Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America Volume Ii Part 10

MISSION OF ATURES.

CATARACT, OR RAUDAL OF MAPARA.

ISLETS OF SURUPAMANA AND UIRAPURI.

The river of the Orinoco, in running from south to north, is crossed by a chain of granitic mountains. Twice confined in its course, it turbulently breaks on the rocks, that form steps and transverse d.y.k.es.

Nothing can be grander than the aspect of this spot. Neither the fall of the Tequendama, near Santa Fe de Bogota, nor the magnificent scenes of the Cordilleras, could weaken the impression produced upon my mind by the first view of the rapids of Atures and of Maypures. When the spectator is so stationed that the eye can at once take in the long succession of cataracts, the immense sheet of foam and vapours illumined by the rays of the setting sun, the whole river seems as it were suspended over its bed.

Scenes so astonis.h.i.+ng must for ages have fixed the attention of the inhabitants of the New World. When Diego de Todaz, Alfonzo de Herrera, and the intrepid Raleigh, anch.o.r.ed at the mouth of the Orinoco, they were informed by the Indians of the Great Cataracts, which they themselves had never visited, and which they even confounded with cascades farther to the east. Whatever obstacles the force of vegetation under the torrid zone may throw in the way of intercourse among nations, all that relates to the course of great rivers acquires a celebrity which extends to vast distances. The Orinoco, the Amazon, and the Uruguay, traverse, like inland arms of seas, in different directions, a land covered with forests, and inhabited by tribes, part of whom are cannibals. It is not yet two hundred years since civilization and the light of a more humane religion have pursued their way along the banks of these ancient ca.n.a.ls traced by the hand of nature; long, however, before the introduction of agriculture, before communications for the purposes of barter were established among these scattered and often hostile tribes, the knowledge of extraordinary phenomena, of falls of water, of volcanic fires, and of snows resisting all the ardent heat of summer, was propagated by a thousand fortuitous circ.u.mstances. Three hundred leagues from the coast, in the centre of South America, among nations whose excursions do not extend to three days' journey, we find an idea of the ocean, and words that denote a ma.s.s of salt water extending as far as the eye can discern. Various events, which repeatedly occur in savage life, contribute to enlarge these conceptions. In consequence of the petty wars between neighbouring tribes, a prisoner is brought into a strange country, and treated as a poito or mero, that is to say, as a slave.

After being often sold, he is dragged to new wars, escapes, and returns home; he relates what he has seen, and what he has heard from those whose tongue he has been compelled to learn. As on discovering a coast, we hear of great inland animals, so, on entering the valley of a vast river, we are surprised to find that savages, who are strangers to navigation, have acquired a knowledge of distant things. In the infant state of society, the exchange of ideas precedes, to a certain point, the exchange of productions.

The two great cataracts of the Orinoco, the celebrity of which is so far-spread and so ancient, are formed by the pa.s.sage of the river across the mountains of Parima. They are called by the natives Mapara and Quittuna; but the missionaries have subst.i.tuted for these names those of Atures and Maypures, after the names of the tribes which were first a.s.sembled together in the nearest villages. On the coast of Caracas, the two Great Cataracts are denoted by the simple appellation of the two Raudales, or rapids; a denomination which implies that the other falls of water, even the rapids of Camiseta and of Carichana, are not considered as worthy of attention when compared with the cataracts of Atures and Maypures.

These last, situated between five and six degrees of north lat.i.tude, and a hundred leagues west of the Cordilleras of New Grenada, in the meridian of Porto Cabello, are only twelve leagues distant from each other. It is surprising that their existence was not known to D'Anville, who, in his fine map of South America, marks the inconsiderable cascades of Marimara and San Borja, by the names of the rapids of Carichana and Tabaje. The Great Cataracts divide the Christian establishments of Spanish Guiana into two unequal parts.

Those situated between the Raudal of Atures and the mouth of the river are called the Missions of the Lower Orinoco; the Missions of the Upper Orinoco comprehend the villages between the Raudal of Maypures and the mountains of Duida. The course of the Lower Orinoco, if we estimate the sinuosities at one-third of the distance in a direct line, is two hundred and sixty nautical leagues: the course of the Upper Orinoco, supposing its sources to be three degrees east of Duida, includes one hundred and sixty-seven leagues.

Beyond the Great Cataracts an unknown land begins. The country is partly mountainous and partly flat, receiving at once the confluents of the Amazon and the Orinoco. From the facility of its communications with the Rio Negro and Grand Para, it appears to belong still more to Brazil than to the Spanish colonies. None of the missionaries who have described the Orinoco before me, neither Father Gumilla, Gili, nor Caulin, had pa.s.sed the Raudal of Maypures. We found but three Christian establishments above the Great Cataracts, along the sh.o.r.es of the Orinoco, in an extent of more than a hundred leagues; and these three establishments contained scarcely six or eight white persons, that is to say, persons of European race. We cannot be surprised that such a desert region should have been at all times the land of fable and fairy visions. There, according to the statements of certain missionaries, are found races of men, some of whom have an eye in the centre of the forehead, whilst others have dogs' heads, and mouths below their stomachs. There they pretend to have found all that the ancients relate of the Garamantes, of the Arimaspes, and of the Hyperboreans. It would be an error to suppose that these simple and often rustic missionaries had themselves invented all these exaggerated fictions; they derived them in great part from the recitals of the Indians. A fondness for narration prevails in the Missions, as it does at sea, in the East, and in every place where the mind seeks amus.e.m.e.nt. A missionary, from his vocation, is not inclined to scepticism; he imprints on his memory what the natives have so often repeated to him; and, when returned to Europe, and restored to the civilized world, he finds a pleasure in creating astonishment by a recital of facts which he thinks he has collected, and by an animated description of remote things. These stories, which the Spanish colonists call tales of travellers and of monks (cuentos de viageros y frailes), increase in improbability in proportion as you increase your distance from the forests of the Orinoco, and approach the coasts inhabited by the whites. When, at c.u.mana, Nueva Barcelona, and other seaports which have frequent communication with the Missions, you betray any sign of incredulity, you are reduced to silence by these few words: The fathers have seen it, but far above the Great Cataracts (mas arriba de los Raudales).

