Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of

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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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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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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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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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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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Part 2 of 3

The most considerable Christian settlements are now concentrated between the mountains of Santa Maria, the mission of San Miguel and the eastern bank of the Carony, from San Buenaventura as far as Guri and the embarcadero of San Joaquin; a space of ground which has not more than four hundred and sixty square leagues of surface. The savannahs to the east and south are almost uninhabited; we find there only the solitary missions of Belem, Tumuremo, Tupuquen, Puedpa, and Santa Clara. It were to be wished that the spots preferred for cultivation were distant from the rivers where the land is higher and the air more favourable to health. The Rio Carony, the waters of which, of an admirable clearness, are not well stocked with fish, is free from shoals from the Villa de Barceloneta, a little above the confluence of the Paragua, as far as the village of Guri. Farther north it winds between innumerable islands and rocks; and only the small boats of the Caribs venture to navigate amid these raudales, or rapids of the Carony. Happily the river is often divided into several branches; and consequently that can be chosen which, according to the height of the waters, presents the fewest whirlpools and shoals. The great fall, celebrated for the picturesque beauty of its situation, is a little above the village of Aguacaqua, or Carony, which in my time had a population of seven hundred Indians. This cascade is said to be from fifteen to twenty feet high; but the bar does not cross the whole bed of the river, which is more than three hundred feet broad. When the population is more extended toward the east, it will avail itself of the course of the small rivers Imataca and Aquire, the navigation of which is pretty free from danger. The monks, who like to keep themselves isolated, in order to withdraw from the eye of the secular power, have been hitherto unwilling to settle on the banks of the Orinoco. It is, however, by this river only, or by the Cuyuni and the Essequibo, that the missions of Carony can export their productions. The latter way has not yet been tried, though several Christian settlements* are formed on one of the principal tributary streams of the Cuyuni, the Rio Juruario. (* Guacipati, Tupuquen, Angel de la Custodia, and Cura, where the military post of the frontiers was stationed in 1800, which had been anciently placed at the confluence of the Cuyuni and the Curumu.) This stream furnishes, at the period of the great swellings, the remarkable phenomenon of a bifurcation. It communicates by the Juraricuima and the Aurapa with the Rio Carony; so that the land comprised between the Orinoco, the sea, the Cuyuni, and the Carony, becomes a real island. Formidable rapids impede the navigation of the Upper Cuyuni; and hence of late an attempt has been made to open a road to the colony of Essequibo much more to the south-east, in order to fall in with the Cuyuni much below the mouth of the Curumu.

The whole of this southern territory is traversed by hordes of independent Caribs; the feeble remains of that warlike people who were so formidable to the missionaries till 1733 and 1735, at which period the respectable bishop Gervais de Labrid,* (* Consecrated a bishop for the four parts of the world (obispo para las quatro partes del mundo) by pope Benedict XIII.) canon of the metropolitan chapter of Lyon, Father Lopez, and several other ecclesiastics, perished by the hands of the Caribs. These dangers, too frequent formerly, exist no longer, either in the missions of Carony, or in those of the Orinoco; but the independent Caribs continue, on account of their connection with the Dutch colonists of Essequibo, an object of mistrust and hatred to the government of Guiana. These tribes favour the contraband trade along the coast, and by the channels or estuaries that join the Rio Barima to the Rio Moroca; they carry off the cattle belonging to the missionaries, and excite the Indians recently converted, and living within the sound of the bell, to return to the forests. The free hordes have everywhere a powerful interest in opposing the progress of cultivation and the encroachments of the Whites. The Caribs and the Aruacas procure fire-arms at Essequibo and Demerara; and when the traffic of American slaves (poitos) was most active, adventurers of Dutch origin took part in these incursions on the Paragua, the Erevato, and the Ventuario. Man-hunting took place on these banks, as heretofore (and probably still) on those of the Senegal and the Gambia. In both worlds Europeans have employed the same artifices, and committed the same atrocities, to maintain a trade that dishonours humanity. The missionaries of the Carony and the Orinoco attribute all the evils they suffer from the independent Caribs to the hatred of their neighbours, the Calvinist preachers of Essequibo. Their works are therefore filled with complaints of the secta diabolica de Calvino y de Lutero, and against the heretics of Dutch Guiana, who also think fit sometimes to go on missions, and spread the germs of social life among the savages.

Of all the vegetable productions of those countries, that which the industry of the Catalonian Capuchins has rendered the most celebrated is the tree that furnishes the Cortex angosturae, which is erroneously designated by the name of cinchona of Carony. We were fortunate enough to make it first known as a new genus distinct from the cinchona, and belonging to the family of meliaceae, or of zanthoxylus. This salutary drug of South America was formerly attributed to the Brucea ferruginea which grows in Abyssinia, to the Magnolia glauca, and to the Magnolia plumieri. During the dangerous disease of M. Bonpland, M. Ravago sent a confidential person to the missions of Carony, to procure for us, by favour of the Capuchins of Upata, branches of the tree in flower which we wished to be able to describe. We obtained very fine specimens, the leaves of which, eighteen inches long, diffused an agreeable aromatic smell. We soon perceived that the cuspare (the indigenous name of the cascarilla or corteza del Angostura) forms a new genus; and on sending the plants of the Orinoco to M. Willdenouw, I begged he would dedicate this plant to M. Bonpland. The tree, known at present by the name of Bonplandia trifoliata, grows at the distance of five or six leagues from the eastern bank of the Carony, at the foot of the hills that surround the missions Capapui, Upata and Alta Gracia. The Caribbee Indians make use of an infusion of the bark of the cuspare, which they consider as a strengthening remedy. M. Bonpland discovered the same tree west of Cumana, in the gulf of Santa Fe, where it may become one of the articles of exportation from New Andalusia.

The Catalonian monks prepare an extract of the Cortex angosturae which they send to the convents of their province, and which deserves to be better known in the north of Europe. It is to be hoped that the febrifuge and anti-dysenteric bark of the bonplandia will continue to be employed, notwithstanding the introduction of another, described by the name of False Angostura bark, and often confounded with the former. This false Angostura, or Angostura pseudo-ferruginea, comes, it is said, from the Brucea antidysenterica; it acts powerfully on the nerves, produces violent attacks of tetanus, and contains, according to the experiments of Pelletier and Caventon, a peculiar alkaline substance* analogous to morphine and strychnine. (* Brucine. M. Pelletier has wisely avoided using the word angosturine, because it might indicate a substance taken from the real Cortex angosturae, or Bonplandia trifoliata. (Annales de Chimie volume 12 page 117.) We saw at Peru the barks of two new species of weinmannia and wintera mixed with those of cinchona; a mixture less dangerous, but still injurious, on account of the superabundance of tannin and acrid matter contained in the false cascarilla.) As the tree which yields the real Cortex angosturae does not grow in great abundance, it is to be wished that plantations of it were formed. The Catalonian monks are well fitted to spread this kind of cultivation; they are more economical, industrious, and active than the other missionaries. They have already established tan-yards and cotton-spinning in a few villages; and if they suffer the Indians henceforth to enjoy the fruit of their labours, they will find great resources in the native population. Concentered on a small space of land, these monks have the consciousness of their political importance, and have from time to time resisted the civil authority, and that of their bishop. The governors who reside at Angostura have struggled against them with very unequal success, according as the ministry of Madrid showed a complaisant deference for the ecclesiastical hierarchy, or sought to limit its power. In 1768 Don Manuel Centurion carried off twenty thousand head of cattle from the missionaries, in order to distribute them among the indigent inhabitants. This liberality, exerted in a manner not very legal, produced very serious consequences. The governor was disgraced on the complaint of the Catalonian monks though he had considerably extended the territory of the missions toward the south, and founded the Villa de Barceloneta, above the confluence of the Carony with the Rio Paragua, and the Ciudad de Guirior, near the union of the Rio Paragua and the Paraguamusi. From that period the civil administration has carefully avoided all intervention in the affairs of the Capuchins, whose opulence has been exaggerated like that of the Jesuits of Paraguay.

The missions of the Carony, by the configuration of their soil* and the mixture of savannahs and arable lands, unite the advantages of the Llanos of Calabozo and the valleys of Aragua. (* It appears that the little table-lands between the mountains of Upata, Cumanu, and Tupuquen, are more than one hundred and fifty toises above the level of the sea.) The real wealth of this country is founded on the care of the herds and the cultivation of colonial produce. It were to be wished that here, as in the fine and fertile province of Venezuela, the inhabitants, faithful to the labours of the fields, would not addict themselves too hastily to the research of mines. The example of Germany and Mexico proves, no doubt, that the working of metals is not at all incompatible with a flourishing state of agriculture; but, according to popular traditions, the banks of the Carony lead to the lake Dorado and the palace of the gilded man* (* El Dorado, that is, el rey o hombre dorado. See volume 2.23.): and this lake, and this palace, being a local fable, it might be dangerous to awaken remembrances which begin gradually to be effaced. I was assured that in 1760, the independent Caribs went to Cerro de Pajarcima, a mountain to the south of Vieja Guayana, to submit the decomposed rock to the action of washing. The gold-dust collected by this labour was put into calabashes of the Crescentia cujete and sold to the Dutch at Essequibo. Still more recently, some Mexican miners, who abused the credulity of Don Jose Avalo, the intendant of Caracas, undertook a very considerable work in the centre of the missions of the Rio Carony, near the town of Upata, in the Cerros del Potrero and de Chirica. They declared that the whole rock was auriferous; stamping-mills, brocards, and smelting-furnaces were constructed. After having expended very large sums, it was discovered that the pyrites contained no trace whatever of gold. These essays, though fruitless, served to renew the ancient idea that every shining rock in Guiana is teeming with gold (una madre del oro). Not contented with taking the mica-slate to the furnace, strata of amphibolic slates were shown to me near Angostura, without any mixture of heterogeneous substances, which had been worked under the whimsical name of black ore of gold (oro negro).

This is the place to make known, in order to complete the description of the Orinoco, the principal results of my researches on El Dorado, the White Sea, or Laguna Parime, and the sources of the Orinoco, as they are marked in the most recent maps. The idea of an auriferous earth, eminently rich, has been connected, ever since the end of the sixteenth century, with that of a great inland lake, which furnishes at the same time waters to the Orinoco, the Rio Branco and the Rio Essequibo. I believe, from a more accurate knowledge of the country, a long and laborious study of the Spanish authors who treat of El Dorado, and, above all, from comparing a great number of ancient maps, arranged in chronological order, I have succeeded in discovering the source of these errors. All fables have some real foundation; that of El Dorado resembles those myths of antiquity, which, travelling from country to country, have been successively adapted to different localities. In the sciences, in order to distinguish truth from error, it often suffices to retrace the history of opinions, and to follow their successive developments. The discussion to which I shall devote the end of this chapter is important, not only because it throws light on the events of the Conquest, and that long series of disastrous expeditions made in search of El Dorado, the last of which was in the year 1775; it also furnishes, in addition to this simply historical interest, another, more substantial and more generally felt, that of rectifying the geography of South America, and of disembarrassing the maps published in our days of those great lakes, and that strange labyrinth of rivers, placed as if by chance between sixty and sixty-six degrees of longitude. No man in Europe believes any longer in the wealth of Guiana and the empire of the Grand Patiti. The town of Manoa and its palaces covered with plates of massy gold have long since disappeared; but the geographical apparatus serving to adorn the fable of El Dorado, the lake Parima, which, similar to the lake of Mexico, reflected the image of so many sumptuous edifices, has been religiously preserved by geographers. In the space of three centuries, the same traditions have been differently modified; from ignorance of the American languages, rivers have been taken for lakes, and portages for branches of rivers; one lake, the Cassipa, has been made to advance five degrees of latitude toward the south, while another, the Parima or Dorado, has been transported the distance of a hundred leagues from the western to the eastern bank of the Rio Branco. From these various changes, the problem we are going to solve has become much more complicated than is generally supposed. The number of geographers who discuss the basis of a map, with regard to the three points of measures, of the comparison of descriptive works, and of the etymological study* of names, is extremely small. (* I use this expression, perhaps an improper one, to mark a species of philological examination, to which the names of rivers, lakes, mountains, and tribes, must be subjected, in order to discover their identity in a great number of maps. The apparent diversity of names arises partly from the difference of the dialects spoken by one and the same family of people, partly from the imperfection of our European orthography, and from the extreme negligence with which geographers copy one another. We recognize with difficulty the Rio Uaupe in the Guaupe or Guape; the Xie, in the Guaicia; the Raudal de Atures, in Athule; the Caribbees, in the Calinas and Galibis; the Guaraunos or Uarau, in the Oaraw-its; etc. It is, however, by similar mutations of letters, that the Spaniards have made hijo of filius; hambre, of fames; and Felipo de Urre, and even Utre, of the Conquistador Philip von Huten; that the Tamanacs in America have substituted choraro for soldado; and the Jews in China, Ialemeiohang for Jeremiah. Analogy and a certain etymological tact must guide geographers in researches of this kind, in which they would be exposed to serious errors, if they were not to study at the same time the respective situations of the upper and lower tributary streams of the same river. Our maps of America are overloaded with names, for which rivers have been created. This desire of compiling, of filling up vacancies, and of employing, without investigation, heterogeneous materials, has given our maps of countries the least visited an appearance of exactness, the falsity of which is discovered when we arrive on the spot.) Almost all the maps of South America which have appeared since the year 1775 are, in what regards the interior of the country, comprised between the steppes of Venezuela and the river of the Amazons, between the eastern back of the Andes and the coast of Cayenne, a simple copy of the great Spanish map of La Cruz Olmedilla. A line, indicating the extent of country which Don Jose Solano boasted of having discovered and pacified by his troops and emissaries, was taken for the road followed by that officer, who never went beyond San Fernando de Atabapo, a village one hundred and sixty leagues distant from the pretended lake Parima. The study of the work of Father Caulin, who was the historiographer of the expedition of Solano, and who states very clearly, from the testimony of the Indians, how the name of the river Parima gave rise to the fable of El Dorado, and of an inland sea, has been neglected. No use either has been made of a map of the Orinoco, three years posterior to that of La Cruz, and traced by Surville from the collection of true or hypothetical materials preserved in the archives of the Despacho universal de Indias. The progress of geography, as manifested on our maps, is much slower than might be supposed from the number of useful results which are found scattered in the works of different nations. Astronomical observations and topographic information accumulate during a long lapse of years, without being made use of; and from a principle of stability and preservation, in other respects praiseworthy, those who construct maps often choose rather to add nothing, than to sacrifice a lake, a chain of mountains, or an interbranching of rivers, which have figured there during ages.

The fabulous traditions of El Dorado and the lake Parima having been diversely modified according to the aspect of the countries to which they were to be adapted, we must distinguish what they contain that is real from what is merely imaginary. To avoid entering here into minute particulars, I shall begin first to call the attention of the reader to those spots which have been, at various periods, the theatre of the expeditions undertaken for the discovery of El Dorado. When we have learnt to know the aspect of the country, and the local circumstances, such as they can now be described, it will be easy to conceive how the different hypotheses recorded on our maps have taken rise by degrees, and have modified each other. To oppose an error, it is sufficient to recall to mind the variable forms in which we have seen it appear at different periods.

Till the middle of the eighteenth century, all that vast space of land comprised between the mountains of French Guiana and the forests of the Upper Orinoco, between the sources of the Carony and the River Amazon (from 0 to 4 degrees of north latitude, and from 57 to 68 degrees of longitude), was so little known that geographers could place in it lakes where they pleased, create communications between rivers, and figure chains of mountains more or less lofty. They have made full use of this liberty; and the situation of lakes, as well as the course and branches of rivers, has been varied in so many ways that it would not be surprising if among the great number of maps some were found that trace the real state of things. The field of hypotheses is now singularly narrowed. I have determined the longitude of Esmeralda in the Upper Orinoco; more to the east amid the plains of Parima (a land as unknown as Wangara and Dar-Saley, in Africa), a band of twenty leagues broad has been travelled over from north to south along the banks of the Rio Carony and the Rio Branco in the longitude of sixty-three degrees. This is the perilous road which was taken by Don Antonio Santos in going from Santo Thome del Angostura to Rio Negro and the Amazon; by this road also the colonists of Surinam communicated very recently with the inhabitants of Grand Para. This road divides the terra incognita of Parima into two unequal portions; and fixes limits at the same time to the sources of the Orinoco, which it is no longer possible to carry back indefinitely toward the east, without supposing that the bed of the Rio Branco, which flows from north to south, is crossed by the bed of the Upper Orinoco, which flows from east to west. If we follow the course of the Rio Branco, or that strip of cultivated land which is dependent on the Capitania General of Grand Para, we see lakes, partly imaginary and partly enlarged by geographers, forming two distinct groups. The first of these groups includes the lakes which they place between the Esmeralda and the Rio Branco; and to the second belong those that are supposed to lie between the Rio Branco and the mountains of Dutch and French Guiana. It results from this sketch that the question whether there exists a lake Parima on the east of the Rio Branco is altogether foreign to the problem of the sources of the Orinoco.

Beside the country which we have just noticed (the Dorado de la Parime, traversed by the Rio Branco), another part of America is found, two hundred and sixty leagues toward the west, near the eastern back of the Cordillera of the Andes, equally celebrated in the expeditions to El Dorado. This is the Mesopotamia between the Caqueta, the Rio Negro, the Uaupes, and the Yurubesh, of which I have already given a particular account; it is the Dorado of the Omaguas which contains Lake Manoa of Father Acunha, the Laguna de oro of the Guanes and the auriferous land whence Father Fritz received plates of beaten gold in his mission on the Amazon, toward the end of the seventeenth century.

The first and above all the most celebrated enterprises attempted in search of El Dorado were directed toward the eastern back of the Andes of New Grenada. Fired with the ideas which an Indian of Tacunga had given of the wealth of the king or zaque of Cundirumarca, Sebastian de Belalcazar, in 1535, sent his captains Anasco and Ampudia, to discover the valley of El Dorado,* twelve days' journey from Guallabamba, consequently in the mountains between Pasto and Popayan. (* El valle del Dorado. Pineda relates: que mas adelante de la provincia de la Canela se hallan tierras muy ricas, adonde andaban los hombres armados de piecas y joyas de oro, y que no havia sierra, ni montana. [Beyond the province of Canela there are found very rich countries (though without mountains) in which the natives are adorned with trinkets and plates of gold.] Herrera dec. 5 lib. 10 cap. 14 and dec. 6 lib. 8 cap. 6 Geogr. Blaviana volume 11 page 261. Southey tome 1 pages 78 and 373.) The information which Pedro de Anasco had obtained from the natives, joined to that which was received subsequently (1536) by Diaz de Pineda, who had discovered the provinces of Quixos and Canela, between the Rio Napo and the Rio Pastaca, gave birth to the idea that on the east of the Nevados of Tunguragua, Cayambe, and Popayan, were vast plains, abounding in precious metals, and where the inhabitants were covered with armour of massy gold. Gonzales Pizarro, in searching for these treasures, discovered accidentally, in 1539, the cinnamon-trees of America (Laurus cinnamomoides, Mut.); and Francisco de Orellana went down the Napo, to reach the river Amazon. Since that period expeditions were undertaken at the same time from Venezuela, New Grenada, Quito, Peru, and even from Brazil and the Rio de la Plata,* for the conquest of El Dorado. (* Nuno de Chaves went from the Ciudad de la Asumpcion, situate on Rio Paraguay, to discover, in the latitude of 24 degrees south, the vast empire of El Dorado, which was everywhere supposed to lie on the eastern back of the Andes.) Those of which the remembrance have been best preserved, and which have most contributed to spread the fable of the riches of the Manaos, the Omaguas, and the Guaypes, as well as the existence of the lagunas de oro, and the town of the gilded king (Grand Patiti, Grand Moxo, Grand Paru, or Enim), are the incursions made to the south of the Guaviare, the Rio Fragua, and the Caqueta. Orellana, having found idols of massy gold, had fixed men's ideas on an auriferous land between the Papamene and the Guaviare. His narrative, and those of the voyages of Jorge de Espira (George von Speier), Hernan Perez de Quesada, and Felipe de Urre (Philip von Huten), undertaken in 1536, 1542, and 1545, furnish, amid much exaggeration, proofs of very exact local knowledge.* (* We may be surprised to see, that the expedition of Huten is passed over in absolute silence by Herrera (dec. 7 lib. 10 cap. 7 volume 4 238). Fray Pedro Simon gives the whole particulars of it, true or fabulous; but he composed his work from materials that were unknown to Herrera.) When these are examined merely in a geographical point of view, we perceive the constant desire of the first conquistadores to reach the land comprised between the sources of the Rio Negro, of the Uaupes (Guape), and of the Jupura or Caqueta. This is the land which, in order to distinguish it from El Dorado de la Parime, we have called El Dorado des Omaguas.* (* In 1560 Pedro de Ursua even took the title of Governador del Dorado y de Omagua. Fray Pedro Simon volume 6 chapter 10 page 430.) No doubt the whole country between the Amazon and the Orinoco was vaguely known by the name of las Provincias del Dorado; but in this vast extent of forests, savannahs, and mountains, the progress of those who sought the great lake with auriferous banks, and the town of the gilded king, was directed towards two points only, on the north-east and south-west of the Rio Negro; that is, to Parima (or the isthmus between the Carony, the Essequibo, and the Rio Branco), and to the ancient abode of the Manaos, the inhabitants of the banks of the Yurubesh. I have just mentioned the situation of the latter spot, which is celebrated in the history of the conquest from 1535 to 1560; and it remains for me to speak of the configuration of the country between the Spanish missions of the Rio Carony, and the Portuguese missions of the Rio Branco or Parima. This is the country lying near the Lower Orinoco, the Esmeralda, and French and Dutch Guiana, on which, since the end of the sixteenth century, the enterprises and exaggerated narratives of Raleigh have shed so bright a splendour.

From the general disposition of the course of the Orinoco, directed successively towards the west, the north, and the east, its mouth lies almost in the same meridian as its sources: so that by proceeding from Vieja Guyana to the south the traveller passes through the whole of the country in which geographers have successively placed an inland sea (Mar Blanco), and the different lakes which are connected with the El Dorado de la Parime. We find first the Rio Carony, which is formed by the union of two branches of almost equal magnitude, the Carony properly so called, and the Rio Paragua. The missionaries of Piritu call the latter river a lake (laguna): it is full of shoals, and little cascades; but, passing through a country entirely flat, it is subject at the same time to great inundations, and its real bed (su verdadera caxa) can scarcely be discovered. The natives have given it the name of Paragua or Parava, which means in the Caribbee language sea, or great lake. These local circumstances and this denomination no doubt have given rise to the idea of transforming the Rio Paragua, a tributary stream of the Carony, into a lake called Cassipa, on account of the Cassipagotos,* who lived in those countries. (* Raleigh pages 64 and 69. I always quote, when the contrary is not expressly said, the original edition of 1596. Have these tribes of Cassipagtos, Epuremei, and Orinoqueponi, so often mentioned by Raleigh, disappeared? or did some misapprehension give rise to these denominations? I am surprised to find the Indian words [of one of the different Carib dialects?] Ezrabeta cassipuna aquerewana, translated by Raleigh, the great princes or greatest commander. Since acarwana certainly signifies a chief, or any person who commands (Raleigh pages 6 and 7), cassipuna perhaps means great, and lake Cassipa is synonymous with great lake. In the same manner Cass-iquiare may be a great river, for iquiare, like veni, is, an the north of the Amazon, a termination common to all rivers. Goto, however, in Cassipa-goto, is a Caribbee term denoting a tribe.) Raleigh gives this basin forty miles in breadth; and, as all the lakes of Parima must have auriferous sands, he does not fail to assert that in summer, when the waters retire, pieces of gold of considerable weight are found there.

