[Footnote 157: The flooded lands are called gapos.]

The Atlantic tide is perceptible at Obidos, four hundred and fifty miles above Para, and Bates observed it up the Tapajos, five hundred and thirty miles distant. The tide, however, does not flow up; there is only a rising and falling of the waters—the momentary check of the great river in its conflict with the ocean. The "bore," or piroroco, is a colossal wave at spring tide, rising suddenly along the whole width of the Amazon to a height of twelve or fifteen feet, and then collapsing with a frightful roar.

The Amazon presents an unparalleled extent of water communication. So many and far reaching are its tributaries, it touches every country on the continent except Chile and Patagonia. South America is well nigh quartered by its river system: the Amazon starts within sixty miles of the Pacific; the Tapajos and Madeira reach down to the La Plata; while the Negro mingles its waters with those of the Orinoco. The tributaries also communicate with each other by intersecting canals, so numerous that central Amazonia is truly a cluster of islands. Wagons and railroads will be out of the question for ages hence in this aquatic basin. No other river runs in so deep a channel to so great a distance. For two thousand miles from its month there are not less than seven fathoms of water. Not a fall interrupts navigation on the main stream for two thousand five hundred miles; and it so happens that while the current is ever east (for even the ocean can not send up its tide against it), there is a constant trade-wind westward, so that navigation up or down has always something in its favor. As a general rule, the breeze is not so strong during the rise of the river. There are at least six thousand miles of navigation for large vessels. It was lately said that the Mississippi carries more vessels in a month, and the Yang-tse-Kiang in a day, than the Amazon all the year round. But this is no longer true. Steamers already ascend regularly to the port of Moyabamba, which is less than twenty days' travel from the Pacific coast. The Amazon was opened to the world September 7, 1867; and the time can not be far distant when the exhaustless wealth of the great valley—its timber, fruit, medicinal plants, gums, and dye-stuffs—will be emptied by this great highway into the commercial lap of the Atlantic; when crowded steamers will plow all these waters—yellow, black, and blue—and the sloths and alligators, monkeys and jaguars, toucans and turtles, will have a bad time of it.

Officially free to the world, the great river is, however, for the present practically closed to foreign shipping, as it is difficult to compete with the Brazilian steamers. For, by the contract which lasts till 1877, the company is allowed an annual subsidy of $4,000,000, which has since been increased by 250 milreys per voyage. In 1867 the steamers and sailing vessels on the Amazon were divided as follows, though it must be remembered that few of the foreign ships, excepting Portuguese, ascended beyond Para:

Nationality. No. Tonnage United States 37 39,901-1/2 Brazil 49 28,639 England 52 13,276-1/2 Portugal 24 7,871 France 18 5,344 Prussia 4 889-1/2 Holland 3 538 Denmark 2 525 Holstein 3 498 Norway 1 135 Spain 1 90

The vessels carrying the stars and stripes exported from Para to the value of 3,235,073$950, or eight times the amount carried by Brazilian craft, and 50,000 milreys more than England. While, therefore, the Imperial Company has the monopoly of trade on the Amazon, our ships distribute one third of the products to the world. The United States is the natural commercial partner with Brazil; for not only is New York the half-way house between Para and Liverpool, but a chip thrown into the sea at the mouth of the Amazon will float close by Cape Hatteras. The official value of exports from Para in 1867 was 9,926,912$557, or about five millions of dollars, an increase of one million over 1866.

The early expeditions into the Valley of the Amazon, in search of the "Gilded King," are the most romantic episodes in the history of Spanish discovery. To the wild wanderings of these worshipers of gold succeeded the more earnest explorations of the Jesuits, those pioneers of geographical knowledge. Pinzon discovered the mouth of the river in 1500; but Orellana, who came down the Napo in 1541, was the first to navigate its waters. Twenty years later Aguirre descended from Cuzco; in 1637, Texeira ascended to Quito by the Napo; Cabrera descended from Peru in 1639; Juan de Palacios by the Napo in 1725; La Condamine from Jaen in 1744, and Madame Godin by the Pastassa in 1769. The principal travelers who preceded us in crossing the continent this century were Mawe (1828), Poeppig (1831), Smyth (1834), Von Tschudi (1845), Castelnau (1846), Herndon and Gibbon (1851), and Marcoy (1867), who came down through Peru, and a Spanish commission (Almagro, Spada, Martinez, and Isern), who made the Napo transit in 1865. To Spix and Martius (1820), Bates and Wallace (1848-1857), Azevedo and Pinto (1862-1864), and Agassiz (1865), the world is indebted for the most scientific surveys of the river in Brazil.

Such is the Amazon, the mightiest river in the world, rising amid the loftiest volcanoes on the globe, and flowing through a forest unparalleled in extent. "It only wants (wrote Father Acuna), in order to surpass the Ganges, Euphrates, and the Nile in felicity, that its source should be in Paradise." As if one name were not sufficient for its grandeur, it has three appellations: Maranon, Solimoens, and Amazon; the first applied to the part in Peru, the second to the portion between Tabatinga and Manaos, and the third to all below the Rio Negro.[158] We have no proper conception of the vast dimensions of the thousand-armed river till we sail for weeks over its broad bosom, beholding it sweeping disdainfully by the great Madeira as if its contribution was of no account, discharging into the sea one hundred thousand cubic feet of water per second more than our Mississippi, rolling its turbid waves thousands of miles exactly as it pleases,—plowing a new channel every year, with tributaries twenty miles wide, and an island in its mouth twice the size of Massachusetts.

[Footnote 158: The upper part of the Maranon, from its source to Jaen, is sometimes called the Tunguragua. Solimoens is now seldom heard; but, instead, Middle Amazon, or simply Amazon. The term Alto Amazonas or High Amazon is also applied to all above the Negro. Maranon, says Velasco, derives its name from the circumstance that a soldier, sent by Pizarro to discover the sources of the Rio Piura, having beheld the mighty stream from the neighborhood of Jaen, and, astonished to behold a sea of fresh water, exclaimed, "Hac mare an non?" Orellana's pretended fight with a nation of female warriors gave rise to the Portuguese name of the river, Amazonas (anglicized Amazon), after the mythical women in Cappadocia, who are said to have burnt off their right breasts that they might use the bow and javelin with more skill and force, and hence their name, [Greek: Amazones] from [Greek: a] and [Greek: mazos]. Orellana's story probably grew out of the fact that the men wear long tunics, part the hair in the middle, and, in certain tribes, alone wear ornaments. Some derive the name from the Indian word amassona, boat-destroyer. The old name, Orellana, after the discoverer, is obsolete, as also the Indian term Parana-tinga, or King of Waters. In ordinary conversation it is designated as the river, in distinction from its tributaries. "In all parts of the world (says Hamboldt), the largest rivers are called by those who dwell on their banks, The River, without any distinct and peculiar appellation."]



CHAPTER XIX.

The Valley of the Amazon.—Its Physical Geography.—Geology.—Climate.—Vegetation.

From the Atlantic shore to the foot of the Andes, and from the Orinoco to the Paraguay, stretches the great Valley of the Amazon. In this vast area the United States might be packed without touching its boundaries. It could contain the basins of the Mississippi, the Danube, the Nile, and the Hoang-Ho. It is girt on three sides by a wall of mountains: on the north are the highlands of Guiana and Venezuela; on the west stand the Andes; on the south rise the table-lands of Matto Grosso. The valley begins at such an altitude, that on the western edge vegetation differs as much from the vegetation at Para, though in the same latitude, as the flora of Canada from the flora of the West Indies.

The greater part of the region drained by the Amazon, however, is not a valley proper, but an extensive plain. From the mouth of the Napo to the ocean, a distance of eighteen hundred miles in a straight line, the slope is one foot in five miles.[159] At Coca, on the Napo, the altitude is 850 feet, according to our observations; at Tinga Maria. on the Huallaga, it is 2200 according to Herndon; at the junction of the Negro with the Cassiquiari, it is 400 according to Wallace; at the mouth of the Marmore, it is 800 according to Gibbon; at the Pongo de Manseriche, below all rapids, it is 1160 according to Humboldt; and at the junction of Araguaia with the Tocantins, it is 200 according to Castelnau. These barometrical measurements represent the basin of the Amazon as a shallow trough lying parallel to the equator, the southern side having double the inclination of the northern, and the whole gently sloping eastward. Farthermore, the channel of the great river is not in the centre of the basin, but lies to the north of it: thus, the hills of Almeyrim rise directly from the river, while the first falls on the Tocantins, Xingu, and Tapajos are nearly two hundred miles above their mouths; the rapids of San Gabriel, on the Negro, are one hundred and seventy-five miles from the Amazon, while the first obstruction to the navigation of the Madeira is a hundred miles farther from the great river.

[Footnote 159: Professor Agassiz gives the average slope as hardly more than a foot in ten miles, which is based on the farther assertion that the distance from Tabatinga to the sea-shore is more than 2000 miles in a straight line. The distance is not 1600, or exactly 1500, from Para.—See A Journey in Brazil, p. 349.]

Of the creation of this valley we have already spoken. No region on the face of the globe of equal extent has such a monotonous geology. Around the rim of the basin are the outcroppings of a cretaceous deposit; this rests on the hidden mezozoic and palaeozoic strata which form the ribs of the Andes. Above it, covering the whole basin from New Granada to the Argentine Republic,[160] are the following formations: first, a stratified accumulation of sand; second, a series of laminated clays, of divers colors, without a pebble; third, a fine, compact sandstone; fourth, a coarse, porous sandstone, so ferruginous as to resemble bog iron-ore. This last was, originally, a thousand feet in thickness, but was worn down, perhaps, in some sudden escape of the pent-up waters of the valley. The table-topped hills of Almeyrim are almost the sole relics.[161] Finally, over the undulating surface of the denuded sandstone an ochraceous, unstratified sandy clay was deposited.