On the 15th of April, we left the island of Panumana at four in the morning, two hours before sunrise. The sky was in great part obscured, and lightnings flashed over dense clouds at more than forty degrees of elevation. We were surprised at not hearing thunder; but possibly this was owing to the prodigious height of the storm? It appears to us, that in Europe the electric flashes without thunder, vaguely called heat-lightning, are seen generally nearer the horizon. Under a cloudy sky, that sent back the radiant caloric of the soil, the heat was stifling; not a breath of wind agitated the foliage of the trees. The jaguars, as usual, had crossed the arm of the Orinoco by which we were separated from the sh.o.r.e, and we heard their cries extremely near.

During the night the Indians had advised us to quit our station in the open air, and retire to a deserted hut belonging to the conucos of the inhabitants of Atures. They had taken care to barricade the opening with planks, a precaution which seemed to us superfluous; but near the Cataracts tigers are very numerous, and two years before, in these very conucos of Panumana, an Indian returning to his hut, towards the close of the rainy season, found a tigress settled in it with her two young. These animals had inhabited the dwelling for several months; they were dislodged from it with difficulty, and it was only after an obstinate combat that the former master regained possession of his dwelling. The jaguars are fond of retiring to deserted ruins, and I believe it is more prudent in general for a solitary traveller to encamp in the open air, between two fires, than to seek shelter in uninhabited huts.

On quitting the island of Panumana, we perceived on the western bank of the river the fires of an encampment of Guahibo savages. The missionary who accompanied us caused a few musket-shots to be fired in the air, which he said would intimidate them, and shew that we were in a state to defend ourselves. The savages most likely had no canoes, and were not desirous of troubling us in the middle of the river. We pa.s.sed at sunrise the mouth of the Rio Anaveni, which descends from the eastern mountains. On its banks, now deserted, Father Olmos had established, in the time of the Jesuits, a small village of j.a.puins or Jaruros. The heat was so excessive that we rested a long time in a woody spot, to fish with a hook and line, and it was not without some trouble that we carried away all the fish we had caught. We did not arrive till very late at the foot of the Great Cataract, in a bay called the lower harbour (puerto de abaxo); and we followed, not without difficulty, in a dark night, the narrow path that leads to the Mission of Atures, a league distant from the river. We crossed a plain covered with large blocks of granite.

The little village of San Juan Nepomuceno de los Atures was founded by the Jesuit Francisco Gonzales, in 1748. In going up the river this is the last of the Christian missions that owe their origin to the order of St. Ignatius. The more southern establishments, those of Atabapo, of Ca.s.siquiare, and of Rio Negro, were formed by the fathers of the Observance of St. Francis. The Orinoco appears to have flowed heretofore where the village of Atures now stands, and the flat savannah that surrounds the village no doubt formed part of the river.

I saw to the east of the mission a succession of rocks, which seemed to have been the ancient sh.o.r.e of the Orinoco. In the lapse of ages the river has been impelled westward, in consequence of the acc.u.mulations of earth, which occur more frequently on the side of the eastern mountains, that are furrowed by torrents. The cataract bears the name of Mapara,* as we have mentioned above (* I am ignorant of the etymology of this word, which I believe means only a fall of water. Gili translates into Maypure a small cascade (raudalito) by uccamatisi mapara canacapatirri. Should we not spell this word matpara? mat being a radical of the Maypure tongue, and meaning bad (Hervas, Saggio N. 29). The radical par (para) is found among American tribes more than five hundred leagues distant from each other, the Caribs, Maypures, Brazilians, and Peruvians, in the words sea, rain, water, lake. We must not confound mapara with mapaja; this last word signifies, in Maypure and Tamanac, the papaw or melon-tree, no doubt on account of the sweetness of its fruit, for mapa means in the Maypure, as well as in the Peruvian and Omagua tongues, the honey of bees. The Tamanacs call a cascade, or raudal, in general uatapurutpe; the Maypures, uca.); while the name of the village is derived from that of the nation of Atures, now believed to be extinct. I find on the maps of the seventeenth century, Island and Cataract of Athule; which is the word Atures written according to the p.r.o.nunciation of the Tamanacs, who confound, like so many other people, the consonants l and r. This mountainous region was so little known in Europe, even in the middle of the eighteenth century, that D'Anville, in the first edition of his South America, makes a branch issue from the Orinoco, near Salto de los Atures, and fall into the Amazon, to which branch he gives the name of Rio Negro.

Early maps, as well as Father Gumilla's work, place the Mission in lat.i.tude 1 degree 30 minutes. Abbe Gili gives it 3 degrees 50 minutes.

I found, by meridian alt.i.tudes of Canopus and a of the Southern Cross, 5 degrees 38 minutes 4 seconds for the lat.i.tude; and by the chronometer 4 hours 41 minutes 17 seconds of longitude west of the meridian of Paris.

We found this small Mission in the most deplorable state. It contained, even at the time of the expedition of Solano, commonly called the expedition of the boundaries, three hundred and twenty Indians. This number had diminished, at the time of our pa.s.sage by the Cataracts, to forty-seven; and the missionary a.s.sured us that this diminution became from year to year more sensible. He showed us, that in the s.p.a.ce of thirty-two months only one marriage had been entered in the registers of the parish church. Two others had been contracted by uncatechised natives, and celebrated before the Indian Gobernador.

