smote it so severely that it has never recovered its former appearance.
A strong French fleet bombarded it; while a raging fire destroyed its
finest buildings. Some time after an overwhelming flood rolled down the
gullies and fissures of the adjacent mountains and carried all before
it. Men, women and children, houses and property, were all swept away
by this mighty torrent. The terrible scene was said to beggar all
description, and the loss was immense.
Dominica is famous for a large species of frog which the inhabitants
keep in readiness to slaughter for the table. In the woods of this
island the large rhinoceros-beetle is very common: it measures above
six inches in length. In the same woods is found the beautiful
humming-bird, the breast and throat of which are of a brilliant
changing purple. I have searched for this bird in Brazil and through
the whole of the wilds from the Rio Branco, which is a branch of the
Amazons, to the River Paumaron, but never could find it. I was told by
a man in the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly that this humming-bird is
found in Mexico; but upon questioning him more about it his information
seemed to have been acquired by hearsay; and so I concluded that it
does not appear in Mexico. I suspect that it is never found out of the
Antilles.
After leaving Dominica you soon reach the grand and magnificent Island
of Martinico. St. Pierre, its capital, is a fine town, and possesses
every comfort. The inhabitants seem to pay considerable attention to
the cultivation of the tropical fruits. A stream of water runs down the
streets with great rapidity, producing a pleasing effect as you pass
along.
Here I had an opportunity of examining a cuckoo which had just been
shot. It was exactly the same as the metallic cuckoo in Wilson's
_Ornithology_. They told me it is a migratory bird in Martinico. It
probably repairs to this island after its departure from the United
States.
At a little distance from Martinico the celebrated Diamond Rock rises
in insulated majesty out of the sea. It was fortified during the last
war with France, and bravely defended by an English captain.
In a few hours from Martinico you are at St. Lucie, whose rough and
towering mountains fill you with sublime ideas, as you approach its
rocky shore. The town Castries is quite embayed. It was literally blown
to pieces by the fatal hurricane in which the unfortunate governor and
his lady lost their lives. Its present forlorn and gloomy appearance,
and the grass which is grown up in the streets, too plainly show that
its hour of joy is passed away and that it is in mourning, as it were,
with the rest of the British West Indies.
From St. Lucie I proceeded to Barbadoes in quest of a conveyance to the
Island of Trinidad.
Near Bridgetown, the capital of Barbadoes, I saw the metallic cuckoo
already alluded to.
Barbadoes is no longer the merry island it was when I visited it some
years ago:
Infelix habitum, temporis hujus habet.
There is an old song, to the tune of "La Belle Catharine," which must
evidently have been composed in brighter times:
Come let us dance and sing,
While Barbadoes bells do ring;
Quashi scrapes the fiddle-string,
And Venus plays the lute.
Quashi's fiddle was silent, and mute was the lute of Venus during my
stay in Barbadoes. The difference betwixt the French and British
islands was very striking. The first appeared happy and content; the
second were filled with murmurs and complaints. The late proceedings in
England concerning slavery and the insurrection in Demerara had
evidently caused the gloom. The abolition of slavery is a question full
of benevolence and fine feelings, difficulties and danger:
Tantum ne noceas, dum vis prodesse videto.
It requires consummate prudence and a vast fund of true information in
order to draw just conclusions on this important subject. Phaeton, by
awkward driving, set the world on fire: "Sylvæ cum montibus ardent."
Dædalus gave his son a pair of wings without considering the
consequence; the boy flew out of all bounds, lost his wings, and
tumbled into the sea:
Icarus, Icariis nomina fecit aquis.
When the old man saw what had happened, he damned his own handicraft in
wing-making: "devovitque suas artes." Prudence is a cardinal virtue:
Omnia consulta mente gerenda tegens.
