river. Setting apart the time which we spent on the shore in preparing the rice and plantains that served us for food, we took but thirty-five hours in going from Esmeralda to Santa Barbara. The chronometer gave me for the longitude of the latter mission 70 degrees 3 minutes; we had therefore made near four miles an hour, a velocity which was partly owing to the current, and partly to the action of the oars. The Indians assert that the crocodiles do not go up the Orinoco above the mouth of the Rio Jao, and that the manatees are not even found above the cataract of Maypures.

The mission of Santa Barbara is situated a little to the west of the mouth of the Rio Ventuari, or Venituari, examined in 1800 by Father Francisco Valor. We found in this small village of one hundred and twenty inhabitants some traces of industry; but the produce of this industry is of little profit to the natives; it is reserved for the monks, or, as they say in these countries, for the church and the convent. We were assured that a great lamp of massive silver, purchased at the expense of the neophytes, is expected from Madrid. Let us hope that, after the arrival of this treasure, they will think also of clothing the Indians, of procuring for them some instruments of agriculture, and assembling their children in a school. Although there are a few oxen in the savannahs round the mission, they are rarely employed in turning the mill (trapiche), to express the juice of the sugar-cane; this is the occupation of the Indians, who work without pay here as they do everywhere when they are understood to work for the church. The pasturages at the foot of the mountains round Santa Barbara are not so rich as at Esmeralda, but superior to those at San Fernando de Atabapo. The grass is short and thick, yet the upper stratum of earth furnishes only a dry and parched granitic sand. The savannahs (far from fertile) of the banks of the Guaviare, the Meta, and the Upper Orinoco, are equally destitute of the mould which abounds in the surrounding forests, and of the thick stratum of clay, which covers the sandstone of the Llanos, or steppes of Venezuela. The small herbaceous mimosas contribute in this zone to fatten the cattle, but are very rare between the Rio Jao and the mouth of the Guaviare.

During the few hours of our stay at the mission of Santa Barbara, we obtained pretty accurate ideas respecting the Rio Ventuari, which, next to the Guaviare, appeared to me to be the most considerable tributary of the Orinoco. Its banks, heretofore occupied by the Maypures, are still peopled by a great number of independent nations. On going up by the mouth of the Ventuari, which forms a delta covered with palm-trees, you find in the east, after three days' journey, the Cumaruita and the Paru, two streams that rise at the foot of the lofty mountains of Cuneva. Higher up, on the west, lie the Mariata and the Manipiare, inhabited by the Macos and Curacicanas. The latter nation is remarkable for their active cultivation of cotton. In a hostile incursion (entrada) a large house was found containing more than thirty or forty hammocks of a very fine texture of spun cotton, cordage, and fishing implements. The natives had fled; and Father Valor informed us, that the Indians of the mission who accompanied him had set fire to the house before he could save these productions of the industry of the Curacicanas. The neophytes of Santa Barbara, who think themselves very superior to these supposed savages, appeared to me far less industrious. The Rio Manipiare, one of the principal branches of the Ventuari, approaches near its source those lofty mountains, the northern ridge of which gives birth to the Cuchivero. It is a prolongation of the chain of Baraguan; and there Father Gili places the table-land of Siamacu, of which he vaunts the temperate climate. The upper course of the Rio Ventuari, beyond the confluence of the Asisi, and the Great Raudales, is almost unknown. I was informed only that the Upper Ventuari bends so much towards the east that the ancient road from Esmeralda to the Rio Caura crosses the bed of the river. The proximity of the tributary streams of the Carony, the Caura, and the Ventuari, has facilitated for ages the access of the Caribs to the banks of the Upper Orinoco. Bands of this warlike and trading people went up from the Rio Carony, by the Paragua, to the sources of the Paruspa. A portage conducted them to the Chavarro, an eastern tributary stream of the Rio Caura; they descended with their canoes first this stream, and then the Caura itself as far as the mouth of the Erevato. After having gone up this last river south-west, and traversed vast savannahs for three days, they entered by the Manipiare into the great Rio Ventuari. I trace this road with precision not only because it was that by which the traffic of native slaves was carried on, but also to call the attention of those, who at some future day may rule the destiny of Guiana, to the high importance of this labyrinth of rivers.

It is by the four largest tributary streams, which the majestic river of the Orinoco receives on the right (the Carony, the Caura, the Padamo, and the Ventuari), that European civilization will one day penetrate into this region of forests and mountains, which has a surface of ten thousand six hundred square leagues, and which is bounded by the Orinoco on the north, the west, and the south. The Capuchins of Catalonia and the Observantins of Andalusia and Valencia, have already made settlements in the valleys of the Carony and the Caura. The tributary streams of the Lower Orinoco, being the nearest to the coast and to the cultivated region of Venezuela, were naturally the first to receive missionaries, and with them some germs of social life. Corresponding to the Carony and the Caura, which flow toward the north, are two great tributary streams of the Upper Orinoco, that send their waters toward the south; these are the Padamo and the Ventuari. No village has hitherto risen on their banks, though they offer advantages for agriculture and pasturage, which would be sought in vain in the valley of the immense river to which they are tributary. In the centre of these wild countries, where there will long be no other road than the rivers, every project of civilization should be founded on an intimate knowledge of the hydraulic features of the country, and the relative importance of the tributary streams.

In the morning of the 26th of May we left the little village of Santa Barbara, where we found several Indians of Esmeralda, who had come reluctantly, by order of the missionary, to construct for him a house of two stories. During the whole day we enjoyed the view of the fine mountains of Sipapo, which rise at a distance of more than eighteen leagues in the direction of north-north-west. The vegetation of the banks of the Orinoco is singularly varied in this part of the country; the aborescent ferns* descend from the mountains, and mingle with the palm-trees of the plain. (* The geographical distribution of these plants is extremely singular. Scarcely any are found on the eastern coast of Brazil. See the interesting work of Prince Maximilian of Neuwied, Reise nach Brasilien volume 1 page 274.) We rested that night on the island of Minisi; and, after having passed the mouths of the little rivers Quejanuma, Ubua, and Masao, we arrived, on the 27th of May, at San Fernando de Atabapo. We lodged in the same house which we had occupied a month previously, when going up the Rio Negro. We then directed our course towards the south, by the Atabapo and the Temi; we were now returning from the west, having made a long circuit by the Cassiquiare and the Upper Orinoco.

We remained only one day at San Fernando de Atabapo, although that village, adorned as it was by the pirijao palm-tree, with fruit like peaches, appeared to us a delicious abode. Tame pauxis* (* Not the ourax of Cuvier, Crax pauxi Linn., but the Crax alector.) surrounded the Indian huts; in one of which we saw a very rare monkey, which inhabits the banks of the Guaviare. This monkey is the caparro, which I have made known in my Observations on Zoology and comparative Anatomy; it forms, as Geoffroy believes, a new genus (Lagothrix) between the ateles and the alouates. The hair of this monkey is grey, like that of the marten, and extremely soft to the touch. The caparro is distinguished by a round head, and a mild and agreeable expression of countenance. I believe the missionary Gili is the only author who has made mention before me of this curious animal, around which zoologists begin to group other monkeys of Brazil. Having quitted San Fernando on the 27th of May, we arrived, by help of the rapid current of the Orinoco, in seven hours, at the mouth of the Rio Mataveni. We passed the night in the open air, under the granitic rock El Castillito, which rises in the middle of the river, and the form of which reminded us of the ruin called the Mouse-tower (Mausethurm), on the Rhine, opposite Bingen. Here, as on the banks of the Atabapo, we were struck by the sight of a small species of drosera, having exactly the appearance of the drosera of Europe.

The Orinoco had sensibly swelled during the night; and the current, strongly accelerated, bore us, in ten hours, from the mouth of the Mataveni to the Upper Great Cataract, that of Maypures, or Quituna. The distance which we passed over was thirteen leagues. We recalled to mind, with much satisfaction, the scenes where we had reposed in going up the river. We again found the Indians who had accompanied us in our herborizations; and we visited anew the fine spring that issues from a rock of stratified granite behind the house of the missionary: its temperature was not changed more than 0.3 degrees. From the mouth of the Atabapo as far as that of the Apure we seemed to be travelling as through a country which we had long inhabited. We were reduced to the same abstinence; we were stung by the same mosquitos; but the certainty of reaching in a few weeks the term of our physical sufferings kept up our spirits.

The passage of the canoe through the Great Cataract obliged us to stop two days at Maypures. Father Bernardo Zea, missionary at the Raudales, who had accompanied us to the Rio Negro, though ill, insisted on conducting us with his Indians as far as Atures. One of these Indians, Zerepe, the interpreter, who had been so unmercifully punished at the beach of Pararuma, rivetted our attention by his appearance of deep sorrow. We learned that his grief was caused by the loss of a young girl to whom he was engaged, and that he had lost her in consequence of false intelligence which had been spread respecting the direction of our journey. Zerepe, who was a native of Maypures, had been brought up in the woods by his parents, who were of the tribe of the Macos. He had brought with him to the mission a girl of twelve years of age, whom he intended to marry at our return from the Cataracts. The Indian girl was little pleased with the life of the missions, and she was told that the whites would go to the country of the Portuguese (Brazil), and would take Zerepe with them. Disappointed in her hopes, she seized a boat, and with another girl of her own age, crossed the Great Cataract, and fled al monte. The recital of this courageous adventure was the great news of the place. The affliction of Zerepe, however, was not of long duration. Born among the Christians, having travelled as far as the foot of the Rio Negro, understanding Spanish and the language of the Macos, he thought himself superior to the people of his tribe, and he no doubt soon forgot his forest love.

On the 31st of May we passed the rapids of Guahibos and Garcita. The islands which rise in the middle of the waters of the river were overspread with the purest verdure. The rains of winter had unfolded the spathes of the vadgiai palm-tree, the leaves of which rise straight toward the sky. The eye is never wearied of the view of those scenes, where the trees and rocks give the landscape that grand and severe character which we admire in the background of the pictures of Salvator Rosa. We landed before sunset on the eastern bank of the Orinoco, at the Puerto de la Expedicion, in order to visit the cavern of Ataruipe, which is the place of sepulchre of a whole nation destroyed. I shall attempt to describe this cavern, so celebrated among the natives.

We climbed with difficulty, and not without some danger, a steep rock of granite, entirely bare. It would have been almost impossible to fix the foot on its smooth and sloping surface, if large crystals of feldspar, resisting decomposition, did not stand out from the rock, and furnish points of support. Scarcely had we attained the summit of the mountain when we beheld with astonishment the singular aspect of the surrounding country. The foamy bed of the waters is filled with an archipelago of islands covered with palm-trees. Westward, on the left bank of the Orinoco, the wide-stretching savannahs of the Meta and the Casanare resembled a sea of verdure. The setting sun seemed like a globe of fire suspended over the plain, and the solitary Peak of Uniana, which appeared more lofty from being wrapped in vapours which softened its outline, all contributed to augment the majesty of the scene. Immediately below us lay a deep valley, enclosed on every side. Birds of prey and goatsuckers winged their lonely flight in this inaccessible circus. We found a pleasure in following with the eye their fleeting shadows, as they glided slowly over the flanks of the rock.

A narrow ridge led us to a neighbouring mountain, the rounded summit of which supported immense blocks of granite. These masses are more than forty or fifty feet in diameter; and their form is so perfectly spherical, that, as they appear to touch the soil only by a small number of points, it might be supposed, at the least shock of an earthquake, they would roll into the abyss. I do not remember to have seen anywhere else a similar phenomenon, amid the decompositions of granitic soils. If the balls rested on a rock of a different nature, as in the blocks of Jura, we might suppose that they had been rounded by the action of water, or thrown out by the force of an elastic fluid; but their position on the summit of a hill alike granitic, makes it more probable that they owe their origin to the progressive decomposition of the rock.

The most remote part of the valley is covered by a thick forest. In this shady and solitary spot, on the declivity of a steep mountain, the cavern of Ataruipe opens to the view. It is less a cavern than a jutting rock in which the waters have scooped a vast hollow when, in the ancient revolutions of our planet, they attained that height.* (* I saw no vein, no hole (four) filled with crystals. The decomposition of granitic rocks, and their separation into large masses, dispersed in the plains and valleys in the form of blocks and balls with concentric layers, appear to favour the enlarging of these natural excavations, which resemble real caverns.) In this tomb of a whole extinct tribe we soon counted nearly six hundred skeletons well preserved, and regularly placed. Every skeleton reposes in a sort of basket made of the petioles of the palm-tree. These baskets, which the natives call mapires, have the form of a square bag. Their size is proportioned to the age of the dead; there are some for infants cut off at the moment of their birth. We saw them from ten inches to three feet four inches long, the skeletons in them being bent together. They are all ranged near each other, and are so entire that not a rib or a phalanx is wanting. The bones have been prepared in three different manners, either whitened in the air and the sun, dyed red with anoto, or, like mummies, varnished with odoriferous resins, and enveloped in leaves of the heliconia or of the plantain-tree. The Indians informed us that the fresh corpse is placed in damp ground, that the flesh may be consumed by degrees; some months afterwards it is taken out, and the flesh remaining on the bones is scraped off with sharp stones. Several hordes in Guiana still observe this custom. Earthen vases half-baked are found near the mapires or baskets. They appear to contain the bones of the same family. The largest of these vases, or funeral urns, are five feet high, and three feet three inches long. Their colour is greenish-grey, and their oval form is pleasing to the eye. The handles are made in the shape of crocodiles or serpents; the edges are bordered with painted meanders, labyrinths, and grecques, in rows variously combined. Such designs are found in every zone among nations the farthest removed from each other, either with respect to their respective positions on the globe, or to the degree of civilization which they have attained. They still adorn the common pottery made by the inhabitants of the little mission of Maypures; they ornament the bucklers of the Otaheitans, the fishing-implements of the Esquimaux, the walls of the Mexican palace of Mitla, and the vases of ancient Greece.

We could not acquire any precise idea of the period to which the origin of the mapires and the painted vases, contained in the bone-cavern of Ataruipe, can be traced. The greater part seemed not to be more than a century old; but it may be supposed that, sheltered from all humidity under the influence of a uniform temperature, the preservation of these articles would be no less perfect if their origin dated from a period far more remote. A tradition circulates among the Guahibos, that the warlike Atures, pursued by the Caribs, escaped to the rocks that rise in the middle of the Great Cataracts; and there that nation, heretofore so numerous, became gradually extinct, as well as its language. The last families of the Atures still existed in 1767, in the time of the missionary Gili. At the period of our voyage an old parrot was shown at Maypures, of which the inhabitants said, and the fact is worthy of observation, that they did not understand what it said, because it spoke the language of the Atures.

We opened, to the great concern of our guides, several mapires, for the purpose of examining attentively the form of the skulls. They were all marked by the characteristics of the American race, with the exception of two or three, which approached indubitably to the Caucasian. In the middle of the Cataracts, in the most inaccessible spots, cases are found strengthened with iron bands, and filled with European tools, vestiges of clothes, and glass trinkets. These articles, which have given rise to the most absurd reports of treasures hidden by the Jesuits, probably belonged to Portuguese traders who had penetrated into these savage countries. May we suppose that the skulls of European race, which we saw mingled with the skeletons of the natives, and preserved with the same care, were the remains of some Portuguese travellers who had died of sickness, or had been killed in battle? The aversion evinced by the natives for whatever is not of their own race renders this hypothesis little probable. Perhaps fugitive mestizos of the missions of the Meta and Apure may have come and settled near the Cataracts, marrying women of the tribe of the Atures. Such mixed marriages sometimes take place in this zone, though they are more rare than in Canada, and in the whole of North America, where hunters of European origin unite themselves with savages, assume their habits, and sometimes acquire great political influence.