At the first foundation of the Mission, the Atures, Maypures, Meyepures, Abanis, and Quirupas, had been a.s.sembled together. Instead of these tribes we found only Guahibos, and a few families of the nation of Macos. The Atures have almost entirely disappeared; they are no longer known, except by the tombs in the cavern of Ataruipe, which recall to mind the sepulchres of the Guanches at Teneriffe. We learned on the spot, that the Atures, as well as the Quaquas, and the Macos or Piaroas, belong to the great stock of the Salive nations; while the Maypures, the Abanis, the Parenis, and the Guaypunaves, are of the same race as the Cabres or Caveres, celebrated for their long wars with the Caribs. In this labyrinth of petty nations, divided from one another as the nations of Latium, Asia Minor, and Sogdiana, formerly were, we can trace no general relations but by following the a.n.a.logy of tongues. These are the only monuments that have reached us from the early ages of the world; the only monuments, which, not being fixed to the soil, are at once moveable and lasting, and have as it were traversed time and s.p.a.ce. They owe their duration, and the extent they occupy, much less to conquering and polished nations, than to those wandering and half-savage tribes, who, fleeing before a powerful enemy, carried along with them in their extreme wretchedness only their wives, their children, and the languages of their fathers.

Between the lat.i.tudes of 4 and 8 degrees, the Orinoco not only separates the great forest of the Parime from the bare savannahs of the Apure, Meta, and Guaviare, but also forms the boundary between tribes of very different manners. To the westward, over treeless plains, wander the Guahibos, the Chiricoas, and the Guamos; nations, proud of their savage independence, whom it is difficult to fix to the soil, or habituate to regular labour. The Spanish missionaries characterise them well by the name of Indios andantes (errant or vagabond Indians), because they are perpetually moving from place to place. To the east of the Orinoco, between the neighbouring sources of the Caura, Cataniapo, and Ventuari, live the Macos, the Salives, the Curacicanas, Parecas, and Maquiritares, mild, tranquil tribes, addicted to agriculture, and easily subjected to the discipline of the Missions. The Indian of the plains differs from the Indian of the forests in language as well as manners and mental disposition; both have an idiom abounding in spirited and bold terms; but the language of the former is harsher, more concise, and more impa.s.sioned; that of the latter, softer, more diffuse, and fuller of ambiguous expressions.

The Mission of Atures, like most of the Missions of the Orinoco, situated between the mouths of the Apure and the Atabapo, is composed of both the cla.s.ses of tribes we have just described. We there find the Indians of the forests, and the Indians heretofore nomadic*

(Indios monteros and Indios llaneros, or andantes). (* I employ the word nomadic as synonymous with wandering, and not in its primitive signification. The wandering nations of America (those of the indigenous tribes, it is to be understood) are never shepherds; they live by fis.h.i.+ng and hunting, on the fruit of a few trees, the farinaceous pith of palm-trees, etc.) We visited with the missionary the huts of Macos, whom the Spaniards call Piraoas, and those of the Guahibos. The first indicated more love of order, cleanliness, and ease. The independent Macos (I do not designate them by the name of savages) have their rochelas, or fixed dwellings, two or three days'

journey east of Atures, toward the sources of the little river Cataniapo. They are very numerous. Like most of the natives of the woods, they cultivate, not maize, but ca.s.sava; and they live in great harmony with the Christian Indians of the mission. The harmony was established and wisely cultivated by the Franciscan monk, Bernardo Zea. This alcalde of the reduced Macos quitted the village of Atures for a few months every year, to live in the plantations which he possessed in the midst of the forests near the hamlet of the independent Macos. In consequence of this peaceful intercourse, many of the Indios monteros came and established themselves some time ago in the mission. They asked eagerly for knives, fis.h.i.+ng hooks, and those coloured gla.s.s beads, which, notwithstanding the positive prohibition of the priests, were employed not as necklaces, but as ornaments of the guayuco (perizoma). Having obtained what they sought, they returned to the woods, weary of the regulations of the mission.

Epidemic fevers, which prevailed with violence at the entrance of the rainy season, contributed greatly to this unexpected flight. In 1799 the mortality was very considerable at Carichana, on the banks of the Meta, and at the Raudal of Atures. The Indian of the forest conceives a horror of the life of the civilized man, when, I will not say any misfortune befalls his family settled in the mission, but merely any disagreeable or unforeseen accident. Natives, who were neophytes, have been known to desert for ever the Christian establishments, on account of a great drought; as if this calamity would not have reached them equally in their plantations, had they remained in their primitive independence.

The fevers which prevail during a great part of the year in the villages of Atures and Maypures, around the two Great Cataracts of the Orinoco, render these spots highly dangerous to European travellers.

They are caused by violent heats, in combination with the excessive humidity of the air, bad nutriment, and, if we may believe the natives, the pestilent exhalations rising from the bare rocks of the Raudales. These fevers of the Orinoco appeared to us to resemble those which prevail every year between New Barcelona, La Guayra, and Porto Cabello, in the vicinity of the sea; and which often degenerate into adynamic fevers. "I have had my little fever (mi calenturita) only eight months," said the good missionary of the Atures, who accompanied us to the Rio Negro; speaking of it as of an habitual evil, easy to be borne. The fits were violent, but of short duration. He was sometimes seized with them when lying along in the boat under a shelter of branches of trees, sometimes when exposed to the burning rays of the sun on an open beach. These tertian agues are attended with great debility of the muscular system; yet we find poor ecclesiastics on the Orinoco, who endure for several years these calenturitas, or tercianas: their effects are not so fatal as those which are experienced from fevers of much shorter duration in temperate climates.