[Footnote 160: Messrs. Myers and Forbes found this red clay on the Negro, most abundantly near Barcellos; also in small quantities on the Orinoco above Maipures. The officers of the "Morona" assured us that the same formation was traceable far up the Ucayali and Huallaga. This clay from the Amazon, as examined microscopically by Prof. H. James Clark, contains fragments of gasteropod shells and bivalve casts. The red earth of the Pampas, according to Ehrenberg, contains eight fresh-water to one salt-water animalcule.]

[Footnote 161: "On the South American coast, where tertiary and supra-tertiary beds have been extensively elevated, I repeatedly noticed that the uppermost beds were formed of coarser materials than the lower; this appears to indicate that, as the sea becomes shallower, the force of the waves or currents increased."—Darwin's Observations, pt. ii., 131. "Nowhere in the Pampas is there any appearance of much superficial denudation."—Pt. iii., 100.]

It is a question to what period this great accumulation is to be assigned. Humboldt called it "Old Red Sandstone;" Martius pronounced it "New Red;" Agassiz says "Drift"—the glacial deposit brought down from the Andes and worked over by the melting of the ice which transported it.[162] The Professor farther declares that "these deposits are fresh-water deposits; they show no sign of a marine origin; no sea-shells nor remains of any marine animal have as yet been found throughout their whole extent; tertiary deposits have never been observed in any part of the Amazonian basin." This was true up to 1867. Neither Bates, Wallace, nor Agassiz found any marine fossil on the banks of the great river. But there is danger in building a theory on negative evidence. These explorers ascended no farther than Tabatinga. Two hundred miles west of that fort is the little Peruvian village of Pebas, at the confluence of the Ambiyacu. We came down the Napo and Maranon, and stopped at this place. Here we discovered a fossiliferous bed intercalated between the variegated clays so peculiar to the Amazon. It was crowded with marine tertiary shells! This was Pebas vs. Cambridge. It was unmistakable proof that the formation was not drift, but tertiary; not of fresh, but salt water origin. The species, as determined by W.M. Gabb, Esq., of Philadelphia, are: Neritina pupa, Turbonilla minuscula, Mesalia Ortoni, Tellina Amazonenis, Pachydon obliqua, and P. tenua.[163] All of these are new forms excepting the first, and the last is a new genus. It is a singular fact that the Neritina is now living in the West India waters, and the species found at Pebas retains its peculiar markings. So that we have some ground for the supposition that not many years ago there was a connection between the Caribbean Sea and the Upper Amazon; in other words, that Guiana has only very lately ceased to be an island. There is no mountain range on the water-shed between the Orinoco and the Negro and Japura, but the three rivers are linked by natural canals.[164] Interstratified with the clay deposit are seams of a highly bituminous lignite; we traced it from near the mouth of the Curaray on the Rio Napo to Loreto on the Maranon, a distance of about four hundred miles. It occurs also at Iquitos. This is farther testimony against the glacial theory of the formation of the Amazonian Valley. The paucity of shells in such a vast deposit is not astonishing. It is as remarkable in the similar accumulation of reddish argillaceous earth, called "Pampean mud," which overspreads the Rio Plata region.[165] Some of the Pampa shells, like those at Pebas, are proper to brackish water, and occur only on the highest banks. The Pampean formation is believed by Mr. Darwin to be an estuary or delta deposit. We will mention, in this connection, that silicified wood is found at the head waters of the Napo; the Indians use it instead of flint (which does not occur there) in striking a light. Darwin found silicified trees on the same slope of the Andes as the Uspallata Pass.

[Footnote 162: A Journey in Brazil, p. 250, 411, 424. Again, in his Lecture before the Lowell Institute, 1866: "These deposits could not have been made by the sea, nor in a large lake, as they contain no marine nor fresh-water fossils."]

[Footnote 163: These interesting fossils are figured and described in the Am. Journal of Conchology.]

[Footnote 164: "The whole basin between the Orinoco and the Amazon is composed of granite and gneiss, slightly covered with debris. There is a total absence of sedimentary rocks. The surface is often bare and destitute of soil, the undulations being only a few feet above or below a straight line."—Evan Hopkins, in Quart. Jour. Geol. Soc., vol. vi.]

[Footnote 165: See Darwin on the absence of extensive modern conchiferous deposits in South America, Geological Observations, pt. iii., ch. v.]

The climatology of the Valley of the Amazon is as simple as its physical geography. There is no circle of the seasons as with us—nature moves in a straight line. The daily order of the weather is uniform for months. There is very little difference between the dry and hot seasons; the former, lasting from July to December, is varied with showers, and the latter, from January to June, with sunny days, while the daily temperature is the same within two or three degrees throughout the year. On the water-shed between the Orinoco and Negro it rains throughout the year, but most water falls between May and November, the coolest season in that region. On the Middle Negro the wet season extends from June 1st to December 1st, and is the most sultry time.

Comparatively few insects, birds, or beasts are to be seen in summer; but it is the harvest-time of the inhabitants, who spend the glorious weather rambling over the plaias and beaches, fishing and turtle-hunting. The middle of September is the midsummer of the valley. The rainy season, or winter, is ushered in by violent thunder-storms from the west. It is then that the woods are eloquent with buzzing insects, shrill cicadas, screaming parrots, chattering monkeys, and roaring jaguars. The greatest activity of animal and vegetable life is in June and July. The heaviest rains fall in April, May, and June. Scarcely ever is there a continuous rain for twenty-four hours. Castelnau witnessed at Pebas a fall of not less than thirty inches in a single storm. The greatest amount noticed in New York during the whole month of September was 12.2 inches. The humidity of the atmosphere, as likewise the luxuriance of vegetation and the abundance and beauty of animal forms, increases from the Atlantic to the Andes. At the foot of the Andes, Poeppig found that the most refined sugar in a few days dissolved into sirup, and the best gunpowder became liquid even when inclosed in canisters. So we found the Napo steaming with vapor. Fogs, however, are rarely seen on the Amazon.

The animals and plants are not all simultaneously affected by the change of seasons. The trees retain their verdure through the dry veraō, and have no set time for renewing their foliage. There are a few trees, like Mongruba, which drop their leaves at particular seasons; but they are so few in number they create the impression of a few dead leaves in a thick-growing forest. Leaves are falling and flowers drooping all the year round. Each species, and, in some cases, each individual, has its own particular autumn and spring. There is no hibernation nor aestivation (except by land shells); birds have not one uniform time for nidification; and moulting extends from February to May.

Amazonia, though equatorially situated, has a temperate climate. It is cooler than Guinea or Guiana. This is owing to the constant evaporation from so much submerged land, and the ceaseless trade winds. The mean annual temperature of the air is about 81 deg..[166] The nights are always cool. There are no sudden changes, and no fiery "dog days." Venereal and cutaneous affections are found among the people; but they spring from an irregular life. A traveler on the slow black tributaries may take the tertiana, but only after weeks of exposure. Yellow fever and cholera seldom ascend the river above Para; and on the Middle Amazon there are neither endemics nor epidemics, though the trades are feebly felt there, and the air is stagnant and sultry. According to Bates, swampy and weedy places on the Amazon are generally more healthy than dry ones. Whatever exceptions be taken to the branches, the main river is certainly as healthy as the Mississippi: the rapid current of the water and the continual movement of the air maintaining its salubrity. The few English residents (Messrs. Hislop, Jeffreys, and Hauxwell), who have lived here thirty or forty years, are as fresh and florid as if they had never left their native country. The native women preserve their beauty until late in life. Great is the contrast between the gloomy winters and dusty summers, the chilly springs and frosty autumns of the temperate zone, and the perennial beauty of the equator! No traveler on the Amazon would exchange what Wallace calls "the magic half-hour after sunset" for the long gray twilight of the north. "The man accustomed to this climate (wrote Herndon) is ever unwilling to give it up for a more bracing one."

[Footnote 166: Agassiz calls the average temperature 84 deg., which, it seems to us, is too high. The mean between the temperatures of Para, Manaos, and Tabatinga is 80.7 deg..]

The mineral kingdom is represented only by sand, clay, and loam. The solid rock (except the sandstone already mentioned) begins above the falls on the tributaries. The precious gems and metals are confined to the still higher lands of Goyaz, Matto Grosso, and the slopes of the Andes. The soil on the Lower Amazon is sandy; on the Solimoens and Maranon it is a stiff loam or vegetable mould, in many places twenty feet deep.

Both in botany and zoology, South America is a natural and strongly-marked division, quite as distinct from North America as from the Old World; and as there are no transverse barriers, there is a remarkable unity in the character of the vegetation. No spot on the globe contains so much vegetable matter as the Valley of the Amazon. From the grassy steppes of Venezuela to the treeless Pampas of Buenos Ayres, expands a sea of verdure, in which we may draw a circle of eleven hundred miles in diameter, which shall include an ever green, unbroken forest. There is a most bewildering diversity of grand and beautiful trees—a wild, unconquered race of vegetable giants, draped, festooned, corded, matted, and ribboned with climbing and creeping plants, woody and succulent, in endless variety. The exuberance of nature displayed in these million square acres of tangled, impenetrable forest offers a bar to civilization nearly as great as its sterility in the African deserts. A macheta is a necessary predecessor: the moment you land (and it is often difficult to get a footing on the bank), you are confronted by a wall of vegetation. Lithe lianas, starred with flowers, coil up the stately trees, and then hang down like strung jewels; they can be counted only by myriads, yet they are mere superfluities. The dense dome of green overhead is supported by crowded columns, often branchless for eighty feet. The reckless competition among both small and great adds to the solemnity and gloom of a tropical forest. Individual struggles with individual, and species with species, to monopolize the air, light, and soil. In the effort to spread their roots, some of the weaker sort, unable to find a footing, climb a powerful neighbor, and let their roots dangle in the air; while many a full-grown tree has been lifted up, as it were, in the strife, and now stands on the ends of its stilt-like roots, so that a man may walk upright between the roots and under the trunk.[167]

[Footnote 167: Buttress roots are not peculiar to any one species, but common to most of the large trees in the crowded forest, where the lateral growth of the roots is made difficult by the multitude of rivals. The Paxiuba, or big-bellied palm, is a fine example.]