The sources of the tributary streams of the Carony, the Arui, and the Caura (Caroli, Arvi, and Caora,* of the ancient geographers (* D'Anville names the Rio Caura, Coari; and the Rio Arui, Aroay. I have not been able hitherto to guess what is meant by the Aloica (Atoca, Atoica of Raleigh), which issues from the lake Cassipa, between the Caura and the Arui.)) being very near each other, this suggested the idea of making all these rivers take their rise from the pretended lake Cassipa.* (* Raleigh makes only the Carony and the Arui issue from it (Hondius, Nieuwe Caerte van het wonderbare landt Guiana, besocht door Sir Walter Raleigh, 1594 to 1596): but in later maps, for instance that of Sanson, the Rio Caura issues also from Lake Cassipa.) Sanson has so much enlarged this lake, that he gives it forty-two leagues in length, and fifteen in breadth. The ancient geographers placed opposite to each other, with very little hesitation, the tributary streams of the two banks of a river; and they place the mouth of the Carony, and lake Cassipa, which communicates by the Carony with the Orinoco, sometimes* ABOVE the confluence of the Meta. (* Sanson, Map for the Voyage of Acunha, 1680. Id. South America, 1659. Coronelli, Indes occidentales, 1689.) Thus it is carried back by Hondius as far as the latitudes of 2 and 3 degrees, giving it the form of a rectangle, the longest sides of which run from north to south. This circumstance is worthy of remark, because, in assigning gradually a more southern latitude to lake Cassipa, it has been detached from the Carony and the Arui, and has taken the name of Parima. To follow this metamorphosis in its progressive development, we must compare the maps which have appeared since the voyage of Raleigh till now. La Cruz, who has been copied by all the modern geographers, has preserved the oblong form of the lake Cassipa for his lake Parima, although this form is entirely different from that of the ancient lake Parima, or Rupunuwini, of which the great axis was directed from east to west. The ancient lake (that of Hondius, Sanson, and Coronelli) was also surrounded by mountains, and gave birth to no river; while the lake Parima of La Cruz and the modern geographers communicates with the Upper Orinoco, as the Cassipa with the Lower Orinoco.

I have stated the origin of the fable of the lake Cassipa, and the influence it has had on the opinion that the lake Parima is the source of the Orinoco. Let us now examine what relates to this latter basin, this pretended interior sea, called Rupunuwini by the geographers of the sixteenth century. In the latitude of four degrees or four degrees and a half (in which direction unfortunately, south of Santo Thome del Angostura to the extent of eight degrees, no astronomical observation has been made) is a long and narrow Cordillera, that of Pacaraimo, Quimiropaca, and Ucucuamo; which, stretching from east to south-west, unites the group of mountains of Parima to the mountains of Dutch and French Guiana. It divides its waters between the Carony, the Rupunury or Rupunuwini, and the Rio Branco, and consequently between the valleys of the Lower Orinoco, the Essequibo, and the Rio Negro. On the north-west of the Cordillera de Pacaraimo, which has been traversed but by a small number of Europeans (by the German surgeon, Nicolas Hortsmann, in 1739; by a Spanish officer, Don Antonio Santos, in 1775; by the Portuguese colonel, Barata, in 1791; and by several English settlers, in 1811), descend the Noeapra, the Paraguamusi, and the Paragua, which fall into the Rio Carony; on the north-east, the Rupunuwini, a tributary stream of the Rio Essequibo. Toward the south, the Tacutu and the Urariquera form together the famous Rio Parima, or Rio Branco.

This isthmus, between the branches of the Rio Essequibo and the Rio Branco (that is, between the Rupunuwini on one side, and the Pirara, the Mahu, and the Uraricuera or Rio Parima on the other), may be considered as the classical soil of the Dorado of Parima. The rivers at the foot of the mountains of Pacaraimo are subject to frequent overflowings. Above Santa Rosa, the right bank of the Urariapara, a tributary stream of the Uraricuera, is called el Valle de la Inundacion. Great pools are also found between the Rio Parima and the Xurumu. These are marked on the maps recently constructed in Brazil, which furnish the most ample details of those countries. More to the west, the Cano Pirara, a tributary stream of the Mahu, issues from a lake covered with rushes. This is the lake Amucu described by Nicolas Hortsmann, and respecting which some Portuguese of Barcelos, who had visited the Rio Branco (Rio Parima or Rio Paravigiana), gave me precise notions during my stay at San Carlos del Rio Negro. The lake Amucu is several leagues broad, and contains two small islands, which Santos heard called Islas Ipomucena. The Rupunuwini (Rupunury), on the banks of which Hortsmann discovered rocks covered with hieroglyphical figures, approaches very near this lake, but does not communicate with it. The portage between the Rupunuwini and the Mahu is farther north, where the mountain of Ucucuamo* rises, the natives still call the mountain of gold. (* I follow the orthography of the manuscript journal of Rodriguez; it is the Cerro Acuquamo of Caulin, or rather of his commentator. Hist. corogr. page 176.) They advised Hortsmann to seek round the Rio Mahu for a mine of silver (no doubt mica with large plates), of diamonds, and emeralds. He found nothing but rocky crystals. His account seems to prove that the whole length of the mountains of the Upper Orinoco (Sierra Parima) toward the east, is composed of granitic rocks, full of druses and open veins, the Peak of Duida. Near these lands, which still enjoy a great celebrity for their riches, on the western limits of Dutch Guiana, live the Macusis, Aturajos, and Acuvajos. The traveller Santos found them stationed between the Rupunuwini, the Mahu, and the chain of Pacaraimo. It is the appearance of the micaceous rocks of the Ucucuamo, the name of the Rio Parima, the inundations of the rivers Urariapara, Parima, and Xurumu, and more especially the existence of the lake Amucu (near the Rio Rupunuwini, and regarded as the principal source of the Rio Parima), which have given rise to the fable of the White Sea and the Dorado of Parima. All these circumstances (which have served on this very account to corroborate the general opinion) are found united on a space of ground which is eight or nine leagues broad from north to south, and forty long from east to west. This direction, too, was always assigned to the White Sea, by lengthening it in the direction of the latitude, till the beginning of the sixteenth century. Now this White Sea is nothing but the Rio Parima, which is called the White River (Rio Branco, or Rio del Aguas blancas), and runs through and inundates the whole of this land. The name of Rupunuwini is given to the White Sea on the most ancient maps, which identifies the place of the fable, since of all the tributary streams of the Rio Essequibo the Rupunuwini is the nearest to the lake Amucu. Raleigh, in his first voyage (1595), had formed no precise idea of the situation of El Dorado and the lake Parima, which he believed to be salt, and which he calls another Caspian Sea. It was not till the second voyage (1596), performed equally at the expense of Raleigh, that Laurence Keymis fixed so well the localities of El Dorado, that he appears to me to have no doubt of the identity of the Parima de Manao with the lake Amucu, and with the isthmus between the Rupunuwini (a tributary stream of the Essequibo) and the Rio Parima or Rio Branco. "The Indians," says Keymis, "go up the Dessekebe [Essequibo] in twenty days, towards the south. To mark the greatness of this river, they call it the brother of the Orinoco. After twenty days' navigating they convey their canoes by a portage of one day, from the river Dessekebe to a lake, which the Jaos call Roponowini, and the Caribbees Parime. This lake is as large as a sea; it is covered with an infinite number of canoes; and I suppose" [the Indians then had told him nothing of this] "that this lake is no other than that which contains the town of Manoa."* (* Cayley's Life of Raleigh volume 1 pages 159, 236 and 283. Masham in the third voyage of Raleigh (1596) repeats these accounts of the Lake Rupunuwini.) Hondius has given a curious plate of this portage; and, as the mouth of the Carony was then supposed to be in latitude 4 degrees (instead of 8 degrees 8 minutes), the portage of Parima was placed close to the equator. At the same period the Viapoco (Oyapoc) and the Rio Cayenne (Maroni?) were made to issue from this lake Parima. The same name being given by the Caribs to the western branch of the Rio Branco has perhaps contributed as much to the imaginary enlargement of the lake Amucu, as the inundations of the various tributary streams of the Uraricuera, from the confluence of the Tacutu to the Valle de la Inundacion.

We have shown above that the Spaniards took the Rio Paragua, or Parava, which falls into the Carony, for a lake, because the word parava signifies sea, lake, river. Parima seems also to denote vaguely great water; for the root par is found in the Carib words that designate rivers, pools, lakes, and the ocean.* (* In Persian the root water (ab) is found also in lake (abdan). For other etymologies of the words Parima and Manoa see Gili volume 1 pages 81 and 141; and Gumilla volume 1 page 403.) In Arabic and in Persian, bahr and deria are also applied at the same time to the sea, to lakes, and to rivers; and this practice, common to many nations in both worlds, has, on our ancient maps, converted lakes into rivers and rivers into lakes. In support of what I here advance, I shall appeal to very respectable testimony, that of Father Caulin. "When I inquired of the Indians," says this missionary, who sojourned longer than I on the banks of the Lower Orinoco, "what Parima was, they answered that it was nothing more than a river that issued from a chain of mountains, the opposite side of which furnished waters to the Essequibo." Caulin, knowing nothing of lake Amucu, attributes the erroneous opinion of the existence of an inland sea solely to the inundations of the plains (a las inundaciones dilatadas por los bajos del pais). According to him, the mistakes of geographers arise from the vexatious circumstance of all the rivers of Guiana having different names at their mouths and near their sources. "I have no doubt," he adds, "that one of the upper branches of the Rio Branco is that very Rio Parima which the Spaniards have taken for a lake (a quien suponian laguna)." Such are the opinions which the historiographer of the Expedition of the Boundaries had formed on the spot. He could not expect that La Cruz and Surville, mingling old hypotheses with accurate ideas, would reproduce on their maps the Mar Dorado or Mar Blanco. Thus, notwithstanding the numerous proofs which I have furnished since my return from America, of the non-existence of an inland sea the origin of the Orinoco, a map has been published in my name,* on which the Laguna Parima figures anew. (* Carte de l'Amerique, dressee sur les Observations de M. de Humboldt, par Fried. Vienna 1818.)

From the whole of these statements it follows, first, that the Laguna Rupunuwini, or Parima of the voyage of Raleigh and of the maps of Hondius, is an imaginary lake, formed by the lake Amucu* (* This is the lake Amaca of Surville and La Cruz. By a singular mistake, the name of this lake is transformed to a village on Arrowsmith's map.) and the tributary streams of the Uraricuera, which often overflow their banks; secondly, that the Laguna Parime of Surville's map is the lake Amucu, which gives rise to the Rio Pirara and (conjointly with the Mahu, the Tacutu, the Uraricuera, or Rio Parima, properly so called) to the Rio Branco; thirdly, that the Laguna Parime of La Cruz is an imaginary swelling of the Rio Parime (confounded with the Orinoco) below the junction of the Mahu with the Xurumu. The distance from the mouth of the Mahu to that of the Tacutu is scarcely 0 degrees 40 minutes; La Cruz enlarges it to 7 degrees of latitude. He calls the upper part of the Rio Branco (that which receives the Mahu) Orinoco or Purumu. There can be no doubt of its being the Xurumu, one of the tributary streams of the Tacutu, which is well known to the inhabitants of the neighbouring fort of San Joaquim. All the names that figure in the fable of El Dorado are found in the tributary streams of the Rio Branco. Slight local circumstances, joined to the remembrances of the salt lake of Mexico, more especially of the celebrated lake Manoa in the Dorado des Omaguas, have served to complete a picture created by the imagination of Raleigh and his two lieutenants, Keymis and Masham. The inundations of the Rio Branco, I conceive, may be compared at the utmost to those of the Red River of Louisiana, between Nachitoches and Cados, but not to the Laguna de los Xarayes, which is a temporary swelling of the Rio Paraguay.* (* Southey volume 1 page 130. These periodical overflowings of the Rio Paraguay have long acted the same part in the southern hemisphere, as lake Parima has been made to perform in the northern. Hondius and Sanson have made the Rio de la Plata, the Rio Topajos (a tributary stream of the Amazon), the Rio Tocantines, and the Rio de San Francisco, issue from the Laguna de los Xarayes.)

We have now examined a White Sea,* (* That of D'Anville and La Cruz, and of the greater part of the modern maps.) which the principal of the Rio Branco is made to traverse; and another,* (* The lake of Surville, which takes the place of lake Amucu.) which is placed on the east of this river, and communicates with it by the Cano Pirara. A third lake* (* The lake which Surville calls Laguna tenida hasta ahora or La una Parime.) is figured on the west of the Rio Branco, respecting which I found recently some curious details in the manuscript journal of the surgeon Hortsmann. "At the distance of two days' journey below the confluence of the Mahu (Tacutu) with the Rio Parima (Uraricuera) a lake is found on top of a mountain. This lake is stocked with the same fish as the Rio Parima; but the waters of the former are black, and those of the latter white." May not Surville, from a vague notion of this basin, have imagined, in his map prefixed to Father Caulin's work, an Alpine lake of ten leagues in length, near which, towards the east, rise at the same time the Orinoco, and the Rio Idapa, a tributary stream of the Rio Negro? However vague may be the account of the surgeon of Hildesheim, it is impossible to admit that the mountain, which has a lake at its summit, is to the north of the parallel of 2 degrees 30 minutes: and this latitude coincides nearly with that of the Cerro Unturan. Hence it follows that the Alpine lake of Hortsmann, which has escaped the attention of D'Anville, and which is perhaps situate amid a group of mountains, lies north-east of the portage from the Idapa to the Mavaca, and south-east of the Orinoco, where it goes up above Esmeralda.

Most of the historians who have treated of the first ages of the conquest seem persuaded that the name provincias or pais del Dorado denoted originally every region abounding in gold. Forgetting the precise etymology of the word El Dorado (the gilded), they have not perceived that this tradition is a local fable, as were almost all the ancient fables of the Greeks, the Hindoos, and the Persians. The history of the gilded man belongs originally to the Andes of New Grenada, and particularly to the plains in the vicinity of their eastern side: we see it progressively advance, as I observed above, three hundred leagues toward the east-north-east, from the sources of the Caqueta to those of the Rio Branco and the Essequibo. Gold was sought in different parts of South America before 1536, without the word El Dorado having been ever pronounced, and without the belief of the existence of any other centre of civilization and wealth, than the empire of the Inca of Cuzco. Countries which now do not furnish commerce with the smallest quantities of the precious metals, the coast of Paria, Terra Firma (Castillo del Oro), the mountains of Santa Marta, and the isthmus of Darien, then enjoyed the same celebrity which has been more recently acquired by the auriferous lands of Sonora, Choco, and Brazil.

Diego de Ordaz (1531) and Alonzo de Herrera (1535) directed their journeys of discovery along the banks of the Lower Orinoco. The former is the famous Conquistador of Mexico, who boasted that he had taken sulphur out of the crater of the Peak of Popocatepetl, and whom the emperor Charles V permitted to wear a burning volcano on his armorial bearings. Ordaz, named Adelantado of all the country which he could conquer between Brazil and the coast of Venezuela, which was then called the country of the German Company of Welsers (Belzares) of Augsburg, began his expedition by the mouth of the Maranon. He there saw, in the hands of the natives, "emeralds as big as a man's fist." They were, no doubt, pieces of that saussurite jade, or compact feldspar, which we brought home from the Orinoco, and which La Condamine found in abundance at the mouth of the Rio Topayos. The Indians related to Diego de Ordaz that on going up during a certain number of suns toward the west, he would find a large rock (pena) of green stone; but before they reached this pretended mountain of emerald (rocks of euphotide?) a shipwreck put an end to all farther discovery. The Spaniards saved themselves with difficulty in two small vessels. They hastened to get out of the mouth of the Amazon; and the currents, which in those parts run with violence to the north-west, led Ordaz to the coast of Paria where, in the territory of the cacique Yuripari (Uriapari, Viapari), Sedeno had constructed the Casa fuerte de Paria. This post being very near the mouth of the Orinoco, the Mexican Conquistador resolved to attempt an expedition on this great river. He sojourned first at Carao (Caroa, Carora), a large Indian village, which appears to me to have been a little to the east of the confluence of the Carony; he then went up the Cabruta (Cabuta, Cabritu), and to the mouth of the Meta (Metacuyu), where he found great difficulty in passing his boats through the Raudal of Cariven. The Aruacas, whom Ordaz employed as guides, advised him to go up the Meta; where, on advancing towards the west, they asserted he would find men clothed, and gold in abundance. Ordaz pursued in preference the navigation of the Orinoco, but the cataracts of Tabaje (perhaps even those of the Atures) compelled him to terminate his discoveries.

It is worthy of remark that in this voyage, far anterior to that of Orellana, and consequently the greatest which the Spaniards had then performed on a river of the New World, the name of the Orinoco was for the first time heard. Ordaz, the leader of the expedition, affirms that the river, from its mouth as far as the confluence of the Meta, is called Uriaparia, but that above this confluence it bears the name of Orinucu. This word (formed analogously with the words Tamanacu, Otomacu, Sinarucu) is, in fact, of the Tamanac tongue; and, as the Tamanacs dwell south-east of Encaramada, it is natural that the conquistadores heard the actual name of the river only on drawing near the Rio Meta.* (* Gili volume 3 page 381. The following are the most ancient names of the Orinoco, known to the natives near its mouth, and which historians give us altered by the double fault of pronunciation and orthography; Yuyapari, Yjupari, Huriaparia, Urapari, Viapari, Rio de Paria. The Tamanac word Orinucu was disfigured by the Dutch pilots into Worinoque. The Otomacs say Joga-apurura (great river); the Cabres and Guaypunabis, Paragua, Bazagua Parava, three words signifying great water, river, sea. That part of the Orinoco between the Apure and the Guaviare is often denoted by the name of Baraguan. A famous strait, which we have described above, bears also this name, which is no doubt a corruption of the word Paragua. Great rivers in every zone are called by the dwellers on their banks the river, without any particular denominations. If other names be added, they change in every province. Thus the Rio Turiva, near the Encaramada, has five names in the different parts of its course. The Upper Orinoco, or Paragua, is called by the Maquiritares (near Esmeralda) Maraguaca, on account of the lofty mountains of this name near Duida. Gili volume 1 pages 22 and 364. Caulin page 75. In most of the names of the rivers of America we recognize the root water. Thus yacu in the Peruvian, and veni in the Maypure tongues, signify water and river. In the Lule dialect I find fo, water; foyavolto, a river; foysi, a lake; as in Persian, ab is water; abi frat, the river Euphrates; abdan, a lake. The root water is preserved in the derivatives.) On this last tributary stream Diego de Ordaz received from the natives the first idea of civilized nations who inhabited the table-lands of the Andes of New Granada; of a very powerful prince with one eye (Indio tuerto), and of animals less than stags, but fit for riding like Spanish horses. Ordaz had no idea that these animals were llamas (ovejas del Peru). Must we admit that llamas, which were used in the Andes to draw the plough and as beasts of burden, but not for riding, were already common on the north and east of Quito? I find that Orellana saw these animals at the river Amazon, above the confluence of the Rio Negro, consequently in a climate very different from that of the table-land of the Andes. The table of an army of Omaguas mounted on llamas served to embellish the account given by the fellow-travellers of Felipe de Urre of their adventurous expedition to the Upper Caqueta. We cannot be sufficiently attentive to these traditions, which seem to prove that the domestic animals of Quito and Peru had already begun to descend the Cordilleras, and spread themselves by degrees in the eastern regions of South America.

Herrera, the treasurer of the expedition of Ordaz, was sent in 1553, by the governor Geronimo de Ortal, to pursue the discovery of the Orinoco and the Meta. He lost nearly thirteen months between Punta Barina and the confluence of the Carony in constructing flat-bottomed boats, and making the preparations indispensable for a long voyage. We cannot read without astonishment the narrative of those daring enterprises, in which three or four hundred horses were embarked to be put ashore whenever cavalry could act on one of the banks. We find in the expedition of Herrera the same stations which we already knew; the fortress of Paria, the Indian village of Uriaparia (no doubt below Imataca, on a point where the inundations of the delta prevented the Spaniards from being able to procure firewood), Caroa, in the province of Carora; the rivers Caranaca (Caura?) and Caxavana (Cuchivero?); the village of Cabritu (Cabruta), and the Raudal near the mouth of the Meta (probably the Raudal of Cariven and the Piedra de la Paciencia). As the Rio Meta, on account of the proximity of its sources and of its tributary streams to the auriferous Cordilleras of new Grenada (Cundinamarca), enjoyed great celebrity, Herrera attempted to go up this river. He there found nations more civilized than those of the Orinoco, but that fed on the flesh of mute dogs. Herrera was killed in battle by an arrow poisoned with the juice of curare (yierva); and when dying named Alvaro de Ordaz his lieutenant, who led the remains of the expedition (1535) to the fortress of Paria, after having lost the few horses which had resisted a campaign of eighteen months.

Confused reports which were circulated of the wealth of the inhabitants of the Meta, and the other tributary streams that descend from the eastern side of the Cordilleras of New Grenada, engaged successively Geronimo de Ortal, Nicolas Federmann, and Jorge de Espira (George von Speier), in 1535 and 1536, to undertake expeditions by land towards the south and south-west. From the promontory of Paria, as far as Cabo de la Vela, little figures of molten gold had been found in the hands of the natives, as early as the years 1498 and 1500. The principal markets for these amulets, which the women used as ornaments, were the villages of Curiana (Coro) and Cauchieto (Near the Rio la Hacha). The metal employed by the founders of Cauchieto came from a mountainous country more to the south. It may be conceived that the expeditions of Ordaz and Herrera served to increase the desire of drawing nearer to those auriferous countries. George von Speier left Coro (1535), and penetrated by the mountains of Merida to the banks of the Apure and the Meta. He passed these two rivers near their sources, where they have but little breadth. The Indians told him that, farther on, white men wandered about the plains. Speier, who imagined that he was not far from the banks of the Amazon, had no doubt that these wandering Spaniards were men unfortunately shipwrecked in the expedition of Ordaz. He crossed the savannahs of San Juan de los Llanos, which were said to abound in gold; and made a long stay at an Indian village called Pueblo de Nuestra Senora, and afterwards La Fragua, south-east of the Paramo de la Suma Paz. I have been on the western back of this group of mountains, at Fusagasuga, and there heard that the plains by which they are skirted toward the east still enjoy some celebrity for wealth among the natives. Speier found in the populous village of La Fragua a Casa del Sol (temple of the sun), and a convent of virgins similar to those of Peru and New Granada. Were these the consequence of a migration of religious rites towards the east? or must we admit that the plains of San Juan were their first cradle? Tradition, indeed, records that Bochica, the legislator of New Granada and high-priest of Iraca, had gone up from the plains of the east to the table-land of Bogota. But Bochica being at once the offspring and the symbol of the sun, his history may contain allegories that are merely astrological. Speier, pursuing his way toward the south, and crossing the two branches of the Guaviare, which are the Ariare and the Guayavero (Guayare or Canicamare), arrived on the banks of the great Rio Papamene or Caqueta. The resistance he met with during a whole year in the province de los Choques, put an end, in 1537, to this memorable expedition. Nicolas Federmann and Geronimo de Ortal (1536), who went from Macarapana and the mouth of the Rio Neveri, followed (1535) the traces of Jorge de Espira. The former sought for gold in the Rio Grande de la Magdalena; the latter endeavoured to discover a temple of the sun (Casa del Sol) on the banks of the Meta. Ignorant of the idiom of the natives, they seemed to see everywhere, at the foot of the Cordilleras, the reflexion of the greatness of the temples of Iraca (Sogamozo), which was then the centre of the civilization of Cundinamarca.

I have now examined, in a geographical point of view, the expeditions on the Orinoco, and in a western and southern direction on the eastern back of the Andes, before the tradition of El Dorado was spread among the conquistadores. This tradition, as we have noticed above, had its origin in the kingdom of Quito, where Luis Daza (1535) met with an Indian of New Grenada who had been sent by his prince (no doubt the zippa of Bogota, or the zaque of Tunja), to demand assistance from Atahualpa, inca of Peru. This ambassador boasted, as is usual, the wealth of his country; but what particularly fixed the attention of the Spaniards who were assembled with Daza in the town of Tacunga (Llactacunga), was the history of a lord who, his body covered with powdered gold, went into a lake amid the mountains. This lake may have been the Laguna de Totta, a little to the east of Sogamozo (Iraca) and of Tunja (Hunca, the town of Huncahua), where two chiefs, ecclesiastical and secular, of the empire of Cundinamarca, or Cundirumarca, resided; but no historical remembrance being attached to this mountain lake, I rather suppose that it was the sacred lake of Guatavita, on the east of the mines of rock-salt of Zipaquira, into which the gilded lord was made to enter. I saw on its banks the remains of a staircase hewn in the rock, and serving for the ceremonies of ablution. The Indians said that powder of gold and golden vessels were thrown into this lake, as a sacrifice to the adoratorio de Guatavita. Vestiges are still found of a breach which was made by the Spaniards for the purpose of draining the lake. The temple of the sun at Sogamozo being pretty near the northern coasts of Terra Firma, the notions of the gilded man were soon applied to a high-priest of the sect of Bochica, or Indacanzas, who every morning, before he performed his sacrifice, caused powder of gold to be stuck upon his hands and face, after they had been smeared with grease. Other accounts, preserved in a letter of Oviedo addressed to the celebrated cardinal Bembo, say that Gonzalo Pizarro, when he discovered the province of cinnamon-trees, "sought at the same time a great prince, noised in those countries, who was always covered with powdered gold, so that from head to foot he resembled an image of gold fashioned by the hand of a skilful workman (a una figura d'oro lavorato di mano d'un buonissimo orefice). The powdered gold is fixed to the body by means of an odoriferous resin; but, as this kind of garment would be uneasy to him while he slept, the prince washes himself every evening, and is gilded anew in the morning, which proves that the empire of El Dorado is infinitely rich in mines." It seems probable that there was something in the ceremonies of the worship introduced by Bochica which gave rise to a tradition so generally spread. The strangest customs are found in the New World. In Mexico the sacrificers painted their bodies and wore a kind of cape, with hanging sleeves of tanned human skin.