I have just alluded to the noxious influence on the salubrity of the atmosphere, which is attributed by the natives, and even the missionaries, to the bare rocks. This opinion is the more worthy of attention, as it is connected with a physical phenomenon lately observed in different parts of the globe, and not yet sufficiently explained. Among the cataracts, and wherever the Orinoco, between the Missions of Carichana and of Santa Barbara, periodically washes the granitic rocks, they become smooth, black, and as if coated with plumbago. The colouring matter does not penetrate the stone, which is coa.r.s.e-grained granite, containing a few solitary crystals of hornblende. Taking a general view of the primitive formation of Atures, we perceive, that, like the granite of Syene in Egypt, it is a granite with hornblende, and not a real syenite formation. Many of the layers are entirely dest.i.tute of hornblende. The black crust is 0.3 of a line in thickness; it is found chiefly on the quartzose parts. The crystals of feldspar sometimes preserve externally their reddish-white colour, and rise above the black crust. On breaking the stone with a hammer, the inside is found to be white, and without any trace of decomposition. These enormous stony ma.s.ses appear sometimes in rhombs, sometimes under those hemispheric forms, peculiar to granitic rocks when they separate in blocks. They give the landscape a singularly gloomy aspect; their colour being in strong contrast with that of the foam of the river which covers them, and of the vegetation by which they are surrounded. The Indians say, that the rocks are burnt (or carbonized) by the rays of the sun. We saw them not only in the bed of the Orinoco, but in some spots as far as five hundred toises from its present sh.o.r.e, on heights which the waters now never reach even in their greatest swellings.

What is this brownish black crust, which gives these rocks, when they have a globular form, the appearance of meteoric stones? What idea can we form of the action of the water, which produces a deposit, or a change of colour, so extraordinary? We must observe, in the first place, that this phenomenon does not belong to the cataracts of the Orinoco alone, but is found in both hemispheres. At my return from Mexico in 1807, when I showed the granites of Atures and Maypures to M. Roziere, who had travelled over the valley of Egypt, the coasts of the Red Sea, and Mount Sinai, this learned geologist pointed out to me that the primitive rocks of the little cataracts of Syene display, like the rocks of the Orinoco, a glossy surface, of a blackish-grey, or almost leaden colour, and of which some of the fragments seem coated with tar. Recently, in the unfortunate expedition of Captain Tuckey, the English naturalists were struck with the same appearance in the yellalas (rapids and shoals) that obstruct the river Congo or Zaire. Dr. Koenig has placed in the British Museum, beside the syenites of the Congo, the granites of Atures, taken from a series of rocks which were presented by M. Bonpland and myself to the ill.u.s.trious president of the Royal Society of London. "These fragments," says Mr. Koenig, "alike resemble meteoric stones; in both rocks, those of the Orinoco and of Africa, the black crust is composed, according to the a.n.a.lysis of Mr. Children, of the oxide of iron and manganese." Some experiments made at Mexico, conjointly with Senor del Rio, led me to think that the rocks of Atures, which blacken the paper in which they are wrapped,* contain, besides oxide of manganese, carbon, and supercarburetted iron. (* I remarked the same phenomenon from spongy grains of platina one or two lines in length, collected at the stream-works of Taddo, in the province of Choco.

Having been wrapped up in white paper during a journey of several months, they left a black stain, like that of plumbago or supercarburetted iron.) At the Orinoco, granitic ma.s.ses of forty or fifty feet thick are uniformly coated with these oxides; and, however thin these crusts may appear, they must nevertheless contain pretty considerable quant.i.ties of iron and manganese, since they occupy a s.p.a.ce of above a league square.

It must be observed that all these phenomena of coloration have hitherto appeared in the torrid zone only, in rivers that have periodical overflowings, of which the habitual temperature is from twenty-four to twenty-eight centesimal degrees, and which flow, not over gritstone or calcareous rocks, but over granite, gneiss, and hornblende rocks. Quartz and feldspar scarcely contain five or six thousandths of oxide of iron and of manganese; but in mica and hornblende these oxides, and particularly that of iron, amount, according to Klaproth and Herrmann, to fifteen or twenty parts in a hundred. The hornblende contains also some carbon, like the Lydian stone and kieselschiefer. Now, if these black crusts were formed by a slow decomposition of the granitic rock, under the double influence of humidity and the tropical sun, how is it to be conceived that these oxides are spread so uniformly over the whole surface of the stony ma.s.ses, and are not more abundant round a crystal of mica or hornblende than on the feldspar and milky quartz? The ferruginous sandstones, granites, and marbles, that become cinereous and sometimes brown in damp air, have an aspect altogether different. In reflecting upon the l.u.s.tre and equal thickness of the crusts, we are rather inclined to think that this matter is deposited by the Orinoco, and that the water has penetrated even into the clefts of the rocks.

Adopting this hypothesis, it may be asked whether the river holds the oxides suspended like sand and other earthy substances, or whether they are found in a state of chemical solution. The first supposition is less admissible, on account of the h.o.m.ogeneity of the crusts, which contain neither grains of sand, nor spangles of mica, mixed with the oxides. We must then recur to the idea of a chemical solution; and this idea is no way at variance with the phenomena daily observable in our laboratories. The waters of great rivers contain carbonic acid; and, were they even entirely pure, they would still be capable, in very great volumes, of dissolving some portions of oxide, or those metallic hydrates which are regarded as the least soluble. The mud of the Nile, which is the sediment of the matters which the river holds suspended, is dest.i.tute of manganese; but it contains, according to the a.n.a.lysis of M. Regnault, six parts in a hundred of oxide of iron; and its colour, at first black, changes to yellowish brown by desiccation and the contact of air. The mud consequently is not the cause of the black crusts on the rocks of Syene. Berzelius, who, at my request, examined these crusts, recognized in them, as in those of the granites of the Orinoco and River Congo, the union of iron and manganese. That celebrated chemist was of opinion that the rivers do not take up these oxides from the soil over which they flow, but that they derive them from their subterranean sources, and deposit them on the rocks in the manner of cementation, by the action of particular affinities, perhaps by that of the potash of the feldspar. A long residence at the cataracts of the Orinoco, the Nile, and the Rio Congo, and an examination of the circ.u.mstances attendant on this phenomenon of coloration, could alone lead to the complete solution of the problem we have discussed. Is this phenomenon independent of the nature of the rocks? I shall content myself with observing, in general, that neither the granitic ma.s.ses remote from the ancient bed of the Orinoco, but exposed during the rainy season to the alternations of heat and moisture, nor the granitic rocks bathed by the brownish waters of the Rio Negro, a.s.sume the appearance of meteoric stones. The Indians say, that the rocks are black only where the waters are white. They ought, perhaps, to add, where the waters acquire great swiftness, and strike with force against the rocks of the banks. Cementation seems to explain why the crusts augment so little in thickness.