We took several skulls, the skeleton of a child of six or seven years old, and two of full-grown men of the nation of the Atures, from the cavern of Ataruipe. All these bones, partly painted red, partly varnished with odoriferous resins, were placed in the baskets (mapires or canastos) which we have just described. They made almost the whole load of a mule; and as we knew the superstitious feelings of the Indians in reference to the remains of the dead after burial, we carefully enveloped the canastos in mats recently woven. Unfortunately for us, the penetration of the Indians, and the extreme quickness of their sense of smelling, rendered all our precautions useless. Wherever we stopped, in the missions of the Caribbees, amid the Llanos, between Angostura and Nueva Barcelona, the natives assembled round our mules to admire the monkeys which we had purchased at the Orinoco. These good people had scarcely touched our baggage, when they announced the approaching death of the beast of burden that carried the dead. In vain we told them that they were deceived in their conjectures; and that the baskets contained the bones of crocodiles and manatees; they persisted in repeating that they smelt the resin that surrounded the skeletons, and that they were their old relations. We were obliged to request that the monks would interpose their authority, to overcome the aversion of the natives, and procure for us a change of mules.

One of the skulls, which we took from the cavern of Ataruipe, has appeared in the fine work published by my old master, Blumenbach, on the varieties of the human species. The skeletons of the Indians were lost on the coast of Africa, together with a considerable part of our collections, in a shipwreck, in which perished our friend and fellow-traveller, Fray Juan Gonzales, the young monk of the order of Saint Francis.

We withdrew in silence from the cavern of Ataruipe. It was one of those calm and serene nights which are so common in the torrid zone. The stars shone with a mild and planetary light. Their scintillation was scarcely sensible at the horizon, which seemed illumined by the great nebulae of the southern hemisphere. An innumerable multitude of insects spread a reddish light upon the ground, loaded with plants, and resplendent with these living and moving fires, as if the stars of the firmament had sunk down on the savannah. On quitting the cavern we stopped several times to admire the beauty of this singular scene. The odoriferous vanilla and festoons of bignonia decorated the entrance; and above, on the summit of the hill, the arrowy branches of the palm-trees waved murmuring in the air. We descended towards the river, to take the road to the mission, where we arrived late in the night. Our imagination was struck by all we had just seen. Occupied continually by the present, in a country where the traveller is tempted to regard human society as a new institution, he is more powerfully interested by remembrances of times past. These remembrances were not indeed of a distant date; but in all that is monumental antiquity is a relative idea, and we easily confound what is ancient with what is obscure and problematic. The Egyptians considered the historical remembrances of the Greeks as very recent. If the Chinese, or, as they prefer calling themselves, the inhabitants of the Celestial Empire, could have communicated with the priests of Heliopolis, they would have smiled at those pretensions of the Egyptians to antiquity. Contrasts not less striking are found in the north of Europe and of Asia, in the New World, and in every region where the human race has not preserved a long consciousness of itself. The migration of the Toltecs, the most ancient historical event on the tableland of Mexico, dates only in the sixth century of our era. The introduction of a good system of intercalation, and the reform of the calendars, the indispensable basis of an accurate chronology, took place in the year 1091. These epochs, which to us appear so modern, fall on fabulous times, when we reflect on the history of our species between the banks of the Orinoco and the Amazon. We there see symbolic figures sculptured on the rocks, but no tradition throws light upon their origin. In the hot part of Guiana we can go back only to the period when the Castilian and Portuguese conquerors, and more recently peaceful monks, penetrated amid so many barbarous nations.

It appears that to the north of the Cataracts, in the strait of Baraguan, there are caverns filled with bones, similar to those I have just described: but I was informed of this fact only after my return; our Indian pilots did not mention it when we landed at the strait. These tombs no doubt have given rise to a fable of the Ottomacs, according to which the granitic and solitary rocks of Baraguan, the forms of which are very singular, are regarded as the grandfathers, the ancient chiefs of the tribe. The custom of separating the flesh from the bones, very anciently practised by the Massagetes, is still known among several hordes of the Orinoco. It is even asserted, and with some probability, that the Guaraons plunge their dead bodies under water enveloped in nets; and that the small caribe-fishes, of which we saw everywhere an innumerable quantity, devour in a few days the muscular flesh, and thus prepare the skeleton. It may be supposed that this operation can be practised only in places where crocodiles are not common. Some tribes, for instance the Tamanacs, are accustomed to lay waste the fields of a deceased relative, and cut down the trees which he has planted. They say that the sight of objects which belonged to their relation makes them melancholy. They like better to efface than to preserve remembrances. These effects of Indian sensibility are very detrimental to agriculture, and the monks oppose with energy these superstitious practices, to which the natives converted to Christianity still adhere in the missions.

The tombs of the Indians of the Orinoco have not been very closely examined, because they do not contain valuable articles like those of Peru; and even on the spot no faith is now lent to the chimerical ideas, which were heretofore formed of the wealth of the ancient inhabitants of El Dorado. The thirst of gold everywhere precedes the desire of instruction, and a taste for researches into antiquity; in all the mountainous part of South America, from Merida and Santa Martha to the table-lands of Quito and Upper Peru, the labours of absolute mining have been undertaken to discover tombs, or, as the Creoles say, employing a word altered from the Inca language, guacas. When in Peru, at Mancichi, I went into the guaca from which, in the sixteenth century, masses of gold of great value were extracted. No trace of the precious metals has been found in the caverns which have served the natives of Guiana for ages as sepulchres. This circumstance proves that even at the period when the Caribs, and other travelling nations, made incursions to the south-west, gold had flowed in very small quantities from the mountains of Peru towards the eastern plains.

Wherever the granitic rocks do not present any of those large cavities caused by their decomposition, or by an accumulation of their blocks, the Indians deposit their dead in the earth. The hammock (chinchorro), a kind of net in which the deceased had reposed during his life, serves for a coffin. This net is fastened tight round the body, a hole is dug in the hut, and there the body is laid. This is the most usual method, according to the account of the missionary Gili, and it accords with what I myself learned from Father Zea. I do not believe that there exists one tumulus in Guiana, not even in the plains of the Cassiquiare and the Essequibo. Some, however, are to be met with in the savannahs of Varinas, as in Canada, to the west of the Alleghenies.* (* Mummies and skeletons contained in baskets were recently discovered in a cavern in the United States. It is believed they belong to a race of men analogous to that of the Sandwich Islands. The description of these tombs has some similitude with that of the tombs of Ataruipe.) It seems remarkable enough that, notwithstanding the extreme abundance of wood in those countries, the natives of the Orinoco were as little accustomed as the ancient Scythians to burn the dead. Sometimes they formed funeral piles for that purpose; but only after a battle, when the number of the dead was considerable. In 1748, the Parecas burned not only the bodies of their enemies, the Tamanacs, but also those of their own people who fell on the field of battle. The Indians of South America, like all nations in a state of nature, are strongly attached to the spots where the bones of their fathers repose. This feeling, which a great writer has beautifully painted in the episode of Atala, is cherished in all its primitive ardour by the Chinese. These people among whom everything is the produce of art, or rather of the most ancient civilization, do not change their dwelling without carrying along with them the bones of their ancestors. Coffins are seen deposited on the banks of great rivers, to be transported, with the furniture of the family, to a remote province. These removals of bones, heretofore more common among the savages of North America, are not practised among the tribes of Guiana; but these are not nomad, like nations who live exclusively by hunting.

We stayed at the mission of Atures only during the time necessary for passing the canoe through the Great Cataract. The bottom of our frail bark had become so thin that it required great care to prevent it from splitting. We took leave of the missionary, Bernardo Zea, who remained at Atures, after having accompanied us during two months, and shared all our sufferings. This poor monk still continued to have fits of tertian ague; they had become to him an habitual evil, to which he paid little attention. Other fevers of a more fatal kind prevailed at Atures on our second visit. The greater part of the Indians could not leave their hammocks, and we were obliged to send in search of cassava-bread, the most indispensable food of the country, to the independent but neighbouring tribe of the Piraoas. We had hitherto escaped these malignant fevers, which I believe to be always contagious.

We ventured to pass in our canoe through the latter half of the Raudal of Atures. We landed here and there, to climb upon the rocks, which like narrow dikes joined the islands to one another. Sometimes the waters force their way over the dikes, sometimes they fall within them with a hollow noise. A considerable portion of the Orinoco was dry, because the river had found an issue by subterraneous caverns. In these solitary haunts the rock-manakin with gilded plumage (Pipra rupicola), one of the most beautiful birds of the tropics, builds its nest. The Raudalito of Carucari is caused by an accumulation of enormous blocks of granite, several of which are spheroids of five or six feet in diameter, and they are piled together in such a manner, as to form spacious caverns. We entered one of these caverns to gather the confervas that were spread over the clefts and humid sides of the rock. This spot displayed one of the most extraordinary scenes of nature that we had contemplated on the banks of the Orinoco. The river rolled its waters turbulently over our heads. It seemed like the sea dashing against reefs of rocks; but at the entrance of the cavern we could remain dry beneath a large sheet of water that precipitated itself in an arch from above the barrier. In other cavities, deeper, but less spacious, the rock was pierced by the effect of successive filtrations. We saw columns of water, eight or nine inches broad, descending from the top of the vault, and finding an issue by clefts, that seemed to communicate at great distances with each other.

The cascades of Europe, forming only one fall, or several falls close to each other, can never produce such variety in the shifting landscape. This variety is peculiar to rapids, to a succession of small cataracts several miles in length, to rivers that force their way across rocky dikes and accumulated blocks of granite. We had the opportunity of viewing this extraordinary sight longer than we wished. Our boat was to coast the eastern bank of a narrow island, and to take us in again after a long circuit. We passed an hour and a half in vain expectation of it. Night approached, and with it a tremendous storm. It rained with violence. We began to fear that our frail bark had been wrecked against the rocks, and that the Indians, conformably to their habitual indifference for the evils of others, had returned tranquilly to the mission. There were only three of us: we were completely wet, and uneasy respecting the fate of our boat: it appeared far from agreeable to pass, without sleep, a long night of the torrid zone amid the noise of the Raudales. M. Bonpland proposed to leave me in the island with Don Nicolas Soto, and to swim across the branches of the river that are separated by the granitic dikes. He hoped to reach the forest, and seek assistance at Atures from Father Zea. We dissuaded him with difficulty from undertaking this hazardous enterprise. He knew little of the labyrinth of small channels, into which the Orinoco is divided. Most of them have strong whirlpools, and what passed before our eyes while we were deliberating on our situation, proved sufficiently that the natives had deceived us respecting the absence of crocodiles in the cataracts. The little monkeys which we had carried along with us for months were deposited on the point of our island. Wet by the rains and sensible of the least lowering of the temperature, these delicate animals sent forth plaintive cries, and attracted to the spot two crocodiles, the size and leaden colour of which denoted their great age. Their unexpected appearance made us reflect on the danger we had incurred by bathing, at our first passing by the mission of Atures, in the middle of the Raudal. After long waiting, the Indians at length arrived at the close of day. The natural coffer-dam by which they had endeavoured to descend in order to make the circuit of the island, had become impassable owing to the shallowness of the water. The pilot sought long for a more accessible passage in this labyrinth of rocks and islands. Happily our canoe was not damaged and in less than half an hour our instruments, provision, and animals, were embarked.

We pursued our course during a part of the night, to pitch our tent again in the island of Panumana. We recognized with pleasure the spots where we had botanized when going up the Orinoco. We examined once more on the beach of Guachaco that small formation of sandstone, which reposes directly on granite. Its position is the same as that of the sandstone which Burckhardt observed at the entrance of Nubia, superimposed on the granite of Syene. We passed, without visiting it, the new mission of San Borga, where (as we learned with regret a few days after) the little colony of Guahibos had fled al monte, from the chimerical fear that we should carry them off; to sell them as poitos, or slaves. After having passed the rapids of Tabaje, and the Raudal of Cariven, near the mouth of the great Rio Meta, we arrived without accident at Carichana. The missionary received us with that kind hospitality which he extended to us on our first passage. The sky was unfavourable for astronomical observations; we had obtained some new ones in the two Great Cataracts; but thence, as far as the mouth of the Apure, we were obliged to renounce the attempt. M. Bonpland had the satisfaction at Carichana of dissecting a manatee more than nine feet long. It was a female, and the flesh appeared to us not unsavoury. I have spoken in another place of the manner of catching this herbivorous cetacea. The Piraoas, some families of whom inhabit the mission of Carichana, detest this animal to such a degree, that they hid themselves, to avoid being obliged to touch it, whilst it was being conveyed to our hut. They said that the people of their tribe die infallibly when they eat of it. This prejudice is the more singular, as the neighbours of the Piraoas, the Guamos and the Ottomacs, are very fond of the flesh of the manatee. The flesh of the crocodile is also an object of horror to some tribes, and of predilection to others.

The island of Cuba furnishes a fact little known in the history of the manatee. South of the port of Xagua, several miles from the coast, there are springs of fresh water in the middle of the sea. They are supposed to be owing to a hydrostatic pressure existing in subterraneous channels, communicating with the lofty mountains of Trinidad. Small vessels sometimes take in water there; and, what is well worthy of observation, large manatees remain habitually in those spots. I have already called the attention of naturalists to the crocodiles which advance from the mouth of rivers far into the sea. Analogous circumstances may have caused, in the ancient catastrophes of our planet, that singular mixture of pelagian and fluviatile bones and petrifactions, which is observed in some rocks of recent formation.

Our stay at Carichana was very useful in recruiting our strength after our fatigues. M. Bonpland bore with him the germs of a cruel malady; he needed repose; but as the delta of the tributary streams included between the Horeda and Paruasi is covered with a rich vegetation, he made long herbalizations, and was wet through several times in a day. We found, fortunately, in the house of the missionary, the most attentive care; we were supplied with bread made of maize flour, and even with milk. The cows yield milk plentifully enough in the lower regions of the torrid zone, wherever good pasturage is found. I call attention to this fact, because local circumstances have spread through the Indian Archipelago the prejudice of considering hot climates as repugnant to the secretion of milk. We may conceive the indifference of the inhabitants of the New World for a milk diet, the country having been originally destitute of animals capable of furnishing it*; (* The reindeer are not domesticated in Greenland as they are in Lapland; and the Esquimaux care little for their milk. The bisons taken very young accustom themselves, on the west of the Alleghenies, to graze with herds of European cows. The females in some districts of India yield a little milk, but the natives have never thought of milking them. What is the origin of that fabulous story related by Gomara (chapter 43 page 36) according to which the first Spanish navigators saw, on the coast of South Carolina, stags led to the savannahs by herdsmen? The female bisons, according to Mr. Buchanan and the philosophical historian of the Indian Archipelago, Mr. Crawford, yield more milk than common cows.) but how can we avoid being astonished at this indifference in the immense Chinese population, living in great part beyond the tropics, and in the same latitude with the nomad and pastoral tribes of central Asia? If the Chinese have ever been a pastoral people, how have they lost the tastes and habits so intimately connected with that state, which precedes agricultural institutions? These questions are interesting with respect both to the history of the nations of oriental Asia, and to the ancient communications that are supposed to have existed between that part of the world and the north of Mexico.