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Part 3 of 3

On the banks of the Caura, and in other wild parts of Guiana, where painting the body is used instead of tattooing, the nations anoint themselves with turtle-fat, and stick spangles of mica with a metallic lustre, white as silver and red as copper, on their skin, so that at a distance they seem to wear laced clothes. The fable of the gilded man is, perhaps, founded on a similar custom; and, as there were two sovereign princes in New Granada, the lama of Iraca and the secular chief or zaque of Tunja, we cannot be surprised that the same ceremony was attributed sometimes to the prince and sometimes to the high-priest. It is more extraordinary that, as early as the year 1535, the country of El Dorado was sought for on the east of the Andes. Robertson is mistaken in admitting that Orellana received the first notions of it (1540) on the banks of the Amazon. The history of Fray Piedro Simon, founded on the memoirs of Queseda, the conqueror of Cundirumarca, proves directly the contrary; and Gonzalo Diaz de Pineda, as early as 1536, sought for the gilded man beyond the plains of the province of Quixos. The ambassador of Bogota, whom Daza met with in the kingdom of Quito, had spoken of a country situate toward the east. Was this because the table-land of New Granada is not on the north, but on the north-east of Quito? We may venture to say that the tradition of a naked man covered with powdered gold must have belonged originally to a hot region, and not to the cold table-lands of Cundirumarca, where I often saw the thermometer sink below four or five degrees; however, on account of the extraordinary configuration of the country, the climate differs greatly at Guatavita, Tunja, Iraca, and on the banks of the Sogamozo. Sometimes, also, religious ceremonies are preserved which took rise in another zone; and the Muyscas, according to ancient traditions, made Bochica, their first legislator and the founder of their worship, arrive from the plains situate to the east of the Cordilleras. I shall not decide whether these traditions expressed an historical fact, or merely indicated, as we have already observed in another place, that the first Lama, who was the offspring and symbol of the sun, must necessarily have come from the countries of the East. Be it as it may, it is not less certain that the celebrity which the expeditions of Ordaz, Herrera, and Speier had already given to the Orinoco, the Meta, and the province of Papamene, situate between the sources of the Guaviare and Caqueta, contributed to fix the fable of El Dorado near to the eastern back of the Cordilleras.

The junction of three bodies of troops on the table-land of New Granada spread through all that part of America occupied by the Spaniards the news of an immensely rich and populous country which remained to be conquered. Sebastian de Belalcazar marched from Quito by way of Popayan (1536) to Bogota; Nicholas Federmann, coming from Venezuela, arrived from the east by the plains of Meta. These two captains found, already settled on the table-land of Cundirumarca, the famous Adelantado Gonzalo Ximenez de Queseda, one of whose descendants I saw near Zipaquira, with bare feet, attending cattle. The fortuitous meeting of the three conquistadores, one of the most extraordinary and dramatic events of the history of the conquest, took place in 1538. Belalcazar's narratives inflamed the imagination of warriors eager for adventurous enterprises; and the notions communicated to Luis Daza by the Indian of Tacunga were compared with the confused ideas which Ordaz had collected on the Meta respecting the treasures of a great king with one eye (Indio tuerto), and a people clothed, who rode upon llamas. An old soldier, Pedro de Limpias, who had accompanied Federmann to the table-land of Bogota, carried the first news of El Dorado to Coro, where the remembrance of the expedition of Speier (1535 to 1537) to the Rio Papamene was still fresh. It was from this same town of Coro that Felipe von Huten (Urre, Utre) undertook his celebrated voyage to the province of the Omaguas, while Pizarro, Orellana, and Hernan Perez de Quesada, brother of the Adelantado, sought for the gold country at the Rio Napo, along the river of the Amazons, and on the eastern chain of the Andes of New Grenada. The natives, in order to get rid of their troublesome guests, continually described Dorado as easy to be reached, and situate at no considerable distance. It was like a phantom that seemed to flee before the Spaniards, and to call on them unceasingly. It is in the nature of man, wandering on the earth, to figure to himself happiness beyond the region which he knows. El Dorado, similar to Atlas and the islands of the Hesperides, disappeared by degrees from the domain of geography, and entered that of mythological fictions.

I shall not here relate the numerous enterprises which were undertaken for the conquest of this imaginary country. Unquestionably we are indebted to them in great part for our knowledge of the interior of America; they have been useful to geography, as errors and daring hypotheses are often to the search of truth: but in the discussion on which we are employed, it is incumbent on me to rest only upon those facts which have had the most direct influence on the construction of ancient and modern maps. Hernan Perez de Quesada, after the departure of his brother the Adelantado for Europe, sought anew (1539) but this time in the mountainous land north-east of Bogota, the temple of the sun (Casa del Sol), of which Geronimo de Ortal had heard spoken in 1536 on the banks of the Meta. The worship of the sun introduced by Bochica, and the celebrity of the sanctuary of Iraca, or Sogamozo, gave rise to those confused reports of temples and idols of massy gold; but on the mountains as in the plains, the traveller believed himself to be always at a distance from them, because the reality never corresponded with the chimerical dreams of the imagination. Francisco de Orellana, after having vainly sought El Dorado with Pizarro in the Provincia de los Canelos, and on the auriferous banks of the Napo, went down (1540) the great river of the Amazon. He found there, between the mouths of the Javari and the Rio de la Trinidad (Yupura?) a province rich in gold, called Machiparo (Muchifaro), in the vicinity of that of the Aomaguas, or Omaguas. These notions contributed to carry El Dorado toward the south-east, for the names Omaguas (Om-aguas, Aguas), Dit-Aguas, and Papamene, designated the same country—that which Jorge de Espira had discovered in his expedition to the Caqueta. The Omaguas, the Manaos or Manoas, and the Guaypes (Uaupes or Guayupes) live in the plains on the north of the Amazon. They are three powerful nations, the latter of which, stretching toward the west along the banks of the Guape or Uaupe, had been already mentioned in the voyages of Quesada and Huten. These two conquistadores, alike celebrated in the history of America, reached by different roads the llanos of San Juan, then called Valle de Nuestra Senora. Hernan Perez de Quesada (1541) passed the Cordilleras of Cundirumarca, probably between the Paramos of Chingasa and Suma Paz; while Felipe de Huten, accompanied by Pedro de Limpias (the same who had carried to Venezuela the first news of Dorado from the land of Bogota), directed his course from north to south, by the road which Speier had taken to the eastern side of the mountains. Huten left Coro, the principal seat of the German factory or company of Welser, when Henry Remboldt was its director. After having traversed (1541) the plains of Casanare, the Meta, and the Caguan, he arrived at the banks of the Upper Guaviare (Guayuare), a river which was long believed to be the source of the Orinoco, and the mouth of which I saw in passing by San Fernando de Atabapo to the Rio Negro. Not far from the right bank of the Guaviare, Huten entered Macatoa, the city of the Guapes. The people there were clothed, the fields appeared well cultivated; everything denoted a degree of civilization unknown in the hot region of America which extends to the east of the Cordilleras. Speier, in his expedition to the Rio Caqueta and the province of Papamene, had probably crossed the Guaviare far above Macatoa, before the junction of the two branches of this river, the Ariari and the Guayavero. Huten was told that on advancing more to the south-east he would enter the territory of the great nation of the Omaguas, the priest-king of which was called Quareca, and which possessed numerous herds of llamas. These traces of cultivation—these ancient resemblances to the table-land of Quito—appear to me very remarkable. It has already been said above that Orellana saw llamas at the dwelling of an Indian chief on the banks of the Amazon, and that Ordaz had heard mention made of them in the plains of Meta.

I pause where ends the domain of geography and shall not follow Huten in the description either of that town of immense extent, which he saw from afar; or of the battle of the Omaguas, where thirty-nine Spaniards (the names of fourteen are recorded in the annals of the time) fought against fifteen thousand Indians. These false reports contributed greatly to embellish the fable of El Dorado. The name of the town of the Omaguas is not found in the narrative of Huten; but the Manoas, from whom Father Fritz received, in the seventeenth century, plates of beaten gold, in his mission of Yurim-Aguas, are neighbours of the Omaguas. The name of Manoa subsequently passed from the country of the Amazons to an imaginary town, placed in El Dorado de la Parima. The celebrity attached to those countries between the Caqueta (Papamene) and the Guaupe (one of the tributary streams of the Rio Negro) excited Pedro de Ursua, in 1560, to that fatal expedition, which ended by the revolt of the tyrant Aguirre. Ursua, in going down the Caqueta to enter the river of the Amazons, heard of the province of Caricuri. This denomination clearly indicates the country of gold; for I find that this metal is called caricuri in the Tamanac, and carucuru in the Caribbee. Is it a foreign word that denotes gold among the nations of the Orinoco, as the words sugar and cotton are in our European languages? This would prove that these nations learned to know the precious metals among the foreign products which came to them from the Cordilleras,* or from the plains at the eastern back of the Andes. (* In Peruvian or Quichua (lengua del Inca) gold is called cori, whence are derived chichicori, gold in powder, and corikoya, gold-ore.)

We arrive now at the period when the fable of El Dorado was fixed in the eastern part of Guiana, first at the pretended lake Cassipa (on the banks of the Paragua, a tributary stream of the Carony), and afterwards between the sources of the Rio Essequibo and the Rio Branco. This circumstance has had the greatest influence on the state of geography in those countries. Antonio de Berrio, son-in-law* (* Properly casado con una sobrina. Fray Pedro Simon pages 597 and 608. Harris Coll. volume 2 page 212. Laet page 652. Caulin page 175. Raleigh calls Quesada Cemenes de Casada. He also confounds the periods of the voyages of Ordaz (Ordace), Orellana (Oreliano), and Ursua. See Empire of Guiana pages 13 to 20.) and sole heir of the great Adelantado Gonzalo Ximenez de Quesada, passed the Cordilleras to the east of Tunja,* (* No doubt between the Paramos of Chita and of Zoraca, taking the road of Chire and Pore. Berrio told Raleigh that he came from the Casanare to the Pato, from the Pato to the Meta, and from the Meta to the Baraguan (Orinoco). We must not confound this Rio Pato (a name connected no doubt with that of the ancient mission of Patuto) with the Rio Paute.) embarked on the Rio Casanare, and went down by this river, the Meta, and the Orinoco, to the island of Trinidad. We scarcely know this voyage except by the narrative of Raleigh; it appears to have preceded a few years the first foundation of Vieja Guayana, which was in the year 1591. A few years later (1595) Berrio caused his maese de campo, Domingo de Vera, to prepare in Europe an expedition of two thousand men to go up the Orinoco, and conquer El Dorado, which then began to be called the country of the Manoa, and even the Laguna de la gran Manoa. Rich landholders sold their farms, to take part in a crusade, to which twelve Observantin monks, and ten secular ecclesiastics were annexed. The tales related by one Martinez* (Juan Martin de Albujar?), who said he had been abandoned in the expedition of Diego de Ordaz, and led from town to town till he reached the capital of El Dorado, had inflamed the imagination of Berrio. (* I believe I can demonstrate that the fable of Juan Martinez, spread abroad by the narrative of Raleigh, was founded on the adventures of Juan Martin de Albujar, well known to the Spanish historians of the Conquest; and who, in the expedition of Pedro de Silva (1570), fell into the hands of the Caribs of the Lower Orinoco. This Albujar married an Indian woman and became a savage himself, as happens sometimes in our own days on the western limits of Canada and of the United States. After having long wandered with the Caribs, the desire of rejoining the Whites led him by the Rio Essequibo to the island of Trinidad. He made several excursions to Santa Fe de Bogota, and at length settled at Carora. (Simon page 591). I know not whether he died at Porto Rico; but it cannot be doubted that it was he who learned from the Carib traders the name of the Manoas [of Jurubesh]. As he lived on the banks of the Upper Carony and reappeared by the Rio Essequibo, he may have contributed also to place the lake Manoa at the isthmus of Rupunuwini. Raleigh makes his Juan Martinez embark below Morequito, a village at the east of that confluence of the Carony with the Orinoco. Thence he makes him dragged by the Caribs from town to town, till he finds at Manoa a relation of the inca Atabalipa (Atahualpa), whom he had known before at Caxamarca, and who had fled before the Spaniards. It appears that Raleigh had forgotten that the voyage of Ordaz (1531) was two years anterior to the death of Atahualpa and the entire destruction of the empire of Peru! He must have confounded the expedition of Ordaz with that of Silva (1570), in which Juan Martin de Albuzar partook. The latter, who related his tales at Santa Fe, at Venezuela, and perhaps at Porto Rico, must have combined what he had heard from the Caribs with what he had learned from the Spaniards respecting the town of the Omaguas seen by Huten; of the gilded man who sacrificed in a lake, and of the flight of the family of Atahualpa into the forests of Vilcabamba, and the eastern Cordillera of the Andes. Garcilasso volume 2 page 194.) It is difficult to distinguish what this conquistador had himself observed in going down the Orinoco from what he said he had collected in a pretended journal of Martinez, deposited at Porto Rico. It appears that in general at that period the same ideas prevailed respecting America as those which we have long entertained in regard to Africa; it was imagined that more civilization would be found towards the centre of the continent than on the coasts. Already Juan Gonzalez, whom Diego de Ordaz had sent in 1531 to explore the banks of the Orinoco, announced that "the farther you went up this river the more you saw the population increase." Berrio mentions the often-inundated province of Amapaja, between the confluence of the Meta and the Cuchivero, where he found many little idols of molten gold, similar to those which were fabricated at Cauchieto, east of Coro. He believed this gold to be a product of the granitic soil that covers the mountainous country between the Carichana, Uruana, and Cuchivero. In fact the natives have recently found a mass of native gold in the Quebrada del Tigre near the mission of Encaramada. Berrio mentions on the east of the province of Amapaja the Rio Carony (Caroly), which was said to issue from a great lake, because one of the tributary streams of the Carony, the Rio Paragua (river of the great water), had been taken for an inland sea, from ignorance of the Indian languages. Several of the Spanish historians believed that this lake, the source of the Carony, was the Grand Manoa of Berrio; but the notions he communicated to Raleigh show that the Laguna de Manoa (del Dorado, or de Parime) was supposed to be to the south of the Rio Paragua, transformed into Laguna Cassipa. "Both these basins had auriferous sands; but on the banks of the Cassipa was situate Macureguarai (Margureguaira), the capital of the cacique of Aromaja, and the first city of the imaginary empire of Guyana."

As these often-inundated lands have been at all times inhabited by nations of Carib race, who carried on a very active inland trade with the most distant regions, we must not be surprised that more gold was found here in the hands of the Indians than elsewhere. The natives of the coast did not employ this metal in the form of ornaments or amulets only; but also as a medium of exchange. It is not extraordinary, therefore, that gold has disappeared on the coast of Paria, and among the nations of the Orinoco, their inland communications have been impeded by the Europeans. The natives who have remained independent are in our days, no doubt, more wretched, more indolent, and in a ruder state, than they were before the conquest. The king of Morequito, whose son Raleigh took to England, had visited Cumana in 1594, to exchange a great quantity of images of massy gold for iron tools, and European merchandise. The unexpected appearance of an Indian chief augmented the celebrity of the riches of the Orinoco. It was supposed that El Dorado must be near the country from which the king of Morequito came; and as this country was often inundated, and rivers vaguely called great seas, or great basins of water, El Dorado must be on the banks of a lake. It was forgotten that the gold brought by the Caribs and other trading people was as little the produce of the soil as the diamonds of Brazil and India are the produce of the regions of Europe, where they are most abundant. The expedition of Berrio which had increased in number during the stay of the vessels at Cumana, La Margareta, and the island of Trinidad, proceeded by Morequito (near Vieja Guayana) towards the Rio Paragua, a tributary stream of the Carony; but sickness, the ferocity of the natives, and the want of subsistence, opposed invincible obstacles to the progress of the Spaniards. They all perished; except about thirty, who returned in a deplorable state to the post of Santo Thome.

These disasters did not calm the ardour displayed during the first half of the 17th century in the search of El Dorado. The Governor of the island of Trinidad, Antonio de Berrio, became the prisoner of Sir Walter Raleigh in the celebrated incursion of that navigator, in 1595, on the coast of Venezuela and at the mouths of the Orinoco. Raleigh collected from Berrio, and from other prisoners made by Captain Preston* at the taking of Caracas, all the information which had been obtained at that period on the countries situate to the south of Vieya Guayana. (* These prisoners belonged to the expedition of Berrio and of Hernandez de Serpa. The English landed at Macuto (then Guayca Macuto), whence a white man, Villalpando, led them by a mountain-path between Cumbre and the Silla (perhaps passing over the ridge of Galipano) to the town of Caracas. Simon page 594; Raleigh page 19. Those only who are acquainted with the situation can be sensible how difficult and daring this enterprise was.) He lent faith to the fables invented by Juan Martin de Albujar, and entertained no doubt either of the existence of the two lakes Cassipa and Rupunuwini, or of that of the great empire of the Inca, which, after the death of Atahualpa, the fugitive princes were supposed to have founded near the sources of the Essequibo. We are not in possession of a map that was constructed by Raleigh, and which he recommended to lord Charles Howard to keep secret. The geographer Hondius has filled up this void; and has even added to his map a table of longitudes and latitudes, among which figure the laguna del Dorado, and the Ville Imperiale de Manoas. Raleigh, when at anchor near the Punta del Gallo* in the island of Trinidad (* The northern part of La Punta de Icacos, which is the south-east cape of the island of Trinidad. Christopher Columbus cast anchor there on August 3, 1498. A great confusion exists in the denomination of the different capes of the island of Trinidad; and as recently, since the expedition of Fidalgo and Churruca, the Spaniards reckon the longitudes in South America west of La Punta de la Galera (latitude 10 degrees 50 minutes, longitude 63 degrees 20 minutes), it is important to fix the attention of geographers on this point. Columbus called the south-east cape of the island Punta Galera, on account of the form of a rock. From Punta de la Galera he sailed to the west and landed at a low cape, which he calls Punta del Arenal; this is our Punta de Icacos. In this passage, near a place (Punta de la Playa) where he stopped to take in water (perhaps at the mouth of the Rio Erin), he saw to the south, for the first time, the continent of America, which he called Isla Santa. It was, therefore, the eastern coast of the province of Cumana, to the east of the Cano Macareo, near Punta Redonda, and not the mountainous coast of Paria (Isla de Gracia, of Columbus), which was first discovered.), made his lieutenants explore the mouths of the Orinoco, principally those of Capuri, Grand Amana (Manamo Grande), and Macureo (Macareo). As his ships drew a great deal of water, he found it difficult to enter the bocas chicas, and was obliged to construct flat-bottomed barks. He remarked the fires of the Tivitivas (Tibitibies), of the race of the Guaraon Indians, on the tops of the mauritia palm-trees; and appears to have first brought the fruit to Europe (fructum squamosum, similem palmae pini). I am surprised, that he scarcely mentions the settlement, which had been made by Berrio under the name of Santo Thome (la Vieja Guayana.) This settlement however dates from 1591; and though, according to Fray Pedro Simon, "religion and policy prohibited all mercantile connection between Christians [Spaniards] and Heretics [the Dutch and English]," there was then carried on at the end of the sixteenth century, as in our days, an active contraband trade by the mouths of the Orinoco. Raleigh passed the river Europa (Guarapo), and "the plains of Saymas (Chaymas), which extend, keeping the same level, as far as Cumana and Caracas;" he stopped at Morequito (perhaps a little to the north of the site of the villa de Upata, in the missions of the Carony), where an old cacique confirmed to him all the reveries of Berrio on the irruption of foreign nations (Orejones and Epuremei) into Guiana. The Raudales or cataracts of the Caroli (Carony), a river which was at that period considered as the shortest way for reaching the towns of Macureguarai and Manoa, situate on the banks of lake Cassipa and of lake Rupunuwini or Dorado, put an end to this expedition.

Raleigh went scarcely the distance of sixty leagues along the Orinoco; but he names the upper tributary streams, according to the vague notions he had collected; the Cari, the Pao, the Apure (Capuri?) the Guarico (Voari?) the Meta,* and even, "in the province of Baraguan, the great cataract of Athule (Atures), which prevents all further navigation." (* Raleigh distinguishes the Meta from the Beta, which flows into the Baraguan (the Orinoco) conjointly with the Daune, near Athule; as he distinguishes the Casanare, a tributary stream of the Meta, and the Casnero, which comes from the south, and appears to be the Rio Cuchivero. All above the confluence of the Apure was then very confusedly known; and streams that flow into the tributary streams of the Orinoco were considered as flowing into this river itself. The Apure (Capuri) and Meta appeared long to be the same river on account of their proximity, and the numerous branches by which the Arauca and the Apure join each other. Is the name of Beta perchance connected with that of the nation of Betoyes, of the plains of the Casanare and the Meta? Hondius and the geographers who have followed him, with the exception of De L'Isle (1700), and of Sanson (1656), place the province of Amapaja erroneously to the east of the Orinoco. We see clearly by the narrative of Raleigh (pages 26 and 72), that Amapaja is the inundated country between the Meta and the Guarico. Where are the rivers Dauney and Ubarro? The Guaviare appears to me to be the Goavar of Raleigh.) Notwithstanding Raleigh's exaggeration, so little worthy of a statesman, his narrative contains important materials for the history of geography. The Orinoco above the confluence of the Apure was at that period as little known to Europeans, as in our time the course of the Niger below Sego. The names of several very remote tributary streams were known, but not their situation; and when the same name, differently pronounced, or not properly apprehended by the ear, furnished different sounds, their number was multiplied. Other errors had perhaps their source in the little interest which Antonio de Berrio, the Spanish governor, felt in communicating true and precise notions to Raleigh, who indeed complains of his prisoner, "as being utterly unlearned, and not knowing the east from the west." I shall not here discuss the point how far the belief of Raleigh, in all he relates of inland seas similar to the Caspian sea; on "the imperial and golden city of Manoa," and on the magnificent palaces built by the emperor Inga of Guyana, in imitation of those of his ancestors at Peru, was real or pretended. The learned historian of Brazil, Mr. Southey, and the biographer of Raleigh, Sir G. Cayley, have recently thrown much light on this subject. It seems to me difficult to doubt of the extreme credulity of the chief of the expedition, and of his lieutenants. We see Raleigh adapted everything to the hypotheses he had previously formed. He was certainly deceived himself; but when he sought to influence the imagination of queen Elizabeth, and execute the projects of his own ambitious policy, he neglected none of the artifices of flattery. He described to the Queen "the transports of those barbarous nations at the sight of her picture;" he would have "the name of the august virgin, who knows how to conquer empires, reach as far as the country of the warlike women of the Orinoco and the Amazon;" he asserts that "at the period when the Spaniards overthrew the throne of Cuzco, an ancient prophecy was found, which predicted that the dynasty of the Incas would one day owe its restoration to Great Britain;" he advises that "on pretext of defending the territory against external enemies, garrisons of three or four thousand English should be placed in the towns of the Inca, obliging this prince to pay a contribution annually to Queen Elizabeth of three hundred thousand pounds sterling;" finally he adds, like a man who foresees the future, that "all the vast countries of South America will one day belong to the English nation."* (* "I showed them her Majesty's picture, which the Casigui so admired and honoured, as it had been easy to have brought them idolatrous thereof. And I further remember that Berreo confessed to me and others (which I protest before the majesty of God to be true), that there was found among prophecies at Peru (at such a time as the empire was reduced to the Spanish obedience) in their chiefest temple, among divers others which foreshowed the losse of the said empyre, that from Inglatierra those Ingas should be again in time to come restored. The Inga would yield to her Majesty by composition many hundred thousand pounds yearely as to defend him against all enemies abroad and defray the expenses of a garrison of 3000 or 4000 soldiers. It seemeth to me that this Empyre of Guiana is reserved for the English nation." (Raleigh pages 7, 17, 51 and 100.)