I know not whether it be an error, but in the Missions of the Orinoco, the neighbourhood of bare rocks, and especially of the ma.s.ses that have crusts of carbon, oxide of iron, and manganese, are considered injurious to health. In the torrid zone, still more than in others, the people multiply pathogenic causes at will. They are afraid to sleep in the open air, if forced to expose the face to the rays of the full moon. They also think it dangerous to sleep on granite near the river; and many examples are cited of persons, who, after having pa.s.sed the night on these black and naked rocks, have awakened in the morning with a strong paroxysm of fever. Without entirely lending faith to the a.s.sertions of the missionaries and natives, we generally avoided the laxas negras, and stretched ourselves on the beach covered with white sand, when we found no tree from which to suspend our hammocks. At Carichana, the village is intended to be destroyed, and its place changed, merely to remove it from the black rocks, or from a site where, for a s.p.a.ce of more than ten thousand square toises, banks of bare granite form the surface. From similar motives, which must appear very chimerical to the naturalists of Europe, the Jesuits Olmo, Forneri, and Mellis, removed a village of Jaruros to three different spots, between the Raudal of Tabaje and the Rio Anaveni. I merely state these facts as they were related to me, because we are almost wholly ignorant of the nature of the gaseous mixtures which cause the insalubrity of the atmosphere. Can it be admitted that, under the influence of excessive heat and of constant humidity, the black crusts of the granitic rocks are capable of acting upon the ambient air, and producing miasmata with a triple basis of carbon, azote, and hydrogen?

This I doubt. The granites of the Orinoco, it is true, often contain hornblende; and those who are accustomed to practical labour in mines are not ignorant that the most noxious exhalations rise from galleries wrought in syenitic and hornblende rocks: but in an atmosphere renewed every instant by the action of little currents of air, the effect cannot be the same as in a mine.

It is probably dangerous to sleep on the laxas negras, only because these rocks retain a very elevated temperature during the night. I have found their temperature in the day at 48 degrees, the air in the shade being at 29.7 degrees; during the night the thermometer on the rock indicated 36 degrees, the air being at 26 degrees. When the acc.u.mulation of heat in the stony ma.s.ses has reached a stationary degree, these ma.s.ses become at the same hours nearly of the same temperature. What they have acquired more in the day they lose at night by radiation, the force of which depends on the state of the surface of the radiating body, the interior arrangement of its particles, and, above all, on the clearness of the sky, that is, on the transparency of the atmosphere and the absence of clouds. When the declination of the sun varies very little, this luminary adds daily nearly the same quant.i.ties of heat, and the rocks are not hotter at the end than in the middle of summer. There is a certain maximum which they cannot pa.s.s, because they do not change the state of their surface, their density, or their capacity for caloric. On the sh.o.r.es of the Orinoco, on getting out of one's hammock during the night, and touching with the bare feet the rocky surface of the ground, the sensation of heat experienced is very remarkable. I observed pretty constantly, in putting the bulb of the thermometer in contact with the ledges of bare rocks, that the laxas negras are hotter during the day than the reddish-white granites at a distance from the river; but the latter cool during the night less rapidly than the former. It may be easily conceived that the emission and loss of caloric is more rapid in ma.s.ses with black crusts than in those which abound in laminae of silvery mica. When walking between the hours of one and three in the afternoon, at Carichana, Atures, or Maypures, among those blocks of stone dest.i.tute of vegetable mould, and piled up to great heights, one feels a sensation of suffocation, as if standing before the opening of a furnace. The winds, if ever felt in those woody regions, far from bringing coolness, appear more heated when they have pa.s.sed over beds of stone, and heaps of rounded blocks of granite. This augmentation of heat adds to the insalubrity of the climate.

Among the causes of the depopulation of the Raudales, I have not reckoned the small-pox, that malady which in other parts of America makes such cruel ravages that the natives, seized with dismay, burn their huts, kill their children, and renounce every kind of society.

This scourge is almost unknown on the banks of the Orinoco, and should it penetrate thither, it is to be hoped that its effects may be immediately counteracted by vaccination, the blessings of which are daily felt along the coasts of Terra Firma. The causes which depopulate the Christian settlements are, the repugnance of the Indians for the regulations of the missions, insalubrity of climate, bad nourishment, want of care in the diseases of children, and the guilty practice of preventing pregnancy by the use of deleterious herbs. Among the barbarous people of Guiana, as well as those of the half-civilized islands of the South Sea, young wives are fearful of becoming mothers. If they have children, their offspring are exposed not only to the dangers of savage life, but also to other dangers arising from the strangest popular prejudices. When twins are born, false notions of propriety and family honour require that one of them should be destroyed. To bring twins into the world, say the Indians, is to be exposed to public scorn; it is to resemble rats, opossums, and the vilest animals, which bring forth a great number of young at a time. Nay, more, they affirm that two children born at the same time cannot belong to the same father. This is an axiom of physiology among the Salives; and in every zone, and in different states of society, when the vulgar seize upon an axiom, they adhere to it with more stedfastness than the better-informed men by whom it was first hazarded. To avoid the disturbance of conjugal tranquillity, the old female relations of the mother take care, that when twins are born one of them shall disappear. If a new-born infant, though not a twin, have any physical deformity, the father instantly puts it to death. They will have none but robust and well-made children, for deformities indicate some influence of the evil spirit Ioloquiamo, or the bird Tikitiki, the enemy of the human race. Sometimes children of a feeble const.i.tution undergo the same fate. When the father is asked what is become of one of his sons, he will pretend that he has lost him by a natural death. He will disavow an action that appears to him blameable, but not criminal. "The poor boy," he will tell you, "could not follow us; we must have waited for him every moment; he has not been seen again; he did not come to sleep where we pa.s.sed the night."