We went down the Orinoco in two days, from Carichana to the mission of Uruana, after having again passed the celebrated strait of Baraguan. We stopped several times to determine the velocity of the river, and its temperature at the surface, which was 27.4 degrees. The velocity was found to be two feet in a second (sixty-two toises in 3 minutes 6 seconds) in places where the bed of the Orinoco was more than twelve thousand feet broad, and from ten to twelve fathoms deep. The slope of the river is in fact extremely gentle from the Great Cataracts to Angostura; and, if a barometric measurement were wanting, the difference of height might be determined by approximation, by measuring from time to time the velocity of the stream, and the extent of the section in breadth and depth. We had some observations of the stars at Uruana. I found the latitude of the mission to be 7 degrees 8 minutes; but the results from different stars left a doubt of more than 1 minute. The stratum of mosquitos, which hovered over the ground, was so thick that I could not succeed in rectifying properly the artificial horizon. I tormented myself in vain; and regretted that I was not provided with a mercurial horizon. On the 7th of June, good absolute altitudes of the sun gave me 69 degrees 40 minutes for the longitude. We had advanced from Esmeralda 1 degree 17 minutes toward the west, and this chronometric determination merits entire confidence on account of the double observations, made in going and returning, at the Great Cataracts, and at the confluence of the Atabapo and of the Apure.

The situation of the mission of Uruana is extremely picturesque. The little Indian village stands at the foot of a lofty granitic mountain. Rocks everywhere appear in the form of pillars above the forest, rising higher than the tops of the tallest trees. The aspect of the Orinoco is nowhere more majestic than when viewed from the hut of the missionary, Fray Ramon Bueno. It is more than two thousand six hundred toises broad, and it runs without any winding, like a vast canal, straight toward the east. Two long and narrow islands (Isla de Uruana and Isla vieja de la Manteca) contribute to give extent to the bed of the river; the two banks are parallel, and we cannot call it divided into different branches. The mission is inhabited by the Ottomacs, a tribe in the rudest state, and presenting one of the most extraordinary physiological phenomena. They eat earth; that is, they swallow every day, during several months, very considerable quantities, to appease hunger, and this practice does not appear to have any injurious effect on their health. Though we could stay only one day at Uruana, this short space of time sufficed to make us acquainted with the preparation of the poya, or balls of earth. I also found some traces of this vitiated appetite among the Guamos; and between the confluence of the Meta and the Apure, where everybody speaks of dirt-eating as of a thing anciently known. I shall here confine myself to an account of what we ourselves saw or heard from the missionary, who had been doomed to live for twelve years among the savage and turbulent tribe of the Ottomacs.

The inhabitants of Uruana belong to those nations of the savannahs called wandering Indians (Indios andantes) who, more difficult to civilize than the nations of the forest (Indios del monte), have a decided aversion to cultivate the land, and live almost exclusively by hunting and fishing. They are men of very robust constitution; but ill-looking, savage, vindictive, and passionately fond of fermented liquors. They are omnivorous animals in the highest degree; and therefore the other Indians, who consider them as barbarians, have a common saying, nothing is so loathsome but that an Ottomac will eat it. While the waters of the Orinoco and its tributary streams are low, the Ottomacs subsist on fish and turtles. The former they kill with surprising dexterity, by shooting them with an arrow when they appear at the surface of the water. When the rivers swell fishing almost entirely ceases.* (* In South America, as in Egypt and Nubia, the swelling of the rivers, which occurs periodically in every part of the torrid zone, is erroneously attributed to the melting of the snows.) It is then very difficult to procure fish, which often fails the poor missionaries, on fast-days as well as flesh-days, though all the young Indians are under the obligation of fishing for the convent. During the period of these inundations, which last two or three months, the Ottomacs swallow a prodigious quantity of earth. We found heaps of earth-balls in their huts, piled up in pyramids three or four feet high. These balls were five or six inches in diameter. The earth which the Ottomacs eat is a very fine and unctuous clay of a yellowish grey colour; and, when being slightly baked at the fire, the hardened crust has a tint inclining to red, owing to the oxide of iron which is mingled with it. We brought away some of this earth, which we took from the winter-provision of the Indians; and it is a mistake to suppose that it is steatitic, and that it contains magnesia. Vauquelin did not discover any traces of that substance in it but he found that it contained more silex than alumina, and three or four per cent of lime.

The Ottomacs do not eat every kind of clay indifferently; they choose the alluvial beds or strata, which contain the most unctuous earth, and the smoothest to the touch. I inquired of the missionary whether the moistened clay were made to undergo that peculiar decomposition which is indicated by a disengagement of carbonic acid and sulphuretted hydrogen, and which is designated in every language by the term of putrefaction; but he assured us that the natives neither cause the clay to rot, nor do they mingle it with flour of maize, oil of turtle's eggs, or fat of the crocodile. We ourselves examined, both at the Orinoco and after our return to Paris, the balls of earth which we brought away with us, and found no trace of the mixture of any organic substance, whether oily or farinaceous. The savage regards every thing as nourishing that appeases hunger: when, therefore, you inquire of an Ottomac on what he subsists during the two months when the river is at its highest flood he shows you his balls of clayey earth. This he calls his principal food at the period when he can seldom procure a lizard, a root of fern, or a dead fish swimming at the surface of the water. If necessity force the Indians to eat earth during two months (and from three quarters to five quarters of a pound in twenty-four hours), he eats it from choice during the rest of the year. Every day in the season of drought, when fishing is most abundant, he scrapes his balls of poya, and mingles a little clay with his other aliment. It is most surprising that the Ottomacs do not become lean by swallowing such quantities of earth: they are, on the contrary, extremely robust. The missionary Fray Ramon Bueno asserts that he never remarked any alteration in the health of the natives at the period of the great risings of the Orinoco.

The Ottomacs during some months eat daily three-quarters of a pound of clay slightly hardened by fire, but which they moisten before swallowing it. It has not been possible to verify hitherto with precision how much nutritious vegetable or animal matter they take in a week at the same time; but they attribute the sensation of satiety which they feel to the clay, and not to the wretched aliments which they take with it occasionally.

No physiological phenomenon being entirely insulated, it may be interesting to examine several analogous phenomena, which I have been able to collect. I observed everywhere within the torrid zone, in a great number of individuals, children, women, and sometimes even full-grown men, an inordinate and almost irresistible desire of swallowing earth; not an alkaline or calcareous earth to neutralize (as it is said) acid juices, but a fat clay, unctuous, and exhaling a strong smell. It is often found necessary to tie the children's hands or to confine them to prevent them eating earth when the rain ceases to fall. At the village of Banco, on the bank of the river Magdalena, I saw the Indian women who make pottery continually swallowing great pieces of clay. These women were not in a state of pregnancy; and they affirmed that earth is an aliment which they do not find hurtful. In other American tribes, people soon fall sick, and waste away, when they yield too much to this mania of eating earth. We found at the mission of San Borja an Indian child of the Guahiba nation, who was as thin as a skeleton. The mother informed us that the little girl was reduced to this lamentable state of atrophy in consequence of a disordered appetite, she having refused during four months to take almost any other food than clay. Yet San Borja is only twenty-five leagues distant from the mission of Uruana, inhabited by that tribe of the Ottomacs, who, from the effect no doubt of a habit progressively acquired, swallow the poya without experiencing any pernicious effects. Father Gumilla asserts that the Ottomacs take as an aperient, oil, or rather the melted fat of the crocodile, when they feel any gastric obstructions; but the missionary whom we found among them was little disposed to confirm this assertion. It may be asked, why the mania of eating earth is much more rare in the frigid and temperate than in the torrid zones; and why in Europe it is found only among women in a state of pregnancy, and sickly children. This difference between hot and temperate climates arises perhaps only from the inert state of the functions of the stomach caused by strong cutaneous perspiration. It has been supposed to be observed that the inordinate taste for eating earth augments among the African slaves, and becomes more pernicious when they are restricted to a regimen purely vegetable and deprived of spirituous liquors.

The negroes on the coast of Guinea delight in eating a yellowish earth, which they call caouac. The slaves who are taken to America endeavour to indulge in this habit; but it proves detrimental to their health. They say that the earth of the West Indies is not so easy of digestion as that of their country. Thibaut de Chanvalon, in his Voyage to Martinico, expresses himself very judiciously on this pathological phenomenon. "Another cause," he says, "of this pain in the stomach is that several of the negroes, who come from the coast of Guinea, eat earth; not from a depraved taste, or in consequence of disease, but from a habit contracted at home in Africa, where they eat, they say, a particular earth, the taste of which they find agreeable, without suffering any inconvenience. They seek in our islands for the earth most similar to this, and prefer a yellowish red volcanic tufa. It is sold secretly in our public markets; but this is an abuse which the police ought to correct. The negroes who have this habit are so fond of caouac, that no chastisement will prevent their eating it."
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Re: Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions

Postby admin » Mon Jun 04, 2018 7:03 am

Part 4 of 4

In the Indian Archipelago, at the island of Java, Labillardiere saw, between Surabaya and Samarang, little square and reddish cakes exposed for sale. These cakes called tanaampo, were cakes of clay, slightly baked, which the natives eat with relish. The attention of physiologists, since my return from the Orinoco, having been powerfully directed to these phenomena of geophagy, M. Leschenault (one of the naturalists of the expedition to the Antarctic regions under the command of captain Baudin) has published some curious details on the tanaampo, or ampo, of the Javanese. "The reddish and somewhat ferruginous clay," he says "which the inhabitants of Java are fond of eating occasionally, is spread on a plate of iron, and baked, after having been rolled into little cylinders in the form of the bark of cinnamon. In this state it takes the name of ampo, and is sold in the public markets. This clay has a peculiar taste, which is owing to the baking: it is very absorbent, and adheres to the tongue, which it dries. In general it is only the Javanese women who eat the ampo, either in the time of pregnancy, or in order to grow thin; the absence of plumpness being there regarded as a kind of beauty. The use of this earth is fatal to health; the women lose their appetite imperceptibly, and take only with relish a very small quantity of food; but the desire of becoming thin, and of preserving a slender shape, induces them to brave these dangers, and maintains the credit of the ampo." The savage inhabitants of New Caledonia also, to appease their hunger in times of scarcity, eat great pieces of a friable Lapis ollaris. Vauquelin analysed this stone, and found in it, beside magnesia and silex in equal portions, a small quantity of oxide of copper. M. Goldberry had seen the negroes in Africa, in the islands of Bunck and Los Idolos, eat an earth of which he had himself eaten, without being incommoded by it, and which also was a white and friable steatite. These examples of earth-eating in the torrid zone appear very strange. We are struck by the anomaly of finding a taste, which might seem to belong only to the inhabitants of the most sterile regions, prevailing among races of rude and indolent men, who live in the finest and most fertile countries on the globe. We saw at Popayan, and in several mountainous parts of Peru, lime reduced to a very fine powder, sold in the public markets to the natives among other articles of food. This powder, when eaten, is mingled with coca, that is, with the leaves of the Erythroxylon peruvianum. It is well known that Indian messengers take no other aliment for whole days than lime and coca: both excite the secretion of saliva, and of the gastric juice; they take away the appetite, without affording any nourishment to the body. In other parts of South America, on the coast of Rio de la Hacha, the Guajiros swallow lime alone, without adding any vegetable matter to it. They carry with them a little box filled with lime, as we do snuff-boxes, and as in Asia people carry a betel-box. This American custom excited the curiosity of the first Spanish navigators. Lime blackens the teeth; and in the Indian Archipelago, as among several American hordes, to blacken the teeth is to beautify them. In the cold regions of the kingdom of Quito, the natives of Tigua eat habitually from choice, and without any injurious consequences, a very fine clay, mixed with quartzose sand. This clay, suspended in water, renders it milky. We find in their huts large vessels filled with this water, which serves as a beverage, and which the Indians call agua or leche de llanka.* (* Water or milk of clay. Llanka is a word of the general language of the Incas, signifying fine clay.)

When we reflect on these facts, we perceive that the appetite for clayey, magnesian, and calcareous earth is most common among the people of the torrid zone; that it is not always a cause of disease; and that some tribes eat earth from choice, whilst others (as the Ottomacs in America, and the inhabitants of New Caledonia in the Pacific) eat it from want and to appease hunger. A great number of physiological phenomena prove that a temporary cessation of hunger may be produced though the substances that are submitted to the organs of digestion may not be, properly speaking, nutritive. The earth of the Ottomacs, composed of alumine and silex, furnishes probably nothing, or almost nothing, to the composition of the organs of man. These organs contain lime and magnesia in the bones, in the lymph of the thoracic duct, in the colouring matter of the blood, and in white hairs; they afford very small quantities of silex in black hair; and, according to Vauquelin, but a few atoms of alumine in the bones, though this is contained abundantly in the greater part of those vegetable substances which form part of our nourishment. It is not the same with man as with animated beings placed lower in the scale of organization. In the former, assimilation is exerted only on those substances that enter essentially into the composition of the bones, the muscles, and the medullary matter of the nerves and the brain. Plants, on the contrary, draw from the soil the salts that are found accidentally mixed in it; and their fibrous texture varies according to the nature of the earths that predominate in the spots which they inhabit. An object well worthy of research, and which has long fixed my attention, is the small number of simple substances (earthy and metallic) that enter into the composition of animated beings, and which alone appear fitted to maintain what we may call the chemical movement of vitality.

We must not confound the sensations of hunger with that vague feeling of debility which is produced by want of nutrition, and by other pathologic causes. The sensation of hunger ceases long before digestion takes place, or the chyme is converted into chyle. It ceases either by a nervous and tonic impression exerted by the aliments on the coats of the stomach; or, because the digestive apparatus is filled with substances that excite the mucous membranes to an abundant secretion of the gastric juice. To this tonic impression on the nerves of the stomach the prompt and salutary effects of what are called nutritive medicaments may be attributed, such as chocolate, and every substance that gently stimulates and nourishes at the same time. It is the absence of a nervous stimulant that renders the solitary use of a nutritive substance (as starch, gum, or sugar) less favourable to assimilation, and to the reparation of the losses which the human body undergoes. Opium, which is not nutritive, is employed with success in Asia, in times of great scarcity; it acts as a tonic. But when the matter which fills the stomach can be regarded neither as an aliment, that is, as proper to be assimilated, nor as a tonic stimulating the nerves, the cessation of hunger is probably owing only to the secretion of the gastric juice. We here touch upon a problem of physiology which has not been sufficiently investigated. Hunger is appeased, the painful feeling of inanition ceases, when the stomach is filled. It is said that this viscus stands in need of ballast; and every language furnishes figurative expressions which convey the idea that a mechanical distension of the stomach causes an agreeable sensation. Recent works of physiology still speak of the painful contraction which the stomach experiences during hunger, the friction of its sides against one another, and the action of the gastric juice on the texture of the digestive apparatus. The observations of Bichat, and more particularly the fine experiments of Majendie, are in contradiction to these superannuated hypotheses. After twenty-four, forty-eight, or even sixty hours of abstinence, no contraction of the stomach is observed; it is only on the fourth or fifth day that this organ appears to change in a small degree its dimensions. The quantity of the gastric juice diminishes with the duration of abstinence. It is probable that this juice, far from accumulating, is digested as an alimentary substance. If a cat or dog be made to swallow a substance which is not susceptible of being digested, a pebble for instance, a mucous and acid liquid is formed abundantly in the cavity of the stomach, somewhat resembling in its composition the gastric juice of the human body. It appears to me very probable, that when the want of aliments compels the Ottomacs and the inhabitants of New Caledonia to swallow clay and steatite during a part of the year, these earths occasion a powerful secretion of the gastric and pancreatic juices in the digestive apparatus of these people. The observations which I made on the banks of the Orinoco, have been recently confirmed by the direct experiments of two distinguished young physiologists, MM. Cloquet and Breschet. After long fasting they ate as much as five ounces of a silvery green and very flexible laminar talc. Their hunger was completely satisfied, and they felt no inconvenience from a kind of food to which their organs were unaccustomed. It is known that great use is still made in the East of the bolar and sigillated earths of Lemnos, which are clay mingled with oxide of iron. In Germany the workmen employed in the quarries of sandstone worked at the mountain of Kiffhauser spread a very fine clay upon their bread, instead of butter, which they call steinbutter* (stone-butter). (* This steinbutter must not be confounded with the mountain butter (bergbutter) which is a saline substance, produced by a decomposition of aluminous schists.)