The mass of the forest on the banks of the great river is composed of palms (about thirty species[168]), leguminous or pod-bearing trees, colossal nut-trees, broad-leaved Musaceae or bananas, and giant grasses. The most prominent palms are the architectural Pupunha, or "peach-palm," with spiny stems, drooping, deep green leaves, and bunches of mealy, nutritious fruit; the slender Assai, with a graceful head of delicate green plumes; the Ubussu, with mammoth, undivided fronds; the stiff, serrated-leaved Bussu, and gigantic Miriti. One of the noblest trees of the forest is the Massaranduba, or "cow-tree" (Brosimum galactodendron), often rising one hundred and fifty feet. It is a hard, fine-grained, durable timber, and has a red bark, and leathery, fig-like foliage. The milk has the consistency of cream, and may be used for tea, coffee, or custards. It hardens by exposure, so as to resemble gutta-percha. Another interesting tree, and one which yields the chief article of export, is the Caucho, or India-rubber tree[169] (Siphonia Brasiliensis), growing in the lowlands of the Amazon for eighteen hundred miles above Para. It has an erect, tall trunk, from forty to eighty feet high, a smooth, gray bark, and thick, glossy leaves. The milk resembles thick, yellow cream, and is colored by a dense smoke obtained by burning palm-nuts. It is gathered between August and December. A man can collect six pounds a day, though this is rarely done. It is frequently adulterated with sand. The tree belongs to the same apetalous family as our castor-oil and the mandioca; while the tree which furnishes the caoutchouc of the East Indies and Africa is a species of Ficus, and yields an inferior article to the rubber of America. Other characteristic trees are the Mongruba, one of the few which shed their foliage before the new leaf-buds expand; the giant Samauema, or silk-cotton tree (called huimba in Peru); the Calabash, or cuieira, whose gourd-like fruit furnishes the cups used throughout the Amazon; the Itauba, or stone-wood, furnishing ship-timber as durable as teak; the red and white Cedar, used for canoes (not coniferous like the northern evergreen, but allied to the mahogany); the Jacaranda, or rose-wood, resembling our locust; Palo de sangre, one of the most valuable woods on the river; Huacapu, a very common timber; Capirona, used as fuel on the steamers; and Tauari, a heavy, close-grained wood, the bark of which splits into thin leaves, much used in making cigarettes. The Piassaba, a palm yielding a fibre extensively manufactured into cables and ropes, and exported to foreign countries for brushes and brooms, being singularly elastic, strong, and more durable than hemp; and the Moira-pinima, or "tortoise-shell wood," the most beautiful wood in all Amazonia, if not in the world, grow on the Upper Rio Negro. A small willow represents the great catkin family.

[Footnote 168: Von Martius, in his great work on the Brazilian Palms, enumerates in all 582 species.]

[Footnote 169: The Portuguese and Brazilians call it seringa, or syringe, in which form it is still used extensively, injections forming a great feature in the popular system of cures. The tree mentioned above yields most of the rubber of commerce, and is considered distinct from the species in Guiana, S. elastica; while the rubber from the Upper Amazon and Rio Negro comes from the S. lutea and S. brevifolia. Agassiz puts milk-weed in the same family!]

The valley is as remarkable for the abundance, variety, and value of its timber as for any thing else. Within an area of half a mile square, Agassiz counted one hundred and seventeen different kinds of woods, many of them eminently fitted, by their hardness, tints, and beautiful grain, for the finest cabinet-work. Enough palo de sangre or moira-pinima is doubtless wasted annually to veneer all the palaces of Europe.

While most of our fruits belong to the rose family, those of the Amazon come from the myrtle tribe. The delicious flavor, for which our fruits are indebted to centuries of cultivation, is wanting in many of the torrid productions. We prefer the sweetness of Pomona in temperate climes to her savage beauty in the sunny south. It is a curious fact, noticed by Herndon, that nearly all the valuable fruits of the valley are inclosed in hard shells or acid pulps. They also reach a larger size in advancing westward. The common Brazil nut is the product of one of the tallest trees in the forest (Bertholletia excelsa). The fruit is a hard, round shell, resembling a common ball, which contains from twenty to twenty-four nuts. Eighteen months are required for the bud to reach maturity. This tree, says Humboldt, offers the most remarkable example of high organic development. Akin to it is the Sapucaya or "chickens' nuts" (Lecythis sapucaya), whose capsule has a natural lid, and is called "monkey's drinking-cup." The nuts, about a dozen in number, are of irregular shape and much richer than the preceding. But they do not find their way to market, because they drop out of the capsule as soon as ripe, and are devoured by peccaries and monkeys. The most luscious fruit on the Amazon is the atta of Santarem. It has the color, taste, and size of the chirimoya; but the rind, which incloses a rich, custardly pulp, frosted with sugar, is scaled. Next in rank are the melting pine-apples of Para, and the golden papayas, fully equal to those on the western coast. This is the original home of the cacao. It grows abundantly in the forests of the upper river, and particularly on the banks of the Madeira. The wild nut is smaller but more oily than the cultivated. The Amazon is destined to supply the world with the bulk of chocolate. The aromatic tonka beans (Cumaru) used in flavoring snuff, and the Brazilian nutmegs (Puxiri), inferior to the Ceylon, grow on lofty trees on the Negro and Lower Amazon. The Guarana beans are the seeds of a trailing plant; from these the Mauhes prepare the great medicine, on the Amazon, for diarrhoea and intermittent fevers. Its active principle, caffeine, is more abundant than in any other substance, amounting to 5.07 per cent.; while black tea contains only 2.13. Coffee, rice, tobacco, and sugar-cane are grown to a limited extent. Rio Negro coffee, if put into the market, would probably eclipse that of Ceara, the best Brazilian. Wild rice grows abundantly on the banks of the rivers and lakes. The cultivated grain is said to yield forty fold. Most of the tobacco comes down from the Maranon and Madeira. It is put up in slender rolls from three to six feet long, tapering at each end, and wound with palm fibre. The sugar-cane is an exotic from Southeastern Asia, but grows well. The first sugar made in the New World was by the Dutch in the island of St. Thomas, 1610. Farina is the principal farinaceous production of Brazil. The mandioca or cassava (Manihot utilissima) from which it is made is supposed to be indigenous, though it is not found wild. It does not grow at a higher altitude than 2000 feet. Life and death are blended in the plant, yet every part is useful. The cattle eat the leaves and stalks, while the roots are ground into pulp, which, when pressed and baked, forms farina, the bread of all classes. The juice is a deadly poison: thirty-five drops were sufficient to kill, in six minutes, a negro convicted of murder; but it deposits a fine sediment of pure starch that is the well-known tapioca; and the juice, when fermented and boiled, forms a drink. On the upper waters grow the celebrated coca, a shrub with small, light-green leaves, having a bitter, aromatic taste. The powdered leaves, mixed with lime, form ypadu. This is to Peruvians what opium is to the Turk, betel to the Malay, and tobacco to the Yankee. Thirty million pounds are annually consumed in South America. It is not, however, an opiate, but a powerful stimulant. With it the Indian will perform prodigies of labor, traveling days without fatigue or food. Von Tschudi considers its moderate consumption wholesome, and instances the fact that one coca-chewer attained the good old age of one hundred and thirty years; but when used to excess it leads to idiocy. The signs of intemperance are an uncertain step, sallow complexion, black-rimmed, deeply-sunken eyes, trembling lips, incoherent speech, and stolid apathy. Coca played an important part in the religious rights of the Incas, and divine honors were paid to it. Even to-day the miners of Peru throw a quid of coca against the hard veins of ore, affirming that it renders them more easily worked; and the Indians sometimes put coca in the mouth of the dead to insure them a welcome in the other world. The alkaloid cocaine was discovered by Woehler.

Flowers are nearly confined to the edges of the dense forest, the banks of the rivers and lagunes. There are a greater number of species under the equator, but we have brighter colors in the temperate zone. "There is grandeur and sublimity in the tropical forest (wrote Wallace, after four years of observation), but little of beauty or brilliancy of color." Perhaps the finest example of inflorescence in the world is seen in the Victoria Regia, the magnificent water-lily discovered by Schoemberg in 1837. It inhabits the tranquil waters of the shallow lakes which border the Amazon. The leaves are from fifteen to eighteen feet in circumference, and will bear up a child twelve years old; the upper part is dark, glossy green, the under side violet or crimson. The flowers are a foot in diameter, at first pure white, passing, in twenty-four hours, through successive hues from rose to bright red. This queen of water-plants was dedicated to the Queen whose empire is never at once shrouded in night.



CHAPTER XX.

Life within the Great River.—Fishes.—Alligators.—Turtles.—Porpoises and Manatis.

The Amazon is a crowded aquarium, holding representatives of every zoological class—infusoria, hydras, fresh-water shells (chiefly Ampullaria, Melania, and Unios), aquatic beetles (belonging mostly to new genera), fishes, reptiles, water birds, and cetaceans. The abundance and variety of fishes are extraordinary; so also are the species. This great river is a peculiar ichthyic province, and each part has its characteristics. According to Agassiz, the whole river, as well as its tributaries, is broken up into numerous distinct fauna.[170] The pirarucu, or "redfish" (the Sudis gigas of science), is at once the largest, most common, and most useful fish. The Peruvian Indians call it payshi. It is a powerful fish, often measuring eight feet in length and five in girth, clad in an ornamental coat-of-mail, its large scales being margined with bright red. It ranges from Peru to Para. It is usually taken by the arrow or spear. Salted and dried, the meat will keep for a year, and forms, with farina, the staple food on the Amazon. The hard, rough tongue is used as a grater. Other fishes most frequently seen are the prettily-spotted catfish, Pescada, Piranha, Acara, which carries its young in its mouth, and a long, slender needle-fish. There are ganoids in the river, but no sturgeons proper. Pickerel, perch, and trout are also wanting. The sting-ray represents the shark family. As a whole, the fishes of the Amazon have a marine character peculiarly their own.