Foresight is half the battle. "Hombre apercebido, medio combatido,"
says Don Quixote, or Sancho, I do not remember which. Had Queen Bess
weighed well in her own mind the probable consequences of this
lamentable traffic, it is likely she would not have been owner of two
vessels in Sir John Hawkins's squadron, which committed the first
robbery in negro flesh on the coast of Africa. As philanthropy is the
very life and soul of this momentous question on slavery, which is
certainly fraught with great difficulties and danger, perhaps it would
be as well at present for the nation to turn its thoughts to poor
ill-fated Ireland, where oppression, poverty and rags make a
heart-rending appeal to the feelings of the benevolent.
But to proceed. There was another thing which added to the dullness of
Barbadoes and which seemed to have considerable effect in keeping away
strangers from the island. The Legislature had passed a most
extraordinary Bill, by virtue of which every person who arrives at
Barbadoes is obliged to pay two dollars, and two dollars more on his
departure from it. It is called the Alien Bill; and every Barbadian who
leaves or returns to the island, and every Englishman too, pays the tax!
Finding no vessel here for Trinidad, I embarked in a schooner for
Demerara, landed there after being nearly stranded on a sandbank, and
proceeded without loss of time to the forests in the interior. It was
the dry season, which renders a residence in the woods very delightful.
There are three species of jacamar to be found on the different
sandhills and dry savannas of Demerara; but there is another much
larger and far more beautiful to be seen when you arrive in that part
of the country where there are rocks. The jacamar has no affinity to
the woodpecker or kingfisher (notwithstanding what travellers affirm)
either in its haunts or anatomy. The jacamar lives entirely on insects,
but never goes in search of them. It sits patiently for hours together
on the branch of a tree, and when the incautious insect approaches it
flies at it with the rapidity of an arrow, seizes it, and generally
returns to eat it on the branch which it had just quitted. It has not
the least attempt at song, is very solitary, and so tame that you may
get within three or four yards of it before it takes flight. The males
of all the different species which I have examined have white feathers
on the throat. I suspect that all the male jacamars hitherto discovered
have this distinctive mark. I could learn nothing of its incubation.
The Indians informed me that one species of jacamar lays its eggs in
the wood-ants' nests, which are so frequent in the trees of Guiana, and
appear like huge black balls. I wish there had been proof positive of
this; but the breeding-time was over, and in the ants' nests which I
examined I could find no marks of birds having ever been in them. Early
in January the jacamar is in fine plumage for the cabinet of the
naturalist. The largest species measures ten inches and a half from the
point of the beak to the end of the tail. Its name amongst the Indians
is una-waya-adoucati, that is, grandfather of the jacamar. It is
certainly a splendid bird, and in the brilliancy and changeableness of
its metallic colours it yields to none of the Asiatic and African
feathered tribe. The colours of the female are nearly as bright as
those of the male, but she wants the white feathers on the throat. The
large jacamar is pretty common about two hundred miles up the River
Demerara.
Here I had a fine opportunity once more of examining the three-toed
sloth. He was in the house with me for a day or two. Had I taken a
description of him as he lay sprawling on the floor I should have
misled the world and injured natural history. On the ground he appeared
really a bungled composition, and faulty at all points; awkwardness and
misery were depicted on his countenance; and when I made him advance he
sighed as though in pain. Perhaps it was that by seeing him thus out of
his element, as it were, that the Count de Buffon, in his history of
the sloth, asks the question: "Why should not some animals be created
for misery, since, in the human species, the greatest number of
individuals are devoted to pain from the moment of their existence?"
Were the question put to me I would answer, I cannot conceive that any
of them are created for misery. That thousands live in misery there can
be no doubt; but then misery has overtaken them in their path through
life, and wherever man has come up with them I should suppose they have
seldom escaped from experiencing a certain proportion of misery.
After fully satisfying myself that it only leads the world into error
to describe the sloth while he is on the ground or in any place except
in a tree, I carried the one I had in my possession to his native
haunts. As soon as he came in contact with the branch of a tree all
went right with him. I could see as he climbed up into his own country
that he was on the right road to happiness; and felt persuaded more
than ever that the world has hitherto erred in its conjectures
concerning the sloth, on account of naturalists not having given a
description of him when he was in the only position in which he ought
to have been described, namely, clinging to the branch of a tree.