The state of perfect health enjoyed by the Ottomacs during the time when they use little muscular exercise, and are subjected to so extraordinary a regimen, is a phenomenon difficult to be explained. It can be attributed only to a habit prolonged from generation to generation. The structure of the digestive apparatus differs much in animals that feed exclusively on flesh or on seeds; it is even probable that the gastric juice changes its nature, according as it is employed in effecting the digestion of animal or vegetable substances; yet we are able gradually to change the regimen of herbivorous and carnivorous animals, to feed the former with flesh, and the latter with vegetables. Man can accustom himself to an extraordinary abstinence and find it but little painful if he employ tonic or stimulating substances (various drugs, small quantities of opium, betel, tobacco, or leaves of coca); or if he supply his stomach, from time to time, with earthy insipid substances that are not in themselves fit for nutrition. Like man in a savage state some animals, when pressed by hunger in winter, swallow clay or friable steatites; such are the wolves in the northeast of Europe, the reindeer and, according to the testimony of M. Patrin, the kids in Siberia. The Russian hunters, on the banks of the Yenisei and the Amour, use a clayey matter which they call rock-butter, as a bait. The animals scent this clay from afar, and are fond of the smell; as the clays of bucaro, known in Portugal and Spain by the name of odoriferous earths (tierras olorosas), have an odour agreeable to women.* (* Bucaro (vas fictile odoriferum). People are fond of drinking out of these vessels on account of the smell of the clay. The women of the province of Alentejo acquire a habit of masticating the bucaro earth; and feel a great privation when they cannot indulge this vitiated taste.) Brown relates in his History of Jamaica that the crocodiles of South America swallow small stones and pieces of very hard wood, when the lakes which they inhabit are dry, or when they are in want of food. M. Bonpland and I observed in a crocodile, eleven feet long, which we dissected at Batallez, on the banks of the Rio Magdalena, that the stomach of this reptile contained half-digested fish, and rounded fragments of granite three or four inches in diameter. It is difficult to admit that the crocodiles swallow these stony masses accidentally, for they do not catch fish with their lower jaw resting on the ground at the bottom of the river. The Indians have framed the absurd hypothesis that these indolent animals like to augment their weight, that they may have less trouble in diving. I rather think that they load their stomach with large pebbles to excite an abundant secretion of the gastric juice. The experiments of Majendie render this explanation extremely probable. With respect to the habit of the granivorous birds, particularly the gallinaceae and ostriches, of swallowing sand and small pebbles, it has been hitherto attributed to an instinctive desire of accelerating the trituration of the aliments in a muscular and thick stomach.

We have mentioned that tribes of Negroes on the Gambia mingle clay with their rice. Some families of Ottomacs were perhaps formerly accustomed to cause the maize and other farinaceous seeds to rot in their poya, in order to eat earth and amylaceous matter together: possibly it was a preparation of this kind, that Father Gumilla described indistinctly in the first volume of his work when he affirms that the Guamos and the Ottomacs feed upon earth only because it is impregnated with the sustancia del maiz (substance of maize) and the fat of the cayman. I have already observed that neither the present missionary of Uruana, nor Fray Juan Gonzales, who lived long in those countries, knew anything of this mixture of animal and vegetable substances with the poya. Perhaps Father Gumilla has confounded the preparation of the earth which the natives swallow with the custom they still retain (of which M. Bonpland acquired the certainty on the spot) of burying in the ground the beans of a species of mimosacea,* (* Of the genus Inga.) to cause them to enter into decomposition so as to reduce them into a white bread, savoury, but difficult of digestion. I repeat that the balls of poya, which we took from the winter stores of the Indians, contained no trace of animal fat, or of amylaceous matter. Gumilla being one of the most credulous travellers we know, it almost perplexes us to credit facts which even he has thought fit to reject. In the second volume of his work he however gainsays a great part of what he advanced in the first; he no longer doubts that half at least (a lo menos) of the bread of the Ottomacs and the Guamos is clay. He asserts, that children and full grown persons not only eat this bread without suffering in their health, but also great pieces of pure clay (muchos terrones de pura greda.) He adds that those who feel a weight on the stomach physic themselves with the fat of the crocodile which restores their appetite and enables them to continue to eat pure earth.* (* Gumilla volume 2 page 260.) It is certain that the Guamos are very fond, if not of the fat, at least of the flesh of the crocodile, which appeared to us white, and without any smell of musk. In Sennaar, according to Burckhardt, it is equally esteemed, and sold in the markets.

The little village of Uruana is more difficult to govern than most of the other missions. The Ottomacs are a restless, turbulent people, with unbridled passions. They are not only fond to excess of the fermented liquors prepared from cassava and maize, and of palm-wine, but they throw themselves into a peculiar state of intoxication, we might say of madness, by the use of the powder of niopo. They gather the long pods of a mimosacea which we have made known by the name of Acacia niopo,* cut them into pieces, moisten them, and cause them to ferment. (* It is an acacia with very delicate leaves, and not an Inga. We brought home another species of mimosacea (the chiga of the Ottomacs and the sepa of the Maypures) that yields seeds, the flour of which is eaten at Uruana like cassava. From this flour the chiga bread is prepared, which is so common at Cunariche, and on the banks of the Lower Orinoco. The chiga is a species of Inga, and I know of no other mimosacea that can supply the place of the cerealia.) When the softened seeds begin to grow black, they are kneaded like a paste; mixed with some flour of cassava and lime procured from the shell of a helix, and the whole mass is exposed to a very brisk fire, on a gridiron made of hard wood. The hardened paste takes the form of small cakes. When it is to be used, it is reduced to a fine powder, and placed on a dish five or six inches wide. The Ottomac holds this dish, which has a handle, in his right hand, while he inhales the niopo by the nose, through the forked bone of a bird, the two extremities of which are applied to the nostrils. This bone, without which the Ottomac believes that he could not take this kind of snuff, is seven inches long: it appeared to me to be the leg-bone of a large sort of plover. The niopo is so stimulating that the smallest portions of it produce violent sneezing in those who are not accustomed to its use. Father Gumilla says this diabolical powder of the Ottomacs, furnished by an arborescent tobacco-plant, intoxicates them through the nostrils (emboracha por las narices), deprives them of reason for some hours, and renders them furious in battle. However varied may be the family of the leguminous plants in the chemical and medical properties of their seeds, juices, and roots, we cannot believe, from what we know hitherto of the group of mimosaceae, that it is principally the pod of the Acacia niopo which imparts the stimulant power to the snuff of the Ottomacs. This power is owing, no doubt, to the freshly calcined lime. We have shown above that the mountaineers of the Andes of Popayan, and the Guajiros, who wander between the lake of Maracaybo and the Rio la Hacha, are also fond of swallowing lime as a stimulant, to augment the secretion of the saliva and the gastric juice.

A custom analogous to the use of the niopo just described was observed by La Condamine among the natives of the Upper Maranon. The Omaguas, whose name is rendered celebrated by the expeditions attempted in search of El Dorado, have like the Ottomacs a dish, and the hollow bone of a bird, by which they convey to their nostrils their powder of curupa. The seed that yields this powder is no doubt also a mimosacea; for the Ottomacs, according to Father Gili, designate even now, at the distance of one hundred and sixty leagues from the Amazon, the Acacia niopo by the name of curupa. Since the geographical researches which I have recently made on the scene of the exploits of Philip von Huten, and the real situation of the province of Papamene, or of the Omaguas, the probability of an ancient communication between the Ottomacs of the Orinoco and the Omaguas of the Maranon has become more interesting and more probable. The former came from the Meta, perhaps from the country between the Meta and the Guaviare; the latter assert that they descended in great numbers to the Maranon by the Rio Jupura, coming from the eastern declivity of the Andes of New Grenada. Now, it is precisely between the Guayavero (which joins the Guaviare) and the Caqueta (which takes lower down the name of Japura) that the country of the Omagua appears to be situate, of which the adventurers of Coro and Tocuyo in vain attempted the conquest. There is no doubt a striking contrast between the present barbarism of the Ottomacs and the ancient civilization of the Omaguas; but all parts of the latter nation were not perhaps alike advanced in civilization, and the example of tribes fallen into complete barbarism are unhappily but too common in the history of our species. Another point of resemblance may be remarked between the Ottomacs and the Omaguas. Both of these nations are celebrated among all the tribes of the Orinoco and the Amazon for their employment of caoutchouc in the manufacture of various articles of utility.

The real herbaceous tobacco* (for the missionaries have the habit of calling the niopo or curupa tree-tobacco) has been cultivated from time immemorial by all the native people of the Orinoco; and at the period of the conquest the habit of smoking was found to be alike spread over both North and South America.

(* The word tobacco (tabacco), like the words savannah, maize, cacique, maguey (agave), and manati, belongs to the ancient language of Haiti, or St. Domingo. It did not properly denote the herb but the tube through which the smoke was inhaled. It seems surprising that a vegetable production so universally spread should have different names among neighbouring people. The pete-ma of the Omaguas is, no doubt, the pety of the Guaranos; but the analogy between the Cabre and Algonkin (or Lenni-Lenape) words which denote tobacco may be merely accidental. The following are the synonyms in thirteen languages.

North America. Aztec or Mexican; yetl: Algonkin; sema: Huron; oyngoua.

South America. Peruvian or Quichua; sayri: Chiquito; pais. Guarany; pety: Vilela; tusup: Mbaja (west of the Paraguay), nalodagadi: Moxo (between the Rio Ucayale and the Rio Madeira); sabare. Omagua; petema. Tamanac; cavas. Maypure; jema. Cabre; scema.)

The Tamanacs and the Maypures of Guiana wrap maize-leaves round their cigars, as the Mexicans did at the time of the arrival of Cortes. The Spaniards have substituted paper for the leaves of maize in imitation of them. The poor Indians of the forests of the Orinoco know as well as did the great nobles at the court of Montezuma that the smoke of tobacco is an excellent narcotic; and they use it not only to procure their afternoon nap, but also to put themselves into that state of quiescence, which they call dreaming with the eyes open, or day-dreaming. The use of tobacco appears to me to be now very rare in the missions; and in New Spain, to the great regret of the revenue-officers, the natives, who are almost all descended from the lowest class of the Aztec people, do not smoke at all. Father Gili affirms that the practice of chewing tobacco is unknown to the Indians of the Lower Orinoco. I rather doubt the truth of this assertion, having been told that the Sercucumas of the Erevato and the Caura, neighbours of the whitish Taparitos, swallow tobacco chopped small, and impregnated with some other very stimulant juices, to prepare themselves for battle. Of the four species of nicotiana cultivated in Europe* (* Nicotiana tabacum, N. rustica, N. paniculata, and N. glutinosa.) we found only two growing wild; but the Nicotiana loxensis, and the Nicotiana andicola, which I found on the back of the Andes, at the height of eighteen hundred and fifty toises (almost the height of the Peak of Teneriffe), are very similar to the N. tabacum and N. rustica. The whole genus, however, is almost exclusively American, and the greater number of the species appeared to me to belong to the mountainous and temperate region of the tropics.

It was neither from Virginia, nor from South America, but from the Mexican province of Yucatan, that Europe received the first tobacco seeds, about the year 1559.* (* The Spaniards became acquainted with tobacco in the West India Islands at the end of the 15th century. I have already mentioned that the cultivation of this narcotic plant preceded the cultivation of the potato in Europe more than 120 or 140 years. When Raleigh brought tobacco from Virginia to England in 1586, whole fields of it were already cultivated in Portugal. It was also previously known in France, where it was brought into fashion by Catherine de Medicis, from whom it received the name of herbe a la reine, the queen's herb.) The celebrated Raleigh contributed most to introduce the custom of smoking among the nations of the north. As early as the end of the sixteenth century bitter complaints were made in England of this imitation of the manners of a savage people. It was feared that, by the practice of smoking tobacco, Englishmen would degenerate into a barbarous state.* (* This remarkable passage of Camden is as follows, Annal. Elizabet. page 143 1585; "ex illo sane tempore [tabacum] usu cepit esse creberrimo in Anglia et magno pretio dum quamplurimi graveolentem illius fumum per tubulum testaceum hauriunt et mox e naribus efflant; adeo ut Auglornm corporum in barbarorum naturam degenerasse videantur, quum iidem ac barbari delectentur." We may see from this passage that they emitted the smoke through the nose; but at the court of Montezuma the pipe was held in one hand, while the nostrils were stopped with the other, in order that the smoke might be more easily swallowed. Life of Raleigh volume 1 page 82.)

When the Ottomacs of Uruana, by the use of niopo (their arborescent tobacco), and of fermented liquors, have thrown themselves into a state of intoxication, which lasts several days, they kill one another without ostensibly fighting. The most vindictive among them poison the nail of their thumb with curare; and, according to the testimony of the missionary, the mere impression of this poisoned nail may become a mortal wound if the curare be very active and immediately mingle with the mass of the blood. When the Indians, after a quarrel at night, commit a murder, they throw the dead body into the river, fearing that some indications of the violence committed on the deceased may be observed. "Every time," said Father Bueno, "that I see the women fetch water from a part of the shore to which they are not accustomed to go, I suspect that a murder has been committed in my mission."

We found in the Indian huts at Uruana the vegetable substance called touchwood of ants,* (* Yesca de hormigas.) with which we had become acquainted at the Great Cataracts, and which is employed to stop bleeding. This substance, which might less improperly be called ants' nests, is in much request in a region whose inhabitants are of so turbulent a character. A new species of ant, of a fine emerald-green (Formica spinicollis), collects for its habitation a cotton-down, of a yellowish-brown colour, and very soft to the touch, from the leaves of a melastomacea. I have no doubt that the yesca or touchwood of ants of the Upper Orinoco (the animal is found, we were assured, only south of Atures) will one day become an article of trade. This substance is very superior to the ants' nests of Cayenne, which are employed in the hospitals of Europe, but can rarely be procured.

On the 7th of June we took leave with regret of Father Ramon Bueno. Of the ten missionaries whom we had found in different parts of the vast extent of Guiana, he alone appeared to me to be earnestly attentive to all that regarded the natives. He hoped to return in a short time to Madrid, where he intended to publish the result of his researches on the figures and characters that cover the rocks of Uruana.

In the countries we had just passed through, between the Meta, the Arauca, and the Apure, there were found, at the time of the first expeditions to the Orinoco, in 1535, those mute dogs, called by the natives maios, and auries. This fact is curious in many points of view. We cannot doubt that the dog, whatever Father Gili may assert, is indigenous in South America. The different Indian languages furnish words to designate this animal, which are scarcely derived from any European tongue. To this day the word auri, mentioned three hundred years ago by Alonzo de Herrera, is found in the Maypure. The dogs we saw at the Orinoco may perhaps have descended from those that the Spaniards carried to the coast of Caracas; but it is not less certain that there existed a race of dogs before the conquest, in Peru, in New Granada, and in Guiana, resembling our shepherds' dogs. The allco of the natives of Peru, and in general all the dogs that we found in the wildest countries of South America, bark frequently. The first historians, however, all speak of mute dogs (perros mudos). They still exist in Canada; and, what appears to me worthy of attention, it was this dumb variety that was eaten in preference in Mexico,* and at the Orinoco. (* See on the Mexican techichi and on the numerous difficulties that occur in the history of mute dogs and dogs destitute of hair the Views of Nature Bohn's edition page 85.) A very well informed traveller, M. Giesecke, who resided six years in Greenland, assured me that the dogs of the Esquimaux, which pass their lives in the open air and bury themselves in winter beneath the snow, do not bark, but howl like wolves.* (* They sit down in a circle, one of them begins to howl alone and the others follow in the same tone. The groups of alouate monkeys howl in the same manner, and among them the Indians distinguish the leader of the band. It was the practice at Mexico to castrate the mute dogs in order to fatten them. This operation must have contributed to alter the organ of the voice.)