[Footnote 170: We await the Professor's examination of his "more than 80,000 specimens" before we give the number of new species.]

The reptilian inhabitants of this inland sea are introduced by numerous batrachians, water-snakes (Heliops), and anacondas. But alligators bear the palm for ugliness, size, and strength. In summer the main river swarms with them; in the wet season they retreat to the interior lakes and flooded forests. It was for this reason that we did not see an alligator on the Napo. At low water they are found above the entrance of the Curaray. About Obidos, where many of the pools dry up in the fine months, the alligator buries itself in the mud, and sleeps till the rainy season returns. "It is scarcely exaggerating to say (writes Bates) that the waters of the Solimoens are as well stocked with large alligators in the dry season as a ditch in England is in summer with tadpoles." There are three or four species in the Amazon. The largest, the Jacare-uassu of the natives, attains a length of twenty feet. The Jacare-tinga is a smaller kind (only five feet long when full grown), and has the long, slender muzzle of the extinct teleosaurus. The South American alligators are smaller than the crocodiles of the Nile or Ganges, and they are also inferior in rank. The head of the Jacare-uassu (the ordinary species) is broad, while the gavial of India has a long, narrow muzzle, and that of the Egyptian lizard is oblong. The dentition differs: while in the Old World saurian the teeth interlock, so that the two jaws are brought close together, the teeth in the upper jaw of the Amazonian cayman pass by the lower series outside of them. The latter has therefore much less power. It has a ventral cuirass as well as dorsal, and it is web-footed, while the crocodile has the toes free—another mark of inferiority. Sluggish on land, the alligator is very agile in its element. It never attacks man when on his guard, but it is cunning enough to know when it may do this with safety. It lays its eggs (about twenty) some distance from the river bank, covering them with leaves and sticks. They are larger than those of Guayaquil, or about four inches long, of an elliptical shape, with a rough, calcareous shell. Negro venders sell them cooked in the streets of Para.

Turtles are, perhaps, the most important product of the Amazon, not excepting the pirarucu. The largest and most abundant species is the Tortaruga grande. It measures, when full grown, nearly three feet in length and two in breadth, and has an oval, smooth, dark-colored shell. Every house has a little pond (called currul) in the back yard to hold a stock of turtles through the wet season. It furnishes the best meat on the Upper Amazon. We found it very tender, palatable, and wholesome; but Bates, who was obliged to live on it for years, says it is very cloying. Every part of the creature is turned to account. The entrails are made into soup; sausages are made of the stomach; steaks are cut from the breast; and the rest is roasted in the shell.[171] The turtle lays its eggs (generally between midnight and dawn) on the central and highest part of the plaias, or about a hundred feet from the shore. The Indians say it will lay only where itself was hatched out. With its hind flippers it digs a hole two or three feet deep, and deposits from eighty to one hundred and sixty eggs (Gibbon says from one hundred and fifty to two hundred). These are covered with sand, and the next comer makes another deposit on the top, and so on until the pit is full. Egg-laying comes earlier on the Amazon than on the Napo, taking place in August and September. The tracaja, a smaller species, lays in July and August; its eggs are smaller and oval, but richer than those of the great turtles.

[Footnote 171: The natives have this notion about the land-tortoise, that by throwing it three times over the head, the liver (the best part) will be enlarged.]

The mammoth tortoise of the Galapagos lays an egg very similar in size and shape to that of the Tortaruga, but a month later, or in October. The hunting of turtle eggs is a great business on the Amazon. They are used chiefly in manufacturing oil (manteca) for illumination. Thrown into a canoe, they are broken and beaten up by human feet; water is then poured in, and the floating oil is skimmed off, purified over the fire in copper kettles, and finally put up in three-gallon earthen jars for the market. The turtles are caught for the table as they return to the river after laying their eggs. To secure them, it suffices to turn them over on their backs. The turtles certainly have a hard time of it. The alligators and large fishes swallow the young ones by hundreds; jaguars pounce upon the full-grown specimens as they crawl over the plaias, and vultures and ibises attend the feast. But man is their most formidable foe. The destruction of turtle life is incredible. It is calculated that fifty millions of eggs are annually destroyed. Thousands of those that escape capture in the egg period are collected as soon as hatched and devoured, "the remains of yolk in their entrails being considered a great delicacy." An unknown number of full-grown turtles are eaten by the natives on the banks of the Maranon and Solimoens and their tributaries, while every steamer, schooner, and little craft that descends the Amazon is laden with turtles for the tables of Manaos, Santarem, and Para. When we consider, also, that all the mature turtles taken are females, we wonder that the race is not well-nigh extinct. They are, in fact, rapidly decreasing in numbers. A large turtle which twenty years ago could be bought for fifty cents, now commands three dollars. One would suppose that the males, being unmolested, would far outnumber the other sex, but Bates says "they are immensely less numerous than the females." The male turtles, or Capitaris, "are distinguishable by their much smaller size, more circular shape, and the greater length and thickness of their tails." Near the Tapajos we met a third species, called Mata-mata. It has a deeply-keeled carapax, beautifully bossed, and a hideous triangular head, having curious, lobed, fleshy appendages, and nostrils prolonged into a tube. It is supposed to have great virtues as a remedy for rheumatism. But the most noticeable feature of the Amazonian fauna, as Agassiz has remarked, is the abundance of cetaceans through its whole extent. From the brackish estuary of Para to the clear, cool waters at the base of the Andes, these clumsy refugees from the ocean may be seen gamboling and blowing as in their native element. Four different kinds of porpoises have been seen. A black species lives in the Bay of Marajo. In the Middle Amazon are two distinct porpoises, one flesh-colored;[172] and in the upper tributaries is the Inia Boliviensis, resembling, but specifically different from the sea-dolphin and the soosoo of the Ganges. "It was several years (says the Naturalist on the Amazon) before I could induce a fisherman to harpoon dolphins (Boutos) for me as specimens, for no one ever kills these animals voluntarily; the superstitious people believe that blindness would result from the use of the oil in lamps." The herbivorous manati (already mentioned, Chap. XV.) is found throughout the great river. It differs slightly from the Atlantic species. It rarely measures over twelve feet in length. It is taken by the harpoon or nets of chambiri twine. Both Herndon and Gibbon mention seals as occurring in the Peruvian tributaries; but we saw none, neither did Bates, Agassiz, or Edwards. They probably meant the manati.

[Footnote 172: Dephinus pallidus. Bates observed this species at Villa Nova; we saw it at Coary, 500 miles west; and Herndon found it in the Huallaga.]



CHAPTER XXI.

Life around the Great River.—Insects.—Reptiles.—Birds.—Mammals.

The forest of the Amazon is less full of life than the river. Beasts, birds, and reptiles are exceedingly scarce; still there is, in fact, a great variety, but they are widely scattered and very shy. In the animal, as in the vegetable kingdom, diversity is the law; there is a great paucity of individuals compared with the species.[173] Insects are rare in the dense forest; they are almost confined to the more open country along the banks of the rivers. Ants are perhaps the most numerous. There is one species over an inch long. But the most prominent, by their immense numbers, are the dreaded sauebas. Well-beaten paths branch off in every direction through the forest, on which broad columns may be seen marching to and fro, each bearing vertically a circular piece of leaf. Unfortunately they prefer cultivated trees, especially the coffee and orange. They are also given to plundering provisions; in a single night they will carry off bushels of farina. They are of a light red color, with powerful jaws. In every formicarium or ant colony there are three sets of individuals—males, females, and workers; but the sauebas have the singularity of possessing three classes of workers. The light-colored mounds often met in the forest, sometimes measuring forty feet in diameter by two feet in height, are the domes which overlie the entrances to the vast subterranean galleries of the saueba ants. These ants are eaten by the Rio Negro Indians, and esteemed a luxury; while the Tapajos tribes use them to season their mandioca sauce. Akin to the vegetable-feeding sauebas are the carnivorous ecitons, or foraging ants, of which Bates found ten distinct species. They hunt for prey in large organized armies, almost every species having its own special manner of marching and hunting. Fortunately the ecitons choose the thickest part of the forest. The fire-ant is the great plague on the Tapajos. It is small, and of a shiny reddish color; but its sting is very painful, and it disputes every fragment of food with the inhabitants. All eatables and hammocks have to be hung by cords smeared with copaiba balsam.

[Footnote 173: Amazonia is divided into four distinct zoological districts: those of Ecuador, Peru, Guiana, and Brazil; the limits being the Amazon, Madeira, and Negro. The species found on one side of these rivers are seldom found on the other.]

The traveler on the Amazon frequently meets with conical hillocks of compact earth, from three to five feet high, from which radiate narrow covered galleries or arcades. The architects of these wonderful structures are the termites, or "white ants," so called, though they belong to a higher order of insects, widely differing from the true ants. The only thing in common is the principle of division of labor. The termite neuters are subdivided into two classes, soldiers and workers, both wingless and blind. Their great enemy is the ant-eater; but it is a singular fact, noticed by Bates, that the soldiers only attach themselves to the long worm-like tongue of this animal, so that the workers, on whom the prosperity of the termitarum depends, are saved by the self-sacrifice of the fighting caste. The office of the termites in the tropics seems to be to hasten the decomposition of decaying vegetation. But they also work their way into houses, trunks, wardrobes, and libraries. "It is principally owing to their destructiveness" (wrote Humboldt) "that it is so rare to find papers in tropical America older than fifty or sixty years."