As the appearance of this part of the country bears great resemblance
to Cayenne, and is so near to it, I was in hopes to have found the
grande gobe-mouche of Buffon and the septi-coloured tangara, both of
which are common in Cayenne; but after many diligent searches I did not
succeed, nor could I learn from the Indians that they had ever seen
those two species of birds in these parts.
Here I procured the gross-beak with a rich scarlet body and black head
and throat. Buffon mentions it as coming from America. I had been in
quest of it for years, but could never see it, and concluded that it
was not to be found in Demerara. This bird is of a greenish brown
before it acquires its rich plumage.
Amongst the bare roots of the trees, alongside of this part of the
river, a red crab sometimes makes its appearance as you are passing up
and down. It is preyed upon by a large species of owl which I was
fortunate enough to procure. Its head, back, wings and tail are of so
dark a brown as almost to appear black. The breast is of a somewhat
lighter brown. The belly and thighs are of a dirty yellow-white. The
feathers round the eyes are of the same dark brown as the rest of the
body; and then comes a circle of white which has much the appearance of
the rim of a large pair of spectacles. I strongly suspect that the
dirty yellow-white of the belly and thighs has originally been pure
white, and that it has come to its present colour by means of the bird
darting down upon its prey in the mud. But this is mere conjecture.
Here, too, close to the river, I frequently saw the bird called
sun-bird by the English colonists and tirana by the Spaniards in the
Oroonoque. It is very elegant, and in its outward appearance approaches
near to the heron tribe; still, it does not live upon fish. Flies and
insects are its food, and it takes them just as the heron takes fish,
by approaching near and then striking with its beak at its prey so
quick that it has no chance to escape. The beautiful mixture of grey,
yellow, green, black, white and chestnut in the plumage of this bird
baffles any attempt to give a description of the distribution of them
which would be satisfactory to the reader.
There is something remarkable in the great tinamou which I suspect has
hitherto escaped notice. It invariably roosts in trees, but the feet
are so very small in proportion to the body of this bulky bird that
they can be of no use to it in grasping the branch; and, moreover, the
hind-toe is so short that it does not touch the ground when the bird is
walking. The back part of the leg, just below the knee, is quite flat
and somewhat concave. On it are strong pointed scales, which are very
rough, and catch your finger as you move it along from the knee to the
toe. Now, by means of these scales and the particular flatness of that
part of the leg, the bird is enabled to sleep in safety upon the branch
of a tree.
At the close of day the great tinamou gives a loud, monotonous,
plaintive whistle, and then immediately springs into the tree. By the
light of the full-moon the vigilant and cautious naturalist may see him
sitting in the position already described.
The small tinamou has nothing that can be called a tail. It never lays
more than one egg, which is of a chocolate colour. It makes no nest,
but merely scratches a little hollow in the sand, generally at the foot
of a tree.
Here we have an instance of a bird the size of a partridge, and of the
same tribe, laying only one egg, while the rest of the family, from the
peahen to the quail, are known to lay a considerable number. The foot
of this bird is very small in proportion, but the back part of the leg
bears no resemblance to that of the larger tinamou; hence one might
conclude that it sleeps upon the ground.
Independent of the hollow trees, the vampires have another
hiding-place. They clear out the inside of the large ants' nests and
then take possession of the shell. I had gone about half a day down the
river to a part of the forest where the wallaba-trees were in great
plenty. The seeds had ripened, and I was in hopes to have got the large
scarlet ara, which feeds on them. But unfortunately the time had passed
away, and the seeds had fallen.
While ranging here in the forest we stopped under an ants' nest, and,
by the dirt below, conjectured that it had got new tenants. Thinking it
no harm to dislodge them, "vi et armis," an Indian boy ascended the
tree, but before he reached the nest out flew above a dozen vampires.