The practice of eating the flesh of dogs is now entirely unknown on the banks of the Orinoco; but as it is a Tartar custom spread through all the eastern part of Asia, it appears to me highly interesting for the history of nations to have ascertained that it existed heretofore in the hot regions of Guiana and on the table-lands of Mexico. I must observe, also, that on the confines of the province of Durango, at the northern extremity of New Spain, the Comanches have preserved the habit of loading the backs of the great dogs that accompany them in their migrations with their tents of buffalo-leather. It is well known that employing dogs as beasts of burthen and of draught is equally common near the Slave Lake and in Siberia. I dwell on these features of conformity in the manners of nations, which become of some weight when they are not solitary, and are connected with the analogies furnished by the structure of languages, the division of time, and religious creeds and institutions.

We passed the night at the island of Cucuruparu, called also Playa de la Tortuga, because the Indians of Uruana go thither to collect the turtles' eggs. It is one of the best determined points of latitude along the banks of the Orinoco. I was there fortunate enough to observe the passage of three stars over the meridian. To the east of the island is the mouth of the Cano de la Tortuga, which descends from the mountains of Cerbatana, continually wrapped in electric clouds. On the southern bank of the Cano, between the tributary streams Parapara and Oche, lies the almost ruined mission of San Miguel de la Tortuga. The Indians assured us that the environs of this little mission abound in otters with a very fine fur, called by the Portuguese water-dogs (perritos de agua); and what is still more remarkable, in lizards (lagartos) with only two feet. The whole of this country, which is very accessible between the Rio Cuchivero and the strait of Baraguan, is worthy of being visited by a well-informed zoologist. The lagarto destitute of hinder extremities is perhaps a species of Siren, different from the Siren lacertina of Carolina. If it were a saurian, a real Bimanis (Chirotes, Cuvier), the natives would not have compared it to a lizard. Besides the arrau turtles, of which I have in a former place given a detailed account, an innumerable quantity of land tortoises also, called morocoi, are found on the banks of the Orinoco, between Uruana and Encaramada. During the great heats of summer, in the time of drought, these animals remain without taking food, hidden beneath stones, or in the holes they have dug. They issue from their shelter and begin to eat, only when the humidity of the first rains penetrates into the earth. The terekay, or tajelu turtle which lives in fresh water, has the same habits. I have already spoken of the summer-sleep of some animals of the tropics. As the natives know the holes in which the tortoises sleep amidst the dried lands, they get out a great number at once, by digging fifteen or eighteen inches deep. Father Gili says that this operation, which he had seen, is not without danger, because serpents often bury themselves in summer with the terekays.

From the island of Cucuruparu, to the capital of Guiana, commonly called Angostura, we were but nine days on the water. The distance is somewhat less than ninety-five leagues. We seldom slept on shore but the torment of the mosquitos diminished in proportion as we advanced. We landed on the 8th of June at a farm (Hato de San Rafael del Capuchino) opposite the mouth of the Rio Apure. I obtained some good observations of latitude and longitude.* (* I had found, on the 4th of April, for the Boca del Rio Apure (on the western bank of the Orinoco), the latitude 7 degrees 36 minutes 30 seconds, the longitude 59 degrees 7 minutes 30 seconds; on the 8th of June I found, for the Hato del Capuchino (on the eastern bank of the Orinoco), the latitude 7 degrees 37 minutes 45 seconds, the longitude 69 degrees 5 minutes 30 seconds.) Having two months before taken horary angles on the bank opposite Capuchino, these observations were important for determining the rate of my chronometer, and connecting the situations on the Orinoco with those on the shore of Venezuela. The situation of this farm, being at the point where the Orinoco changes its course (which had previously been from south to north), and runs from west to east, is extremely picturesque. Granite rocks rise like islets amidst vast meadows. From their tops we discerned towards the north the Llanos of Calabozo bounding the horizon. We had been so long accustomed to the aspect of forests, that this view made a powerful impression on us. The steppes after sunset assume a tint of greenish gray. The visual ray being intercepted only by the rotundity of the earth, the stars seemed to rise as from the bosom of the ocean, and the most experienced mariner would have fancied himself placed on a projecting cape of a rocky coast. Our host was a Frenchman who lived amidst his numerous herds. Though he had forgotten his native language, he seemed pleased to learn that we came from his country, which he had left forty years before; and he wished to retain us for some days at his farm. The small towns of Caycara and Cabruta were only a few miles distant from the farm; but during part of the year our host was in complete solitude. The Capuchino becomes an island by the inundations of the Apure and the Orinoco, and the communication with the neighbouring farms can be kept up only by means of a boat. The horned cattle then seek the higher grounds which extend on the south toward the chain of the mountains of Encaramada. This granitic chain is intersected by valleys which contain magnetic sands (granulary oxidulated iron), owing no doubt to the decomposition of some amphibolic or chloritic strata.

On the morning of the 9th of June we met a great number of boats laden with merchandize sailing up the Orinoco, in order to enter the Apure. This is a commercial road much frequented between Angostura and the port of Torunos in the province of Varinas. Our fellow-traveller, Don Nicolas Soto, brother-in-law of the governor of Varinas, took the same course to return to his family. At the period of the high waters, several months are lost in contending with the currents of the Orinoco, the Apure, and the Rio de Santo Domingo. The boatmen are forced to carry out ropes to the trunks of trees and thus warp their canoes up. In the great sinuosities of the river whole days are sometimes passed without advancing more than two or three hundred toises. Since my return to Europe the communications between the mouth of the Orinoco and the provinces situated on the eastern slope of the mountains of Merida, Pamplona, and Santa Fe de Bogota, have become more active; and it may be hoped that steamboats will facilitate these long voyages on the Lower Orinoco, the Portuguesa, the Rio Santo Domingo, the Orivante, the Meta, and the Guaviare. Magazines of cleft wood might be formed, as on the banks of the great rivers of the United States, sheltering them under sheds. This precaution would be indispensable, as, in the country through which we passed, it is not easy to procure dry fuel fit to keep up a fire beneath the boiler of a steam-engine.

We disembarked below San Rafael del Capuchino, on the right, at the Villa de Caycara, near a cove called Puerto Sedeno. The Villa is merely a few houses grouped together. Alta Gracia, la Ciudad de la Piedra, Real Corona, Borbon, in short all the towns or villas lying between the mouth of the Apure and Angostura, are equally miserable. The presidents of the missions, and the governors of the provinces, were formerly accustomed to demand the privileges of villas and ciudades at Madrid, the moment the first foundations of a church were laid. This was a means of persuading the ministry that the colonies were augmenting rapidly in population and prosperity. Sculptured figures of the sun and moon, such as I have already mentioned, are found near Caycara, at the Cerro del Tirano.* (* The tyrant after whom these mountains are named is not Lope de Aguirre, but probably, as the name of the neighbouring cove seems to prove, the celebrated conquistador Antonio Sedeno, who, after the expedition of Herrera, sought to penetrate by the Orinoco to the Rio Meta. He was in a state of rebellion against the audiencia of Santo Domingo. I know not how Sedeno came to Caycara; for historians relate that he was poisoned on the banks of the Rio Tisnado, one of the tributary streams of the Portuguesa.) It is the work of the old people (that is of our fathers), say the natives. On a rock more distant from the shore, and called Tecoma, the symbolic figures are found, it is said, at the height of a hundred feet. The Indians knew heretofore a road, that led by land from Caycara to Demerara and Essequibo.

On the northern bank of the Orinoco, opposite Caycara, is the mission of Cabruta, founded by the Jesuit Rotella, in 1740, as an advanced post against the Caribs. An Indian village, known by the name of Cabritu,* had existed on the same spot for several ages. (* A cacique of Cabritu received Alonzo de Herrera at his dwelling, on the expedition undertaken by Herrera for ascending the Orinoco in 1535.) At the time when this little place became a Christian settlement, it was believed to be situate in 5 degrees latitude, or two degrees forty minutes more to the south than I found it by direct observations made at San Rafael, and at La Boca del Rio Apure. No idea was then conceived of the direction of a road that could lead by land to Nueva Valencia and Caracas, which were supposed to be at an immense distance. The merit of having first crossed the Llanos to go to Cabruta from the Villa de San Juan Baptista del Pao belongs to a woman. Father Gili relates that Dona Maria Bargas was so devoted to the Jesuits that she attempted herself to discover the way to the missions. She was seen with astonishment to arrive at Cabruta from the north. She took up her abode near the fathers of St. Ignatius, and died in their settlements on the banks of the Orinoco. Since that period the northern part of the Llanos has been considerably peopled; and the road leading from the valleys of Aragua by Calabozo to San Fernando de Apure and Cabruta is much frequented. The chief of the famous expedition of the boundaries made choice of the latter place in 1754 to establish dock-yards for building the vessels necessary for conveying his troops intended for the Upper Orinoco. The little mountain that rises northeast of Cabruta can be discerned from afar in the steppes and serves as a landmark for travellers.

We embarked in the morning at Caycara; and driving with the current of the Orinoco, we soon passed the mouth of the Rio Cuchivero, which according to ancient tradition is the country of the Aikeambenanos, or women without husbands; and we there reached the paltry village of Alta Gracia, which is called a Spanish town. It was near this place that Jose de Iturriaga founded the Pueblo de Ciudad Real, which still figures on the most modern maps, though it has not existed for fifty years past, on account of the insalubrity of its situation. Beyond the point where the Orinoco turns to the east, forests are constantly seen on the right bank, and the llanos or steppes of Venezuela on the left. The forests which border the river are not however so thick as those of the Upper Orinoco. The population, which augments perceptibly as you advance toward the capital, comprises but few Indians, and is composed chiefly of whites, negroes, and men of mixed descent. The number of the negroes is not great; but here, as everywhere else, the poverty of their masters does not tend to procure for them more humane treatment. An inhabitant of Caycara had just been condemned to four years' imprisonment, and a fine of one hundred piastres for having, in a paroxysm of rage, tied a negress by the legs to the tail of his horse, and dragged her at full gallop through the savannah till she expired. It is gratifying to record that the Audiencia was generally blamed in the country for not having punished more severely so atrocious an action. Yet some few persons, who pretended to be the most enlightened and most sagacious of the community, deemed the punishment of a white contrary to sound policy, at the moment when the blacks of St. Domingo were in complete insurrection. Since I left those countries, civil dissensions have put arms into the hands of the slaves; and fatal experience has led the inhabitants of Venezuela to regret that they refused to listen to Don Domingo Tovar, and other right-thinking men, who, as early as the year 1795, lifted up their voices in the cabildo of Caracas, to prevent the introduction of blacks, and to propose means that might ameliorate their condition.

After having slept on the 10th of June in an island in the middle of the river (I believe that called Acaru by Father Caulin), we passed the mouth of the Rio Caura. This, the Aruy and the Carony, are the largest tributary streams which the Orinoco receives on its right bank. All the Christian settlements are near the mouth of the river; and the villages of San Pedro, Aripao, Urbani, and Guaraguaraico, succeed each other at the distance of a few leagues. The first and the most populous contains only about two hundred and fifty souls. San Luis de Guaraguaraico is a colony of negroes, some freed and others fugitives from Essequibo. This colony merits the particular attention of the Spanish Government, for it can never be sufficiently recommended to endeavour to attach the slaves to the soil, and suffer them to enjoy as farmers the fruits of their agricultural labours. The land on the Caura, for the most part a virgin soil, is extremely fertile. There are pasturages for more than 15,000 beasts; but the poor inhabitants have neither horses nor horned cattle. More than five-sixths of the banks of the Caura are either desert, or occupied by independent and savage tribes. The bed of the river is twice choked up by rocks: these obstructions occasion the famous Raudales of Mura and of Para or Paru, the latter of which has a portage, because it cannot be passed by canoes. At the time of the expedition of the boundaries, a small fort was erected on the northern cataract, that of Mura; and the governor, Don Manuel Centurion, gave the name of Ciudad de San Carlos to a few houses which some families, consisting of whites and mulattos, had constructed near the fort. South of the cataract of Para, at the confluence of the Caura and the Erevato, the mission of San Luis was then situated; and a road by land led thence to Angostura, the capital of the province. All these attempts at civilization have been fruitless. No village now exists above the Raudal of Mura; and here, as in many other parts of the colonies, the natives may be said to have reconquered the country from the Spaniards. The valley of Caura may become one day or other highly interesting from the value of its productions, and the communications which it affords with the Rio Ventuari, the Carony, and the Cuyuni. I have shown above the importance of the four tributary streams which the Orinoco receives from the mountains of Parima. Near the mouth of the Caura, between the villages of San Pedro de Alcantara and San Francisco de Aripao, a small lake of four hundred toises in diameter was formed in 1790, by the sinking of the ground, consequent on an earthquake. It was a portion of the forest of Aripao, which sunk to the depth of eighty or a hundred feet below the level of the neighbouring land. The trees remained green for several months; and some of them, it was believed, continued to push forth leaves beneath the water. This phenomenon is the more worthy of attention as the soil of these countries is probably granitic. I doubt the secondary formations of the Llanos being continued southward as far as the valley of Caura.

On the 11th of June we landed on the right bank of the Orinoco at Puerto de los Frailes, at the distance of three leagues above the Ciudad de la Piedra, to take altitudes of the sun. The longitude of this point is 67 degrees 26 minutes 20 seconds, or 1 degree 41 minutes east of the mouth of the Apure. Farther on, between the towns of La Piedra and Muitaco, or Real Corona, are the Torno and Boca del Infierno, two points formerly dreaded by travellers. The Orinoco suddenly changes its direction; it flows first east, then north-north-west, and then again east. A little above the Cano Marapiche, which opens on the northern bank, a very long island divides the river into two branches. We passed on the south of this island without difficulty; northward, a chain of small rocks, half covered at high water, forms whirlpools and rapids. This is La Boca del Infierno, and the Raudal de Camiseta. The first expeditions of Diego Ordaz (1531) and Alonzo de Herrera (1535) have given celebrity to this bar. The Great Cataracts of the Atures and Maypures were then unknown; and the clumsy vessels (vergantines), in which travellers persisted in going up the river, rendered the passage through the rapids extremely difficult. At present no apprehension is felt in ascending or descending the Orinoco, at any season, from its mouth as far as the confluence of the Apure and the Meta. The only falls of water in this space are those of Torno or Camiseta, Marimara, and Cariven or Carichana Vieja. Neither of these three obstacles is to be feared with experienced Indian pilots. I dwell on these hydrographic details because a great political and commercial interest is now connected with the communications between Angostura and the banks of the Meta and the Apure, two rivers that lead to the eastern side of the Cordilleras of New Grenada. The navigation from the mouth of the Lower Orinoco to the province of Varinas is difficult only on account of the current. The bed of the river nowhere presents obstacles more difficult to be surmounted than those of the Danube between Vienna and Linz. We meet with no great bars, no real cataracts, until we get above the Meta. The Upper Orinoco, therefore, with the Cassiquiare and the Rio Negro, forms a particular system of rivers, where the active industry of Angostura and the shore of Caracas will remain long unknown.