Dragon-flies are conspicuous specimens of insect life on the Amazon. The largest and most brilliant kinds are found by the shady brooks and creeks in the recesses of the forest, some of them with green or crimson bodies seven inches long, and their elegant lace-like wings tipped with white or yellow. Still more noticeable are the butterflies. There is a vast number of genera and species, and great beauty of dress, unequaled in the temperate zone. Some idea of the diversity is conveyed by the fact mentioned by Mr. Bates that about 700 species are found within an hour's walk of Para, and 550 at Ega; while the total number found in the British Islands does not exceed 66, and the whole of Europe supports only 300. After a shower in the dry season the butterflies appear in fluttering clouds (for they live in societies), white, yellow, red, green, purple, black, and blue, many of them bordered with metallic lines and spots of a silvery or golden lustre. The sulphur-yellow and orange-colored kinds predominate. A colossal morpho, seven and a half inches in expanse, and visible a quarter of a mile off, frequents the shady glades; splendid swallow-tailed papilios, green, rose, or velvety-black, are seen only in the thickets; while the Hetaira esmeralda, with transparent wings, having one spot of a violet hue, as it flies over the dead leaves in the dense forest looks "like a wandering petal of a flower." Very abundant is the Heliconius, which plays such an important figure, by its variations, in Wallace's theory of the origin of species. On the Maranon we found Callidryas eubule, a yellow butterfly common in Florida. The most brilliant butterflies are found on the Middle Amazon, out of reach of the strong trade winds. The males far outnumber the other sex, are more richly colored, and generally lead a sunshiny life.

The females are of dull hues, and spend their lives in the gloomy shadows of the forest. Caterpillars and nocturnal moths are rare.

There are no true hive-bees (Apides) in South America,[174] but instead there are about one hundred and fifty species of bees (mostly social Moliponas), smaller than the European, stingless, and constructing oblong cells. Their colonies are much larger than those of the honey-bee. The Trigona occurs on the Napo. Unlike the Melipona, it is not confined to the New World. A large sooty-black Bombus represents our humble-bee. Shrill cicadas, blood-thirsty mantucas, piums, punkies, and musquitoes are always associated in the traveler's memory with the glorious river. Of the last there are several kinds. "The forest musquito belongs to a different species from that of the town, being much larger and having transparent wings. It is a little cloud that one carries about his person every step on a woodland ramble, and their hum is so loud that it prevents one hearing well the notes of birds. The town musquito has opaque, speckled wings, a less severe sting, and a silent way of going to work. The inhabitants ought to be thankful the big noisy fellows never come out of the forest" (Bates, ii., 386). There are few musquitoes below Ega; above that point a musquito net is indispensable. Beetles abound, particularly in shady places, and are of all sizes, from that of a pin's head to several inches in length. The most noticeable are the gigantic Megalosoma and Enema, armed with horns. Very few are carnivorous. "This is the more remarkable," observes Darwin, "when compared to the case of carnivorous quadrupeds, which are so abundant in hot countries." Very few are terrestrial, even the carnivorous species being found clinging to branches and leaves. In going from the pole to the equator we find that insect life increases in the same proportion as vegetable life. There is not a single beetle on Melville Island; eleven species are found in Greenland; in England, 2500; in Brazil, 8000. Here lives the king of spiders, the Mygale Blondii, a monstrous hairy fellow, five inches long, of a brown color, with yellowish lines along its stout legs. Its abode is a slanting subterranean gallery about two feet in length, the sides of which are beautifully lined with silk. Other spiders barricade the walks in the forest with invisible threads; some build nests in the trees and attack birds; others again spin a closely-woven web, resembling fine muslin, under the thatched roofs of the houses.

[Footnote 174: The honey-bee of Europe was introduced into South America in 1845.]

Of land vertebrates, lizards are the first to attract the attention of the traveler on the equator. Great in number and variety, they are met every where—crawling up the walls of buildings, scampering over the hot, dusty roads, gliding through the forest. They stand up on their legs, carry their tails cocked up in the air, and run with the activity of a warm-blooded animal. It is almost impossible to catch them. Some of them are far from being the unpleasant-looking animals many people imagine; but in their coats of many colors, green, gray, brown, and yellow, they may be pronounced beautiful. Others, however, have a repulsive aspect, and are a yard in length. The iguana, peculiar to the New World tropics, is covered with minute green scales handed with brown (though it changes its color like the chameleon), and has a serrated back and gular pouch. It grows to the length of five feet, and is arboreal. Its white flesh, and its oblong, oily eggs, arc considered great delicacies. We heard of a lady who kept one as a pet. Frogs and toads, the chief musicians in the Amazonian forest, are of all sizes, from an inch to a foot in diameter. The Bufo gigas is of a dull gray color, and is covered with warts. Tree-frogs (Hyla) are very abundant; they do not occur on the Andes or on the Pacific coast. Their quack-quack, drum-drum, hoo-hoo, is one of our pleasant memories of South America. Of snakes there is no lack; and yet they are not so numerous as imagination would make them. There are one hundred and fifty species in South America, or one half as many, on the same area, as in the East Indies. The diabolical family is led by the boa, while the rear is brought up by the Amphisbaenas, or "double-headed snakes," which progress equally well with either end forward, so that it is difficult to make head or tail of them. The majority are harmless. The deadly coral is found on both sides of the Andes, and wherever there is a cacao plantation. One of the most beautiful specimens of the venomous kind is a new species (Elaps imperator, Cope), which we discovered on the Maranon. It has a slender body more than two feet in length, with black and red bands margined with yellow, and a black and yellow head, with permanently erect fangs.



We have already mentioned the most common birds. Probably, says Wallace, no country in the world contains a greater variety of birds than the Amazonian Valley. But the number does not equal the expectations of the traveler; he may ramble a whole day without meeting one. The rarity, however, is more apparent than real; we forget, for the moment, the vastness of their dwelling-place. The birds of the country, moreover, are gregarious, so that a locality may be deserted and silent at one time and swarming with them at another. Parrots and toucans are the most characteristic groups. To the former belong true parrots, parroquets, and macaws. The first are rarely seen walking, but are rapid flyers and expert climbers. On the trees they are social as monkeys, but in flight they always go in pairs. The parroquets go in flocks. The Hyacinthine macaw (the Araruna of the natives) is one of the finest and rarest species of the parrot family. It is found only on the south side of the Amazon. The macaw was considered sacred by the Maya Indians of Yucatan, and dedicated to the sun. The Quichuans call it guacamayo, guaca meaning sacred. Of toucans there are many species; the largest is the toco, with a beak shaped like a banana; the most beautiful are the curb-crested, or Beauharnais toucans, and the P. flavirostris, whose breast is adorned with broad belts of red, crimson, and black. "Wherefore such a beak?" every naturalist has asked; but the toucan still wags his head, as much as to say, "you can not tell." There must be some other reason than adaptation. Birds of the same habits are found beside it—the ibis, pigeon, spoonbill, and toucan are seen feeding together. "How astonishing are the freaks and fancies of Nature! (wrote the funny Sidney Smith). To what purpose, we say, is a bird placed in the woods of Cayenne with a bill a yard long, making a noise like a puppy-dog, and laying eggs in hollow trees? The toucan, to be sure, might retort, to what purpose are certain foolish, prating members of Parliament created, pestering the House of Commons with their ignorance and folly, and impeding the business of the country? There is no end to such questions; so we will not enter into the metaphysics of the toucan."



On the flooded islands of the Negro and Upper Amazon is found the rare and curious umbrella bird, black as a crow, and decorated with a crest of hairy plumes and a long lobe suspended from the neck, covered with glossy blue feathers. This latter appendage is connected with the vocal organs, and assists the bird in producing its deep, loud, and lengthy fluty note. There are three species. Another rare bird is the Uruponga, or Campanero, in English the tolling-bell bird, found only on the borders of Guiana. It is of the size of our jay, of a pure white color, with a black tubercle on the upper side of the bill. "Orpheus himself (says Waterton) would drop his lute to listen to him, so sweet, so novel, and romantic is the toll of the pretty, snow-white Campanero." "The Campanero may be heard three miles! (echoes Sidney Smith). This single little bird being more powerful than the belfry of a cathedral ringing for a new dean! It is impossible to contradict a gentleman who has been in the forests of Cayenne, but we are determined, as soon as a Campanero is brought to England, to make him toll in a public place, and have the distance measured."[175] But the most remarkable songster of the Amazonian forest is the Realejo, or organ-bird. Its notes are as musical as the flageolet. It is the only songster, says Bates, which makes any impression on the natives. Besides those are the Jacamars, peculiar to equatorial America, stupid, but of the most beautiful golden, bronze, and steel colors; sulky Trogons, with glossy green backs and rose-colored breasts; long-toed Jacanas, half wader, half fowl; the rich, velvety purple and black Rhamphocoelus Jacapa, having an immense range from Archidona to Para; the gallinaceous yet arboreal Ciganas; scarlet ibises, smaller, but more beautiful than their sacred cousins of the Nile; stilted flamingoes, whose awkwardness is atoned for by their brilliant red plumage; glossy black Mutums, or curassow turkeys; ghostly storks, white egrets, ash-colored herons, black ducks, barbets, kingfishers, sandpipers, gulls, plovers, woodpeckers, oreoles; tanagers, essentially a South American family, and, excepting three or four species, found only east of the Andes; wagtails, finches, thrushes, doves, and hummers. The last, "by western Indians living sunbeams named," are few, and not to be compared with the swarms in the Andean valleys. The birds of the Amazon have no uniform time for breeding. The majority, however, build their nests between September and New Year's, and rarely lay more than two eggs.

[Footnote 175: Review of Waterton's Wanderings in South America.]