The four voyages of Raleigh to the Lower Orinoco succeeded each other from 1595 to 1617. After all these useless attempts the ardour of research after El Dorado has greatly diminished. No expeditions have since been formed by a numerous band of colonists; but some solitary enterprises have been encouraged by the governors of the provinces. The notions spread by the journeys of Father Acunha in 1688, and Father Fritz in 1637, to the auriferous land of the Manoas of Jurubesh, and to the Laguna de Ore, contributed to renew the ideas of El Dorado in the Portuguese and Spanish colonies north and south of the equator. At Cuenza, in the kingdom of Quito, I met with some men, who were employed by the bishop Marfil to seek at the east of the Cordilleras, in the plains of Macas, the ruins of the town of Logrono, which was believed to be situate in a country rich in gold. We learn by the journal of Hortsmann, which I have often quoted, that it was supposed, in 1740, El Dorado might be reached from Dutch Guiana by going up the Rio Essequibo. Don Manuel Centurion, the governor of Santo Thome del Angostura, displayed an extreme ardour for reaching the imaginary lake of Manoa. Arimuicaipi, an Indian of the nation of the Ipurucotos, went down the Rio Carony, and by his false narrations inflamed the imagination of the Spanish colonists. He showed them in the southern sky the Clouds of Magellan, the whitish light of which he said was the reflection of the argentiferous rocks situate in the middle of the Laguna Parima. This was describing in a very poetical manner the splendour of the micaceous and talcy slates of his country! Another Indian chief, known among the Caribs of Essequibo by the name El Capitan Jurado, vainly attempted to undeceive the governor Centurion. Fruitless attempts were made by the Caura and the Rio Paragua; and several hundred persons perished miserably in these rash enterprises, from which, however, geography has derived some advantages. Nicolas Rodriguez and Antonio Santos (1775 to 1780) were employed by the Spanish governor. Santos, proceeding by the Carony, the Paragua, the Paraguamusi, the Anocapra, and the mountains of Pacaraymo and Quimiropaca, reached the Uraricuera and the Rio Branco. I found some valuable information in the journals of these perilous expeditions.

The maritime charts which the Florentine traveller, Amerigo Vespucci,* constructed in the early years of the sixteenth century, as Piloto mayor de la Casa de Contratacion of Seville, and in which he placed, perhaps artfully, the words Tierra de Amerigo, have not reached our times. (* He died in 1512, as Mr. Munoz has proved by the documents of the archives of Simancas. Hist. del Nuevo Mundo volume 1 page 17. Tiraboschi, Storia della Litteratura.) The most ancient monument we possess of the geography of the New Continent,* is the map of the world by John Ruysch, annexed to a Roman edition of Ptolemy in 1508. (* See the learned researches of M. Walckenaer, in the Bibliographie Universelle volume 6 page 209 article Buckinck. On the maps added to Ptolemy in 1506 we find no trace of the discoveries of Columbus.) We there find Yucatan and Honduras (the most southern part of Mexico)* figured as an island, by the name of Culicar. (* No doubt the lands between Uucatan, Cape Gracias a Dios, and Veragua, discovered by Columbus (1502 and 1503), by Solis, and by Pincon (1506).) There is no isthmus of Panama, but a passage, which permits of a direct navigation from Europe to India. The great southern island (South America) bears the name of Terra de Pareas, bounded by two rivers, the Rio Lareno and the Rio Formoso. These Pareas are, no doubt, the inhabitants of Paria, a name which Christopher Columbus had already heard in 1498, and which was long applied to a great part of America. Bishop Geraldini says clearly, in a letter addressed to Pope Leo X in 1516: Insula illa, quae Europa et Asia est major, quam indocti Continentem Asiae appellant, et alii Americam vel Pariam nuncupant [that island, larger than Europe and Asia joined together, which the unlearned call the continent of Asia, and others America or Paria].* (* Alexandri Geraldini Itinerarium page 250.) I find in the map of the world of 1508 no trace whatever of the Orinoco. This river appears, for the first time, by the name of Rio Dolce, on the celebrated map constructed in 1529 by Diego Ribeyro, cosmographer of the emperor Charles V, which was published, with a learned commentary, by M. Sprengel, in 1795. Neither Columbus (1498) nor Alonzo de Ojeda, accompanied by Amerigo Vespucci (1499), had seen the real mouth of the Orinoco; they confounded it with the northern opening of the Gulf of Paria, to which they attributed (by an exaggeration so common to the navigators of that time, an immense volume of fresh water. It was Vicente Yanez Pincon, who, after having discovered the mouth of the Rio Maranon,* first saw, in 1500, that of the Orinoco. (* The name of Maranon was known fifty-nine years before the expedition of Lopez de Aguirre; the denomination of the river is therefore erroneously attributed to the nickname of maranos (hogs), which this adventurer gave his companions in going down the river Amazon. Was not this vulgar jest rather an allusion to the Indian name of the river?) He called this river Rio Dolce—a name which, since Ribeyro, was long preserved on our maps, and which has sometimes been given erroneously to the Maroni and to the Essequibo.

The great Lake Parima did not appear on our maps* till after the first voyage of Raleigh. (* I find no trace of it on a very rare map, dedicated to Richard Hakluyt, and constructed on the meridian of Toledo. Novus Orbis, Paris 1587. In this map, published before the voyage of Quiros, a group of Islands is marked (Infortunatae Insulae) where the Friendly Islands actually are. Ortelius (1570) already knew them. Were they islands seen by Magellan?) It was Jodocus Hondius who, as early as the year 1599, fixed the ideas of geographers and figured the interior of Spanish Guiana as a country well known. He transformed the isthmus between the Rio Branco and the Rio Rupunuwini (one of the tributary streams of the Essequibo) into the lake Rupunuwini, Parima, or Dorado, two hundred leagues long, and forty broad, and bounded by the latitudes of 1 degree 45 minutes south, and 2 degrees north. This inland sea, larger than the Caspian, is sometimes traced in the midst of a mountainous country, without communication with any river;* (* See, for instance, Hondius, Nieuwe Caerte van het goudrycke landt Guiana, 1599; and Sanson's Map of America, in 1656 and 1669.) and sometimes the Rio Oyapok (Waiapago, Japoc, Viapoco) and the Rio de Cayana are made to issue from it.* (* Brasilia et Caribaua, auct. Hondio et Huelsen 1599.) The first of these rivers, confounded in the eighth article of the treaty of Utrecht with the Rio de Vicente Pincon (Rio Calsoene of D'Anville), has been, even down to the late congress of Vienna, the subject of interminable discussions between the French and Portuguese diplomatists.* (* I have treated this question in a Memoire sur la fixation des limites de La Guyane Francaise, written at the desire of the Portuguese government during the negotiations of Paris in 1817. (See Schoell, Archives polit. or Pieces inedites volume 1 pages 48 to 58.) Ribeyro, in his celebrated map of the world of 1529, places the Rio de Vicente Pincon south of the Amazon, near the Gulf of Maranhao. This navigator landed at this spot, after having been at Cape Saint Augustin, and before he reached the mouth of the Amazon. Herrera dec. I page 107. The narrative of Gomara, Hist. Nat. 1553 page 48, is very confused in a geographical point of view.) The second is an imaginary prolongation either of the Tonnegrande or of the Oyac (Wia?). The inland sea (Laguna Parime) was at first placed in such a manner that its western extremity coincided with the meridian of the confluence of the Apure and the Orinoco. By degrees it was advanced toward the east,* the western extremity being found to the south of the mouth of the Orinoco. (* Compare the maps of 1599 with those of Sanson (1656) and of Blaeuw (1633).) This change produced others in the respective situations of the lakes Parima and Cassipa, as well as in the direction of the course of the Orinoco. This great river is represented as running from its delta as far as beyond the Meta, from south to north, like the river Magdalena. The tributary streams, therefore, which were made to issue from the lake Cassipa, the Carony, the Arui, and the Caura, then took the direction of the latitude, while in nature they follow that of a meridian. Beside the lakes Parima and Cassipa, a third was traced upon the maps, from which the Aprouague (Apurwaca) was made to issue. It was then a general practice among geographers to attach all rivers to great lakes. By this means Ortelius joined the Nile to the Zaire or Rio Congo, and the Vistula to the Wolga and the Dnieper. North of Mexico, in the pretended kingdoms of Quivira and Cibola, rendered celebrated by the falsehoods of the monk Marcos de Niza, a great inland sea was imagined, from which the Rio Colorado of California was made to issue.* (* This is the Mexican Dorado, where it was pretended that vessels had been found on the coasts [of New Albion?] loaded with the merchandise of Catayo and China (Gomara, Hist. Gen. page 117), and where Fray Marcos (like Huten in the country of the Omaguas) had seen from afar the gilded roofs of a great town, one of the Siete Ciudades. The inhabitants have great dogs, en los quales quando se mudan cargan su menage. (Herrera dec. 6 pages 157 and 206.) Later discoveries, however, leave no doubt that there existed a centre of civilization in those countries.) A branch of the Rio Magdalena flowed to the Laguna de Maracaybo; and the lake of Xarayes, near which a southern Dorado was placed, communicated with the Amazon, the Miari* (Meary) (* As this river flows into the gulf of Maranhao (so named because some French colonists, Rifault, De Vaux, and Ravadiere, believed they were opposite the mouth of the Maranon or Amazon), the ancient maps call the Meary Maranon, or Maranham. See the maps of Hondius, and Paulo de Forlani. Perhaps the idea that Pincon, to whom the discovery of the real Maranon is due, had landed in these parts, since become celebrated by the shipwreck of Ayres da Cunha, has also contributed to this confusion. The Meary appears to me identical with the Rio de Vicente Pincon of Diego Ribeyro, which is more than one hundred and forty leagues from that of the modern geographers. At present the name of Maranon has remained at the same time to the river of the Amazons, and to a province much farther eastward, the capital of which is Maranhao, or St. Louis de Maranon.) and the Rio de San Francisco. These hydrographic reveries have for the most part disappeared; but the lakes Cassipa and Dorado have been long simultaneously preserved on our maps.

In following the history of geography we see the Cassipa, figured as a rectangular parallelogram, enlarge by degrees at the expense of El Dorado. While the latter is sometimes suppressed, no one ventures to touch the former,* which is the Rio Paragua (a tributary stream of the Caroni) enlarged by temporary inundations. (* Sanson, Course of the Amazon, 1680; De L'Isle, Amerique Merid. 1700. D'Anville, first edition of his America, 1748.) When D'Anville learned from the expedition of Solano that the sources of the Orinoco, far from lying to the west, on the back of the Andes of Pasto, came from the east, from the mountains of Parima, he restored in the second edition of his fine map of America (1760) the Laguna Parime, and very arbitrarily made it to communicate with three rivers, the Orinoco, the Rio Branco, and the Essequibo, by the Mazuruni and the Cujuni; assigning to it the latitude from 3 to 4 degrees north, which had till then been given to lake Cassipa.

I have now stated, as I announced above, the variable forms which geographical errors have assumed at different periods. I have explained what in the configuration of the soil, the course of the rivers, the names of the tributary streams, and the multiplicity of the portages, may have given rise to the hypothesis of an inland sea in the centre of Guiana. However dry discussions of this nature may appear, they ought not to be regarded as sterile and fruitless. They show travellers what remains to be discovered; and make known the degree of certainty which long-repeated assertions may claim. It is with maps, as with those tables of astronomical positions which are contained in our ephemerides, designed for the use of navigators: the most heterogeneous materials have been employed in their construction during a long space of time; and, without the aid of the history of geography, we could scarcely hope to discover at some future day on what authority every partial statement rests.

Before I resume the thread of my narrative, it remains for me to add a few general reflections on the auriferous lands situate between the Amazon and the Orinoco. We have just shown that the fable of El Dorado, like the most celebrated fables of the nations of the ancient world, has been applied progressively to different spots. We have seen it advance from the south-west to the north-east, from the oriental declivity of the Andes towards the plains of Rio Branco and the Essequibo, an identical direction with that in which the Caribs for ages conducted their warlike and mercantile expeditions. It may be conceived that the gold of the Cordilleras might be conveyed from hand to hand, through an infinite number of tribes, as far as the shore of Guiana; since, long before the fur-trade had attracted English, Russian, and American vessels to the north-west coast of America, iron tools had been carried from New Mexico and Canada beyond the Rocky Mountains. From an error in longitude, the traces of which we find in all the maps of the 16th century, the auriferous mountains of Peru and New Granada were supposed to be much nearer the mouths of the Orinoco and the Amazon than they are in fact. Geographers have the habit of augmenting and extending beyond measure countries that are recently discovered. In the map of Peru, published at Verona by Paulo di Forlani, the town of Quito is placed at the distance of 400 leagues from the coast of the South Sea, on the meridian of Cumana; and the Cordillera of the Andes there fills almost the whole surface of Spanish, French, and Dutch Guiana. This erroneous opinion of the breadth of the Andes has no doubt contributed to give so much importance to the granitic plains that extend on their eastern side. Unceasingly confounding the tributary streams of the Amazon with those of the Orinoco, or (as the lieutenants of Raleigh called it, to flatter their chief) the Rio Raleana, to the latter were attributed all the traditions which had been collected respecting the Dorado of Quixos, the Omaguas, and the Manoas.* (* The flight of Manco-Inca, brother of Atahualpa, to the east of the Cordilleras, no doubt gave rise to the tradition of the new empire of the Incas in Dorado. It was forgotten that Caxamarca and Cuzco, two towns where the princes of that unfortunate family were at the time of their emigration, are situate to the south of the Amazon, in the latitudes seven degrees eight minutes, and thirteen degrees twenty-one minutes south, and consequently four hundred leagues south-west of the pretended town of Manoa on the lake Parima (three degrees and a half north latitude). It is probable that, from the extreme difficulty of penetration into the plains east of the Andes, covered with forests, the fugitive princes never went beyond the banks of the Beni. The following is what I learnt with certainty respecting the emigration of the family of the Inca, some sad vestiges of which I saw on passing by Caxamarca. Manco-Inca, acknowledged as the legitimate successor of Atahualpa, made war without success against the Spaniards. He retired at length into the mountains and thick forests of Vilcabamba, which are accessible either by Huamanga and Antahuaylla, or by the valley of Yucay, north of Cuzco. Of the two Sons of Manco-Inca, the eldest, Sayri-Tupac, surrendered himself to the Spaniards, upon the invitation of the viceroy of Peru, Hurtado de Mendoza. He was received with great pomp at Lima, was baptized there, and died peaceably in the fine valley of Yucay. The youngest son of Manco-Inca, Tupac-Amaru, was carried off by stratagem from the forests of Vilcabamba, and beheaded on pretext of a conspiracy formed against the Spanish usurpers. At the same period, thirty-five distant relations of the Inca Atahualpa were seized, and conveyed to Lima, in order to remain under the inspection of the Audiencia. (Garcilasso volume 2 pages 194, 480 and 501.) It is interesting to inquire whether any other princes of the family of Manco-Capac have remained in the forests of Vilcabamba, and if there still exist any descendants of the Incas of Peru between the Apurimac and the Beni. This supposition gave rise in 1741 to the famous rebellion of the Chuncoes, and to that of the Amages and Campoes led on by their chief, Juan Santos, called the false Atahualpa. The late political events of Spain have liberated from prison the remains of the family of Jose Gabriel Condorcanqui, an artful and intrepid man, who, under the name of the Inca Tupac-Amaru, attempted in 1781 that restoration of the ancient dynasty which Raleigh had projected in the time of Queen Elizabeth.) The geographer Hondius supposed that the Andes of Loxa, celebrated for their forests of cinchona, were only twenty leagues distant from the lake Parima, or the banks of the Rio Branco. This proximity procured credit to the tidings of the flight of the Inca into the forests of Guiana, and the removal of the treasures of Cuzco to the easternmost parts of that country. No doubt in going up towards the east, either by the Meta or by the Amazon, the civilization of the natives, between the Puruz, the Jupura, and the Iquiari, was observed to increase. They possessed amulets, little idols of molten gold, and chairs, elegantly carved; but these traces of dawning civilization are far distant from those cities and houses of stone described by Raleigh and those who followed him. We have made drawings of some ruins of great edifices east of the Cordilleras, when going down from Loxa towards the Amazon, in the province of Jaen de Bracamoros; and thus far the Incas had carried their arms, their religion, and their arts. The inhabitants of the Orinoco were also, before the conquest, when abandoned to themselves, somewhat more civilized than the independent hordes of our days. They had populous villages along the river, and a regular trade with more southern nations; but nothing indicates that they ever constructed an edifice of stone. We saw no vestige of any during the course of our journey.

Though the celebrity of the riches of Spanish Guiana is chiefly assignable to the geographical situation of the country and the errors of the old maps, we are not justified in denying the existence of any auriferous land in the tract of country of eighty-two thousand square leagues, which stretches between the Orinoco and the Amazon, on the east of the Andes of Quito and New Granada. What I saw of this country between the second and eighth degrees of latitude, and the sixty-sixth and seventy-first degrees of longitude, is entirely composed of granite, and of a gneiss passing into micaceous and talcous slate. These rocks appear naked in the lofty mountains of Parima, as well as in the plains of the Atabapo and the Cassiquiare. Granite predominates there over the other rocks; and though, in both continents, the granite of ancient formation is pretty generally destitute of gold-ore, we cannot thence conclude that the granite of Parima contains no vein, no stratum of auriferous quartz. On the east of the Cassiquiare towards the sources of the Orinoco, we observed that the number of these strata and these veins increased. The granite of these countries, by its structure, its mixture of hornblende, and other geological features alike important, appears to me to belong to a more recent formation, perhaps posterior to the gneiss, and analogous to the stanniferous granites, the hyalomictes, and the pegmatites. Now the least ancient granites are also the least destitute of metals; and several auriferous rivers and torrents in the Andes, in the Salzburg, Fichtelgebirge, and the table-land of the two Castiles, lead us to believe that these granites sometimes contain native gold, and portions of auriferous pyrites and galena disseminated throughout the whole rock, as is the case with tin and magnetic and micaceous iron. The group of the mountains of Parima, several summits of which attain the height of one thousand three hundred toises, was almost entirely unknown before our visit to the Orinoco. This group, however, is a hundred leagues long and eighty broad; and though wherever M. Bonpland and I traversed this vast group of mountains, its structure seemed to us extremely uniform, it would be wrong to affirm that it may not contain very metalliferous transition rocks and mica-slates superimposed on the granite.

I have already observed that the silvery lustre and frequency of mica have contributed to give Guiana great celebrity for metallic wealth. The peak of Calitamini, glowing every evening at sunset with a reddish fire, still attracts the attention of the inhabitants of Maypures. According to the fabulous stories of the natives, the islets of mica-slate, situate in lake Amucu, augment by their reflection the lustre of the nebulae of the southern sky. "Every mountain," says Raleigh, "every stone in the forests of the Orinoco, shines like the precious metals; if it be not gold, it is madre del oro (mother of gold)." Raleigh asserts that he brought back gangues of auriferous white quartz ("harde white sparr"); and to prove the richness of this ore he gives an account of the assays that were made by the officers of the mint at London.* (* Messrs. Westewood, Dimocke, and Bulmar.) I have no reason to believe that the chemists of that time sought to lead Queen Elizabeth into error, and I will not insult the memory of Raleigh by supposing, like his contemporaries,* that the auriferous quartz which he brought home had not been collected in America. (* See the defence of Raleigh in the preface to the Discovery of Guiana, 1596 pages 2 to 4.) We cannot judge of things from which we are separated by so long an interval of time. The gneiss of the littoral chain* contains traces of the precious metals (* In the southern branch of this chain which passes by Yusma, Villa de Cura and Ocumare, particularly near Buria, Los Teques and Los Marietas.); and some grains of gold have been found in the mountains of Parima, near the mission of Encaramada. How can we infer the absolute sterility of the primitive rocks of Guiana from testimony merely negative, from the circumstance that during a journey of three months we saw no auriferous vein appearing above the soil?

In order to bring together whatever may enlighten the government of this country on a subject so long disputed, I will enter upon a few more geological considerations. The mountains of Brazil, notwithstanding the numerous traces of embedded ore which they display between Saint Paul and Villa Rica, have furnished only stream-works of gold. More than six-sevenths of the seventy-eight thousand marks (52,000 pounds) of this metal, with which at the beginning of the 19th century America annually supplied the commerce of Europe, have come, not from the lofty Cordilleras of the Andes, but from the alluvial lands on the east and west of the Cordilleras. These lands are raised but little above the level of the sea, like those of Sonora in Mexico, and of Choco and Barbacoas in New Granada; or they stretch along in table-lands, as in the interior of Brazil.* (* The height of Villa Rica is six hundred and thirty toises; but the great table-land of the Capitania de Minas Geraes is only three hundred toises in height. See the profile which Colonel d'Eschwege has published at Weimar, with an indication of the rocks, in imitation of my profile of the Mexican table-land.) Is it not probable that some other depositions of auriferous earth extend toward the northern hemisphere, as far as the banks of the Upper Orinoco and the Rio Negro, two rivers which form but one basin with that of the Amazon? I observed, when speaking of El Dorado de Canelas, the Omaguas and the Iquiare, that almost all the rivers which flow from the west wash down gold in abundance, and very far from the Cordilleras. From Loxa to Popayan these Cordilleras are composed alternately of trachytes and primitive rocks. The plains of Ramora, of Logrono, and of Macas (Sevilla del Oro), the great Rio Napo with its tributary streams* (the Ansupi and the Coca, in the province of Quixos (* The little rivers Cosanga, Quixos, and Papallacta or Maspa, which form the Coca, rise on the eastern slope of the Nevado de Antisana. The Rio Ansupi brings down the largest grains of gold: it flows into the Napo, south of the Archidona, above the mouth of the Misagualli. Between the Misagualli and the Rio Coca, in the province of Avila, five other northern tributary streams of the Napo (the Siguna, Munino, Suno, Guataracu, and Pucono) are known as being singularly auriferous. These local details are taken from several manuscript reports of the Governor of Quixos, from which I traced the map of the countries east of the Antisana.)), the Caqueta de Mocoa as far as the mouth of the Fragua, in fine, all the country comprised between Jaen de Bracamoros and the Guaviare,* (* From Rio Santiago, a tributary stream of the Upper Maranon, to the Llanos of Caguan and of San Juan.) preserve their ancient celebrity for metallic wealth. More to the east, between the sources of the Guainia (Rio Negro), the Uaupes, the Iquiare, and the Yurubesh, we find a soil incontestably auriferous. There Acunha and Father Fritz placed their Laguna del Oro; and various accounts which I obtained at San Carlos from Portuguese Americans explain perfectly what La Condamine has related of the plates of beaten gold found in the hands of the natives. If we pass from the Iquiare to the left bank of the Rio Negro, we enter a country entirely unknown, between the Rio Branco, the sources of the Essequibo, and the mountains of Portuguese Guiana. Acunha speaks of the gold washed down by the northern tributary streams of the Lower Maranon, such as the Rio Trombetas (Oriximina), the Curupatuba, and the Ginipape (Rio de Paru). It appears to me a circumstance worthy of attention that all these rivers descend from the same table-land, the northern slope of which contains the lake Amucu, the Dorado of Raleigh and the Dutch, and the isthmus between the Rupunuri (Rupunuwini) and the Rio Mahu. There is no reason for denying the existence of auriferous alluvial lands far from the Cordilleras of the Andes on the north of the Amazon; as there are on the south in the mountains of Brazil. The Caribs of the Carony, the Cuyuni and the Essequibo, have practised on a small scale the washing of alluvial earth from the remotest times.* (* "On the north of the confluence of the Curupatuba and the Amazon," says Acunha, "is the mountain of Paraguaxo, which, when illumined by the sun, glows with the most beautiful colours; and thence from time to time issues a horrible noise (revienta con grandes struenos)." Is there a volcanic phenomenon in this eastern part of the New Continent? or is it the love of the marvellous, which has given rise to the tradition of the bellowings (bramidos) of Paraguaxo? The lustre emitted from the sides of the mountain recalls to mind what we have mentioned above of the miraculous rocks of Calitamini, and the island Ipomucena, in the imaginary Lake Dorado. In one of the Spanish letters intercepted at sea by Captain George Popham, in 1594, it is said, "Having inquired of the natives whence they obtained the spangles and powder of gold, which we found in their huts, and which they stick on their skin by means of some greasy substances, they told us that in a certain plain they tore up the grass, and gathered the earth in baskets, to subject it to the process of washing." Raleigh page 109. Can this passage be explained by supposing that the Indians sought thus laboriously, not for gold, but for spangles of mica, which the natives of Rio Caura still employ as ornaments, when they paint their bodies?) When we examine the structure of mountains and embrace in one point of view an extensive surface of the globe, distances disappear; and places the most remote insensibly draw near each other. The basin of the Upper Orinoco, the Rio Negro, and the Amazon is bounded by the mountains of Parime on the north, and by those of Minas Geraes, and Matogrosso on the south. The opposite slopes of the same valley often display an analogy in their geological relations.