I obtained horary angles of the sun in an island in the midst of the Boca del Infierno, where we had set up our instruments. The longitude of this point according to the chronometer is 67 degrees 10 minutes 31 seconds. I attempted to determine the magnetic dip and intensity, but was prevented by a heavy storm of rain. As the sky again became serene in the afternoon, we lay down to rest that night on a vast beach, on the southern bank of the Orinoco, nearly in the meridian of the little town of Muitaco, or Real Corona. I found the latitude by three stars to be 8 degrees 0 minutes 26 seconds, and the longitude 67 degrees 5 minutes 19 seconds. When the Observantin monks in 1752 made their first entradas on the territory of the Caribs, they constructed on this spot a small fort. The proximity of the lofty mountains of Araguacais renders Muitaco one of the most healthy places on the Lower Orinoco. There Iturriaga took up his abode in 1756, to repose after the fatigues of the expedition of the boundaries; and as he attributed his recovery to this hot rather than humid climate, the town, or more properly the village, of Real Corona took the name of Pueblo del Puerto sano. Going down the Orinoco more to the east, we left the mouth of the Rio Pao on the north, and that of the Arui on the south. The latter river, which is somewhat considerable, is often mentioned by Raleigh. The current of the Orinoco diminished in velocity as we advanced. I measured several times a base along the beach, to ascertain the time taken by floating bodies in traversing a known distance. Above Alta Gracia, near the mouth of the Rio Ujape, I had found the velocity of the Orinoco 2.3 feet in a second; between Muitaco and Borbon it was only 1.7 foot. The barometric observations made in the neighbouring steppes prove the small slope of the ground from the longitude of 69 degrees to the eastern coast of Guiana. We found in this country, on the right bank of the Orinoco, small formations of primitive grunstein, superimposed on granite (perhaps even embedded in the rock). We saw between Muitaco and the island of Ceiba a hill entirely composed of balls with concentric layers, in which we perceived a close mixture of hornblende and feldspar, with some traces of pyrites. The grunstein resembles that in the vicinity of Caracas; but it was impossible to ascertain the position of a formation which appeared to me to be of the same age as the granite of Parima. Muitaco was the last spot where we slept in the open air on the shore of the Orinoco: we proceeded along the river two nights more before we reached Angostura, which terminated our voyage.

It would be difficult for me to express the satisfaction we felt on landing at Angostura, the capital of Spanish Guiana. The inconveniences endured at sea in small vessels are trivial in comparison with those that are suffered under a burning sky, surrounded by swarms of mosquitos, and lying stretched in a canoe, without the possibility of taking the least bodily exercise. In seventy-five days we had performed a passage of five hundred leagues (twenty to a degree) on the five great rivers, Apure, Orinoco, Atabapo, Rio Negro, and Cassiquiare; and in this vast extent we had found but a very small number of inhabited places. After the life we had led in the woods, our dress was not in the very best order, yet nevertheless M. Bonpland and I hastened to present ourselves to Don Felipe de Ynciarte, the governor of the province of Guiana. He received us in the most cordial manner, and lodged us in the house of the secretary of the Intendencia. Coming from an almost desert country, we were struck with the bustle of the town, though it contained only six thousand inhabitants. We admired the conveniences which industry and commerce furnish to civilized man. Humble dwellings appeared to us magnificent; and every person with whom we conversed seemed to be endowed with superior intelligence. Long privations give a value to the smallest enjoyments; and I cannot express the pleasure we felt when we saw for the first time wheaten bread on the governor's table. Sensations of this sort are doubtless familiar to all who have made distant voyages.

A painful circumstance obliged us to sojourn a whole month in the town of Angostura. We felt ourselves on the first days after our arrival tired and enfeebled, but in perfect health. M. Bonpland began to examine the small number of plants which he had been able to save from the influence of the damp climate; and I was occupied in settling by astronomical observations the longitude and latitude of the capital,* as well as the dip of the magnetic needle. (* I found the latitude of Santo Tomas de la Nueva Guiana, commonly called Angostura, or the Strait, near the cathedral, 8 degrees 8 minutes 11 seconds, the longitude 66 degrees 15 minutes 21 seconds.) These labours were soon interrupted. We were both attacked almost on the same day by a disorder which with my fellow-traveller took the character of a debilitating fever. At this period the air was in a state of the greatest salubrity at Angostura; and as the only mulatto servant we had brought from Cumana felt symptoms of the same disorder, it was suspected that we had imbibed the germs of typhus in the damp forests of Cassiquiare. It is common enough for travellers to feel no effects from miasmata till, on arriving in a purer atmosphere, they begin to enjoy repose. A certain excitement of the mental powers may suspend for some time the action of pathogenic causes. Our mulatto servant having been much more exposed to the rains than we were, his disorder increased with frightful rapidity. His prostration of strength was excessive, and on the ninth day his death was announced to us. He was however only in a state of swooning, which lasted several hours, and was followed by a salutary crisis. I was attacked at the same time with a violent fit of fever, during which I was made to take a mixture of honey and bark (the cortex Angosturae): a remedy much extolled in the country by the Capuchin missionaries. The intensity of the fever augmented but it left me on the following day. M. Bonpland remained in a very alarming state which during several weeks caused us the most serious inquietude. Fortunately he preserved sufficient self-possession to prescribe for himself; and he preferred gentler remedies better adapted to his constitution. The fever was continual and, as almost always happens within the tropics, it was accompanied by dysentery. M. Bonpland displayed that courage and mildness of character which never forsook him in the most trying situations. I was agitated by sad presages for I remembered that the botanist Loefling, a pupil of Linnaeus, died not far from Angostura, near the banks of the Carony, a victim of his zeal for the progress of natural history. We had not yet passed a year in the torrid zone and my too faithful memory conjured up everything I had read in Europe on the dangers of the atmosphere inhaled in the forests. Instead of going up the Orinoco we might have sojourned some months in the temperate and salubrious climate of the Sierra Nevada de Merida. It was I who had chosen the path of the rivers; and the danger of my fellow-traveller presented itself to my mind as the fatal consequence of this imprudent choice.

After having attained in a few days an extraordinary degree of exacerbation the fever assumed a less alarming character. The inflammation of the intestines yielded to the use of emollients obtained from malvaceous plants. The sidas and the melochias have singularly active properties in the torrid zone. The recovery of the patient however was extremely slow, as it always happens with Europeans who are not thoroughly seasoned to the climate. The period of the rains drew near; and in order to return to the coast of Cumana, it was necessary again to cross the Llanos, where, amidst half-inundated lands, it is rare to find shelter, or any other food than meat dried in the sun. To avoid exposing M. Bonpland to a dangerous relapse, we resolved to stay at Angostura till the 10th of July. We spent part of this time at a neighbouring plantation, where mango-trees and bread-fruit trees* were cultivated. (* Artocarpus incisa. Father Andujar, Capuchin missionary of the province of Caracas, zealous in the pursuit of natural history, has introduced the bread-fruit tree from Spanish Guiana at Varinas, and thence into the kingdom of New Grenada. Thus the western Coasts of America, washed by the Pacific, receive from the English Settlements in the West Indies a production of the Friendly Islands.) The latter had attained in the tenth year a height of more than forty feet. We measured several leaves of the Artocarpus that were three feet long and eighteen inches broad, remarkable dimensions in a plant of the family of the dicotyledons.

END OF VOLUME 2.
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Re: Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions

Postby admin » Mon Jun 04, 2018 7:26 am

Part 1 of 3

Volume 3.

The longitudes mentioned in the text refer always to the meridian of the Observatory of Paris.

The real is about 6 1/2 English pence.

The agrarian measure, called caballeria, is eighteen cordels, (each cordel includes twenty-four varas) or 432 square varas; consequently, as 1 vara = 0.835m., according to Rodriguez, a caballeria is 186,624 square varas, or 130,118 square metres, or thirty-two and two-tenths English acres.

20 leagues to a degree.

5000 varas = 4150 metres.

3403 square toises = 1.29 hectare.

An acre = 4044 square metres.

Five hundred acres = fifteen and a half caballerias.

Sugar-houses are thought to be very considerable that yield 2000 cases annually, or 32,000 arrobas (nearly 368,000 kilogrammes.)

An arroba of 25 Spanish pounds = 11.49 kilogrammes.

A quintal = 45.97 kilogrammes.

A tarea of wood = one hundred and sixty cubic feet.

CHAPTER 3.25. SPANISH GUIANA. ANGOSTURA. PALM-INHABITING TRIBES. MISSIONS OF THE CAPUCHINS. THE LAGUNA PARIME. EL DORADO. LEGENDARY TALES OF THE EARLY VOYAGERS.

I shall commence this chapter by a description of Spanish Guiana (Provincia de la Guyana), which is a part of the ancient Capitania general of Caracas. Since the end of the sixteenth century three towns have successively borne the name of St. Thomas of Guiana. The first was situated opposite to the island of Faxardo, at the confluence of the Carony and the Orinoco, and was destroyed* by the Dutch, under the command of Captain Adrian Janson, in 1579. (* The first of the voyages undertaken at Raleigh's expense was in 1595; the second, that of Laurence Keymis, in 1596; the third, described by Thomas Masham, in 1597; and the fourth, in 1617. The first and last only were performed by Raleigh in person. This celebrated man was beheaded on October the 29th, 1618. It is therefore the second town of Santo Tomas, now called Vieja Guyana, which existed in the time of Raleigh.) The second, founded by Antonio de Berrio in 1591, near twelve leagues east of the mouth of the Carony, made a courageous resistance to Sir Walter Raleigh, whom the Spanish writers of the conquest know only by the name of the pirate Reali. The third town, now the capital of the province, is fifty leagues west of the confluence of the Carony. It was begun in 1764, under the Governor Don Joacquin Moreno de Mendoza, and is distinguished in the public documents from the second town, vulgarly called the fortress (el castillo, las fortalezas), or Old Guayana (Vieja Guayana), by the name of Santo Thome de la Nueva Guayana. This name being very long, that of Angostura* (the strait) has been commonly substituted for it. (* Europe has learnt the existence of the town of Angostura by the trade carried on by the Catalonians in the Carony bark, which is the beneficial bark of the Bonplanda trifoliata. This bark, coming from Nueva Guiana, was called corteza or cascarilla del Angostura (Cortex Angosturae). Botanists so little guessed the origin of this geographical denomination that they began by writing Augustura, and then Augusta.)

Angostura, the longitude and latitude of which I have already indicated from astronomical observations, stands at the foot of a hill of amphibolic schist* bare of vegetation. (* Hornblendschiefer.) The streets are regular, and for the most part parallel with the course of the river. Several of the houses are built on the bare rock; and here, as at Carichana, and in many other parts of the missions, the action of black and strong strata, when strongly heated by the rays of the sun upon the atmosphere, is considered injurious to health. I think the small pools of stagnant water (lagunas y anegadizos), which extend behind the town in the direction of south-east, are more to be feared. The houses of Angostura are lofty and convenient; they are for the most part built of stone; which proves that the inhabitants have but little dread of earthquakes. But unhappily this security is not founded on induction from any precise data. It is true that the shore of Nueva Andalusia sometimes undergoes very violent shocks, without the commotion being propagated across the Llanos. The fatal catastrophe of Cumana, on the 4th of February, 1797, was not felt at Angostura; but in the great earthquake of 1766, which destroyed the same city, the granitic soil of the two banks of the Orinoco was agitated as far as the Raudales of Atures and Maypures. South of these Raudales shocks are sometimes felt, which are confined to the basin of the Upper Orinoco and the Rio Negro. They appear to depend on a volcanic focus distant from that of the Caribbee Islands. We were told by the missionaries at Javita and San Fernando de Atabapo that in 1798 violent earthquakes took place between the Guaviare and the Rio Negro, which were not propagated on the north towards Maypures. We cannot be sufficiently attentive to whatever relates to the simultaneity of the oscillations, and to the independence of the movements in contiguous ground. Everything seems to prove that the propagation of the commotion is not superficial, but depends on very deep crevices that terminate in different centres of action.

The scenery around the town of Angostura is little varied; but the view of the river, which forms a vast canal, stretching from south-west to north-east, is singularly majestic.

When the waters are high, the river inundates the quays; and it sometimes happens that, even in the town, imprudent persons become the prey of crocodiles. I shall transcribe from my journal a fact that took place during M. Bonpland's illness. A Guaykeri Indian, from the island of La Margareta, was anchoring his canoe in a cove where there were not three feet of water. A very fierce crocodile, which habitually haunted that spot, seized him by the leg, and withdrew from the shore, remaining on the surface of the water. The cries of the Indian drew together a crowd of spectators. This unfortunate man was first seen seeking, with astonishing presence of mind, for a knife which he had in his pocket. Not being able to find it, he seized the head of the crocodile and thrust his fingers into its eyes. No man in the hot regions of America is ignorant that this carnivorous reptile, covered with a buckler of hard and dry scales, is extremely sensitive in the only parts of his body which are soft and unprotected, such as the eyes, the hollow underneath the shoulders, the nostrils, and beneath the lower jaw, where there are two glands of musk. The Guaykeri Indian was less fortunate than the negro of Mungo Park, and the girl of Uritucu, whom I mentioned in a former part of this work, for the crocodile did not open its jaws and lose hold of its prey. The animal, overcome by pain, plunged to the bottom of the river, and, after having drowned the Indian, came up to the surface of the water, dragging the dead body to an island opposite the port. A great number of the inhabitants of Angostura witnessed this melancholy spectacle.

The crocodile, owing to the structure of its larynx, of the hyoidal bone, and of the folds of its tongue, can seize, though not swallow, its prey under water; thus when a man disappears, the animal is usually perceived some hours after devouring its prey on a neighbouring beach. The number of individuals who perish annually, the victims of their own imprudence and of the ferocity of these reptiles, is much greater than is believed in Europe. It is particularly so in villages where the neighbouring grounds are often inundated. The same crocodiles remain long in the same places. They become from year to year more daring, especially, as the Indians assert, if they have once tasted of human flesh. These animals are so wary, that they are killed with difficulty. A ball does not pierce their skin; and the shot is only mortal when it penetrates the throat or a part beneath the shoulder. The Indians, who know little of the use of fire-arms, attack the crocodile with lances, after the animal has been caught with large pointed iron hooks, baited with pieces of meat, and fastened by a chain to the trunk of a tree. They do not approach the animal till it has struggled a long time to disengage itself from the iron fixed in the upper jaw. There is little probability that a country in which a labyrinth of rivers without number brings every day new bands of crocodiles from the eastern back of the Andes, by the Meta and the Apure, toward the coast of Spanish Guiana, should ever be delivered from these reptiles. All that will be gained by civilization will be to render them more timid and more easily put to flight.

Affecting instances are related of African slaves, who have exposed their lives to save those of their masters, who had fallen into the jaws of a crocodile. A few years ago, between Uritucu and the Mission de Abaxo, a negro, hearing the cries of his master, flew to the spot, armed with a long knife (machete), and plunged into the river. He forced the crocodile, by putting out his eyes, to let go his prey and to plunge under the water. The slave bore his expiring master to the shore; but all succour was unavailing to restore him to life. He had died of suffocation, for his wounds were not deep. The crocodile, like the dog, appears not to close its jaws firmly while swimming.