Amazonia, like Australia, is poor in terrestrial mammals, and the species are of small size. Nearly the only game a hunter can depend upon for food, besides toucans and macaws, is peccari. One species of tapir, to represent the elephants and rhinoceroses of the Old World; three small species of deer, taking the places of deer, antelopes, buffaloes, sheep, and goats of the other continent; three species of large Felidae; one peccari, and a wild dog, with opossums, ant-eaters, armadilloes, sloths, squirrels (the only rodents which approach ours),[176] capybaras, pacas, agoutis, and monkeys, comprise all the quadrupeds of equatorial America. The last two are the most numerous. Marsupial rats take the place of the insectivorous mammals. Of ant-eaters, there are at least four distinct species; but they are scattered sparingly, and are seldom found on the low flooded lands. Four or five species of armadillo inhabit the valley. These little nocturnal burrowing edentates are the puny representatives of the gigantic Glyptodon of Pleistocene times, and the sloths are the dwindling shadows of the lordly Megatherium. There are two species of three-toed sloths—one inhabiting the swampy lowlands, the other confined to the terra-firma land. They lead a lonely life, never in groups, harmless and frugal as a hermit. They have four stomachs, but not the long intestines of ruminating animals. They feed chiefly on the leaves of the trumpet-tree (Cecropia), resembling our horse-chestnut. The natives, both Indian and Brazilian, hold the common opinion that the sloth is the type of laziness. The capybara or ronsoco, the largest of living rodents, is quite common on the river side. It is gregarious and amphibious, and resembles a mammoth guinea-pig. Pacas and agoutis are most abundant in the lowlands, and are nocturnal. These semi-hoofed rodents, like the Toxodon of old, approach the Pachyderms. The tapir, or gran-bestia, as it is called, is a characteristic quadruped of South America. It is a clumsy-looking animal, with a tough hide of an iron-gray color, covered with a coat of short coarse hair. Its flesh is dry, but very palatable. It has a less powerful proboscis than the Malay species. M. Roulin distinguishes another species from the mountains, which more nearly resembles the Asiatic. The tapir, like the condor, for an unknown reason, is not found north of 8 deg. N., though it wanders as far south as 40 deg.. We met but one species of peccari, the white-lipped (D. labiatus). It is much larger than the "Mexican hog," and, too thick-headed to understand danger, is a formidable antagonist. The raposa is seen only on the Middle Amazon, and very rarely there. It has a long tapering muzzle, small ears, bushy tail, and grayish hair. It takes to the water, for the one we saw at Tabatinga was caught while crossing the Amazon. Fawn-colored pumas, spotted jaguars, black tigers, tiger-cats—all members of the graceful feline family—inhabit all parts of the valley, but are seldom seen. The puma, or panther, is more common on the Pacific side of the Andes. The jaguar[177] is the fiercest and most powerful animal in South America. It is marked like the leopard—roses of black spots on a yellowish ground; but they are angular instead of rounded, and have a central dot. There are also several black streaks across the breast, which easily distinguish it from its transatlantic representative. It is also longer than the leopard; indeed, Humboldt says he saw a jaguar "whose length surpassed that of any of the tigers of India which he had seen in the collections of Europe." The jaguar frequents the borders of the rivers and lagunes, and its common prey is the capybara. It fears the peccari. The night air is alive with bats of many species, the most prominent one being the Dysopes perotis, which measures two feet from tip to tip of the wings. If these Cheiropters are as impish as they look, and as blood-thirsty as some travelers report, it is singular that Bates and Waterton, though residing for years in the country, and ourselves, though sleeping for months unprotected, were unmolested.

[Footnote 176: Large rats abound on the Marnanon, but they are not American.]

[Footnote 177: The Tupi word for dog is yaguara, and for wolf, yagua-men, or old dog.]



About forty species of monkeys, or one half of the New World forms, inhabit the Valley of the Amazon. Wallace, in a residence of four years, saw twenty-one species—seven with prehensile and fourteen with non-prehensile tails. They all differ from the apes of the other hemisphere. While those of Africa and Asia (Europe has only one) have opposable thumbs on the fore feet as well as hind, uniformly ten molar teeth in each jaw, as in man, and generally cheek-pouches and naked collosities, the American monkeys arc destitute of the two latter characteristics. None of them are terrestrial, like the baboon; all (save the marmosets) have twenty-four molars; the thumbs of the fore-hands are not habitually opposed to the fingers (one genus, Ateles, "the imperfect," is thumbless altogether); the nostrils open on the sides of the nose instead of beneath it, as in the gorilla, and the majority have long prehensile tails. They are inferior in rank to the anthropoids of the Old World, though superior to the lemurs of Madagascar. They are usually grouped in two families—Marmosets and Cebidre. The former are restless, timid, squirrel-like lilliputs (one species is only seven inches long), with tails not prehensile—in the case of the scarlet-faced, nearly wanting. The Barigudos, or gluttons (Lagothrix), are the largest of American monkeys, but are not so tall as the Coaitas. They are found west of Manaos. They have more human features than the other monkeys, and, with their woolly gray fur, resemble an old negro. There are three kinds of howlers (Mycetes)—the red or mono-colorado of Humboldt, the black, and the M. beelzebub, found only near Para. The forest is full of these surly, untamable guaribas, as the natives call them. They are gifted with a voice of tremendous power and volume, with which they make night and day hideous. They represent the baboons of the Old World in disposition and facial angle (30 deg.), and the gibbons in their yells and gregarious habits.[178] The Sapajous (Cebus) are distributed throughout Brazil, and have the reputation of being the most mischievous monkeys in the country. On the west coast of South America there are at least three or four species of monkeys, among them a black howler and a Cebus capucinus. The Coitas, or spider-monkeys, are the highest of American quadrumana. They are slender-legged, sluggish, and thumbless, with a most perfectly prehensile tail, terminating in a naked palm, which answers for a fifth hand. The Indians say they walk under the limbs like the sloth. They are the most common pets in Brazil, but they refuse to breed in captivity. Both Coitas and Barigudos are much persecuted for their flesh, which is highly esteemed by the Indians.

[Footnote 178: Ruetimeyer has found a fossil howler in the Swiss Jura—middle cocene.]

Mr. Bates has called our attention to the arboreal character of a large share of the animals in the Amazonian forest. All the monkeys and bats are climbers, and live in the trees. Nearly all the carnivores are feline, and are therefore tree-mounters, though they lead a terrestrial life. The plantigrade Cercoleptes has a long tail, and is entirely arboreal. Of the edentates, the sloth can do nothing on the ground. The gallinaceous birds, as the cigana and curassow—the pheasant and turkey of the Amazon—perch on the trees, while the great number of arboreal frogs and beetles is an additional proof of the adaptation of the fauna to a forest region. Even the epiphytous plants sitting on the branches suggest this arboreal feature in animal life.



CHAPTER XXII.

Life around the Great River.—Origin of the Red Man.—General Characteristics of the Amazonian Indians.—Their Languages, Costumes, and Habitations.—Principal Tribes.—Mixed Breeds.—Brazilians and Brazil.

We come now to the genus Homo. Man makes a very insignificant figure in the vast solitudes of the Amazon. Between Manaos and Para, the most densely-peopled part of the valley, there is only one man to every four square miles; and the native race takes a low place in the scale of humanity. As the western continent is geologically more primitive than the eastern, and as the brute creation is also inferior in rank, so the American man, in point of progress, seems to stand in the rear of the Old World races. Both the geology and zoology of the continent were arrested in their development. Vegetable life alone has been favored. "The aboriginal American (wrote Von Martius) is at once in the incapacity of infancy and unpliancy of old age; he unites the opposite poles of intellectual life."[179]

[Footnote 179: "I think I discover in the Americans (said Humboldt) the descendants of a rare which, early separated from the rest of mankind, has followed up for a series of years a peculiar road in the unfolding of its intellectual faculties and its tendency toward civilization." The South American Indian seems to have a natural aptitude for the arts of civilized life not found in the red men of our continent.]

We will not touch the debatable ground of the red man's origin, nor inquire whether he is the last remains of a people once high in civilization. But we are tempted to express the full belief that tropical America is not his "centre of creation." He is not the true child of the tropics; and he lives as a stranger, far less fitted for its climate than the Negro or Caucasian. Yet a little while, and the race will be as extinct as the Dodo. He has not the supple organization of the European, enabling him to accommodate himself to diverse conditions. Among the Andean tribes there are seldom over five children, generally but one, in a family; and Bates, speaking of Brazilian Indians, says "their fecundity is of a low degree, and it is very rare to find a family having so many as four children."[180]

[Footnote 180: We do not infer, however, from this fact alone, that the race is exotic, for the Negroes of Central Africa multiply very slowly.]

While it is probable that Mexico was peopled from the north, it is very certain that the Tupi and Guarani, the long-headed hordes that occupied eastern South America, came up from the south, moving from the Paraguay to the banks of the Orinoco. From the Tupi nation (perhaps a branch of the Guarani) sprung the multitudinous tribes now dwelling in the vast valley of the Amazon. In such a country—unbroken by a mountain, uniform in climate—we need not look for great diversity. The general characters are these: skin of a brown color, with yellowish tinge, often nearly the tint of mahogany; thick, straight, black hair; black, horizontal eyes; low forehead, somewhat compensated by its breadth; beardless; of the middle height, but thick-set; broad, muscular chest; small hands and feet; incurious; unambitious; impassive; undemonstrative; with a dull imagination and little superstition; with no definite idea of a Supreme Being, few tribes having a name for God, though one for the "Demon;" with no belief in a future state; and, excepting civility, with virtues all negative. The semi-civilized along the Lower Amazon, called Tupuyos, seem to have lost (in the language of Wallace) the good qualities of savage life, and gained only the vices of civilization.