I have described in this and the preceding volume the vast provinces of Venezuela and Spanish Guiana. While examining their natural limits, their climate, and their productions, I have discussed the influence produced by the configuration of the soil on agriculture, commerce, and the more or less rapid progress of society. I have successively passed over the three regions that succeed each other from north to south; from the Mediterranean of the West Indies to the forests of the Upper Orinoco and of the Amazon. The fertile land of the shore, the centre of agricultural riches, is succeeded by the Llanos, inhabited by pastoral tribes. These Llanos are in their turn bordered by the region of forests, the inhabitants of which enjoy, I will not say liberty, which is always the result of civilization, but a sort of savage independence. On the limit of these two latter zones the struggle now exists which will decide the emancipation and future prosperity of America. The changes which are preparing cannot efface the individual character of each region; but the manners and condition of the inhabitants will assume a more uniform colour. This consideration perhaps adds interest to a tour made in the beginning of the nineteenth century. We like to see, traced in the same picture, the civilized nations of the sea-shore, and the feeble remains of the natives of the Orinoco, who know no other worship than that of the powers of nature; and who, like the ancient Germans, deify the mysterious object which excites their simple admiration.* (* Deorum nominibus appellant secretum illud, quod sola reverentia vident. Tacitus Germania 9.)

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Part 1 of 3

CHAPTER 3.26. THE LLANOS DEL PAO, OR EASTERN PART OF THE PLAINS OF VENEZUELA. MISSIONS OF THE CARIBS. LAST VISIT TO THE COAST OF NUEVA BARCELONA, CUMANA, AND ARAYA.

Night had set in when we crossed for the last time the bed of the Orinoco. We purposed to rest near the little fort San Rafael, and on the following morning at daybreak to set out on our journey through the plains of Venezuela. Nearly six weeks had elapsed since our arrival at Angostura; and we earnestly wished to reach the coast, with the view of finding, at Cumana, or at Nueva Barcelona, a vessel in which we might embark for the island of Cuba, thence to proceed to Mexico. After the sufferings to which we had been exposed during several months, whilst sailing in small boats on rivers infested by mosquitos, the idea of a sea voyage was not without its charms. We had no idea of ever again returning to South America. Sacrificing the Andes of Peru to the Archipelago of the Philippines (of which so little is known), we adhered to our old plan of remaining a year in New Spain, then proceeding in a galleon from Acapulco to Manila, and returning to Europe by way of Bassora and Aleppo. We imagined that, when we had once left the Spanish possessions in America, the fall of that ministry which had procured for us so many advantages, could not be prejudicial to the execution of our enterprise.

Our mules were in waiting for us on the left bank of the Orinoco. The collection of plants, and the different geological series which we had brought from the Esmeralda and Rio Negro, had greatly augmented our baggage; and, as it would have been dangerous to lose sight of our herbals, we expected to make a very slow journey across the Llanos. The heat was excessive, owing to the reverberation of the soil, which was almost everywhere destitute of vegetation; yet the centigrade thermometer during the day (in the shade) was only from thirty to thirty-four degrees, and during the night, from twenty-seven to twenty-eight degrees. Here, therefore, as almost everywhere within the tropics, it was less the absolute degree of heat than its duration that affected our sensations. We spent thirteen days in crossing the plains, resting a little in the Caribbee (Caraibes) missions and in the little town of Pao. The eastern part of the Llanos through which we passed, between Angostura and Nueva Barcelona, presents the same wild aspect as the western part, through which we had passed from the valleys of Aragua to San Fernando de Apure. In the season of drought, (which is here called summer,) though the sun is in the southern hemisphere, the breeze is felt with greater force in the Llanos of Cumana, than in those of Caracas; because those vast plains, like the cultivated fields of Lombardy, form an inland basin, open to the east, and closed on the north, south and west by high chains of primitive mountains. Unfortunately, we could not avail ourselves of this refreshing breeze, of which the Llaneros, or the inhabitants of the plains, speak with rapture. It was now the rainy season north of the equator; and though it did not rain in the plains, the change in the declination of the sun had for some time caused the action of the polar currents to cease. In the equatorial regions, where the traveller may direct his course by observing the direction of the clouds, and where the oscillations of the mercury in the barometer indicate the hour almost as well as a clock, everything is subject to a regular and uniform rule. The cessation of the breezes, the setting-in of the rainy season, and the frequency of electric explosions, are phenomena which are found to be connected together by immutable laws.

On entering the Llanos of Nueva Barcelona, we met with a Frenchman, at whose house we passed the first night, and who received us with the kindest hospitality. He was a native of Lyons, and he had left his country at a very early age. He appeared extremely indifferent to all that was passing beyond the Atlantic, or, as they say here, disdainfully enough, when speaking of Europe, on the other side of the great pool (al otro lado del charco). Our host was employed in joining large pieces of wood by means of a kind of glue called guayca. This substance, which is used by the carpenters of Angostura, resembles the best animal glue. It is found perfectly prepared between the bark and the alburnum of a creeper* of the family of the Combretaceae. (* Combretum guayca.) It probably resembles in its chemical properties birdlime, the vegetable principle obtained from the berries of the mistletoe, and the internal bark of the holly. An astonishing abundance of this glutinous matter issues from the twining branches of the vejuco de guayca when they are cut. Thus we find within the tropics a substance in a state of purity and deposited in peculiar organs, which in the temperate zone can be procured only by artificial means.

We did not arrive until the third day at the Caribbee missions of Cari. We observed that the ground was less cracked by the drought in this country than in the Llanos of Calabozo. Some showers had revived the vegetation. Small gramina and especially those herbaceous sensitive-plants so useful in fattening half-wild cattle, formed a thick turf. At great distances one from another, there arose a few fan-palms (Corypha tectorum), rhopalas* (chaparro (* The Proteaceae are not, like the Araucaria, an exclusively southern form. We found the Rhopala complicata and the R. obovata, in 2 degrees 30 minutes, and in 10 degrees of north latitude.)), and malpighias* with coriaceous and glossy leaves. (* A neighbouring genus, Byrsonima cocollobaefolia, B. laurifolia, near Matagorda, and B. ropalaefolia.) The humid spots are recognized at a distance by groups of mauritia, which are the sago-trees of those countries. Near the coast this palm-tree constitutes the whole wealth of the Guaraon Indians; and it is somewhat remarkable that we also found it one hundred and sixty leagues farther south, in the midst of the forests of the Upper Orinoco, in the savannahs that surround the granitic peak of Duida.* (* The moriche, like the Sagus Rumphii, is a palm-tree of the marshes, not a palm-tree of the coast, like the Chamaerops humilis, the common cocoa-tree, and the lodoicea.) It was loaded at this season with enormous clusters of red fruit, resembling fir-cones. Our monkeys were extremely fond of this fruit, which has the taste of an over-ripe apple. The monkeys were placed with our baggage on the backs of the mules, and they made great efforts to reach the clusters that hung over their heads. The plain was undulating from the effects of the mirage; and when, after travelling for an hour, we reached the trunks of the palm-trees, which appeared like masts in the horizon, we observed with astonishment how many things are connected with the existence of a single plant. The winds, losing their velocity when in contact with the foliage and the branches, accumulate sand around the trunk. The smell of the fruit and the brightness of the verdure attract from afar the birds of passage, which love to perch on the slender, arrow-like branches of the palm-tree. A soft murmuring is heard around; and overpowered by the heat, and accustomed to the melancholy silence of the plains, the traveller imagines he enjoys some degree of coolness on hearing the slightest sound of the foliage. If we examine the soil on the side opposite to the wind, we find it remains humid long after the rainy season. Insects and worms, everywhere else so rare in the Llanos, here assemble and multiply. This one solitary and often stunted tree, which would not claim the notice of the traveller amid the forests of the Orinoco, spreads life around it in the desert.

On the 13th of July we arrived at the village of Cari, the first of the Caribbee missions that are under the Observantin monks of the college of Piritu. We lodged as usual at the convent, that is, with the clergyman. Our host could scarcely comprehend how natives of the north of Europe could arrive at his dwelling from the frontiers of Brazil by the Rio Negro, and not by way of the coast of Cumana. He behaved to us in the most affable manner, at the same time manifesting that somewhat importunate curiosity which the appearance of a stranger, not a Spaniard, always excites in South America. He expressed his belief that the minerals we had collected must contain gold; and that the plants, dried with so much care, must be medicinal. Here, as in many parts of Europe, the sciences are thought worthy to occupy the mind only so far as they confer some immediate and practical benefit on society.

We found more than five hundred Caribs in the village of Cari; and saw many others in the surrounding missions. It is curious to observe this nomad people, recently attached to the soil, and differing from all the other Indians in their physical and intellectual powers. They are a very tall race of men, their height being from five feet six inches, to five feet ten inches. According to a practice common in America, the women are more sparingly clothed than the men. The former wear only the guajuco, or perizoma, in the form of a band. The men have the lower part of the body wrapped in a piece of blue cloth, so dark as to be almost black. This drapery is so ample that, on the lowering of the temperature towards evening, the Caribs throw it over their shoulders. Their bodies tinged with onoto,* (* Rocou, obtained from the Bixa orellana. This paint is called in the Carib tongue, bichet.) their tall figures, of a reddish copper-colour, and their picturesque drapery, when seen from a distance, relieved against the sky as a background, resemble antique statues of bronze. The men cut their hair in a very peculiar manner, very much in the style of the monks. A part of the forehead is shaved, which makes it appear extremely high, and a circular tuft of hair is left near the crown of the head. This resemblance between the Caribs and the monks is not the result of mission life. It is not caused, as had been erroneously supposed, by the desire of the natives to imitate their masters, the Franciscan monks. The tribes that have preserved their wild independence, between the sources of the Carony and the Rio Branco, are distinguished by the same cerquillo de frailes,* (* Circular tonsure of the friars.) which the early Spanish historians at the time of the discovery of America attributed to the nations of the Carib race. All the men of this race whom we saw either during our voyage on the Lower Orinoco, or in the missions of Piritu, differ from the other Indians not only in the tallness of their stature, but also in the regularity of their features. Their noses are smaller, and less flattened; the cheek-bones are not so high; and their physiognomy has less of the Mongol character. Their eyes, which are darker than those of the other hordes of Guiana, denote intelligence, and it may even be said, the habit of reflection. The Caribs have a gravity of manner, and a certain look of sadness which is observable among most of the primitive inhabitants of the New World. The expression of severity in their features is heightened by the practice of dyeing their eyebrows with the juice of caruto: they also lengthen their eyebrows, thereby giving them the appearance of being joined together; and they often mark their faces all over with black spots to give themselves a more fierce appearance. The Carib women are less robust and good-looking than the men, On them devolves almost the whole burden of domestic work, as well as much of the out-door labour. They asked us eagerly for pins, which they stuck under their lower lip, making the head of the pin penetrate deeply into the skin. The young girls are painted red, and are almost naked. Among the different nations of the old and the new worlds, the idea of nudity is altogether relative. A woman in some parts of Asia is not permitted to show the tips of her fingers; while an Indian of the Carib race is far from considering herself unclothed if she wear round her waist a guajuco two inches broad. Even this band is regarded as less essential than the pigment which covers the skin. To go out of the hut without being painted, would be to transgress all the rules of Carib decency.

The Indians of the missions of Piritu especially attracted our attention, because they belong to a nation which, by its daring, its warlike enterprises, and its mercantile spirit has exercised great influence over the vast country extending from the equator towards the northern coast. Everywhere on the Orinoco we beheld traces of the hostile incursions of the Caribs: incursions which heretofore extended from the sources of the Carony and the Erevato as far as the banks of the Ventuari, the Atacavi, and the Rio Negro. The Carib language is consequently the most general in this part of the world; it has even passed (like the language of the Lenni-Lenapes, or Algonkins, and the Natchez or Muskoghees, on the west of the Allegheny mountains) to tribes which have not a common origin.

When we survey that multitude of nations spread over North and South America, eastward of the Cordilleras of the Andes, we fix our attention particularly on those who, having long held dominion over their neighbours, have acted an important part on the stage of the world. It is the business of the historian to group facts, to distinguish masses, to ascend to the common sources of many migrations and popular movements. Great empires, the regular organization of a sacerdotal hierarchy, and the culture which that organization favours in the first ages of society, have existed only on the high mountains of the western world. In Mexico we see a vast monarchy enclosing small republics; at Cundinamarca and Peru we find pure theocracies. Fortified towns, highways and large edifices of stone, an extraordinary development of the feudal system, the separation of castes, convents of men and women, religious congregations regulated by discipline more or less severe, complicated divisions of time connected with the calendars, the zodiacs, and the astrology of the enlightened nations of Asia—all these phenomena in America belong to one region only, the long and narrow Alpine band extending from the thirtieth degree of north latitude to the twenty-fifth degree of south. The migration of nations in the ancient world was from east to west; the Basques or Iberians, the Celts, the Germans and the Pelasgi, appeared in succession. In the New World similar migrations flowed from north to south. Among the nations that inhabit the two hemispheres, the direction of this movement followed that of the mountains; but in the torrid zone the temperate table-lands of the Cordilleras had greater influence on the destiny of mankind, than the mountains of Asia and central Europe. As, properly speaking, only civilized nations have a history, the history of the Americans is necessarily no more than that of a small portion of the inhabitants of the mountains. Profound obscurity envelops the vast country which stretches from the eastern slope of the Cordilleras towards the Atlantic; and for this very reason, whatever in that country relates to the preponderance of one nation over others, to distant migrations, to the physiognomical features which denote a foreign race, excite our deepest interest.

Amidst the plains of North America, some powerful nation, which has disappeared, constructed circular, square, and octagonal fortifications; walls six thousand toises in length; tumuli from seven to eight hundred feet in diameter, and one hundred and forty feet in height, sometimes round, sometimes with several stories and containing thousands of skeletons. These skeletons are the remains of men less slender and more squat than the present inhabitants of those countries. Other bones wrapped in fabrics resembling those of the Sandwich and Feejee Islands are found in the natural grottoes of Kentucky. What is become of those nations of Louisiana anterior to the Lenni-Lenapes, the Shawanese, and perhaps even to the Sioux (Nadowesses, Nahcotas) of the Missouri, who are strongly mongolised; and who, it is believed, according to their own traditions, came from the coast of Asia? In the plains of South America we find only a very few hillocks of that kind called cerros hechos a mano;* (* Hills made by the hand, or artificial hills.) and nowhere any works of fortification analogous to those of the Ohio. However, on a vast space of ground, at the Lower Orinoco, as well as on the banks of the Cassiquiare and between the sources of the Essequibo and the Rio Branco, there are rocks of granite covered with symbolic figures. These sculptures denote that the extinct generations belonged to nations different from those which now inhabit the same regions. There seems to be no connection between the history of Mexico and that of Cundinamarca and of Peru; but in the plains of the east a warlike and long-dominant nation betrays in its features and its physical constitution traces of a foreign origin. The Caribs preserve traditions that seem to indicate ancient communications between North and South America. Such a phenomenon deserves particular attention. If it be true that savages are for the most part degenerate races, remnants escaped from a common wreck, as their languages, their cosmogonic fables, and numerous other indications seem to prove, it becomes doubly important to examine the course by which these remnants have been driven from one hemisphere to the other.

That fine race of people, the Caribs, now occupy only a small part of the country which they inhabited at the time of the discovery of America. The cruelties exercised by Europeans have entirely exterminated them from the West Indian Islands and the coasts of Darien; while under the government of the missions they have formed populous villages in the provinces of New Barcelona and Spanish Guiana. The Caribs who inhabit the Llanos of Piritu and the banks of the Carony and the Cuyuni may be estimated at more than thirty-five thousand. If we add to this number the independent Caribs who live westward of the mountains of Cayenne and Pacaraymo, between the sources of the Essequibo and the Rio Branco, we shall no doubt obtain a total of forty thousand individuals of pure race, unmixed with any other tribes of natives. Prior to my travels, the Caribs were mentioned in many geographical works as an extinct race. Writers unacquainted with the interior of the Spanish colonies of the continent supposed that the small islands of Dominica, Guadaloupe, and St. Vincent had been the principal abodes of that nation of which the only vestiges now remaining throughout the whole of the eastern West India Islands are skeletons petrified, or rather enveloped in a limestone containing madrepores.* (* These skeletons were discovered in 1805 by M. Cortez. They are encased in a formation of madrepore breccia, which the negroes call God's masonry, and which, like the travertin of Italy, envelops fragments of vases and other objects created by human skill. M. Dauxion Lavaysse and Dr. Koenig first made known in Europe this phenomenon which has greatly interested geologists.)

The name of Caribs, which I find for the first time in a letter of Peter Martyr d'Anghiera is derived from Calina and Caripuna, the l and p being transferred into r and b. It is very remarkable that this name, which Columbus heard pronounced by the people of Hayti, was known to exist at the same time among the Caribs of the islands and those of the continent. From the word Carina, or Calina, has been formed Galibi (Caribi). This is the distinctive denomination of a tribe in French Guiana,* who are of much more diminutive stature than the inhabitants of Cari, but speaking one of the numerous dialects of the Carib tongue. (* The Galibis (Calibitis), the Palicours, and the Acoquouas, also cut their hair in the style of the monks; and apply bandages to the legs of their children for the purpose of swelling the muscles. They have the same predilection for green stones (saussurite) which we observed among the Carib nations of the Orinoco. There exist, besides, in French Guiana, twenty Indian tribes which are distinguished from the Galibis though their language proves that they have a common origin.) The inhabitants of the islands are called Calinago in the language of the men; and in that of the women, Callipinan. The difference in the language of the two sexes is more striking among the people of the Carib race than among other American nations (the Omaguas, the Guaranis, and the Chiquitos) where it applies only to a limited number of ideas; for instance, the words mother and child. It may be conceived that women, from their separate way of life, frame particular terms which men do not adopt. Cicero observes* that old forms of language are best preserved by women because by their position in society they are less exposed to those vicissitudes of life, changes of place and occupation which tend to corrupt the primitive purity of language among men. (* Cicero, de Orat. lib. 3 cap. 12 paragraph 45 ed. Verburg. Facilius enim mulieres incorruptam antiquitatem conservant, quod multorum sermonis expertes ea tenent semper, quae prima didicerunt.) But in the Carib nations the contrast between the dialect of the two sexes is so great that to explain it satisfactorily we must refer to another cause; and this may perhaps be found in the barbarous custom, practised by those nations, of killing their male prisoners, and carrying the wives of the vanquished into captivity. When the Caribs made an irruption into the archipelago of the West India Islands, they arrived there as a band of warriors, not as colonists accompanied by their families. The language of the female sex was formed by degrees, as the conquerors contracted alliances with the foreign women; it was composed of new elements, words distinct from the Carib words,* which in the interior of the gynaeceums were transmitted from generation to generation, but on which the structure, the combinations, the grammatical forms of the language of the men exercised an influence. (* The following are examples of the difference between the language of the men (m), and the women (w); isle, oubao (m), acaera (w); man, ouekelli (m), eyeri (w); but, irhen (m), atica (w).) There was then manifested in a small community the peculiarity which we now find in the whole group of the nations of the New Continent. The American languages, from Hudson's Bay to the Straits of Magellan, are in general characterized by a total disparity of words combined with a great analogy in their structure. They are like different substances invested with analogous forms. If we recollect that this phenomenon extends over one-half of our planet, almost from pole to pole; if we consider the shades in the grammatical forms (the genders applied to the three persons of the verb, the reduplications, the frequentatives, the duals); it appears highly astonishing to find a uniform tendency in the development of intelligence and language among so considerable a portion of the human race.

We have just seen that the dialect of the Carib women in the West India Islands contains the vestiges of a language that was extinct. Some writers have imagined that this extinct language might be that of the Ygneris, or primitive inhabitants of the Caribbee Islands; others have traced in it some resemblance to the ancient idiom of Cuba, or to those of the Arowaks, and the Apalachites in Florida: but these hypotheses are all founded on a very imperfect knowledge of the idioms which it has been attempted to compare one with another.

The Spanish writers of the sixteenth century inform us that the Carib nations then extended over eighteen or nineteen degrees of latitude, from the Virgin Islands east of Porto Rico, to the mouths of the Amazon. Another prolongation toward the west, along the coast-chain of Santa Marta and Venezuela, appears less certain. Gomara, however, and the most ancient historians, give the name of Caribana, not, as it has since been applied, to the country between the sources of the Orinoco and the mountains of French Guiana,* (* This name is found in the map of Hondius, of 1599, which accompanies the Latin edition of the narrative of Raleigh's voyage. In the Dutch edition Nieuwe Caerte van het goudrycke landt Guiana, the Llanos of Caracas, between the mountains of Merida and the Rio Pao, bear the name of Caribana. We may remark here, what we observe so often in the history of geography, that the same denomination has spread by degrees from west to east.) but to the marshy plains between the mouths of the Rio Atrato and the Rio Sinu. I have visited those coasts in going from the Havannah to Porto Bello; and I there learned that the cape which bounds the gulf of Darien or Uraba on the east, still bears the name of Punta Caribana. An opinion heretofore prevailed pretty generally that the Caribs of the West India Islands derived their origin, and even their name, from these warlike people of Darien. "From the eastern shore springs Cape Uraba, which the natives call Caribana, whence the Caribs of the island are said to have received their present name."* (* Inde Vrabam ab orientali prehendit ora, quam appellant indigenae Caribana, unde Caribes insulares originem habere nomenque retinere dicuntur.) Thus Anghiera expresses himself in his Oceanica. He had been told by a nephew of Amerigo Vespucci that thence, as far as the snowy mountains of St. Marta, all the natives were e genere Caribium, vel Canibalium. I do not deny that Caribs may have had a settlement near the gulf of Darien, and that they may have been driven thither by the easterly currents; but it also may have happened that the Spanish navigators, little attentive to languages, gave the names Carib and Cannibal to every race of people of tall stature and ferocious character. Still it is by no means probable that the Caribs of the islands and of Parima took to themselves the name of the region which they had originally inhabited. On the east of the Andes and wherever civilization has not yet penetrated, it is the people who have given names to the places where they have settled.* (* These names of places can be perpetuated only where the nations succeed immediately to each other, and where the tradition is interrupted. Thus in the province of Quito many of the summits of the Andes bear names which belong neither to the Quichua (the language of Inca) nor to the ancient language of the Paruays, governed by the Conchocando of Lican.) The words Caribs and Cannibals appear significant; they are epithets referring to valour, strength and even superior intelligence.* (* Vespucci says: Charaibi magnae sapientiae viri.) It is worthy of remark that, at the arrival of the Portuguese, the Brazilians gave to their magicians the name of caraibes. We know that the Caribs of Parima were the most wandering people of America; possibly some wily individuals of that nation played the same part as the Chaldeans of the ancient continent. The names of nations readily become affixed to particular professions; and when, in the time of the Caesars, the superstitions of the East were introduced into Italy, the Chaldeans no more came from the banks of the Euphrates than our Gypsies (Egyptians or Bohemians) came from the banks of the Nile or the Elbe.