Such is the candour and simplicity of manners--such the boasted happiness--of man in the state of nature! He kills his son to escape the ridicule of having twins, or to avoid journeying more slowly; in fact, to avoid a little inconvenience.

These acts of cruelty, I confess, are less frequent than they are believed to be; yet they occur even in the Missions, during the time when the Indians leave the village, to retire to the conucos of the neighbouring forests. It would be erroneous to attribute these actions to the state of polygamy in which the uncatechized Indians live.

Polygamy no doubt diminishes the domestic happiness and internal union of families; but this practice, sanctioned by Ismaelism, does not prevent the people of the east from loving their children with tenderness. Among the Indians of the Orinoco, the father returns home only to eat, or to sleep in his hammock; he lavishes no caresses on his infants, or on his wives, whose office it is to serve him.

Parental affection begins to display itself only when the son has become strong enough to take a part in hunting, fis.h.i.+ng, and the agricultural labours of the plantations.

While our boat was unloading, we examined closely, wherever the sh.o.r.e could be approached, the terrific spectacle of a great river narrowed and reduced as it were to foam. I shall endeavour to paint, not the sensations we felt, but the aspect of a spot so celebrated among the scenes of the New World. The more imposing and majestic the objects we describe, the more essential it becomes to seize them in their smallest details, to fix the outline of the picture we would present to the imagination of the reader, and to describe with simplicity what characterises the great and imperishable monuments of nature.

The navigation of the Orinoco from its mouth as far as the confluence of the Anaveni, an extent of 260 leagues, is not impeded. There are shoals and eddies near Muitaco, in a cove that bears the name of the Mouth of h.e.l.l (Boca del Infierno); and there are rapids (raudalitos) near Carichana and San Borja; but in all these places the river is never entirely barred, as a channel is left by which boats can pa.s.s up and down.

In all this navigation of the Lower Orinoco travellers experience no other danger than that of the natural rafts formed by trees, which are uprooted by the river, and swept along in its great floods. Woe to the canoes that during the night strike against these rafts of wood interwoven with lianas! Covered with aquatic plants, they resemble here, as in the Mississippi, floating meadows, the chinampas or floating gardens of the Mexican lakes. The Indians, when they wish to surprise a tribe of their enemies, bring together several canoes, fasten them to each other with cords, and cover them with gra.s.s and branches, to imitate this a.s.semblage of trunks of trees, which the Orinoco sweeps along in its middle current. The Caribs are accused of having heretofore excelled in the use of this artifice; at present the Spanish smugglers in the neighbourhood of Angostura have recourse to the same expedient to escape the vigilance of the custom-house officers.

After proceeding up the Orinoco beyond the Rio Anaveni, we find, between the mountains of Uniana and Sipapu, the Great Cataracts of Mapara and Quittuna, or, as they are more commonly called by the missionaries, the Raudales of Atures and Maypures. These bars, which extend from one bank to the other, present in general a similar aspect: they are composed of innumerable islands, dikes of rock, and blocks of granite piled on one another and covered with palm-trees.

But, notwithstanding a uniformity of aspect, each of these cataracts preserves an individual character. The first, the Atures, is most easily pa.s.sable when the waters are low. The Indians prefer crossing the second, the Maypures, at the time of great floods. Beyond the Maypures and the mouth of the Cano Cameji, the Orinoco is again un.o.bstructed for the length of more than one hundred and sixty-seven leagues, or nearly to its source; that is to say, as far as the Raudalito of Guaharibos, east of the Cano Chiguire and the lofty mountains of Yumariquin.

Having visited the basins of the two rivers Orinoco and Amazon, I was singularly struck by the differences they display in their course of unequal extent. The falls of the Amazon, which is nearly nine hundred and eighty nautical leagues (twenty to a degree) in length, are pretty near its source in the first sixth of its total length, and five-sixths of its course are entirely free. We find the great falls of the Orinoco on a point far more unfavourable to navigation; if not at the half, at least much beyond the first third of its length. In both rivers it is neither the mountains, nor the different stages of flat lands lying over one another, whence they take their origin, that cause the cataracts; they are produced by other mountains, other ledges which, after a long and tranquil course, the rivers have to pa.s.s over, precipitating themselves from step to step.

The Amazon does not pierce its way through the princ.i.p.al chain of the Andes, as was affirmed at a period when it was gratuitously supposed that, wherever mountains are divided into parallel chains, the intermedial or central ridge must be more elevated than the others.

This great river rises (and this is a point of some importance to geology) eastward of the western chain, which alone in this lat.i.tude merits the denomination of the high chain of the Andes. It is formed by the junction of the river Aguamiros with the Rio Chavinillo, which issues from the lake Llauricocha in a longitudinal valley bounded by the western and the intermedial chain of the Andes. To form an accurate idea of these hydrographical relations, it must be borne in mind that a division into three chains takes place in the colossal group or knot of the mountains of Pasco and Huanuco. The western chain, which is the loftiest, and takes the name of the Cordillera Real de Nieve, directs its course (between Huary and Caxatamba, Guamachuco and Luema, Micuipampa and Guangamarca) by the Nevados of Viuda, Pelagatos, Moyopata, and Huaylillas, and by the Paramos of Guamani and Guaringa, towards the town of Loxa. The intermedial chain separates the waters of the Upper Maranon from those of the Guallaga, and over a long s.p.a.ce reaches only the small elevation of a thousand toises; it enters the region of perpetual snow to the south of Huanuco in the Cordillera of Sasaguanca. It stretches at first northward by Huacrachuco, Chachapoyas, Moyobamba, and the Paramo of Piscoguannuna; then it progressively lowers toward Peca, Copallin, and the Mission of Santiago, at the eastern extremity of the province of Jaen de Bracamoros. The third, or easternmost chain, skirts the right bank of the Rio Guallaga, and loses itself in the seventh degree of lat.i.tude.