There are several hundred different tribes in Amazonia, each having a different language; even the scattered members of the same tribe can not understand each other.[181] This segregation of dialects is due in great part to the inflexibility of Indian character, and his isolated and narrow round of thought and life. When and where the Babel existed, whence the many branches of the great Tupi family separated, we know not. We only know that though different in words, these languages have the same grammatical construction. In more than one respect the polyglot American is antipodal to the Chinese. The language of the former is richest in words, that of the latter the poorest. The preposition follows the noun, and the verb ends the sentence. Ancient Tupi is the basis of the Lingoa Geral, the inter-tribal tongue on the Middle Amazon. The semi-civilized Ticunas, Mundurucus, etc., have one costume—the men in trowsers and white cotton shirts, the women in calico petticoats, with short, loose chemises, and their hair held in a knot on the top of the head by a comb, usually of foreign make, but sometimes made of bamboo splinters. The wild tribes north and south go nearly or quite nude, while those on the western tributaries wear cotton or bark togas or ponchos. The habitations are generally a frame-work of poles, thatched with palm-leaves; the walls sometimes latticed and plastered with mud, and the furniture chiefly hammocks and earthen vessels.



[Footnote 181: Authors compute in South America from 280 to 700 languages (Abbe Royo said 2000), of which four fifths are composed of idioms radically distinct.]

The Mundurucus are the most numerous and warlike tribe in Amazonia. They inhabit both banks of the Tapajos, and can muster, it is said, 2000 fighting men. They are friendly to the whites, and industrious, selling to traders large quantities of farina, sarsaparilla, rubber, and tonka beans. Their houses are conical or quadrangular huts, sometimes open sheds, and generally contain many families. According to Wallace, the Mundurucus are the only perfectly tattooed nation in South America. It takes at least ten years to complete the tattooing of the whole person. The skin is pricked with spines, and then the soot from burning pitch rubbed in. Their neighbors, the Pararauates, are intractable, wandering savages, roaming through the forest and sleeping in hammocks slung to the trees. They have delicately-formed hands and feet, an oval face, and glistening black eyes. On the west side of the Tapajos, near Villa Nova, are the Mauhes, an agricultural tribe, well formed, and of a mild disposition. On the Lower Madeira are the houseless, formidable Araras, who paint their chins red with achote (anatto), and usually have a black tattooed streak on each side of the face. They have long made the navigation of the great tributary hazardous. Above them dwell the Parentintins, light colored and finely featured, but nude and savage. In the labyrinth of lakes and channels at the mouth of the Madeira live the lazy, brutal Muras, the most degraded tribe on the Amazon. They have a darker skin than their neighbors, an extraordinary breadth of chest, muscular arms, short legs, protuberant abdomens, a thin beard, and a bold, restless expression. They pierce the lips, and wear peccari tusks in them in time of war. The Indians on the Purus live generally on the communal principle, and are unwarlike and indolent. The Puru-purus bury in sandy beaches, go naked, and have one wife.

On the great northwest tributary of the Rio Negro, the Uacaiari, there are numerous tribes, collectively known as the Uaupes. They have permanent abodes, in shape a parallelogram, with a semicircle at one end, and of a size to contain several families, sometimes a whole tribe. One of them, Wallace informs us, was 115 feet long by 75 broad, and about 30 high. The walls are bullet-proof. Partitions of palm-leaves divide it into apartments for families, the chief occupying the semicircular end. The men alone wear clothes and ornaments, but both sexes paint their bodies with red, black, and yellow colors in regular patterns. The men have a little beard, which they pull out, as also the eyebrows, and allow the hair to grow unshorn, tying it behind with a cord and wearing a comb; while the women cut theirs and wear no comb. They are an agricultural people—peaceable, ingenious, apathetic, diffident, and bashful.

The Catauishes inhabit the banks of the Teffe. They perforate the lips, and wear rows of sticks in the holes. At the mouth of the Jurua are the uncivilized, but tall, noble-looking Marauas. They pierce the ears and lips, and insert sticks. They live in separate families, and have no common chief. Above them live the treacherous Arauas.[182] On the opposite side of the Amazon are the nearly extinct Passes and Juris, the finest tribes in central South America. They are peaceable and industrious, and have always been friendly to the whites. The Passes are a slenderly-built, light-colored, dignified, superior race, distinguished by a large square tattooed patch in the middle of the face. The Juris tattoo in a circle round the mouth. Near by are the Uaenambeus, or "Humming-birds," distinguished by a small blue mark on the upper lip. Higher up the Japura is the large cannibal tribe of Miranhas, living in isolated families; and on the Tocantins dwell the low Caishanas, who kill their first-born children. Along the left bank of the Amazon, from Loreto to Japura, are the scattered houses and villages of the Tucunas. This is an extensive tribe, leading a settled agricultural life, each horde having a chief and a "medicine-man," or priest of their superstitions. They are good-natured and ingenious, excelling most of the other tribes in the manufacture of pottery; but they are idle and debauched, naked except in the villages, and tattooed in numbers of short, straight lines on the face. The Marubos, on the Javari, have a dark complexion and a slight beard; and on the west side of the same river roam the Majeronas—fierce, hostile, light colored, bearded cannibals. In the vicinity of Pebas dwell the inoffensive Yaguas. The shape of the head (but not their vacant expression) is well represented by Catlin's portrait of "Black Hawk," a Sauk chief. They are quite free from the encumbrance of dress, the men wearing a girdle of fibrous bark around the loins, with bunches looking like a mop hanging down in front and rear, and similar bunches hung around the neck and arms. The women tie a strip of brown cotton cloth about the hips. They paint the whole body with achote.[183] They sometimes live in communities. One large structure, with Gothic roof, is used in common; on the inside of which, around the walls, are built family sleeping-rooms. The Yaguas are given to drinking and dancing. They are said to bury their dead inside the house of the deceased, and then set fire to it; but this conflicts with their communal life. Perhaps, with the other tribes on the Japura, Ica, and Napo, they are fragments of the great Omagua nation; but the languages have no resemblance. Of the Oriente Indians we have already spoken. The tall, finely-built Cucamas near Nauta are shrewd, hard-working canoe-men, notorious for the singular desire of acquiring property; and the Yameos, a white tribe, wander across the Maranon as far as Sarayacu. On the Ucayali are numerous vagabond tribes, living for the most part in their canoes and temporary huts. They are all lazy and faithless, using their wives (polygamy is common) as slaves. Infanticide is practiced, i.e., deformed children they put out of the way, saying they belong to the devil. They worship nothing. They bury their dead in a canoe or earthen jar under the house (which is vacated forever), and throw away his property.[184] The common costume is a long gown, called cushma, of closely-twilled cotton, woven by the women. Their weapons are two-edged battle-axes of hard wood, as palo de sangre, and bows and arrows. The arrows, five or six feet long, are made from the flower-stalk of the arrow-grass (Gynerium), the head pointed with the flinty chonta and tipped with bone, often anointed with poison. At the base two rows of feathers are spirally arranged, showing the Indian's knowledge of the rifle principle. When they have fixed abodes several families live together under one roof, with no division separating the women, as among the Red Indians on the Pastassa. The roof is not over ten feet from the ground. The Piros are the highest tribe; they have but one wife. The Conibos are an agricultural people, yet cannibals, stretching from the Upper Ucayali to the sources of the Purus. They are a fair-looking, athletic people, and, like the Shipibos, of ten wear a piece of money under the lip. The Campas are the most numerous and warlike.[185] They are little known, as travelers give them a wide berth. Herndon fancied they were the descendants of the Inca race. They are said to be cannibals, and from the specimen we saw we should judge them uncommonly sharp. He was averse to telling us any thing about his tribe, but turned our questions with an equivocal repartee and a laugh. The Cashibos, on the Pachitea, is another cannibal tribe. They are light colored and bearded. The dwarfish, filthy Rimos alone of the Ucayali Indians tattoo, though not so perfectly as the Mundurucus, using black and blue colors. The other tribes simply paint. It was among these wild Indians on the Ucayali that the Franciscan friars labored so long and zealously, and with a success far greater and more lasting than that which attended any other missionary enterprise in the valley.

[Footnote 182: Near the sources of this river Castlenau locates the Canamas and Uginas; the former dwarfs, the latter having tails a palm and a half long—a hybrid from an Indian and Barigudo monkey.]

[Footnote 183: Query: Is the name Yagua (blood) derived from the practice of coloring the body red?]

[Footnote 184: Compare the ancient burial custom on the Andes: "On the decease of the Inca his palaces are abandoned: all his treasures, except those that were employed in his obsequies, his furniture and apparel, were suffered to remain as he left them, and his mansions, save one, were closed up forever."—Prescott.]

[Footnote 185: The women circumcise themselves, and a man will not marry a woman who is not circumcised. They perform the singular rite upon arriving at the age of puberty, and have a great feast at the time. Other tribes flog and imprison their daughters when they reach womanhood.]

The remaining inhabitants of the Amazon are mixed-breeds, Negroes, and whites. The amalgamations form the greater part of the population of the large towns. Von Tschudi gives a catalogue of twenty-three hybrids in Peru, and there are undoubtedly as many, or more, in Brazil. The most common are Mamelucos (offspring of white with Indian), Mulattoes (from white and Negro), Cafuzos or Zambos (from Indian and Negro), Curibocos (from Cafuzo and Indian); and Xibaros (from Cafuzo and Negro). "To define their characteristics correctly," says Von Tschudi, "would be impossible, for their minds partake of the mixture of their blood. As a general rule, it may be said that they unite in themselves all the faults without any of the virtues of their progenitors. As men they are generally inferior to the pure races, and as members of society they are the worst class of citizens." Yet they display considerable talent and enterprise, as in Quito; a proof that mental degeneracy does not necessarily result from the mixture of white with Indian blood. "There is, however," confesses Bates, after ten years' experience, "a considerable number of superlatively lazy, tricky, and sensual characters among the half-castes, both in rural places and in the towns." Our observations do not support the opinion that the result of amalgamation is "a vague compound, lacking character and expression." The moral part is perhaps deteriorated; but in tact and enterprise they often excel their progenitors.