When a continent and its adjacent islands are peopled by one and the same race, we may choose between two hypotheses; supposing the emigration to have taken place either from the islands to the continent, or from the continent to the islands. The Iberians (Basques) who were settled at the same time in Spain and in the islands of the Mediterranean, afford an instance of this problem; as do also the Malays who appear to be indigenous in the peninsula of Malacca, and in the district of Menangkabao in the island of Sumatra.* (* Crawfurd, Indian Archipelago volume 2 page 371. I make use of the word indigenous (autocthoni) not to indicate a fact of creation, which does not belong to history, but simply to denote that we are ignorant of the autocthoni having been preceded by any other people.) The archipelago of the large and small West India Islands forms a narrow and broken neck of land, parallel with the isthmus of Panama, and supposed by some geographers to join the peninsula of Florida to the north-east extremity of South America. It is the eastern shore of an inland sea which may be considered as a basin with several outlets. This peculiar configuration of the land has served to support the different systems of migration, by which it has been attempted to explain the settlement of the nations of the Carib race in the islands and on the neighbouring continent. The Caribs of the continent admit that the small West India Islands were anciently inhabited by the Arowaks,* a warlike nation, the great mass of which still inhabit the insalubrious shores of Surinam and Berbice. (* Arouaques. The missionary Quandt (Nachricht von Surinam, 1807 page 47) calls them Arawackes.) They assert that the Arowaks, with the exception of the women, were all exterminated by Caribs, who came from the mouths of the Orinoco. In support of this tradition they refer to the traces of analogy existing between the language of the Arowaks and that of the Carib women; but it must be recollected that the Arowaks, though the enemies of the Caribs, belonged to the same branch of people; and that the same analogy exists between the Arowak and Carib languages as between the Greek and the Persian, the German and the Sanscrit. According to another tradition, the Caribs of the islands came from the south, not as conquerors, but because they were expelled from Guiana by the Arowaks, who originally ruled over all the neighbouring nations. Finally, a third tradition, much more general and more probable, represents the Caribs as having come from Florida, in North America. Mr. Bristock, a traveller who has collected every particular relating to these migrations from north to south, asserts that a tribe of Confachites (Confachiqui* (* The province of Confachiqui, which in 1541 became subject to a woman, is celebrated by the expedition of Hernando de Soto to Florida. Among the nations of the Huron tongue, and the Attakapas, the supreme authority was also often exercised by women.)) had long waged war against the Apalachites; that the latter, having yielded to that tribe the fertile district of Amana, called their new confederates Caribes (that is, valiant strangers); but that, owing to a dispute respecting their religious rites, the Confachite-Caribs were driven from Florida. They went first to the Yucayas or Lucayes Islands (to Cigateo and the neighbouring islands); thence to Ayay (Hayhay, now Santa Cruz), and to the lesser Caribbee Islands; and lastly to the continent of South America.* (* Rochefort, Hist. des Antilles volume 1 pages 326 to 353; Garcia page 322; Robertson book 3 note 69. The conjecture of Father Gili that the Caribs of the continent may have come from the islands at the time of the first conquest of the Spaniards (Saggio volume 3 page 204), is at variance with all the statements of the early historians.) It is supposed that this event took place toward the year 1100 of our era. In the course of this long migration the Caribs had not touched at the larger islands; the inhabitants of which however also believed that they came originally from Florida. The islanders of Cuba, Hayti, and Boriken (Porto Rico) were, according to the uniform testimony of the first conquistadores, entirely different from the Caribs; and at the period of the discovery of America, the latter had already abandoned the group of the lesser Lucayes Islands; an archipelago in which there prevailed that variety of languages always found in lands peopled by shipwrecked men and fugitives.* (* La gente de las islas Yucayas era (1492) mas blanca y de major policia que la de Cuba y Haiti. Havia mucha diversidad de lenguas. [The people of the Lucayes were (1492) of fairer complexion and of more civilized manners than those of Cuba and Hayti. They had a great diversity of languages.] Gomara, Hist. de Ind. fol. 22.)

The dominion so long exercised by the Caribs over a great part of the continent, joined to the remembrance of their ancient greatness, has inspired them with a sentiment of dignity and national superiority which is manifest in their manners and their discourse. "We alone are a nation," say they proverbially; "the rest of mankind (oquili) are made to serve us." This contempt of the Caribs for their enemies is so strong that I saw a child of ten years of age foam with rage on being called a Cabre or Cavere; though he had never in his life seen an individual of that unfortunate race of people who gave their name to the town of Cabruta (Cabritu); and who, after long resistance, were almost entirely exterminated by the Caribs. Thus we find among half savage hordes, as in the most civilized part of Europe, those inveterate animosities which have caused the names of hostile nations to pass into their respective languages as insulting appellations.

The missionary of the village of Cari led us into several Indian huts, where extreme neatness and order prevailed. We observed with pain the torments which the Carib mothers inflict on their infants for the purpose not only of enlarging the calf of the leg, but also of raising the flesh in alternate stripes from the ankle to the top of the thigh. Narrow ligatures, consisting of bands of leather, or of woven cotton, are fixed two or three inches apart from each other, and being tightened more and more, the muscles between the bands become swollen. The monks of the missions, though ignorant of the works or even of the name of Rousseau, attempt to oppose this ancient system of physical education: but in vain. Man when just issued from the woods and supposed to be so simple in his manners, is far from being tractable in his ideas of beauty and propriety. I observed, however, with surprise, that the manner in which these poor children are bound, and which seems to obstruct the circulation of the blood, does not operate injuriously on their muscular movements. There is no race of men more robust and swifter in running than the Caribs.

If the women labour to form the legs and thighs of their children so as to produce what painters call undulating outlines, they abstain (at least in the Llanos), from flattening the head by compressing it between cushions and planks from the most tender age. This practice, so common heretofore in the islands and among several tribes of the Caribs of Parima and French Guiana, is not observed in the missions which we visited. The men there have foreheads rounder than those of the Chaymas, the Otomacs, the Macos, the Maravitans and most of the inhabitants of the Orinoco. A systematizer would say that the form is such as their intellectual faculties require. We were so much the more struck by this fact as some of the skulls of Caribs engraved in Europe, for works on anatomy, are distinguished from all other human skulls by the extremely depressed forehead and acute facial angle. In some osteological collections skulls supposed to be those of Caribs of the island of St. Vincent are in fact skulls shaped by having been pressed between planks. They have belonged to Zambos (black Caribs) who are descended from Negroes and true Caribs.* (* These unfortunate remnants of a nation heretofore powerful were banished in 1795 to the Island of Rattam in the Bay of Honduras because they were accused by the English Government of having connexions with the French. In 1760 an able minister, M. Lescallier, proposed to the Court of Versailles to invite the Red and Black Caribs from St. Vincent to Guiana and to employ them as free men in the cultivation of the land. I doubt whether their number at that period amounted to six thousand, as the island of St. Vincent contained in 1787 not more than fourteen thousand inhabitants of all colours.) The barbarous habit of flattening the forehead is practised by several nations,* of people not of the same race; and it has been observed recently in North America; but nothing is more vague than the conclusion that some degree of conformity in customs and manners proves identity of origin. (* For instance the Tapoyranas of Guiana (Barrere page 239), the Solkeeks of Upper Louisiana (Walckenaer, Cosmos page 583). Los Indios de Cumana, says Gomara (Hist. de Ind.), aprietan a los ninos la cabeca muy blando, pero mucho, entre dos almohadillas de algodon para ensancharlos la cara, que lo tienen por hermosura. Las donzellas traen senogiles muy apretados par debaxo y encima de las rodillas, para que los muslos y pantorillas engorden mucho. [The Indians of Cumana press down the heads of young infants tightly between cushions stuffed with cotton for the purpose of giving width to their faces, which they regard as a beauty. The young girls wear very tight bandages round their knees in order to give thickness to the thighs and calves of the legs.]) On observing the spirit of order and submission which prevails in the Carib missions, the traveller can scarcely persuade himself that he is among cannibals. This American word, of somewhat doubtful signification, is probably derived from the language of Hayti, or that of Porto Rico; and it has passed into the languages of Europe, since the end of the fifteenth century, as synonymous with that of anthropophagi. "These newly discovered man-eaters, so greedy of human flesh, are called Caribes or Cannibals,"* says Anghiera, in the third decade of his Oceanica, dedicated to Pope Leo X. (* Edaces humanarum carnium novi helluones anthropophagi, Caribes alias Canibales appellati.) There can be little doubt that the Caribs of the islands, when a conquering people, exercised cruelties upon the Ygneris, or ancient inhabitants of the West Indies, who were weak and not very warlike; but we must also admit that these cruelties were exaggerated by the early travellers, who heard only the narratives of the old enemies of the Caribs. It is not always the vanquished solely, who are calumniated by their contemporaries; the insolence of the conquerors is punished by the catalogue of their crimes being augmented.

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Part 2 of 3

All the missionaries of the Carony, the Lower Orinoco and the Llanos del Cari whom we had an opportunity of consulting assured us that the Caribs are perhaps the least anthropophagous nations of the New Continent. They extend this remark even to the independent hordes who wander on the east of the Esmeralda, between the sources of the Rio Branco and the Essequibo. It may be conceived that the fury and despair with which the unhappy Caribs defended themselves against the Spaniards, when in 1504 a royal decree declared them slaves, may have contributed to acquire for them a reputation for ferocity. The first idea of attacking this nation and depriving it of liberty and of its natural rights originated with Christopher Columbus, who was not in all instances so humane as he is represented to have been. Subsequently the licenciado Rodrigo de Figueroa was appointed by the court, in 1520, to determine the tribes of South America, who were to be regarded as of Carib race, or as cannibals; and those who were Guatiaos,* that is, Indians of peace, and friends of the Castilians. (* I had some trouble in discovering the origin of this denomination which has become so important from the fatal decrees of Figueroa. The Spanish historians often employ the word guatiao to designate a branch of nations. To become a guatiao of any one seems to have signified, in the language of Hayti, to conclude a treaty of friendship. In the West India Islands, as well as in the archipelago of the South Sea, names were exchanged in token of alliance. Juan de Esquivel (1502) se hice guatiao del cacique Cotubanama; el qual desde adelante se llamo Juan de Esquivel, porque era liga de perpetua amistad entre los Indios trocarse los nombres: y trocados quedaban guatiaos, que era tanto coma confederados y hermanos en armas. Ponce de Leon se hace guatiao con el poderoso cacique Agueinaha." Herrera dec. 1 pages 129, 159 and 181. [Juan de Esquivel (1502) became the guatiao of the cacique Cotubanama; and thenceforth the latter called himself Juan de Esquivel, for among the Indians the exchange of names was a bond of perpetual friendship. Those who exchanged names became guaitaos, which meant the same as confederates or brethren-in-arms. Ponce de Leon became guatiao with the powerful cacique Agueinaha.] One of the Lucayes Islands, inhabited by a mild and pacific people, was heretofore called Guatao; but we will not insist on the etymology of this word, because the languages of the Lucayes Islands differed from those of Hayti.) The ethnographic document called El Auto de Figueroa is one of the most curious records of the barbarism of the first conquistadores. Without any attention to the analogy of languages, every nation that could be accused of having devoured a prisoner after a battle was arbitrarily declared of Carib race. The inhabitants of Uriapari (on the peninsula of Paria) were named Caribs; the Urinacos (settled on the banks of the Lower Orinoco, or Urinucu), Guatiaos. All the tribes designated by Figueroa as Caribs were condemned to slavery; and might at will be sold, or exterminated by war. In these sanguinary struggles, the Carib women, after the death of their husbands, defended themselves with such desperation that Anghiera says they were taken for tribes of Amazons. But amidst the cruelties exercised on the Caribs, it is consolatory to find, that there existed some courageous men who raised the voice of humanity and justice. Some of the monks embraced an opinion different from that which they had at first adopted. In an age when there could be no hope of founding public liberty on civil institutions, an attempt was at least made to defend individual liberty. "That is a most holy law (ley sanctissima)," says Gomara, in 1551, "by which our emperor has prohibited the reducing of the Indians to slavery. It is just that men, who are all born free, should not become the slaves of one another."

During our abode in the Carib missions, we observed with surprise the facility with which young Indians of eighteen years of age, when appointed to the post of alguazil, would harangue the municipality for whole hours in succession. Their tone of voice, their gravity of deportment, the gestures which accompanied their speech, all denoted an intelligent people capable of a high degree of civilization. A Franciscan monk, who knew enough of the Carib language to preach in it occasionally, pointed out to us that the long and harmonious periods which occur in the discourses of the Indians are never confused or obscure. Particular inflexions of the verb indicate beforehand the nature of the object, whether it be animate or inanimate, singular or plural. Little annexed forms (suffixes) mark the gradations of sentiment; and here, as in every language formed by a free development, clearness is the result of that regulating instinct which characterises human intelligence in the various stages of barbarism and cultivation. On holidays, after the celebration of mass, all the inhabitants of the village assemble in front of the church. The young girls place at the feet of the missionary faggots of wood, bunches of plantains, and other provision of which he stands in need for his household. At the same time the governador, the alguazil, and other municipal officers, all of whom are Indians, exhort the natives to labour, proclaim the occupations of the ensuing week, reprimand the idle, and flog the untractable. Strokes of the cane are received with the same insensibility as that with which they are given. It were better if the priest did not impose these corporal punishments at the instant of quitting the altar, and if he were not, in his sacerdotal habits, the spectator of this chastisement of men and women; but this abuse is inherent in the principle on which the strange government of the missions is founded. The most arbitrary civil power is combined with the authority exercised by the priest over the little community; and, although the Caribs are not cannibals, and we would wish to see them treated with mildness and indulgence, it may be conceived that energetic measures are sometimes necessary to maintain tranquillity in this rising society.

The difficulty of fixing the Caribs to the soil is the greater, as they have been for ages in the habit of trading on the rivers. We have already described this active people, at once commercial and warlike, occupied in the traffic of slaves, and carrying merchandize from the coasts of Dutch Guiana to the basin of the Amazon. The travelling Caribs were the Bokharians of equinoctial America. The necessity of counting the objects of their little trade, and transmitting intelligence, led them to extend and improve the use of the quipos, or, as they are called in the missions, the cordoncillos con necos (cords with knots). These quipos or knotted cords are found in Canada, in Mexico (where Boturini procured some from the Tlascaltecs), in Peru, in the plains of Guiana, in central Asia, in China, and in India. As rosaries, they have become objects of devotion in the hands of the Christians of the East; as suampans, they have been employed in the operations of manual arithmetic by the Chinese, the Tartars, and the Russians. The independent Caribs who inhabit the little-known country situated between the sources of the Orinoco and those of the rivers Essequibo, Carony, and Parima, are divided into tribes; and, like the nations of the Missouri, of Chili, and of ancient Germany, form a political confederation. This system is most in accordance with the spirit of liberty prevailing amongst those warlike hordes who see no advantage in the ties of society but for common defence. The pride of the Caribs leads them to withdraw themselves from every other tribe; even from those to whom, by their language, they have some affinity.

They claim the same separation in the missions, which seldom prosper when any attempt is made to associate them with other mixed communities, that is, with villages where every hut is inhabited by a family belonging to another nation and speaking another language. The authority of the chiefs of the independent Caribs is hereditary in the male line only, the children of sisters being excluded from the succession. This law of succession which is founded on a system of mistrust, denoting no great purity of manners, prevails in India; among the Ashantees (in Africa); and among several tribes of the savages of North America.* (* Among the Hurons (Wyandots) and the Natchez the succession to the magistracy is continued by the women: it is not the son who succeeds, but the son of the sister, or of the nearest relation in the female line. This mode of succession is said to be the most certain because the supreme power remains attached to the blood of the last chief; it is a practice that insures legitimacy. Ancient traces of this strange mode of succession, so common in Africa and in the East Indies, exist in the dynasty of the kings of the West India Islands.) The young chiefs and other youths who are desirous of marrying, are subject to the most extraordinary fasts and penances, and are required to take medicines prepared by the marirris or piaches, called in the transalleghenian countries, war-physic. The Carribbee marirris are at once priests, jugglers and physicians; they transmit to their successors their doctrine, their artifices, and the remedies they employ. The latter are accompanied by imposition of hands, and certain gestures and mysterious practices, apparently connected with the most anciently known processes of animal magnetism. Though I had opportunities of seeing many persons who had closely observed the confederated Caribs, I could not learn whether the marirris belong to a particular caste. It is observed in North America that, among the Shawanese,* (* People that came from Florida, or from the south (shawaneu) to the north.) divided into several tribes, the priests, who preside at the sacrifices, must be (as among the Hebrews) of one particular tribe, that of the Mequachakes. Any facts that may hereafter be discovered in America respecting the remains of a sacerdotal caste appears to me calculated to excite great interest, on account of those priest-kings of Peru, who styled themselves the children of the Sun; and of those sun-kings among the Natchez, who recall to mind the Heliades of the first eastern colony of Rhodes.

On quitting the mission of Cari, we had some difficulties to settle with our Indian muleteers. They had discovered that we had brought skeletons with us from the cavern of Ataruipe; and they were fully persuaded that the beasts of burden which carried the bodies of their old relations would perish on the journey.* (* See volume 2.24.) Every precaution we had taken was useless; nothing escapes a Carib's penetration and keen sense of smell, and it required all the authority of the missionary to forward our passage. We had to cross the Rio Cari in a boat, and the Rio de agua clara, by fording, or, it may almost be said, by swimming. The quicksands of the bed of this river render the passage very difficult at the season when the waters are high. The strength of the current seems surprising in so flat a country; but the rivers of the plains are precipitated, to quote a correct observation of Pliny the younger,* "less by the declivity of their course than by their abundance, and as it were by their own weight." (* Epist. lib. 8 ep. 8. Clitumnus non loci devexitate, sed ipsa sui copia et quasi pondere impellitur.) We had two bad stations, one at Matagorda and the other at Los Riecetos, before we reached the little town of Pao. We beheld everywhere the same objects; small huts constructed of reeds, and roofed with leather; men on horseback armed with lances, guarding the herds; herds of cattle half wild, remarkable for their uniform colour, and disputing the pasturage with horses and mules. No sheep or goats are found on these immense plains. Sheep do not thrive well in equinoctial America, except on table-lands above a thousand toises high, where their fleece is long and sometimes very fine. In the burning climate of the plains, where the wolves give place to jaguars, these small ruminating animals, destitute of means of defence, and slow in their movements, cannot be preserved in any considerable numbers.

We arrived on the 15th of July at the Fundacion, or Villa, del Pao, founded in 1744, and situated very favourably for a commercial station between Nueva Barcelona and Angostura. Its real name is El Concepcion del Pao. Alcedo, La Cruz, Olmedilla, and many other geographers, have mistaken the situation of this small town of the Llanos of Barcelona, confounding it either with San Juan Bauptisto del Pao of the Llanos of Caracas, or with El Valle del Pao de Zarate. Though the weather was cloudy I succeeded in obtaining some heights of alpha Centauri, serving to determine the latitude of the place; which is 8 degrees 37 minutes 57 seconds. Some altitudes of the sun gave me 67 degrees 8 minutes 12 seconds for the longitude, supposing Angostura to be 66 degrees 15 minutes 21 seconds. The astronomical determinations of Calabozo and Concepcion del Pao are very important to the geography of this country, where, in the midst of savannahs, fixed points are altogether wanting. Some fruit-trees grow in the vicinity of Pao: they are rarely seen in the Llanos. We even found some cocoa-trees, which appeared very vigorous, notwithstanding the great distance of the sea. I was the more struck with this fact because doubts have recently been started respecting the veracity of travellers, who assert that they have seen the cocoa-tree, which is a palm of the shore, at Timbuctoo, in the centre of Africa. We several times saw cocoa-trees amid the cultivated spots on the banks of the Rio Magdalena, more than a hundred leagues from the coast.

Five days, which to us appeared very tedious, brought us from Villa del Pao to the port of Nueva Barcelona. As we advanced the sky became more serene, the soil more dusty, and the atmosphere more hot. The heat from which we suffered is not entirely owing to the temperature of the air, but is produced by the fine sand mingled with it; this sand strikes against the face of the traveller, as it does against the ball of the thermometer. I never observed the mercury rise in America, amid a wind of sand, above 45.8 degrees centigrade. Captain Lyon, with whom I had the pleasure of conversing on his return from Mourzouk, appeared to me also inclined to think that the temperature of fifty-two degrees, so often felt in Fezzan, is produced in great part by the grains of quartz suspended in the atmosphere. Between Pao and the village of Santa Cruz de Cachipo, founded in 1749, and inhabited by five hundred Caribs, we passed the western elongation of the little table-land, known by the name of Mesa de Amana. This table-land forms a point of partition between the Orinoco, the Guarapiche, and the coast of New Andalusia. Its height is so inconsiderable that it would scarcely be an obstacle to the establishment of inland navigation in this part of the Llanos. The Rio Mano however, which flows into the Orinoco above the confluence of the Carony, and which D'Anville (I know not on what authority) has marked in the first edition of his great map as issuing from the lake of Valencia, and receiving the waters of the Guayra, could never have served as a natural canal between two basins of rivers. No bifurcation of this kind exists in the Llano. A great number of Carib Indians, who now inhabit the missions of Piritu, were formerly on the north and east of the table-land of Amana, between Maturin, the mouth of the Rio Arco, and the Guarapiche. The incursions of Don Joseph Careno, one of the most enterprising governors of the province of Cumana, occasioned a general migration of independent Caribs toward the banks of the Lower Orinoco in 1720.

The whole of this vast plain consists of secondary formations which to the southward rest immediately on the granitic mountains of the Orinoco. On the north-west they are separated by a narrow band of transition-rocks from the primitive mountains of the shore of Caracas. This abundance of secondary rocks, covering without interruption a space of more than seven thousand square leagues,* is a phenomenon the more remarkable in that region of the globe, because in the whole of the Sierra da la Parima, between the right bank of the Orinoco and the Rio Negro, there is, as in Scandinavia, a total absence of secondary formations. (* Reckoning only that part of the Llanos which is bounded by the Rio Apure on the south, and by the Sierra Nevada de Merida and the Parima de las Rosas on the west.) The red sandstone, containing some vestiges of fossil wood (of the family of monocotyledons) is seen everywhere in the plains of Calabozo: farther east it is overlaid by calcareous and gypseous rocks which conceal it from the research of the geologist. The marly gypsum, of which we collected specimens near the Carib mission of Cachipo, appeared to me to belong to the same formation as the gypsum of Ortiz. To class it according to the type of European formations I would range it among the gypsums, often muriatiferous, that cover the Alpine limestone or zechstein. Farther north, in the direction of the mission of San Josef de Curataquiche, M. Bonpland picked up in the plain some fine pieces of riband jasper, or Egyptian pebbles. We did not see them in their native place enchased in the rock, and cannot determine whether they belong to a very recent conglomerate or to that limestone which we saw at the Morro of Nueva Barcelona, and which is not transition limestone though it contains beds of schistose jasper (kieselschiefer).

We rested on the night of the 16th of July in the Indian village of Santa Cruz de Cachipo. This mission, founded in 1749 by several Carib families who inhabited the inundated and unhealthy banks of the Lagunetas de Auache, is opposite the confluence of the Zir Puruay with the Orinoco. We lodged at the house of the missionary, Fray Jose de las Piedras; and, on examining the registers of the parish, we saw how rapidly the prosperity of the community has been advanced by his zeal and intelligence. Since we had reached the middle of the plains, the heat had increased to such a degree that we should have preferred travelling no more during the day; but we were without arms and the Llanos were then infested by large numbers of robbers who attacked and murdered the whites who fell into their hands. Nothing can be worse than the administration of justice in these colonies. We everywhere found the prisons filled with malefactors on whom sentence is not passed till after the lapse of seven or eight years. Nearly a third of the prisoners succeed in making their escape; and the unpeopled plains, filled with herds, furnish them with booty. They commit their depredations on horseback in the manner of the Bedouins. The insalubrity of the prisons would be attended with fatal results but that these receptacles are cleared from time to time by the flight of the prisoners. It also frequently happens that sentences of death, tardily pronounced by the Audiencia of Caracas, cannot be executed for want of a hangman. In these cases the barbarous custom is observed of pardoning one criminal on condition of his hanging the others. Our guides related to us that, a short time before our arrival on the coast of Cumana, a Zambo, known for the great ferocity of his manners, determined to screen himself from punishment by turning executioner. The preparations for the execution however, shook his resolution; he felt a horror of himself, and preferring death to the disgrace of thus saving his life, he called again for his irons which had been struck off. He did not long remain in prison, and he underwent his sentence through the baseness of one of his accomplices. This awakening of a sentiment of honour in the soul of a murderer is a psychologic phenomenon worthy of reflection. The man who had so often shed the blood of travellers in the plains recoiled at the idea of becoming the passive instrument of justice in inflicting upon others a punishment which he felt that he himself deserved.