So long as the Amazon flows from south to north in the longitudinal valley, between two chains of unequal height (that is, from the farms of Quivilla and Guancaybamba, where the river is crossed on wooden bridges, as far as the confluence of the Rio Chinchipe), there are neither bars, nor any obstacle whatever to the navigation of boats.

The falls of water begin only where the Amazon turns toward the east, crossing the intermedial chain of the Andes, which widens considerably toward the north. It meets with the first rocks of red sandstone, or ancient conglomerate, between Tambillo and the Pongo of Rentema (near which I measured the breadth, depth, and swiftness of the waters), and it leaves the rocks of red sandstone east of the famous strait of Manseriche, near the Pongo of Tayuchuc, where the hills rise no higher than forty or fifty toises above the level of its waters. The river does not reach the most easterly chain, which bounds the Pampas del Sacramento. From the hills of Tayuchuc as far as Grand Para, during a course of more than seven hundred and fifty leagues, the navigation is free from obstacles. It results from this rapid sketch, that, if the Maranon had not to pa.s.s over the hilly country between Santiago and Tomependa (which belongs to the central chain of the Andes) it would be navigable from its mouth as far as Pumpo, near Piscobamba in the province of Conchucos, forty-three leagues north of its source.

We have just seen that, in the Orinoco, as in the Amazon, the great cataracts are not found near the sources of the rivers. After a tranquil course of more than one hundred and sixty leagues from the little Raudal of Guaharibos, east of Esmeralda, as far as the mountains of Sipapu, the river, augmented by the waters of the Jao, the Ventuari, the Atabapo, and the Guaviare, suddenly changes its primitive direction from east to west, and runs from south to north: then, in crossing the land-strait* in the plains of Meta, (* This strait, which I have several times mentioned, is formed by the Cordilleras of the Andes of New Granada, and the Cordillera of Parima.) meets the advanced b.u.t.tresses of the Cordillera of Parima.

This obstacle causes cataracts far more considerable, and presents greater impediments to navigation, than all the Pongos of the Upper Maranon, because they are proportionally nearer to the mouth of the river. These geographical details serve to prove, in the instances of the two greatest rivers of the New World, first, that it cannot be ascertained in an absolute manner that, beyond a certain number of toises, or a certain height above the level of the sea, rivers are not navigable; secondly, that the rapids are not always occasioned, as several treatises of general topography affirm, by the height of the first obstacles, by the first lines of ridges which the waters have to surmount near their sources.

The most northern of the great cataracts of the Orinoco is the only one bounded on each side by lofty mountains. The left bank of the river is generally lower, but it makes part of a plane which rises again west of Atures, towards the Peak of Uniana, a pyramid nearly three thousand feet high, and placed on a wall of rock with steep slopes. The situation of this solitary peak in the plain contributes to render its aspect more imposing and majestic. Near the Mission, in the country which surrounds the cataract, the aspect of the landscape varies at every step. Within a small s.p.a.ce we find all that is most rude and gloomy in nature, united with an open country and lovely pastoral scenery. In the physical, as in the moral world, the contrast of effects, the comparison of what is powerful and menacing with what is soft and peaceful, is a never-failing source of our pleasures and our emotions.

I shall here repeat some scattered features of a picture which I traced in another work shortly after my return to Europe.* (* Views of Nature page 153 Bohn's edition.) The savannahs of Atures, covered with slender plants and gra.s.ses, are really meadows resembling those of Europe. They are never inundated by the rivers, and seem as if waiting to be ploughed by the hand of man. Notwithstanding their extent, these savannahs do not exhibit the monotony of our plains; they surround groups of rocks and blocks of granite piled on one another. On the very borders of these plains and this open country, glens are seen scarcely lighted by the rays of the setting sun, and hollows where the humid soil, loaded with arums, heliconias, and lianas, manifests at every step the wild fecundity of nature. Everywhere, just rising above the earth, appear those shelves of granite completely bare, which we saw at Carichana, and which I have already described. Where springs gush from the bosom of these rocks, verrucarias, psoras, and lichens are fixed on the decomposed granite, and have there acc.u.mulated mould.

Little euphorbias, peperomias, and other succulent plants, have taken the place of the cryptogamous tribes; and evergreen shrubs, rhexias, and purple-flowered melastomas, form verdant isles amid desert and rocky plains. The distribution of these spots, the cl.u.s.ters of small trees with coriaceous and s.h.i.+ning leaves scattered in the savannahs, the limpid rills that dig channels across the rocks, and wind alternately through fertile places and over bare shelves of granite, all call to mind the most lovely and picturesque plantations and pleasure-grounds of Europe. We seem to recognise the industry of man, and the traces of cultivation, amid this wild scenery.

The lofty mountains that bound the horizon on every side, contribute also, by their forms and the nature of their vegetation, to give an extraordinary character to the landscape. The average height of these mountains is not more than seven or eight hundred feet above the surrounding plains. Their summits are rounded, as for the most part in granitic mountains, and covered with thick forests of the laurel-tribe. Cl.u.s.ters of palm-trees,* (* El cucurito.) the leaves of which, curled like feathers, rise majestically at an angle of seventy degrees, are dispersed amid trees with horizontal branches; and their bare trunks, like columns of a hundred or a hundred and twenty feet high, shoot up into the air, and when seen in distinct relief against the azure vault of the sky, they resemble a forest planted upon another forest. When, as the moon was going down behind the mountains of Uniana, her reddish disc was hidden behind the pinnated foliage of the palm-trees, and again appeared in the aerial zone that separates the two forests, I thought myself transported for a few moments to the hermitage which Bernardin de Saint-Pierre has described as one of the most delicious scenes of the Isle of Bourbon, and I felt how much the aspect of the plants and their groupings resembled each other in the two worlds. In describing a small spot of land in an island of the Indian Ocean, the inimitable author of Paul and Virginia has sketched the vast picture of the landscape of the tropics. He knew how to paint nature, not because he had studied it scientifically, but because he felt it in all its harmonious a.n.a.logies of forms, colours, and interior powers.