I have formerly remarked that I wished to have it in my power to say
that I had been sucked by the vampire. I gave them many an opportunity,
but they always fought shy; and though they now sucked a young man of
the Indian breed very severely, as he was sleeping in his hammock in
the shed next to mine, they would have nothing to do with me. His great
toe seemed to have all the attractions. I examined it minutely as he
was bathing it in the river at daybreak. The midnight surgeon had made
a hole in it almost of a triangular shape, and the blood was then
running from it apace. His hammock was so defiled and stained with
clotted blood that he was obliged to beg an old black woman to wash it.
As she was taking it down to the river-side she spread it out before
me, and shook her head. I remarked that I supposed her own toe was too
old and tough to invite the vampire-doctor to get his supper out of it,
and she answered, with a grin, that doctors generally preferred young
people.
Nobody has yet been able to inform me how it is that the vampire
manages to draw such a large quantity of blood, generally from the toe,
and the patient all the time remains in a profound sleep. I have never
heard of an instance of a man waking under the operation. On the
contrary, he continues in a sound sleep, and at the time of rising his
eyes first inform him that there has been a thirsty thief on his toe.
The teeth of the vampire are very sharp and not unlike those of a rat.
If it be that he inflicts the wound with his teeth (and he seems to
have no other instruments), one would suppose that the acuteness of the
pain would cause the person who is sucked to awake. We are in darkness
in this matter, and I know of no means by which one might be enabled to
throw light upon it. It is to be hoped that some future wanderer
through the wilds of Guiana will be more fortunate than I have been and
catch this nocturnal depredator in the fact. I have once before
mentioned that I killed a vampire which measured thirty-two inches from
wing to wing extended, but others which I have since examined have
generally been from twenty to twenty-six inches in dimension.
The large humming-bird, called by the Indians kara-bimiti, invariably
builds its nest in the slender branches of the trees which hang over
the rivers and creeks. In appearance it is like brown tanned leather,
and without any particle of lining. The rim of the nest is doubled
inwards, and I always conjectured that it had taken this shape on
account of the body of the bird pressing against it while she was
laying her eggs. But this was quite a wrong conjecture. Instinct has
taught the bird to give it this shape in order that the eggs may be
prevented from rolling out.
The trees on the river's bank are particularly exposed to violent gusts
of wind, and while I have been sitting in the canoe and looking on, I
have seen the slender branch of the tree which held the humming-bird's
nest so violently shaken that the bottom of the inside of the nest has
appeared, and had there been nothing at the rim to stop the eggs they
must inevitably have been jerked out into the water. I suspect the
humming-bird never lays more than two eggs. I never found more than two
in any of the many nests which have come in my way. The eggs were
always white without any spots on them.
Probably travellers have erred in asserting that the monkeys of South
America throw sticks and fruit at their pursuers. I have had fine
opportunities of narrowly watching the different species of monkeys
which are found in the wilds betwixt the Amazons and the Oroonoque. I
entirely acquit them of acting on the offensive. When the monkeys are
in the high trees over your head the dead branches will now and then
fall down upon you, having been broken off as the monkeys pass along
them; but they are never hurled from their hands.
Monkeys, commonly so called, both in the old and new continent, may be
classed into three grand divisions: namely, the ape, which has no tail
whatever; the baboon, which has only a short tail; and the monkey,
which has a long tail. There are no apes and no baboons as yet
discovered in the new world. Its monkeys may be very well and very
briefly ranged under two heads: namely, those with hairy and bushy
tails; and those whose tails are bare of hair underneath about six
inches from the extremity. Those with hairy and bushy tails climb just
like the squirrel, and make no use of the tail to help them from branch
to branch. Those which have the tail bare underneath towards the end
find it of infinite advantage to them in their ascent and descent. They
apply it to the branch of the tree, as though it were a supple finger,
and frequently swing by it from the branch like the pendulum of a
clock. It answers all the purposes of a fifth hand to the monkey, as
naturalists have already observed.
The large red monkey of Demerara is not a baboon, though it goes by
that name, having a long pensile tail. [Footnote: I believe _pensile_
is a new-coined word. I have seen it, but do not remember where.]