The inhabitants of the banks of the Orinoco and its tributary streams discourse continually on the dangers to which they are exposed. They have marked the manners of the crocodile, as the torero has studied the manners of the bull. When they are assailed, they put in practice, with that presence of mind and that resignation which characterize the Indians, the Zamboes, and copper-coloured men in general, the counsels they have heard from their infancy. In countries where nature is so powerful and so terrible, man is constantly prepared for danger. We have mentioned before the answer of the young Indian girl, who delivered herself from the jaws of the crocodile: "I knew he would let me go if I thrust my fingers into his eyes." This girl belonged to the indigent class of the people, in whom the habits of physical want augment energy of character; but how can we avoid being surprised to observe in the countries convulsed by terrible earthquakes, on the table-land of the province of Quito, women belonging to the highest classes of society display in the moment of peril, the same calm, the same reflecting intrepidity? I shall mention one example only in support of this assertion. On the 4th of February, 1797, when 35,000 Indians perished in the space of a few minutes, a young mother saved herself and her children, crying out to them to extend their arms at the moment when the cracked ground was ready to swallow them up. When this courageous woman heard the astonishment that was expressed at a presence of mind so extraordinary, she answered, with great simplicity, "I had been told in my infancy: if the earthquake surprise you in a house, place yourself under a doorway that communicates from one apartment to another; if you be in the open air and feel the ground opening beneath you, extend both your arms, and try to support yourself on the edge of the crevice." Thus, in savage regions or in countries exposed to frequent convulsions, man is prepared to struggle with the beasts of the forest, to deliver himself from the jaws of the crocodile, and to escape from the conflict of the elements.

The town of Angostura, in the early years of its foundation, had no direct communication with the mother-country. The inhabitants were contented with carrying on a trifling contraband trade in dried meat and tobacco with the West India Islands, and with the Dutch colony of Essequibo, by the Rio Carony. Neither wine, oil, nor flour, three articles of importation the most sought after, was received directly from Spain. Some merchants, in 1771, sent the first schooner to Cadiz; and since that period a direct exchange of commodities with the ports of Andalusia and Catalonia has become extremely active. The population of Angostura,* after having been a long time languishing, has much increased since 1785. (* Angostura, or Santo Thome de la Nueva Guayana, in 1768, had only 500 inhabitants. Caulin page 63. They were numbered in 1780 and the result was 1513 (455 Whites, 449 Blacks, 363 Mulattoes and Zamboes, and 246 Indians). The population in the year 1789 rose to 4590; and in 1800 to 6600 souls. Official Lists manuscript. The capital of the English colony of Demerara, the town of Stabroek, the name of which is scarcely known in Europe, is only fifty leagues distant, south-east of the mouths of the Orinoco. It contains, according to Bolingbroke, nearly 10,000 inhabitants.) At the time of my abode in Guiana, however, it was far from being equal to that of Stabroek, the nearest English town. The mouths of the Orinoco have an advantage over every other part in Terra Firma. They afford the most prompt communications with the Peninsula. The voyage from Cadiz to Punta Barima is performed sometimes in eighteen or twenty days. The return to Europe takes from thirty to thirty-five days. These mouths being placed to windward of all the islands, the vessels of Angostura can maintain a more advantageous commerce with the West Indies than La Guayra and Porto Cabello. The merchants of Caracas, therefore, have been always jealous of the progress of industry in Spanish Guiana; and Caracas having been hitherto the seat of the supreme government, the port of Angostura has been treated with still less favour than the ports of Cumana and Nueva Barcelona. With respect to the inland trade, the most active is that of the province of Varinas, which sends mules, cacao, indigo, cotton, and sugar to Angostura; and in return receives generos, that is, the products of the manufacturing industry of Europe. I have seen long boats (lanchas) set off, the cargoes of which were valued at eight or ten thousand piastres. These boats went first up the Orinoco to Cabruta; then along the Apure to San Vicente; and finally, on the Rio Santo Domingo, as far as Torunos, which is the port of Varinas Nuevas. The little town of San Fernando de Apure, of which I have already given a description, is the magazine of this river-trade, which might become more considerable by the introduction of steamboats.

I have now described the country through which we passed during a voyage of five hundred leagues; it remains for me to make known the small space of three degrees fifty-two minutes of longitude, that separates the present capital from the mouth of the Orinoco. Exact knowledge of the delta and the course of the Rio Carony is at once interesting to hydrography and to European commerce.

When a vessel coming from sea would enter the principal mouth of the Orinoco, the Boca de Navios, it should make the land at the Punta Barima. The right or southern bank is the highest: the granitic rock pierces the marshy soil at a small distance in the interior, between the Cano Barima, the Aquire, and the Cuyuni. The left, or northern bank of the Orinoco, which stretches along the delta towards the Boca de Mariusas and the Punta Baxa, is very low, and is distinguishable at a distance only by the clumps of moriche palm-trees which embellish the passage. This is the sago-tree* of the country (* The nutritious fecula or medullary flour of the sago-trees is found principally in a group of palms which M. Kunth has distinguished by the name of calameae. It is collected, however, in the Indian Archipelago, as an article of trade, from the trunks of the Cycas revoluta, the Phoenix farinifera, the Corypha umbraculifera, and the Caryota urens. (Ainslie, Materia Medica of Hindostan, Madras 1813.)) The quantity of nutritious matter which the real sago-tree of Asia affords (Sagus Rumphii, or Metroxylon sagu, Roxb.) exceeds that which is furnished by any other plant useful to man. One trunk of a tree in its fifteenth year sometimes yields six hundred pounds weight of sago, or meal (for the word sago signifies meal in the dialect of Amboyna). Mr. Crawfurd, who resided a long time in the Indian Archipelago, calculates that an English acre could contain four hundred and thirty-five sago-trees, which would yield one hundred and twenty thousand five hundred pounds avoirdupois of fecula, or more than eight thousand pounds yearly. History of the Indian Archipelago volume 1 pages 387 and 393. This produce is triple that of corn, and double that of potatoes in France. But the plantain produces, on the same surface of land, still more alimentary substance than the sago-tree.); it yields the flour of which the yuruma bread is made; and far from being a palm-tree of the shore, like the Chamaerops humilis, the common cocoa-tree, and the lodoicea of Commerson, is found as a palm-tree of the marshes as far as the sources of the Orinoco.* (* I dwell much on these divisions of the great and fine families of palms according to the distribution of the species: first, in dry places, or inland plains, Corypha tectorum; second, on the sea-coast, Chamaerops humilis, Cocos nucifera, Corypha maritima, Lodoicea seychellarum, Labill.; third, in the fresh-water marshes, Sagus Rumphii, Mauritia flexuosa; and 4th, in the alpine regions, between seven and fifteen hundred toises high, Ceroxylon andicola, Oreodoxa frigida, Kunthia montana. This last group of palmae montanae, which rises in the Andes of Guanacas nearly to the limit of perpetual snow, was, I believe, entirely unknown before our travels in America. (Nov. Gen. volume 1 page 317; Semanario de Santa Fe de Bogota 1819 Number 21 page 163.) In the season of inundations these clumps of mauritia, with their leaves in the form of a fan, have the appearance of a forest rising from the bosom of the waters. The navigator, in proceeding along the channels of the delta of the Orinoco at night, sees with surprise the summit of the palm-trees illumined by large fires. These are the habitations of the Guaraons (Tivitivas and Waraweties of Raleigh* (* The Indian name of the tribe of Uaraus (Guaraunos of the Spaniards) may be recognized in the Warawety (Ouarauoty) of Raleigh, one of the branches of the Tivitivas. See Discovery of Guiana, 1576 page 90 and the sketch of the habitations of the Guaraons, in Raleghi brevis Descrip. Guianae, 1594 tab 4.)), which are suspended from the trunks of trees. These tribes hang up mats in the air, which they fill with earth, and kindle, on a layer of moist clay, the fire necessary for their household wants. They have owed their liberty and their political independence for ages to the quaking and swampy soil, which they pass over in the time of drought, and on which they alone know how to walk in security to their solitude in the delta of the Orinoco; to their abode on the trees where religious enthusiasm will probably never lead any American stylites.* (* This sect was founded by Simeon Sisanites, a native of Syria. He passed thirty-seven years in mystic contemplation, on five pillars, the last of which was thirty-six cubits high. The sancti columnares attempted to establish their aerial cloisters in the country of Treves, in Germany; but the bishops opposed these extravagant and perilous enterprises. Mosheim, Instit. Hist. Eccles page 192. See Humboldt's Views of Nature (Bohn) pages 13 and 136.) I have already mentioned in another place that the mauritia palm-tree, the tree of life of the missionaries, not only affords the Guaraons a safe dwelling during the risings of the Orinoco, but that its shelly fruit, its farinaceous pith, its juice, abounding in saccharine matter, and the fibres of its petioles, furnish them with food, wine,* and thread proper for making cords and weaving hammocks. (* The use of this moriche wine however is not very common. The Guaraons prefer in general a beverage of fermented honey.) These customs of the Indians of the delta of the Orinoco were found formerly in the Gulf of Darien (Uraba), and in the greater part of the inundated lands between the Guarapiche and the mouths of the Amazon. It is curious to observe in the lowest degree of human civilization the existence of a whole tribe depending on one single species of palm-tree, similar to those insects which feed on one and the same flower, or on one and the same part of a plant.

The navigation of the river, whether vessels arrive by the Boca de Navios, or risk entering the labyrinth of the bocas chicas, requires various precautions, according as the waters are high or low. The regularity of these periodical risings of the Orinoco has been long an object of admiration to travellers, as the overflowings of the Nile furnished the philosophers of antiquity with a problem difficult to solve. The Orinoco and the Nile, contrary to the direction of the Ganges, the Indus, the Rio de la Plata, and the Euphrates, flow alike from the south toward the north; but the sources of the Orinoco are five or six degrees nearer to the equator than those of the Nile. Observing every day the accidental variations of the atmosphere, we find it difficult to persuade ourselves that in a great space of time the effects of these variations mutually compensate each other: that in a long succession of years the averages of the temperature of the humidity, and of the barometric pressure, differ so little from month to month; and that nature, notwithstanding the multitude of partial perturbations, follows a constant type in the series of meteorological phenomena. Great rivers unite in one receptacle the waters which a surface of several thousand square leagues receives. However unequal may be the quantity of rain that falls during several successive years, in such or such a valley, the swellings of rivers that have a very long course are little affected by these local variations. The swellings represent the average of the humidity that reigns in the whole basin; they follow annually the same progression because their commencement and their duration depend also on the mean of the periods, apparently extremely variable, of the beginning and end of the rains in the different latitudes through which the principal trunk and its various tributary streams flow. Hence it follows that the periodical oscillations of rivers are, like the equality of temperature of caverns and springs, a sensible indication of the regular distribution of humidity and heat, which takes place from year to year on a considerable extent of land. They strike the imagination of the vulgar; as order everywhere astonishes, when we cannot easily ascend to first causes. Rivers that belong entirely to the torrid zone display in their periodical movements that wonderful regularity which is peculiar to a region where the same wind brings almost always strata of air of the same temperature; and where the change of the sun in its declination causes every year at the same period a rupture of equilibrium in the electric intensity, in the cessation of the breezes, and the commencement of the season of rains. The Orinoco, the Rio Magdalena, and the Congo or Zaire are the only great rivers of the equinoctial region of the globe, which, rising near the equator, have their mouths in a much higher latitude, though still within the tropics. The Nile and the Rio de la Plata direct their course, in the two opposite hemispheres, from the torrid zone towards the temperate.* (* In Asia, the Ganges, the Burrampooter, and the majestic rivers of Indo-China direct their course towards the equator. The former flow from the temperate to the torrid zone. This circumstance of courses pursuing opposite directions (towards the equator, and towards the temperate climates) has an influence on the period and the height of the risings, on the nature and variety of the productions on the banks of the rivers, on the less or greater activity of trade; and, I may add, from what we know of the nations of Egypt, Merce, and India, on the progress of civilization along the valleys of the rivers.)

As long as, confounding the Rio Paragua of Esmeralda with the Rio Guaviare, the sources of the Orinoco were sought towards the south-west, on the eastern back of the Andes, the risings of this river were attributed to a periodical melting of the snows. This reasoning was as far from the truth as that in which the Nile was formerly supposed to be swelled by the waters of the snows of Abyssinia. The Cordilleras of New Grenada, near which the western tributary streams of the Orinoco, the Guaviare, the Meta, and the Apure take their rise, enter no more into the limit of perpetual snows, with the sole exception of the Paramos of Chita and Mucuchies, than the Alps of Abyssinia. Snowy mountains are much more rare in the torrid zone than is generally admitted; and the melting of the snows, which is not copious there at any season, does not at all increase at the time of the inundations of the Orinoco.

The cause of the periodical swellings of the Orinoco acts equally on all the rivers that take rise in the torrid zone. After the vernal equinox, the cessation of the breezes announces the season of rains. The increase of the rivers (which may be considered as natural pluviometers) is in proportion to the quantity of water that falls in the different regions. This quantity, in the centre of the forests of the Upper Orinoco and the Rio Negro, appeared to me to exceed 90 or 100 inches annually. Such of the natives, therefore, as have lived beneath the misty sky of the Esmeralda and the Atabapo, know, without the smallest notion of natural philosophy, what Eudoxus and Eratosthenes knew heretofore,* that the inundations of the great rivers are owing solely to the equatorial rains. (* Strabo lib. 17 page 789. Diod. Sic. lib. l c. 5.) The following is the usual progress of the oscillations of the Orinoco. Immediately after the vernal equinox (the people say on the 25th of March) the commencement of the rising is perceived. It is at first only an inch in twenty-four hours; sometimes the river again sinks in April; it attains its maximum in July; remains at the same level from the end of July till the 25th of August; and then decreases progressively, but more slowly than it increased. It is at its minimum in January and February. In both worlds the rivers of the northern torrid zone attain the greatest height nearly at the same period. The Ganges, the Niger, and the Gambia reach the maximum, like the Orinoco, in the month of August.* (* Nearly forty or fifty days after the summer solstice.) The Nile is two months later, either on account of some local circumstances in the climate of Abyssinia, or of the length of its course, from the country of Berber, or 17.5 degrees of latitude, to the bifurcation of the delta. The Arabian geographers assert that in Sennaar and in Abyssinia the Nile begins to swell in the month of April (nearly as the Orinoco); the rise, however, does not become sensible at Cairo till toward the summer solstice; and the water attains its greatest height at the end of the month of September.* (* Nearly eighty or ninety days after the summer solstice.) The river keeps at the same level till the middle of October; and is at its minimum in April and May, a period when the rivers of Guiana begin to swell anew. It may be seen from this rapid statement, that, notwithstanding the retardation caused by the form of the natural channels, and by local climatic circumstances, the great phenomenon of the oscillations of the rivers of the torrid zone is everywhere the same. In the two zodiacs vulgarly called the Tartar and Chaldean, or Egyptian (in the zodiac which contains the sign of the Rat, an in that which contains those of the Fishes and Aquarius), particular constellations are consecrated to the periodical overflowings of the rivers. Real cycles, divisions of time, have been gradually transformed into divisions of space; but the generality of the physical phenomena of the risings seems to prove that the zodiac which has been transmitted to us by the Greeks, and which, by the precession of the equinoxes, becomes an historical monument of high antiquity, may have taken birth far from Thebes, and from the sacred valley of the Nile. In the zodiacs of the New World—in the Mexican, for instance, of which we discover the vestiges in the signs of the days, and the periodical series which they compose—there are also signs of rain and of inundation corresponding to the Chou (Rat) of the Chinese* and Thibetan cycle of Tse, and to the Fishes and Aquarius of the dodecatemorion. (* The figure of water itself is often substituted for that of the Rat (Arvicola) in the Tartar zodiac. The Rat takes the place of Aquarius. Gaubil, Obs. Mathem. volume 3 page 33.) These two Mexican signs are Water (Atl) and Cipactli, the sea-monster furnished with a horn. This animal is at once the Antelope-fish of the Hindoos, the Capricorn of our zodiac, the Deucalion of the Greeks, and the Noah (Coxcox) of the Azteks.* (* Coxcox bears also the denomination of Teo-Cipactli, in which the root god or divine is added to the name of the sign Cipactli. It is the man of the Fourth Age; who, at the fourth destruction of the world (the last renovation of nature), saved himself with his wife, and reached the mountain of Colhuacan. According to the commentator Germanicus, Deucalion was placed in Aquarius; but the three signs of the Fishes, Aquarius and Capricorn (the Antelope-fish) were heretofore intimately linked together. The animal, which, after having long inhabited the waters, takes the form of an antelope, and climbs the mountains, reminds people, whose restless imagination seizes the most remote similitudes, of the ancient traditions of Menou, of Noah, and of those Deucalions celebrated among the Scythians and the Thessalians. As the Tartarian and Mexican zodiacs contain the signs of the Monkey and the Tiger, they, no doubt, originated in the torrid zone. With the Muyscas, inhabitants of New Grenada, the first sign, as in eastern Asia, was that of water, figured by a Frog. It is also remarkable that the astrological worship of the Muyscas came to the table-land of Bogota from the eastern side, from the plains of San Juan, which extend toward the Guaviare and the Orinoco.) Thus we find the general results of comparative hydrography in the astrological monuments, the divisions of time and the religious traditions of nations the most remote from each other in their situation and in their degree of intellectual advancement.