If, even in the peaceful times when M. Bonpland and myself had the good fortune to travel through North and South America, the Llanos were the refuge of malefactors who had committed crimes in the missions of the Orinoco, or who had escaped from the prisons on the coast, how much worse must that state of things have been rendered by discord during the continuance of that sanguinary struggle which has terminated in conferring freedom and independence on those vast regions! Our European wastes and heaths are but a feeble image of the savannahs of the New Continent which for the space of eight or ten thousand square leagues are smooth as the surface of the sea. The immensity of their extent insures impunity to robbers, who conceal themselves more effectually in the savannahs than in our mountains and forests; and it is easy to conceive that even a European police would not be very effective in regions where there are travellers and no roads, herds and no herdsmen, and farms so solitary that notwithstanding the powerful action of the mirage, a journey of several days may be made without seeing one appear within the horizon.

Whilst traversing the Llanos of Caracas, New Barcelona, and Cumana, which succeed each other from west to east, from the snowy mountains of Merida to the Delta of the Orinoco, we feel anxious to know whether these vast tracts of land are destined by nature to serve eternally for pasture or whether they will at some future time be subject to the plough and the spade. This question is the more important as the Llanos, situated at the two extremities of South America, are obstacles to the political union of the provinces they separate. They prevent the agriculture of the coast of Venezuela from extending towards Guiana and they impede that of Potosi from advancing in the direction of the mouth of the Rio de la Plata. The intermediate Llanos preserve, together with pastoral life, somewhat of a rude and wild character which separates and keeps them remote from the civilization of countries anciently cultivated. Thus it has happened that in the war of independence they have been the scene of struggle between the hostile parties; and that the inhabitants of Calabozo have almost seen the fate of the confederate provinces of Venezuela and Cundinamarca decided before their walls. In assigning limits to the new states and to their subdivisions, it is to be hoped there may not be cause hereafter to repent having lost sight of the importance of the Llanos, and the influence they may have on the disunion of communities which important common interests should bring together. These plains would serve as natural boundaries like the seas or the virgin forests of the tropics, were it not that armies can cross them with greater facility, as their innumerable troops of horses and mules and herds of oxen furnish every means of conveyance and subsistence.

What we have seen of the power of man struggling against the force of nature in Gaul, in Germany and recently (but still beyond the tropics) in the United States, scarcely affords any just measure of what we may expect from the progress of civilization in the torrid zone. Forests disappear but very slowly by fire and the axe when the trunks of trees are from eight to ten feet in diameter; when in falling they rest one upon another, and the wood, moistened by almost continual rains, is excessively hard. The planters who inhabit the Llanos or Pampas do not generally admit the possibility of subjecting the soil to cultivation; it is a problem not yet solved. Most of the savannahs of Venezuela have not the same advantage as those of North America. The latter are traversed longitudinally by three great rivers, the Missouri, the Arkansas, and the Red River of Nachitoches; the savannahs of Araura, Calabozo, and Pao are crossed in a transverse direction only by the tributary streams of the Orinoco, the most westerly of which (the Cari, the Pao, the Acaru, and the Manapire) have very little water in the season of drought. These streams scarcely flow at all toward the north; so that in the centre of the Llanos there remain vast tracts of land called bancos and mesas* frightfully parched. (* The Spanish words banco and mesa signify literally bench and table. In the Llanos of South America little elevations rising slightly above the general elevation of the plain are called bancos and mesas from their supposed resemblance to benches and tables.) The eastern parts, fertilized by the Portuguesa, the Masparro, and the Orivante, and by the tributary streams of those three rivers, are most susceptible of cultivation. The soil is sand mixed with clay, covering a bed of quartz pebbles. The vegetable mould, the principal source of the nutrition of plants, is everywhere extremely thin. It is scarcely augmented by the fall of the leaves, which, in the forests of the torrid zone, is less periodically regular than in temperate climates. During thousands of years the Llanos have been destitute of trees and brushwood; a few scattered palms in the savannah add little to that hydruret of carbon, that extractive matter, which, according to the experiments of Saussure, Davy, and Braconnot, gives fertility to the soil. The social plants which almost exclusively predominate in the steppes, are monocotyledons; and it is known how much grasses impoverish the soil into which their fibrous roots penetrate. This action of the killingias, paspalums and cenchri, which form the turf, is everywhere the same; but where the rock is ready to pierce the earth this varies according as it rests on red sandstone, or on compact limestone and gypsum; it varies according as periodical inundations accumulate mud on the lower grounds or as the shock of the waters carries away from the small elevations the little soil that has covered them. Many solitary cultivated spots already exist in the midst of the pastures where running water and tufts of the mauritia palm have been found. These farms, sown with maize, and planted with cassava, will multiply considerably if trees and shrubs be augmented.

The aridity and excessive heat of the mesas do not depend solely on the nature of their surface and the local reverberation of the soil; their climate is modified by the adjacent regions; by the whole of the Llano of which they form a part. In the deserts of Africa or Arabia, in the Llanos of South America, in the vast heaths extending from the extremity of Jutland to the mouth of the Scheldt, the stability of the limits of the desert, the savannahs, and the downs, depends chiefly on their immense extent and the nakedness these plains have acquired from some revolution destructive of the ancient vegetation of our planet. By their extent, their continuity, and their mass they oppose the inroads of cultivation and preserve, like inland gulfs, the stability of their boundaries. I will not enter upon the great question, whether in the Sahara, that Mediterranean of moving sands, the germs of organic life are increased in our days. In proportion as our geographical knowledge has extended we have discovered in the eastern part of the desert islets of verdure; oases covered with date-trees crowd together in more numerous archipelagos, and open their ports to the caravans; but we are ignorant whether the form of the oases have not remained constantly the same since the time of Herodotus. Our annals are too incomplete to enable us to follow Nature in her slow and gradual progress. From these spaces entirely bare whence some violent catastrophe has swept away the vegetable covering and the mould; from those deserts of Syria and Africa which, by their petrified wood, attest the changes they have undergone; let us turn to the grass-covered Llanos and to the consideration of phenomena that come nearer the circle of our daily observations. Respecting the possibility of a more general cultivation of the steppes of America, the colonists settled there, concur in the opinions I have deduced from the climatic action of these steppes considered as surfaces, or continuous masses. They have observed that downs enclosed within cultivated and wooded land sooner yield to the labours of the husbandman than soils alike circumscribed, but forming part of a vast surface of the same nature. This observation is extremely just whether in reference to soil covered with heath, as in the north of Europe; with cistuses, mastic-trees, or palmettos, as in Spain; or with cactuses, argemones, or brathys, as in equinoctial America. The more space the association occupies the more resistance do the social plants oppose to the labourer. With this general cause others are combined in the Llanos of Venezuela; namely the action of the small grasses which impoverish the soil; the total absence of trees and brushwood; the sandy winds, the heat of which is increased by contact with a surface absorbing the rays of the sun during twelve hours, and unshaded except by the stalks of the aristides, chanchuses, and paspalums. The progress observable on the vegetation of large trees and the cultivation of dicotyledonous plants in the vicinity of towns, (for instance around Calabozo and Pao) prove what may be gained upon the Llano by attacking it in small portions, enclosing it by degrees, and dividing it by coppices and canals of irrigation. Possibly the influence of the winds which render the soil sterile might be diminished by sowing on a large scale, for example, over fifteen or twenty acres, the seeds of the psidium, the croton, the cassia, or the tamarind, which prefer dry, open spots. I am far from believing that the savannahs will ever disappear entirely; or that the Llanos, so useful for pasturage and the trade in cattle, will ever be cultivated like the valleys of Aragua or other parts near the coast of Caracas and Cumana: but I am persuaded that in the lapse of ages a considerable portion of these plains, under a government favourable to industry, will lose the wild aspect which has characterized them since the first conquest by Europeans.

After three days' journey we began to perceive the chain of the mountains of Cumana, which separates the Llanos, or, as they are often called here, the great sea of verdure,* from the coast of the Caribbean Sea. (* Los Llanos son como un mar de yerbas—The Llanos are like a vast sea of grass—is an observation often repeated in these regions.) If the Bergantin be more than eight hundred toises high, it may be seen supposing only an ordinary refraction of one fourteenth of the arch, at the distance of twenty-seven nautical leagues; but the state of the atmosphere long concealed from us the majestic view of this curtain of mountains. It appeared at first like a fog-bank which hid the stars near the pole at their rising and setting; gradually this body of vapour seemed to augment and condense, to assume a bluish tint, and become bounded by sinuous and fixed outlines. The same effects which the mariner observes on approaching a new land present themselves to the traveller on the borders of the Llano. The horizon began to enlarge in some part and the vault of heaven seemed no longer to rest at an equal distance on the grass-covered soil. A llanero, or inhabitant of the Llanos, is happy only when, as expressed in the simple phraseology of the country, he can see everywhere well around him. What appears to European eyes a covered country, slightly undulated by a few scattered hills, is to him a rugged region bristled with mountains. After having passed several months in the thick forests of the Orinoco, in places where one is accustomed, when at any distance from the river, to see the stars only in the zenith, as through the mouth of a well, a journey in the Llanos is peculiarly agreeable and attractive. The traveller experiences new sensations; and, like the Llanero, he enjoys the happiness of seeing well around him. But this enjoyment, as we ourselves experienced, is not of long duration. There is doubtless something solemn and imposing in the aspect of a boundless horizon, whether viewed from the summits of the Andes or the highest Alps, amid the expanse of the ocean or in the vast plains of Venezuela and Tucuman. Infinity of space, as poets in every language say, is reflected within ourselves; it is associated with ideas of a superior order; it elevates the mind which delights in the calm of solitary meditation. It is true, also, that every view of unbounded space bears a peculiar character. The prospect surveyed from a solitary peak varies according as the clouds reposing on the plain extend in layers, are conglomerated in groups, or present to the astonished eye, through broad openings, the habitations of man, the labour of agriculture, or the verdant tint of the aerial ocean. An immense sheet of water, animated by a thousand various beings even to its utmost depths, changing perpetually in colour and aspect, moveable at its surface like the element that agitates it, all charm the imagination during long voyages by sea; but the dusty and creviced Llano, throughout a great part of the year, has a depressing influence on the mind by its unchanging monotony. When, after eight or ten days' journey, the traveller becomes accustomed to the mirage and the brilliant verdure of a few tufts of mauritia* (* The fan-palm, or sago-tree of Guiana.) scattered from league to league, he feels the want of more varied impressions. He loves again to behold the great tropical trees, the wild rush of torrents or hills and valleys cultivated by the hand of the labourer. If the deserts of Africa and of the Llanos or savannahs of the New Continent filled a still greater space than they actually occupy, nature would be deprived of many of the beautiful products peculiar to the torrid zone.* (* In calculating from maps on a very large scale I found the Llanos of Cumana, Barcelona, and Caracas, from the delta of the Orinoco to the northern bank of the Apure, 7200 square leagues; the Llanos between the Apure and Putumayo, 21,000 leagues; the Pampas on the north-west of Buenos Ayres, 40,000 square leagues; the Pampas south of the parallel of Buenos Ayres, 37,000 square leagues. The total area of the Llanos of South America, covered with gramina, is consequently 105,200 square leagues, twenty leagues to an equatorial degree.) The heaths of the north, the steppes of the Volga and the Don, are scarcely poorer in species of plants and animals than are the twenty-eight thousand square leagues of savannahs extending in a semicircle from north-east to south-west, from the mouths of the Orinoco to the banks of the Caqueta and the Putumayo, beneath the finest sky in the world, and in the land of plantains and bread-fruit trees. The influence of the equinoctial climate, everywhere else so vivifying, is not felt in places where the great associations of gramina almost exclude every other plant. Judging from the aspect of the soil we might have believed ourselves to be in the temperate zone and even still farther northward but that a few scattered palms, and at nightfall the fine constellations of the southern sky (the Centaur, Canopus, and the innumerable nebulae with which the Ship is resplendent), reminded us that we were only eight degrees distant from the equator.

A phenomenon which fixed the attention of De Luc and which in these latter years has furnished a subject of speculation to geologists, occupied us much during our journey across the Llanos. I allude not to those blocks of primitive rock which occur, as in the Jura, on the slope of limestone mountains, but to those enormous blocks of granite and syenite which, in limits very distinctly marked by nature, are found scattered on the north of Holland, Germany and the countries of the Baltic. It seems to be now proved that, distributed as in radii, they came at the time of the ancient revolutions of our globe from the Scandinavian peninsula southward; and that they did not primitively belong to the granitic chains of the Harz and Erzgeberg, which they approach without, however, reaching their foot.* (* Leopold von Buch, Voyage en Norwege volume 1 page 30.) I was surprised at not seeing one of these blocks in the Llanos of Venezuela, though these immense plains are bounded on the south by the Sierra Parima, a group of mountains entirely granitic and exhibiting in its denticulated and often columnar peaks traces of the most violent destruction. Northward the granitic chain of the Silla de Caracas and Porto Cabello are separated from the Llanos by a screen of mountains that are schistose between Villa de Cura and Parapara, and calcareous between the Bergantin and Caripe. I was no less struck by this absence of blocks on the banks of the Amazon. La Condamine affirms that from the Pongo de Manseriche to the Strait of Pauxis not the smallest stone is to be found. Now the basin of the Rio Negro and of the Amazon is also a Llano, a plain like those of Venezuela and Buenos Ayres. The difference consists only in the state of vegetation. The two Llanos situated at the northern and southern extremities of South America are covered with gramina; they are treeless savannahs; but the intermediate Llano, that of the Amazon, exposed to almost continual equatorial rains, is a thick forest. I do not remember having heard that the Pampas of Buenos Ayres or the savannahs of the Missouri* and New Mexico contain granitic blocks. (* Are there any isolated blocks in North America northward of the great lakes?) The absence of this phenomenon appears general in the New World as it probably also is in Sahara, in Africa; for we must not confound the rocky masses that pierce the soil in the midst of the desert, and of which travellers often make mention, with mere scattered fragments. These facts seem to prove that the blocks of Scandinavian granite which cover the sandy countries on the south of the Baltic, and those of Westphalia and Holland, must be traced to some local revolution. The ancient conglomerate (red sandstone) which covers a great part of the Llanos of Venezuela and of the basin of the Amazon contains no doubt fragments of the same primitive rocks which constitute the neighbouring mountains; but the convulsions of which these mountains exhibit evident marks, do not appear to have been attended with circumstances favourable to the removal of great blocks. This geognostic phenomenon was to me the more unexpected since there exists nowhere in the world so smooth a plain entirely granitic. Before my departure from Europe I had observed with surprise that there were no primitive blocks in Lombardy and in the great plain of Bavaria which appears to be the bottom of an ancient lake, and which is situated two hundred and fifty toises above the level of the ocean. It is bounded on the north by the granites of the Upper Palatinate; and on the south by Alpine limestone, transition-thonschiefer, and the mica-slates of the Tyrol.

We arrived, on the 23rd of July, at the town of Nueva Barcelona, less fatigued by the heat of the Llanos, to which we had been long accustomed, than annoyed by the winds of sand which occasion painful chaps in the skin. Seven months previously, in going from Cumana to Caracas, we had rested a few hours at the Morro de Barcelona, a fortified rock, which, near the village of Pozuelos, is joined to the continent only by a neck of land. We were received with the kindest hospitality in the house of Don Pedro Lavie, a wealthy merchant of French extraction. This gentleman, who was accused of having given refuge to the unfortunate Espana when a fugitive on these coasts in 1796, was arrested by order of the Audiencia, and conveyed as a prisoner to Caracas. The friendship of the governor of Cumana and the remembrance of the services he had rendered to the rising commerce of those countries contributed to procure his liberty. We had endeavoured to alleviate his captivity by visiting him in prison; and we had now the satisfaction of finding him in the midst of his family. Illness under which he was suffering had been aggravated by confinement; and he sank into the grave without seeing the dawn of those days of independence, which his friend Don Joseph Espana had predicted on the scaffold prior to his execution. "I die," said that man, who was formed for the accomplishment of grand projects, "I die an ignominious death; but my fellow citizens will soon piously collect my ashes, and my name will reappear with glory." These remarkable words were uttered in the public square of Caracas, on the 8th of May, 1799.

In 1790 Nueva Barcelona contained scarcely ten thousand inhabitants, and in 1800, its population was more than sixteen thousand. The town was founded in 1637 by a Catalonian conquistador, named Juan Urpin. A fruitless attempt was then made, to give the whole province the name of New Catalonia. As our maps often mark two towns, Barcelona and Cumanagoto, instead of one, and as the two names are considered as synonymous, it may be well to explain the cause of this error. Anciently, at the mouth of the Rio Neveri, there was an Indian town, built in 1588 by Lucas Faxardo, and named San Cristoval de los Cumanagotos. This town was peopled solely by natives who came from the saltworks of Apaicuare. In 1637 Urpin founded, two leagues farther inland, the Spanish town of Nueva Barcelona, which he peopled with some of the inhabitants of Cumanagoto, together with some Catalonians. For thirty-four years, disputes were incessantly arising between the two neighbouring communities till in 1671, the governor Angulo succeeded in persuading them to establish themselves on a third spot, where the town of Barcelona now stands. According to my observations it is situated in latitude 10 degrees 6 minutes 52 seconds.* (* These observations were made on the Plaza Major. They are merely the result of six circum-meridian heights of Canopus, taken all in one night. In Las Memorias de Espinosa the latitude is stated to be 10 degrees 9 minutes 6 seconds. The result of M. Ferrer's observations made it 10 degrees 8 minutes 24 seconds.) The ancient town of Cumanagoto is celebrated in the country for a miraculous image of the Virgin,* which the Indians say was found in the hollow trunk of an old tutumo, or calabash-tree (Crescentia cujete). (* La milagrosa imagen de Maria Santissima del Socorro, also called La Virgen del Tutumo.) This image was carried in procession to Nueva Barcelona; but whenever the clergy were dissatisfied with the inhabitants of the new city, the Virgin fled at night, and returned to the trunk of the tree at the mouth of the river. This miracle did not cease till a fine convent (the college of the Propaganda) was built, to receive the Franciscans. In a similar case, the Bishop of Caracas caused the image of Our Lady de los Valencianos to be placed in the archives of the bishopric, where she remained thirty years under seal.

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Part 3 of 3

The climate of Barcelona is not so hot as that of Cumana but it is extremely damp and somewhat unhealthy in the rainy season. M. Bonpland had borne very well the irksome journey across the Llanos; and had recovered his strength and activity. With respect to myself, I suffered more at Barcelona than I did at Angostura, immediately after our passage on the rivers. One of those extraordinary tropical rains during which, at sunset, drops of enormous size fall at great distances from one another, caused me to experience sensations which seemed to threaten an attack of typhus, a disease then prevalent on that coast. We remained nearly a month at Barcelona where we found our friend Fray Juan Gonzales, of whom I have often spoken, and who had traversed the Upper Orinoco before us. He expressed regret that we had not been able to prolong our visit to that unknown country; and he examined our plants and animals with that interest which must be felt by even the most uninformed man for the productions of a region he has long since visited. Fray Juan had resolved to go to Europe and to accompany us as far as the island of Cuba. We were together for the space of seven months, and his society was most agreeable: he was cheerful, intelligent and obliging. How little did we anticipate the sad fate that awaited him. He took charge of a part of our collections; and a friend of his own confided to his care a child who was to be conveyed to Spain for its education. Alas! the collection, the child and the young ecclesiastic were all buried in the waves.

South-east of Nueva Barcelona, at the distance of two Leagues, there rises a lofty chain of mountains, abutting on the Cerro del Bergantin, which is visible at Cumana. This spot is known by the name of the hot waters, (aguas calientes). When I felt my health sufficiently restored, we made an excursion thither on a cool and misty morning. The waters, which are loaded with sulphuretted hydrogen, issue from a quartzose sandstone, lying on compact limestone, the same as that we had examined at the Morro. We again found in this limestone intercalated beds of black hornstein, passing into kieselschiefer. It is not, however, a transition rock; by its position, its division into small strata, its whiteness and its dull and conchoidal fractures (with very flattened cavities), it rather approximates to the limestone of Jura. The real kieselschiefer and Lydian-stone have not been observed hitherto except in the transition-slates and limestones. Is the sandstone whence the springs of the Bergantin issue of the same formation as the sandstone of the Imposible and the Tumiriquiri? The temperature of the thermal waters is only 43.2 degrees centigrade (the atmosphere being 27). They flow first to the distance of forty toises over the rocky surface of the ground; then they rush down into a natural cavern; and finally they pierce through the limestone to issue out at the foot of the mountain on the left bank of the little river Narigual. The springs, while in contact with the oxygen of the atmosphere, deposit a good deal of sulphur. I did not collect, as I had done at Mariara, the bubbles of air that rise in jets from these thermal waters. They no doubt contain a large quantity of nitrogen because the sulphuretted hydrogen decomposes the mixture of oxygen and nitrogen dissolved in the spring. The sulphurous waters of San Juan which issue from calcareous rock, like those of the Bergantin, have also a low temperature (31.3 degrees); while in the same region the temperature of the sulphurous waters of Mariara and Las Trincheras (near Porto Cabello), which gush immediately from gneiss-granite, is 58.9 degrees the former, and 90.4 degrees the latter. It would seem as if the heat which these springs acquire in the interior of the globe diminishes in proportion as they pass from primitive to secondary superposed rocks.

Our excursion to the Aguas Calientes of Bergantin ended with a vexatious accident. Our host had lent us one of his finest saddle-horses. We were warned at the same time not to ford the little river of Narigual. We passed over a sort of bridge, or rather some trunks of trees laid closely together, and we made our horses swim, holding their bridles. The horse I had ridden suddenly disappeared after struggling for some time under water: all our endeavours to discover the cause of this accident were fruitless. Our guides conjectured that the animal's legs had been seized by the caymans which are very numerous in those parts. My perplexity was extreme: delicacy and the affluent circumstances of my host forbade me to think of repairing his loss; and M. Lavie, more considerate of our situation than sensible of his own misfortune, endeavoured to tranquillize us by exaggerating the facility with which fine horses were procurable from the neighbouring savannahs.

The crocodiles of the Rio Neveri are large and numerous, especially near the mouth of the river; but in general they are less fierce than the crocodiles of the Orinoco. These animals manifest in America the same contrasts of ferocity as in Egypt and Nubia: this fact is obvious when we compare with attention the narratives of Burckhardt and Belzoni. The state of cultivation in different countries and the amount of population in the proximity of rivers modify the habits of these large saurians: they are timid when on dry ground and they flee from man, even in the water, when they are not in want of food and when they perceive any danger in attacking. The Indians of Nueva Barcelona convey wood to market in a singular manner. Large logs of zygophyllum and caesalpinia* are thrown into the river and carried down by the stream, while the owners of the wood swim here and there to float the pieces that are stopped by the windings of the banks. (* The Lecythis ollaria, in the vicinity of Nueva Barcelona, furnishes excellent timber. We saw trunks of this tree seventy feet high. Around the town, beyond that arid zone of cactus which separates Nueva Barcelona from the steppe, grow the Clerodendrum tenuifolium, the Ionidium itubu, which resembles the Viola, and the Allionia violacea.) This could not be done in the greater part of those American rivers in which crocodiles are found. The town of Barcelona has not, like Cumana, an Indian suburb; and the only natives who are seen there are inhabitants of the neighbouring missions or of huts scattered in the plain. Neither the one nor the other are of Carib race, but a mixture of the Cumanagotos, Palenkas and Piritus; short, stunted, indolent and addicted to drinking. Fermented cassava is here the favourite beverage; the wine of the palm-tree, which is used on the Orinoco, being almost unknown on the coast. It is curious to observe that men in different zones, to satisfy the passion of inebriety, employ not only all the families of monocotyledonous and dicotyledonous plants, but even the poisonous Agaric (Amanita muscaria) of which, with disgusting economy, the Coriacs have learnt to drink the same juice several times during five successive days.* (* Mr. Langsdor (Wetterauisches Journal part 1 page 254) first made known this very extraordinary physiological phenomenon, which I prefer describing in Latin: Coriaecorum gens, in ora Asiae septentrioni opposita, potum sibi excogitavit ex succo inebriante agarici muscarii. Qui succus (aeque ut asparagorum), vel per humanum corpus transfusus, temulentiam nihilominus facit. Quare gens misera et inops, quo rarius mentis sit suae, propriam urinam bibit identidem: continuoque mingens rursusque hauriens eundem succum (dicas, ne ulla in parte mundi desit ebrietas), pauculis agaricis producere in diem quintum temulentiam potest.)