Nothing can sound more dreadful than its nocturnal howlings. While
lying in your hammock in these gloomy and immeasurable wilds, you hear
him howling at intervals from eleven o'clock at night till daybreak.
You would suppose that half the wild beasts of the forest were
collecting for the work of carnage. Now it is the tremendous roar of
the jaguar as he springs on his prey: now it changes to his terrible
and deep-toned growlings as he is pressed on all sides by superior
force: and now you hear his last dying moan beneath a mortal wound.
Some naturalists have supposed that these awful sounds which you would
fancy are those of enraged and dying wild beasts proceed from a number
of the red monkeys howling in concert. One of them alone is capable of
producing all these sounds; and the anatomists on an inspection of his
trachea will be fully satisfied that this is the case. When you look at
him, as he is sitting on the branch of a tree, you will see a lump in
his throat the size of a large hen's egg. In dark and cloudy weather,
and just before a squall of rain, this monkey will often howl in the
daytime; and if you advance cautiously, and get under the high and
tufted tree where he is sitting, you may have a capital opportunity of
witnessing his wonderful powers of producing these dreadful and
discordant sounds.
His flesh is good food; but when skinned his appearance is so like that
of a young one of our own species that a delicate stomach might
possibly revolt at the idea of putting a knife and fork into it.
However, I can affirm from experience that, after a long and dreary
march through these remote forests, the flesh of this monkey is not to
be sneezed at when boiled in cayenne-pepper or roasted on a stick over
a good fire. A young one tastes not unlike kid, and the old ones have
somewhat the flavour of he-goat.
I mentioned, in a former adventure, that I had hit upon an entirely new
plan of making the skins of quadrupeds retain their exact form and
feature. Intense application to the subject has since that period
enabled me to shorten the process and hit the character of an animal to
a very great nicety, even to the preservation of the pouting lip,
dimples, warts and wrinkles on the face. I got a fine specimen of the
howling monkey, and took some pains with it in order to show the
immense difference that exists betwixt the features of this monkey and
those of man.
I also procured an animal which has caused not a little speculation and
astonishment. In my opinion, his thick coat of hair and great length of
tail put his species out of all question, but then his face and head
cause the inspector to pause for a moment before he ventures to
pronounce his opinion of the classification. He was a large animal, and
as I was pressed for daylight, and moreover, felt no inclination to
have the whole weight of his body upon my back, I contented myself with
his head and shoulders, which I cut off, and have brought them with me
to Europe. [Footnote: My young friend Mr. J. H. Foljambe, eldest son of
Thomas Foljambe, Esq., of Wakefield, has made a drawing of the head and
shoulders of this animal, and it is certainly a most correct and
striking likeness of the original.] I have since found that I acted
quite right in doing so, having had enough to answer for the head
alone, without saying anything of his hands and feet, and of his tail,
which is an appendage, Lord Kames asserts, belongs to us.
The features of this animal are quite of the Grecian cast, and he has a
placidity of countenance which shows that things went well with him
when in life. Some gentlemen of great skill and talent, on inspecting
his head, were convinced that the whole series of its features has been
changed. Others again have hesitated, and betrayed doubts, not being
able to make up their minds whether it be possible that the brute
features of the monkey can be changed into the noble countenance of
man: "Scinditur vulgus." One might argue at considerable length on this
novel subject; and perhaps, after all, produce little more than prolix
pedantry: "Vox et praeterea nihil."
Let us suppose for an instant that it is a new species. Well; "Una
golondrina no hace verano": One swallow does not make summer, as Sancho
Panza says. Still, for all that, it would be well worth while going out
to search for it; and these times of Pasco-Peruvian enterprise are
favourable to the undertaking. Perhaps, gentle reader, you would wish
me to go in quest of another. I would beg leave respectfully to answer
that the way is dubious, long and dreary; and though, unfortunately, I
cannot allege the excuse of "me pia conjux detinet," still I would fain
crave a little repose. I have already been a long while errant:
Longa mihi exilia, et vastum maris æquor aravi,
Ne mandate mihi, nam ego sum defessus agendo.