East of the Atures, near these rounded mountains crowned, as it were, by two superimposed forests of laurels and palms, other mountains of a very different aspect arise. Their ridge is bristled with pointed rocks, towering like pillars above the summits of the trees and shrubs. These effects are common to all granitic table-lands, at the Harz, in the metalliferous mountains of Bohemia, in Galicia, on the limit of the two Castiles, or wherever a granite of new formation appears above the ground. The rocks, which are at distances from each other, are composed of blocks piled together, or divided into regular and horizontal beds. On the summits of those situated near the Orinoco, flamingos, soldados,* (* The soldado (soldier) is a large species of heron.) and other fis.h.i.+ng-birds perch, and look like men posted as sentinels. This resemblance is so striking, that the inhabitants of Angostura, soon after the foundation of their city, were one day alarmed by the sudden appearance of soldados and garzas, on a mountain towards the south. They believed they were menaced with an attack of Indios monteros (wild Indians called mountaineers); and the people were not perfectly tranquilized, till they saw the birds soaring in the air, and continuing their migration towards the mouths of the Orinoco.

The fine vegetation of the mountains spreads over the plains, wherever the rock is covered with mould, We generally find that this black mould, mixed with fibrous vegetable matter, is separated from the granitic rock by a layer of white sand. The missionary a.s.sured us that verdure of perpetual freshness prevails in the vicinity of the cataracts, produced by the quant.i.ty of vapour which the river, broken into torrents and cascades for the length of three or four thousand toises, diffuses in the air.

We had not heard thunder more than once or twice at Atures, and the vegetation everywhere displayed that vigorous aspect, that brilliancy of colour, seen on the coast only at the end of the rainy season. The old trees were decorated with beautiful orchideas,* (* Cymbidium violaceum, Habenaria angustifolia, etc.) yellow bannisterias, blue-flowered bignonias, peperomias, arums, and pothoses. A single trunk displays a greater variety of vegetable forms than are contained within an extensive s.p.a.ce of ground in our countries. Close to the parasite plants peculiar to very hot climates we observed, not without surprise, in the centre of the torrid zone, and near the level of the sea, mosses resembling in every respect those of Europe. We gathered, near the Great Cataract of Atures, that fine specimen of Grimmia* with fontinalis leaves, which has so much fixed the attention of botanists.

(* Grimmia fontinaloides. See Hooker's Musci Exotici, 1818 tab. 2. The learned author of the Monography of the Jungermanniae (Mr. Jackson Hooker), with n.o.ble disinterestedness, published at his own expense, in London, the whole collection of cryptogamous plants, brought by Bonpland and Humboldt from the equinoctial regions of America.) It is suspended to the branches of the loftiest trees. Of the phaenerogamous plants, those which prevail in the woody spots are the mimosa, ficus, and laurinea. This fact is the more characteristic as, according to the observations of Mr. Brown, the laurineae appear to be almost entirely wanting on the opposite continent, in the equinoctial part of Africa. Plants that love humidity adorn the scenery surrounding the cataracts. We there find in the plains groups of heliconias and other scitamineae with large and glossy leaves, bamboos, and the three palm-trees, the murichi, jagua, and vadgiai, each of which forms a separate group. The murichi, or mauritia with scaly fruits, is the celebrated sago-tree of the Guaraon Indians. It has palmate leaves, and has no relation to the palm-trees with pinnate and curled leaves; to the jagua, which appears to be a species of the cocoa-tree; or to the vadgiai or cucurito, which may be a.s.similated to the fine species Oreodoxa. The cucurito, which is the palm most prevalent around the cataracts of the Atures and Maypures, is remarkable for its stateliness. Its leaves, or rather its palms, crown a trunk of eighty or one hundred feet high; their direction is almost perpendicular when young, as well as at their full growth, the points only being incurvated. They look like plumes of the most soft and verdant green.

The cucurito, the pirijao, the fruit of which resembles the apricot, the Oreodoxa regia or palma real of the island of Cuba, and the ceroxylon of the high Andes, are the most majestic of all the palm-trees we saw in the New World. As we advance toward the temperate zone, the plants of this family decrease in size and beauty. What a difference between the species we have just mentioned, and the date-tree of the East, which unfortunately has become to the landscape painters of Europe the type of a group of palm-trees!

It is not suprising that persons who have travelled only in the north of Africa, in Sicily, or in Spain, cannot conceive that, of all large trees, the palm is the most grand and beautiful in form. Incomplete a.n.a.logies prevent Europeans from having a just idea of the aspect of the torrid zone. All the world knows, for instance, that this zone is embellished by the contrasts exhibited in the foliage of the trees, and particularly by the great number of those with pinnate leaves. The ash, the service-tree, the inga, the acacia of the United States, the gleditsia, the tamarind, the mimosa, the desmanthus, have all pinnate leaves, with foliolae more or less long, slender, tough, and s.h.i.+ning.

But can a group of ash-trees, of service-trees, or of sumach, recall the picturesque effect of tamarinds or mimosas, when the azure of the sky appears through their small, slender, and delicately pinnated leaves? These considerations are more important than they may at first seem. The forms of plants determine the physiognomy of nature; and this physiognomy influences the moral dispositions of nations. Every type comprehends species, which, while exhibiting the same general appearance, differ in the varied development of the similar organs.

The palm-trees, the scitamineae, the malvaceae, the trees with pinnate leaves, do not all display the same picturesque beauties; and generally the most beautiful species of each type, in plants as in animals, belong to the equinoctial zone.