As the equatorial rains take place in the flat country when the sun passes through the zenith of the place, that is, when its declination becomes homonymous with the zone comprised between the equator and one of the tropics, the waters of the Amazon sink, while those of the Orinoco rise perceptibly. In a very judicious discussion on the origin of the Rio Congo,* (* Voyage to the Zaire page 17.) the attention of philosophers has been already called to the modifications which the periods of the risings must undergo in the course of a river, the sources and the mouth of which are not on the same side of the equinoctial line.* (* Among the rivers of America this is the case with the Rio Negro, the Rio Branco, and the Jupura.) The hydraulic systems of the Orinoco and the Amazon furnish a combination of circumstances still more extraordinary. They are united by the Rio Negro and the Cassiquiare, a branch of the Orinoco; it is a navigable line, between two great basins of rivers, that is crossed by the equator. The river Amazon, according to the information which I obtained on its banks, is much less regular in the periods of its oscillations than the Orinoco; it generally begins, however, to increase in December, and attains its maximum of height in March.* (* Nearly seventy or eighty days after our winter solstice, which is the summer solstice of the southern hemisphere.) It sinks from the month of May, and is at its minimum of height in the months of July and August, at the time when the Lower Orinoco inundates all the surrounding land. As no river of America can cross the equator from south to north, on account of the general configuration of the ground, the risings of the Orinoco have an influence on the Amazon; but those of the Amazon do not alter the progress of the oscillations of the Orinoco. It results from these data, that in the two basins of the Amazon and the Orinoco, the concave and convex summits of the curve of progressive increase and decrease correspond very regularly with each other, since they exhibit the difference of six months, which results from the situation of the rivers in opposite hemispheres. The commencement of the risings only is less tardy in the Orinoco. This river increases sensibly as soon as the sun has crossed the equator; in the Amazon, on the contrary, the risings do not commence till two months after the equinox. It is known that in the forests north of the line the rains are earlier than in the less woody plains of the southern torrid zone. To this local cause is joined another, which acts perhaps equally on the tardy swellings of the Nile. The Amazon receives a great part of its waters from the Cordillera of the Andes, where the seasons, as everywhere among mountains, follow a peculiar type, most frequently opposite to that of the low regions.

The law of the increase and decrease of the Orinoco is more difficult to determine with respect to space, or to the magnitude of the oscillations, than with regard to time, or the period of the maxima and minima. Having been able to measure but imperfectly the risings of the river, I report, not without hesitation, estimates that differ much from each other.* (* Tuckey, Maritime Geogr. volume 4 page 309. Hippisley, Expedition to the Orinoco page 38. Gumilla volume 1 pages 56 to 59. Depons volume 3 page 301. The greatest height of the rise of the Mississippi is, at Natchez, fifty-five English feet. This river (the largest perhaps of the whole temperate zone) is at its maximum from February to May; at its minimum in August and September. Ellicott, Journal of an Expedition to the Ohio.) Foreign pilots admit ninety feet for the ordinary rise in the Lower Orinoco. M. Depons, who has in general collected very accurate notions during his stay at Caracas, fixes it at thirteen fathoms. The heights naturally vary according to the breadth of the bed and the number of tributary streams which the principal trunk receives.

The people believe that every five years the Orinoco rises three feet higher than common; but the idea of this cycle does not rest on any precise measures. We know by the testimony of antiquity, that the oscillations of the Nile have been sensibly the same with respect to their height and duration for thousands of years; which is a proof, well worthy of attention, that the mean state of the humidity and the temperature does not vary in that vast basin. Will this constancy in physical phenomena, this equilibrium of the elements, be preserved in the New World also after some ages of cultivation? I think we may reply in the affirmative; for the united efforts of man cannot fail to have an influence on the general causes on which the climate of Guiana depends.

According to the barometric height of San Fernando de Apure, I find from that town to the Boca de Navios the slope of the Apure and the Lower Orinoco to be three inches and a quarter to a nautical mile of nine hundred and fifty toises.* (* The Apure itself has a slope of thirteen inches to the mile.) We may be surprised at the strength of the current in a slope so little perceptible; but I shall remind the reader on this occasion, that, according to measurements made by order of Mr. Hastings, the Ganges was found, in a course of sixty miles (comprising the windings,) to have also only four inches fall to a mile; that the mean swiftness of this river is, in the seasons of drought, three miles an hour, and in those of rains six or eight miles. The strength of the current, therefore, in the Ganges as in the Orinoco, depends less on the slope of the bed, than on the accumulation of the higher waters, caused by the abundance of the rains, and the number of tributary streams. European colonists have already been settled for two hundred and fifty years on the banks of the Orinoco; and during this long period of time, according to a tradition which has been propagated from generation to generation, the periodical oscillations of the river (the time of the beginning of the rising, and that when it attains its maximum) have never been retarded more than twelve or fifteen days.

When vessels that draw a good deal of water sail up toward Angostura in the months of January and February, by favour of the sea-breeze and the tide, they run the risk of taking the ground. The navigable channel often changes its breadth and direction; no buoy, however, has yet been laid down, to indicate any deposit of earth formed in the bed of the river, where the waters have lost their original velocity. There exists on the south of Cape Barima, as well by the river of this name as by the Rio Moroca and several estuaries (esteres) a communication with the English colony of Essequibo. Small vessels can penetrate into the interior as far as the Rio Poumaron, on which are the ancient settlements of Zealand and Middleburg. Heretofore this communication interested the government of Caracas only on account of the facility it furnished to an illicit trade; but since Berbice, Demerara, and Essequibo have fallen into the hands of a more powerful neighbour, it fixes the attention of the Spanish Americans as being connected with the security of their frontiers. Rivers which have a course parallel to the coast, and are nowhere farther distant from it than five or six nautical miles, characterize the whole of the shore between the Orinoco and the Amazon.

Ten leagues distant from Cape Barima, the great bed of the Orinoco is divided for the first time into two branches of two thousand toises in breadth. They are known by the Indian names of Zacupana and Imataca. The first, which is the northernmost, communicates on the west of the islands Congrejos and del Burro with the bocas chicas of Lauran, Nuina, and Mariusas. As the Isla del Burro disappears in the time of great inundations, it is unhappily not suited to fortifications. The southern bank of the brazo Imataca is cut by a labyrinth of little channels, into which the Rio Imataca and the Rio Aquire flow. A long series of little granitic hills rises in the fertile savannahs between the Imataca and the Cuyuni; it is a prolongation of the Cordilleras of Parima, which, bounding the horizon south of Angostura, forms the celebrated cataracts of the Rio Caroni, and approaches the Orinoco like a projecting cape near the little fort of Vieja Guyana. The populous missions of the Caribbee and Guiana Indians, governed by the Catalonian Capuchins, lie near the sources of the Imataca and the Aquire. The easternmost of these missions are those of Miamu, Camamu, and Palmar, situate in a hilly country, which extends towards Tupuquen, Santa Maria, and the Villa de Upata. Going up the Rio Aquire, and directing your course across the pastures towards the south, you reach the mission of Belem de Tumeremo, and thence the confluence of the Curumu with the Rio Cuyuni, where the Spanish post or destacamento de Cuyuni was formerly established. I enter into this topographical detail because the Rio Cuyuni, or Cuduvini, runs parallel to the Orinoco from west to east, through an extent of 2.5 or 3 degrees of longitude,* and furnishes an excellent natural boundary between the territory of Caracas and that of English Guiana. (* Including the Rio Juruam, one of the principal branches of the Cuyuni. The Dutch military post is five leagues west of the union of Cuyuni with the Essequibo, where the former river receives the Mazuruni.)

The two great branches of the Orinoco, the Zacupana and the Imataca, remain separate for fourteen leagues: on going up farther, the waters of the river are found united* in a single channel extremely broad. (* At this point of union are found two villages of Guaraons. They also bear the names of Imataca and Zacupana.) This channel is near eight leagues long; at its western extremity a second bifurcation appears; and as the summit of the delta is in the northern branch of the bifurcated river, this part of the Orinoco is highly important for the military defence of the country. All the channels* that terminate in the bocas chicas, rise from the same point of the trunk of the Orinoco. (* Cano de Manamo grande, Cano de Manamo chico, Cano Pedernales, Cano Macareo, Cano Cutupiti, Cano Macuona, Cano grande de Mariusas, etc. The last three branches form by their union the sinuous channel called the Vuelta del Torno.) The branch (Cano Manamo) that separates from it near the village of San Rafael has no ramification till after a course of three or four leagues; and by placing a small fort above the island of Chaguanes, Angostura might be defended against an enemy that should attempt to penetrate by one of the bocas chicas. In my time the station of the gun-boats was east of San Rafael, near the northern bank of the Orinoco. This is the point which vessels must pass in sailing up toward Angostura by the northern channel, that of San Rafael, which is the broadest but the most shallow.

Six leagues above the point where the Orinoco sends off a branch to the bocas chicas is placed an ancient fort (los Castillos de la Vieja or Antigua Guayana,) the first construction of which goes back to the sixteenth century. In this spot the bed of the river is studded with rocky islands; and it is asserted that its breadth is nearly six hundred and fifty toises. The town is almost destroyed, but the fortifications subsist, and are well worthy the attention of the government of Terra Firma. There is a magnificent view from the battery established on a bluff north-west of the ancient town, which, at the period of great inundations, is entirely surrounded with water. Pools that communicate with the Orinoco form natural basins, adapted for the reception of vessels that want repairs.

After having passed the little forts of Vieja Guayana, the bed of the Orinoco again widens. The state of cultivation of the country on the two banks affords a striking contrast. On the north is seen the desert part of the province of Cumana, steppes (Llanos) destitute of habitations, and extending beyond the sources of the Rio Mamo, toward the tableland or mesa of Guanipa. On the south we find three populous villages belonging to the missions of Carony, namely, San Miguel de Uriala, San Felix and San Joaquin. The last of these villages, situate on the banks of the Carony, immediately below the great cataract, is considered as the embarcadero of the Catalonian missions. On navigating more to the east, between the mouth of the Carony and Angostura, the pilot should avoid the rocks of Guarampo, the sandbank of Mamo, and the Piedra del Rosario. From the numerous materials which I brought home, and from astronomical discussions, the principal results of which I have indicated above, I have constructed a map of the country bounded by the delta of the Orinoco, the Carony, and the Cuyuni. This part of Guiana, from its proximity to the coast, will some day offer the greatest attraction to European settlers.

The whole population of this vast province in its present state is, with the exception of a few Spanish parishes, scattered on the banks of the Lower Orinoco, and subject to two monastic governments. Estimating the number of the inhabitants of Guiana, who do not live in savage independence, at thirty-five thousand, we find nearly twenty-four thousand settled in the missions, and thus withdrawn as it were from the direct influence of the secular arm. At the period of my voyage, the territory of the Observantin monks of St. Francis contained seven thousand three hundred inhabitants, and that of the Capuchinos Catalanes seventeen thousand; an astonishing disproportion, when we reflect on the smallness of the latter territory compared to the vast banks of the Upper Orinoco, the Atabapo, the Cassiquiare and the Rio Negro. It results from these statements that nearly two-thirds of the population of a province of sixteen thousand eight hundred square leagues are found concentrated between the Rio Imataca and the town of Santo Thome del Angostura, on a space of ground only fifty-five leagues in length, and thirty in breadth. Both of these monastic governments are equally inaccessible to Whites, and form status in statu. The first, that of the Observantins, I have described from my own observations; it remains for me to record here the notions I could procure respecting the second of these governments, that of the Catalonian Capuchins. Fatal civil dissensions and epidemic fevers have of late years diminished the long-increasing prosperity of the missions of the Carony; but, notwithstanding these losses, the region which we are going to examine is still highly interesting with respect to political economy.

The missions of the Catalonian Capuchins, which in 1804 contained at least sixty thousand head of cattle grazing in the savannahs, extend from the eastern banks of the Carony and the Paragua as far as the banks of the Imataca, the Curumu, and the Cuyuni; at the south-east they border on English Guiana, or the colony of Essequibo; and toward the south, in going up the desert banks of the Paragua and the Paraguamasi, and crossing the Cordillera of Pacaraimo, they touch the Portuguese settlements on the Rio Branco. The whole of this country is open, full of fine savannahs, and no way resembling that through which we passed on the Upper Orinoco. The forests become impenetrable only on advancing toward the south; on the north are meadows intersected with woody hills. The most picturesque scenes lie near the falls of the Carony, and in that chain of mountains, two hundred and fifty toises high, which separates the tributary streams of the Orinoco from those of the Cuyuni. There are situate the Villa de Upata,* the capital of the missions, Santa Maria, and Cupapui. (* Founded in 1762. Population in 1797, 657 souls; in 1803, 769 souls. The most populous villages of these missions, Alta Gracia, Cupapui, Santa Rosa de Cura, and Guri, had between 600 and 900 inhabitants in 1797; but in 1818 epidemic fevers diminished the population more than a third. In some missions these diseases have swept away nearly half of the inhabitants.) Small table-lands afford a healthy and temperate climate. Cacao, rice, cotton, indigo, and sugar grow in abundance wherever a virgin soil, covered with a thick coat of grasses, is subjected to cultivation. The first Christian settlements in those countries are not, I believe, of an earlier date than 1721. The elements of which the present population is composed are the three Indian races of the Guayanos, the Caribs and the Guaycas. The last are a people of mountaineers and are far from being so diminutive in size as the Guaycas whom we found at Esmeralda. It is difficult to fix them to the soil; and the three most modern missions in which they have been collected, those of Cura, Curucuy, and Arechica, are already destroyed. The Guayanos, who early in the sixteenth century gave their name to the whole of that vast province, are less intelligent but milder; and more easy, if not to civilize, at least to subjugate, than the Caribs. Their language appears to belong to the great branch of the Caribbee and Tamanac tongues. It displays the same analogies of roots and grammatical forms, which are observed between the Sanscrit, the Persian, the Greek, and the German. It is not easy to fix the forms of what is indefinite by its nature; and to agree on the differences which should be admitted between dialects, derivative languages and mother-tongues. The Jesuits of Paraguay have made known to us another tribe of Guayanos* in the southern hemisphere, living in the thick forests of Parana. (* They are also called Guananas, or Gualachas.) Though it cannot be denied in general that in consequence of distant migrations,* (* Like the celebrated migrations of the Omaguas, or Omeguas.) the nations that are settled north and south of the Amazon have had communications with each other, I will not decide whether the Guayanos of Parana and of Uruguay exhibit any other relation to those of Carony, than that of an homonomy, which is perhaps only accidental.
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