Negroes are to be seen only on the Lower Amazon. By the new act of emancipation, such as are slaves continue so, but their children are free. Negroes born in the country are called creoles.

Of the white population, save a handful of English, French, and German, the Portuguese immigrants are the most enterprising men on the river. They are willing to work, trade, or do any thing to turn a penny. Those who acquire a fortune generally retire to Lisbon. The Brazilians proper are the descendants of the men who declared themselves "free and independent" of the mother country. Few of them are of pure Caucasian descent, for the immigration from Portugal for many years has been almost exclusively of the male sex. "It is generally considered bad taste in Brazil to boast purity of descent" (Bates, i, 241). Brazilians are stiff and formal, yet courteous and lively, communicative and hospitable, well-bred and intelligent. They are not ambitious, but content to live and enjoy what nature spontaneously offers. The most a Brazilian wants is farina and coffee, a hammock and cigar. Brazilian ladies have led a dreary life of constraint and silence, without education or society, the husband making a nun of his wife after the old bigoted Portuguese notion; but during the last twenty years the doors have been opened. Brazil attained her independence in 1823; Brazilian women in 1848.

Here, in this virgin valley, where every plant is an evergreen, possessing the most agreeable and enjoyable climate in the world, with a brilliant atmosphere, rivaled only by that of Quito, and with no changes of seasons—here we may locate the paradise of the lazy. Life may be maintained with as little labor as in the Garden of Eden. Perhaps no country in the world is capable of yielding so large a return for agriculture. Nature, evidently designing this land as the home of a great nation, has heaped up her bounties of every description—fruits of richest flavors, woods of finest grain, dyes of gayest colors, and drugs of rarest virtues; and left no sirocco or earthquake to disturb its people. Providence, moreover, has given the present emperor a wise and understanding heart; and the government is a happy blending of imperial dignity and republican freedom. White, Negro, half-caste, and Indian may be seen sitting side by side on the jury-bench. Certainly "the nation can not be a despicable one whose best men are able to work themselves up to positions of trust and influence."

God bless the Empire of the South!



CHAPTER XXIII.

How to Travel in South America.—Routes.—Expenses.—Outfit.—Precautions.—Dangers.

The most vague and incorrect notions prevail in respect to traveling in South America. The sources of trustworthy and desirable information are very meagre. Murray has not yet published a "Hand-book for the Andes;" routes, methods, and expenses of travel are almost unknown; and the imagination depicts vampires and scorpions, tigers and anacondas, wild Indians and fevers without end, impassable rivers and inaccessible mountains as the portion of the tourist. The following statements, which can be depended upon, may therefore be acceptable to those who contemplate a trip on the Andes and the Amazon.

The shortest, cheapest, most feasible, and least interesting route across the continent is from Valparaiso to Buenos Ayres. The breadth of South America is here only eight hundred miles. By railroad from Valparaiso to the foot of the Andes; thence a short mule-ride by the Uspallata Pass (altitude 12,000 feet), under the shadow of Aconcagua to Mendoza; thence by coach across the pampas to the Rio Plata. The Portillo Pass (traversed by Darwin) is nearer, but more lofty and dangerous.

Bolivia offers the difficult path of Gibbon: From the coast to Cochabamba; thence down the Marmore and Madeira. There are three routes through Peru: First, from Lima to Mayro, by way of Cerro Pasco and Huanaco, by mule, ten days; thence down the Pachitea, by canoe, six days; thence down the Ucayali to Iquitos, by steamer, six days (forty-five hours' running time). When the road from Lima to Mayro is finished the passage will be shortened four days. No snow is met in crossing the Andes in summer, but in winter it is very deep. Second (Herndon's route), from Lima to Tinga Maria, by way of Huanaco, by mule, fifteen days, distance three hundred miles (the passage is difficult in the rainy season); thence by canoe fifteen days down the Huallaga to Yurimaguas. Third and best, by mule from Truxillo to Caximarca, five days (note the magnificent ruins); thence to Chachapoyas, seven days (here are pre-Incarial relics); thence to Moyabamba, eight days; thence on foot to Balsa Puerto, four days; thence by canoe to Yurimaguas, two days. Price of a mule from Truxillo to Moyabamba is $30; canoe-hire, $10. The Peruvian steamers arrive at Yurimaguas the fifth of every month and leave the seventh; reach Nauta the ninth and Iquitos the tenth; leave Iquitos the sixteenth and arrive at Tabatinga the nineteenth, to connect with the Brazilian line. Going up, they leave Tabatinga the twenty-first and arrive at Iquitos the twenty-fourth, stopping six days. Running time from Yurimaguas to Tabatinga, forty-eight hours; fare, $70, gold; third-class, $17. La Condamine's route, via Loxa and the Maranon, is difficult; and Md. Godin's, via the Pastassa, is perilous on account of rapids and savages. The transit by the Napo we will now give in detail.

Six hundred dollars in gold will be amply sufficient for a first-class passage from New York to New York across the continent of South America, making no allowance for stoppages. For necessary expenses in Ecuador, take a draft on London, which will sell to advantage in Guayaquil; so will Mexican dollars. American gold should be taken for expenses on the Amazon in Brazil; at Para it commands a premium. On the Maranon it is below par; Peruvian gold should therefore be bought at Guayaquil for that part of the route. Also French medios, or quarter francs; they will be very useful every where on the route, especially on the Upper Amazon, where change is scarce. Fifty dollars' worth will not be too many; for, as the Scotchman said of sixpences, "they are canny little dogs, and often do the work of shillings." Take a passport for Brazil. Leave behind your delicacies and superfluities of clothing; woolen clothes will be serviceable throughout. A trunk for mountain travel should not exceed 24 by 15 by 15 inches—smaller the better. Take a rubber air-pillow and mattress: there is no bed between Guayaquil and Para. A hammock for the Amazon can be bought on the Napo.

The Pacific Mail steamships, which leave New York on the first and sixteenth of each month, connect at Panama without delay with the British Steam Navigation line on the South Pacific. Fare, first-class, from New York to Guayaquil, by way of Panama and Paita, $215, gold; second-class, $128. Time to Panama, eight days; to Paita, four days; to Guayaquil, one day. A coasting steamer leaves Panama for Guayaquil the thirteenth of each month. There are two so-called hotels in Guayaquil. "Los tres Mosqueteros," kept by Sr. Gonzales, is the best. Take a front room ($1 per day), and board at the Fonda Italiana or La Santa Rosa ($1 per day). Here complete your outfit for the mountains: saddle, with strong girth and crupper; saddle-bags, saddle-cover, sweat-cloth, and bridle ($40, paper), woolen poncho ($9), rubber poncho ($4), blanket ($6), leggins, native spurs and stirrups, knife, fork, spoon, tea-pot, chocolate (tea, pure and cheap, should be purchased at Panama), candles, matches, soap, towels, and tarpaulin for wrapping up baggage. Convert your draft into paper, quantum sufficit for Guayaquil; the rest into silver.

Besides this outer outfit, an inner one is needed—of patience without stint. You will soon learn that it is one thing to plan and quite another to execute. "To get out of the inn is one half of the journey" is very appropriately a Spanish proverb. Spaniards do nothing d'appressado (in a hurry), but every thing manana (to-morrow). You will find fondas, horses, and roads divided into the bad, the worse, and the worst, and bad is the best. But fret not thyself. "Serenity of mind," wrote Humboldt, "almost the first requisite for an undertaking in inhospitable regions, passionate love for some class of scientific labor, and a pure feeling for the enjoyment which nature in her freedom is ready to impart, are elements which, when they meet together in an individual, insure the attainment of valuable results from a great and important journey."

The journey to Quito must be made between May and November; in the rainy season the roads are impassable. From Guayaquil to Bodegas by Yankee steamer; fare, $2; time, eight hours. At Bodegas hire beasts at the Consignacion for Guaranda; price for riding and cargo beasts, $4 each. No extras for the arriero. A mule will carry two hundred and fifty pounds. Buy bread at Bodegas and Guaranda. The Indians on the road are very loth to sell any thing; buy a fowl, therefore, at the first opportunity, or you will have to live on dirty potato soup, and be glad of that. At the tambos, or wayside inns, you pay only for yerba (fodder). Never unsaddle your beast till it is cool; an Indian will even leave the bridle on for a time. To Guaranda, three full days. There take mules (safer than horses in climbing the mountains) for Quito; $6 25, silver, per beast; time, five days. Be sure to leave Guaranda by 4 a.m., for in the afternoon Chimborazo is swept by furious winds. Also start with a full stomach; you will get nothing for two days. Drink sparingly of the snow-water which dashes down the mountain. You will be tempted to curse Chuquipoyo; but thank heaven it is no worse.

There are two hotels in Quito, French and American; the former has the better location, the latter the better rooms. Best front room, furnished, half a dollar a day; cheaper by the month. Meals (two), twenty-five cents each. The beef is excellent, but the cuisine—oh, onions! "God sends the meat, and the evil one cooks." You can hire a professional male cook (Indian) for $5 a month, but you can't teach him any thing. Fish is not to be had in Quito. Gibbon speaks of having some in Cuzco, but does not tell us where it came from.[186] Price of best flour, $3 60 per quintal; butter, thirty cents a pound; beef, $1 an arroba (twenty-five pounds); refined sugar, $3 50 an arroba; brown sugar (rapidura),[187] five cents a pound; cigars, from six to sixteen for a dime; cigarettes, five cents a hundred. Horse hire, from fifty cents to $1 per day. If you are to remain some time, buy a beast: a good mule costs $40; an ordinary horse, $50. The Post-office Department is a swindle. If you "pay through" you will find on your arrival home that your letters have been paid at both ends. Ask our consul at Guayaquil to forward them.

[Footnote 186: The Guayaquil market is well supplied with fish of a fair quality. Usually the fish of warm tropical waters are poor, but the cold "Humboldt current," which passes along the west coast of Ecuador, renders them as edible as those of temperate zones.]