The packet boats (correos) from Corunna bound for the Havannah and Mexico had been due three months; and it was believed they had been taken by the English cruisers stationed on this coast. Anxious to reach Cumana, in order to avail ourselves of the first opportunity that might offer for our passage to Vera Cruz, we hired an open boat called a lancha, a sort of craft employed habitually in the latitudes east of Cape Codera where the sea is scarcely ever rough. Our lancha, which was laden with cacao, carried on a contraband trade with the island of Trinidad. For this reason the owner imagined we had nothing to fear from the enemy's vessels, which then blockaded all the Spanish ports. We embarked our collection of plants, our instruments and our monkeys; and, the weather being delightful, we hoped to make a very short passage from the mouth of the Rio Neveri to Cumana: but we had scarcely reached the narrow channel between the continent and the rocky isles of Borracha and the Chimanas, when to our great surprise we came in sight of an armed boat, which, whilst hailing us from a great distance, fired some musket-shot at us. The boat belonged to a privateer of Halifax; and I recognized among the sailors a Prussian, a native of Memel. I had found no opportunity, since my arrival in America, of expressing myself in my native language, and I could have wished to have spoken it on a less unpleasant occasion. Our protestations were without effect: we were carried on board the privateer, and the captain, affecting not to recognize the passports delivered by the governor of Trinidad for the illicit trade, declared us to be a lawful prize. Being a little in the habit of speaking English, I entered into conversation with the captain, begging not to be taken to Nova Scotia, but to be put on shore on the neighbouring coast. While I endeavoured, in the cabin, to defend my own rights and those of the owner of the lancha, I heard a noise on deck. Something was whispered to the captain, who left us in consternation. Happily for us, an English sloop of war, the Hawk, was cruising in those parts, and had signalled the captain to bring to; but the signal not being promptly answered, a gun was fired from the sloop and a midshipman sent on board our vessel. He was a polite young man, and gave me hopes that the lancha, which was laden with cacao, would be given up, and that on the following day we might pursue our voyage. In the meantime he invited me to accompany him on board the sloop, assuring me that his commander, Captain Garnier, would furnish me with better accommodation for the night than I should find in the vessel from Halifax.

I accepted these obliging offers and was received with the utmost kindness by Captain Garnier, who had made the voyage to the north-west coast of America with Vancouver, and who appeared to be highly interested in all I related to him respecting the great cataracts of Atures and Maypures, the bifurcation of the Orinoco and its communication with the Amazon. He introduced to me several of his officers who had been with Lord Macartney in China. I had not, during the space of a year, enjoyed the society of so many well-informed persons. They had learned from the English newspapers the object of my enterprise. I was treated with great confidence and the commander gave me up his own state-room. They gave me at parting the astronomical Ephemerides for those years which I had not been able to procure in France or Spain. I am indebted to Captain Garnier for the observations I was enabled to make on the satellites beyond the equator and I feel it a duty to record here the gratitude I feel for his kindness. Coming from the forests of Cassiquiare, and having been confined during whole months to the narrow circle of missionary life, we felt a high gratification at meeting for the first time with men who had sailed round the world, and whose ideas were enlarged by so extensive and varied a course. I quitted the English vessel with impressions which are not yet effaced from my remembrance, and which rendered me more than ever satisfied with the career on which I had entered.

We continued our passage on the following day; and were surprised at the depth of the channels between the Caracas Islands, where the sloop worked her way through them almost touching the rocks. How much do these calcareous islets, of which the form and direction call to mind the great catastrophe that separated from them the mainland, differ in aspect from the volcanic archipelago on the north of Lanzerote where the hills of basalt seem to have been heaved up from the bottom of the sea! Numbers of pelicans and of flamingos, which fished in the nooks or harassed the pelicans in order to seize their prey, indicated our approach to the coast of Cumana. It is curious to observe at sunrise how the sea-birds suddenly appear and animate the scene, reminding us, in the most solitary regions, of the activity of our cities at the dawn of day. At nine in the morning we reached the gulf of Cariaco which serves as a roadstead to the town of Cumana. The hill, crowned by the castle of San Antonio, stood out, prominent from its whiteness, on the dark curtain of the inland mountains. We gazed with interest on the shore, where we first gathered plants in America, and where, some months later, M. Bonpland had been in such danger. Among the cactuses, that rise in columns twenty feet high, appear the Indian huts of the Guaykeries. Every part of the landscape was familiar to us; the forest of cactus, the scattered huts and that enormous ceiba, beneath which we loved to bathe at the approach of night. Our friends at Cumana came out to meet us: men of all castes, whom our frequent herborizations had brought into contact with us, expressed the greater joy at sight of us, as a report that we had perished on the banks of the Orinoco had been current for several months. These reports had their origin either in the severe illness of M. Bonpland, or in the fact of our boat having been nearly lost in a gale above the mission of Uruana.

We hastened to visit the governor, Don Vicente Emparan, whose recommendations and constant solicitude had been so useful to us during the long journey we had just terminated. He procured for us, in the centre of the town, a house which, though perhaps too lofty in a country exposed to violent earthquakes, was extremely useful for our instruments. We enjoyed from its terraces a majestic view of the sea, of the isthmus of Araya, and the archipelago of the islands of Caracas, Picuita and Borracha. The port of Cumana was every day more and more closely blockaded, and the vain expectation of the arrival of Spanish packets detained us two months and a half longer. We were often nearly tempted to go to the Danish islands which enjoyed a happy neutrality; but we feared that, if we left the Spanish colonies, we might find some obstacles to our return. With the ample freedom which in a moment of favour had been granted to us, we did not consider it prudent to hazard anything that might give umbrage to the local authorities. We employed our time in completing the Flora of Cumana, geologically examining the eastern part of the peninsula of Araya, and observing many eclipses of satellites, which confirmed the longitude of the place already obtained by other means. We also made experiments on the extraordinary refractions, on evaporation and on atmospheric electricity.

The living animals which we had brought from the Orinoco were objects of great curiosity to the inhabitants of Cumana. The capuchin of the Esmeralda (Simia chiropotes), which so much resembles man in the expression of its physiognomy; and the sleeping monkey (Simia trivirgata), which is the type of a new group; had never yet been seen on that coast. We destined them for the menagerie of the Jardin des Plantes at Paris. The arrival of a French squadron which had failed in an attack upon Curacao furnished us, unexpectedly, with an excellent opportunity for sending them to Guadaloupe; and General Jeannet, together with the commissary Bresseau, agent of the executive power at the Antilles, promised to convey them. The monkeys and birds died at Guadaloupe but fortunately the skin of the Simia chiropotes, the only one in Europe, was sent a few years ago to the Jardin des Plantes, where the couxio (Simia satanas) and the stentor or alouate of the steppes of Caracas (Simia ursina) had been already received. The arrival of so great a number of French military officers and the manifestation of political and religious opinions not altogether conformable with the interests of the governments of Europe excited singular agitation in the population of Cumana. The governor treated the French authorities with the forms of civility consistent with the friendly relations subsisting at that period between France and Spain. In the streets the coloured people crowded round the agent of the French Directory, whose dress was rich and theatrical. White men, too, with indiscreet curiosity, whenever they could make themselves understood, made enquiries concerning the degree of influence granted by the republic to the colonists in the government of Guadaloupe. The king's officers doubled their zeal in furnishing provision for the little squadron. Strangers, who boasted that they were free, appeared to these people troublesome guests; and in a country of which the growing prosperity depended on clandestine communication with the islands, and on a freedom of trade forced from the ministry, the European Spaniards extolled the wisdom of the old code of laws (leyes de Indias) which permitted the entrance of foreign vessels into their ports only in extreme cases of want or distress. These contrasts between the restless desires of the colonists and the distrustful apathy of the government, throw some light on the great political events which, after long preparation, have separated Spain from her colonies.

We again passed a few agreeable days, from the third to the fifth of November, at the peninsula of Araya, situated beyond the gulf of Cariaco, opposite to Cumana.* (* I have already described the pearls of Araya; its sulphurous deposits and submarine springs of liquid and colourless petroleum. See volume 1.5.) We were informed that the Indians carried to the town from time to time considerable quantities of native alum, found in the neighbouring mountains. The specimens shown to us sufficiently indicated that it was neither alunite, similar to the rock of Tolfa and Piombino, nor those capillary and silky salts of alkaline sulphate of alumina and magnesia that line the clefts and cavities of rocks, but real masses of native alum, with a conchoidal or imperfectly lamellar fracture. We were led to hope that we should find the mine of alum (mina de alun) in the slaty cordillera of Maniquarez, and so new a geological phenomenon was calculated to rivet our attention. The priest Juan Gonzales, and the treasurer, Don Manuel Navarete, who had been useful to us from our first arrival on this coast, accompanied us in our little excursion. We disembarked near Cape Caney and again visited the ancient salt-pit (which is converted into a lake by the irruption of the sea), the fine ruins of the castle of Araya and the calcareous mountain of the Barigon, which, from its steepness on the western side is somewhat difficult of access. Muriatiferous clay mixed with bitumen and lenticular gypsum and sometimes passing to a darkish brown clay, devoid of salt, is a formation widely spread through this peninsula, in the island of Margareta and on the opposite continent, near the castle of San Antonio de Cumana. Probably the existence of this formation has contributed to produce those ruptures and rents in the ground which strike the eye of the geologist when he stands on one of the eminences of the peninsula of Araya. The cordillera of this peninsula, composed of mica-slate and clay-slate, is separated on the north from the chain of mountains of the island of Margareta (which are of a similar composition) by the channel of Cubagua; and on the south it is separated from the lofty calcareous chain of the continent, by the gulf of Cariaco. The whole intermediate space appears to have been heretofore filled with muriatiferous clay; and no doubt the continual erosions of the ocean have removed this formation and converted the plain, first into lakes, then into gulfs, and finally into navigable channels. The account of what has passed in the most modern times at the foot of the castle of Araya, the irruption of the sea into the ancient salt-pit, the formation of the laguna de Chacopata and a lake, four leagues in length, which cuts the island of Margareta nearly into two parts, afford evident proofs of these successive erosions. In the singular configuration of the coasts in the Morro of Chacopata; in the little islands of the Caribbees, the Lobos and Tunal; in the great island of Coche, and the capes of Carnero and Mangliers there still seem to be apparent the remains of an isthmus which, stretching from north to south, formerly joined the peninsula of Araya to the island of Margareta. In that island a neck of very low land, three thousand toises long, and less than two hundred toises broad, conceals on the northern sides the two hilly groups, known by the names of La Vega de San Juan and the Macanao. The Laguna Grande of Margareta has a very narrow opening to the south and small boats pass by portage over the neck of land or northern dyke. Though the waters on these shores seem at present to recede from the continent it is nevertheless very probable that in the lapse of ages, either by an earthquake or by a sudden rising of the ocean, the long island of Margareta will be divided into two rocky islands of a trapezoidal form.

The limestone of the Barigon, which is a part of the great formation of sandstone or calcareous breccia of Cumana, is filled with fossil shells in as perfect preservation as those of other tertiary limestones in France and Italy. We detached some blocks containing oysters eight inches in diameter, pectens, venuses, and lithophyte polypi. I recommend to naturalists better versed in the knowledge of fossils than I then was, to examine with care this mountainous coast (which is easy of access to European vessels) in their way to Cumana, Guayra or Curacao. It would be curious to discover whether any of these shells and these species of petrified zoophytes still inhabit the seas of the West Indies, as M. Bonpland conjectured, and as is the case in the island of Timor and perhaps in Guadaloupe.

We sailed on the 4th of November, at one o'clock in the morning, in search of the mine of native alum. I took with me the chronometer and my large Dollond telescope, intending to observe at the Laguna Chica (Small Lake), east of the village of Maniquarez, the immersion of the first satellite of Jupiter; this design, however, was not accomplished, contrary winds having prevented our arrival before daylight. The spectacle of the phosphorescence of the ocean and the sports of the porpoises which surrounded our canoe somewhat atoned for this disappointment. We again passed those spots where springs of petroleum gush from mica-slate at the bottom of the sea and the smell of which is perceptible from a considerable distance. When it is recollected that farther eastward, near Cariaco, the hot and submarine waters are sufficiently abundant to change the temperature of the gulf at its surface, we cannot doubt that the petroleum is the effect of distillation at an immense depth, issuing from those primitive rocks beneath which lies the focus of all volcanic commotion.

The Laguna Chica is a cove surrounded by perpendicular mountains, and connected with the gulf of Cariaco only by a narrow channel twenty-five fathoms deep. It seems, like the fine port of Acapulco, to owe its existence to the effect of an earthquake. A beach shows that the sea is here receding from the land, as on the opposite coast of Cumana. The peninsula of Araya, which narrows between Cape Mero and Cape las Minas to one thousand four hundred toises, is little more than four thousand toises in breadth near the Laguna Chica, reckoning from one sea to the other. We had to cross this distance in order to find the native alum and to reach the cape called the Punta de Chuparuparu. The road is difficult only because no path is traced; and between precipices of some depth we were obliged to step over ridges of bare rock, the strata of which are much inclined. The principal point is nearly two hundred and twenty toises high; but the mountains, as it often happens in a rocky isthmus, display very singular forms. The Paps (tetas) of Chacopata and Cariaco, midway between the Laguna Chica and the town of Cariaco, are peaks which appear isolated when viewed from the platform of the castle of Cumana. The vegetable earth in this country is only thirty toises above sea level. Sometimes there is no rain for the space of fifteen months; if, however, a few drops fall immediately after the flowering of the melons and gourds, they yield fruit weighing from sixty to seventy pounds, notwithstanding the apparent dryness of the air. I say apparent dryness, for my hygrometric observations prove that the atmosphere of Cumana and Araya contains nearly nine-tenths of the quantity of watery vapour necessary to its perfect saturation. It is this air, at once hot and humid, that nourishes those vegetable reservoirs, the cucurbitaceous plants, the agaves and melocactuses half-buried in the sand. When we visited the peninsula the preceding year there was a great scarcity of water; the goats for want of grass died by hundreds. During our stay at the Orinoco the order of the seasons seemed to be entirely changed. At Araya, Cochen, and even in the island of Margareta it had rained abundantly; and those showers were remembered by the inhabitants in the same way as a fall of aerolites would be noted in the recollection of the naturalists of Europe.

The Indian who was our guide scarcely knew in what direction we should find the alum; he was ignorant of its real position. This ignorance of localities characterises almost all the guides here, who are chosen from among the most indolent class of the people. We wandered for eight or nine hours among rocks totally bare of vegetation. The mica-slate passes sometimes to clay-slate of a darkish grey. I was again struck by the extreme regularity in the direction and inclination of the strata. They run north 50 degrees east, inclining from 60 to 70 degrees north-west. This is the general direction which I had observed in the gneiss-granite of Caracas and the Orinoco, in the hornblende-slates of Angostura, and even in the greater part of the secondary rocks we had just examined. The beds, over a vast extent of land, make the same angle with the meridian of the place; they present a parallelism, which may be considered as one of the great geologic laws capable of being verified by precise measures. Advancing toward Cape Chuparuparu, the veins of quartz that cross the mica-slate increase in size. We found some from one to two toises broad, full of small fasciculated crystals of rutile titanite. We sought in vain for cyanite, which we had discovered in some blocks near Maniquarez. Farther on the mica-state presents not veins, but little beds of graphite or carburetted iron. They are from two to three inches thick and have precisely the same direction and inclination as the rock. Graphite, in primitive soils, marks the first appearance of carbon on the globe—that of carbon uncombined with hydrogen. It is anterior to the period when the surface of the earth became covered with monocotyledonous plants. From the summit of those wild mountains there is a majestic view of the island of Margareta. Two groups of mountains already mentioned, those of Macanao and La Vega de San Juan, rise from the bosom of the waters. The capital of the island, La Asuncion, the port of Pampatar, and the villages of Pueblo de la Mar, Pueblo del Norte and San Juan belong to the second and most easterly of these groups. The western group, the Macanao, is almost entirely uninhabited. The isthmus that divides these large masses of mica-slate was scarcely visible; its form appeared changed by the effect of the mirage and we recognized the intermediate part, through which runs the Laguna Grande, only by two small hills of a sugarloaf form, in the meridian of the Punta de Piedras. Nearer we look down on the small desert archipelago of the four Morros del Tunal, the Caribbee and the Lobos Islands.

After much vain search we at length found, before we descended to the northern coast of the peninsula of Araya, in a ravine of very difficult access (Aroyo del Robalo), the mineral which had been shown to us at Cumana. The mica-slate changed suddenly into carburetted and shining clay-slate. It was an ampelite; and the waters (for there are small springs in those parts, and some have recently been discovered near the village of Maniquarez) were impregnated with yellow oxide of iron and had a styptic taste. We found the sides of the neighbouring rocks lined with capillary sulphate of alumina in effervescence; and real beds, two inches thick, full of native alum, extending as far as the eye could reach in the clay slate. The alum is greyish white, somewhat dull on the surface and of an almost glassy lustre internally. Its fracture is not fibrous but imperfectly conchoidal. It is slightly translucent when its fragments are thin; and has a sweetish and astringent taste without any bitter mixture. When on the spot, I proposed to myself the question whether this alum, so pure, and filling beds in the clay-slate without leaving the smallest void, be of a formation contemporary with the rock, or whether it be of a recent, and in some sort secondary, origin, like the muriate of soda, found sometimes in small veins, where strongly concentrated springs traverse beds of gypsum or clay. In these parts nothing seems to indicate a process of formation likely to be renewed in our days. The slaty rock exhibits no open cleft; and none is found parallel with the direction of the slates. It may also be inquired whether this aluminous slate be a transition-formation lying on the primitive mica-slate of Araya, or whether it owe its origin merely to a change of composition and texture in the beds of mica-slate. I lean to the latter proposition; for the transition is progressive, and the clay-slate (thonschiefer) and mica-slate appear to me to constitute here but one formation. The presence of cyanite, rutile-titanite, and garnets, and the absence of Lydian stone, and all fragmentary or arenaceous rocks, seem to characterise the formation we describe as primitive. It is asserted that even in Europe ampelite and green stone are found, though rarely, in slates anterior to transition-slate.

When, in 1785, after an earthquake, a great rocky mass was broken off in the Aroyo del Robalo, the Guaykeries of Los Serritos collected fragments of alum five or six inches in diameter, extremely pure and transparent. It was sold in my time at Cumana to the dyers and tanners, at the price of two reals* per pound, while alum from Spain cost twelve reals. (* The real is about 6 1/2 English pence.) This difference of price was more the result of prejudice and of the impediments to trade, than of the inferior quality of the alum of the country, which is fit for use without undergoing any purification. It is also found in the chain of mica-slate and clay-slate, on the north-west coast of the island of Trinidad, at Margareta and near Cape Chuparuparu, north of the Cerro del Distiladero.* (* Another place was mentioned to us, west of Bordones, the Puerto Escondido. But that coast appeared to me to be wholly calcareous; and I cannot conceive where could be the situation of ampelite and native alum on this point. Was it in the beds of slaty clay that alternate with the alpine limestone of Cumanacoa? Fibrous alum is found in Europe only in formations posterior to those of transition, in lignites and other tertiary formations belonging to the lignites.) The Indians, who are naturally addicted to concealment, are not inclined to make known the spots whence they obtain native alum; but it must be abundant, for I have seen very considerable quantities of it in their possession at a time.

South America at present receives its alum from Europe, as Europe in its turn received it from the natives of Asia previous to the fifteenth century. Mineralogists, before my travels, knew no substances which, without addition, calcined or not calcined, could directly yield alum (sulphate of alumina and potash), except rocks of trachytic formation, and small veins traversing beds of lignite and bituminous wood. Both these substances, so different in their origin, contain all that constitutes alum, that is to say, alumina, sulphuric acid and potash. The ores of Tolfa, Milo and Nipoligo; those of Montione, in which silica does not accompany the alumina; the siliceous breccia of Mont Dore, which contains sulphur in its cavities; the alumiferous rocks of Parad and Beregh in Hungary, which belong also to trachytic and pumice conglomerates, may no doubt be traced to the penetration of sulphurous acid vapours. They are the products of a feeble and prolonged volcanic action, as may be easily ascertained in the solfataras of Puzzuoli and the Peak of Teneriffe. The alumite of Tolfa, which, since my return to Europe, I have examined on the spot, conjointly with Gay-Lussac, has, by its oryctognostic characters and its chemical composition, a considerable affinity to compact feldspar, which constitutes the basis of so many trachytes and transition-porphyries. It is a siliciferous subsulphate of alumina and potash, a compact feldspar, with the addition of sulphuric acid completely formed in it. The waters circulating in these alumiferous rocks of volcanic origin do not, however, deposit masses of native alum, to yield which the rocks must be roasted. I know not of any deposits analogous to those I brought from Cumana; for the capillary and fibrous masses found in veins traversing beds of lignites (as on the banks of the Egra, between Saatz and Commothau in Bohemia), or efflorescing in cavities (as at Freienwalde in Brandenburg, and at Segario in Sardinia), are impure salts, often destitute of potash, and mixed with the sulphates of ammonia and magnesia. A slow decomposition of the pyrites, which probably act as so many little galvanic piles, renders the waters alumiferous, that circulate across the bituminous lignites and carburetted clays. These waters, in contact with carbonate of lime, even give rise to the deposits of subsulphate of alumina (destitute of potash), found near Halle, and formerly believed erroneously to be pure alumina belonging, like the porcelain earth (kaolin) of Morl, to porphyry of red sandstone. Analogous chemical actions may take place in primitive and transition slates as well as in tertiary formations. All slates, and this fact is very important, contain nearly five per cent of potash, sulphuret of iron, peroxide of iron, carbon, etc. The contact of so many moistened heterogeneous substances must necessarily lead them to a change of state and composition. The efflorescent salts that abundantly cover the aluminous slates of Robalo, show how much these chemical effects are favoured by the high temperature of the climate; but, I repeat, in a rock where there are no crevices, no vacuities parallel to the direction and inclination of the strata, native alum, semitransparent and of conchoidal fracture, completely filling its place (its beds), must be regarded as of the same age with the rock in which it is contained. The term contemporary formation is here taken in the sense attached to it by geologists, in speaking of beds of quartz in clay-slate, granular limestone in mica-slate or feldspar in gneiss.

After having for a long time wandered over barren scenes amidst rocks entirely devoid of vegetation, our eyes dwelt with pleasure on tufts of malpighia and croton, which we found in descending toward the coast. These arborescent crotons were of two new species,* very remarkable for their form, and peculiar to the peninsula of Araya. (* Croton argyrophyllus and C. marginatus.) We arrived too late at the Laguna Chica to visit another rock situated farther east and celebrated by the name of the Laguna Grande, or the Laguna del Obispo.* (* Great Lake, or the Bishop's Lake.) We contented ourselves with admiring it from the height of the mountains that command the view; and, excepting the ports of Ferrol and Acapulco, there is perhaps none presenting a more extraordinary configuration. It is an inland gulf two miles and a half long from east to west, and one mile broad. The rocks of mica-slate that form the entrance of the port leave a free passage only two hundred and fifty toises broad. The water is everywhere from fifteen to twenty-five fathoms deep. Probably the government of Cumana will one day take advantage of the possession of this inland gulf and of that of Mochima,* eight leagues east of the bad road of Nueva Barcelona. (* This is a long narrow gulf, three miles from north to south, similar to the fiords of Norway.) The family of M. Navarete were waiting for us with impatience on the beach; and, though our boat carried a large sail, we did not arrive at Maniquarez before night.

We prolonged our stay at Cumana only a fortnight. Having lost all hope of the arrival of a packet from Corunna, we availed ourselves of an American vessel, laden at Nueva Barcelona with salt provision for the island of Cuba. We had now passed sixteen months on this coast and in the interior of Venezuela, and on the 16th of November we parted from our friends at Cumana to make the passage for the third time across the gulf of Cariaco to Nueva Barcelona. The night was cool and delicious. It was not without emotion that we beheld for the last time the disc of the moon illuminating the summit of the cocoa-trees that surround the banks of the Manzanares. The breeze was strong and in less than six hours we anchored near the Morro of Nueva Barcelona, where the vessel which was to take us to the Havannah was ready to sail.