THE MOUTH OF THE RIO ANAVENI.
PEAK OF UNIANA.
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 dykes.
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 astonishing 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, anchored 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 canals 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 circumstances. 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 mass 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 passage of the river
across the mountains of Parima. They are called by the natives Mapara
and Quittuna; but the missionaries have substituted for these names
those of Atures and Maypures, after the names of the tribes which were
first assembled 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 latitude,
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 passed the Raudal of Maypures. We found but three
Christian establishments above the Great Cataracts, along the shores
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 amusement. 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 Cumana, 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 shore, 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
passed 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 Japuins 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 Cassiquiare, 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 shore of the Orinoco. In the lapse of ages
the river has been impelled westward, in consequence of the
accumulations 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 pronunciation 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
latitude 1 degree 30 minutes. Abbe Gili gives it 3 degrees 50 minutes.
I found, by meridian altitudes of Canopus and a of the Southern Cross,
5 degrees 38 minutes 4 seconds for the latitude; 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 passage by the
Cataracts, to forty-seven; and the missionary assured us that this
diminution became from year to year more sensible. He showed us, that
in the space 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 assembled 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 analogy
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 space. 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 latitudes 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 impassioned; 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 classes 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 fishing 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 cassava; 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, fishing hooks, and
those coloured glass 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
coarse-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 destitute 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 masses 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 shore, 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
illustrious 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 analysis 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 masses 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 quantities of iron and manganese, since they occupy a
space 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
masses, 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 lustre 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 homogeneity 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 destitute of manganese; but it contains, according to
the analysis 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 circumstances 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 masses 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, assume 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 masses 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
passed 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 assertions 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 space 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
accumulation of heat in the stony masses has reached a stationary
degree, these masses 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 quantities 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 pass, because they do not change the state of their
surface, their density, or their capacity for caloric. On the shores
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 masses 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 destitute 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 passed 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
constitution 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 passed 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, fishing, and the
agricultural labours of the plantations.
While our boat was unloading, we examined closely, wherever the shore
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 Hell (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 pass 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 grass and
branches, to imitate this assemblage 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 passable 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
unobstructed 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
pass over, precipitating themselves from step to step.
The Amazon does not pierce its way through the principal 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 latitude
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 space 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 latitude.
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 pass 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 buttresses 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 space 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 grasses, 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 accumulated 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 clusters of small
trees with coriaceous and shining 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. Clusters 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 analogies 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 fishing-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 assured us that
verdure of perpetual freshness prevails in the vicinity of the
cataracts, produced by the quantity 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 space 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 noble 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 assimilated 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
analogies 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 shining.
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.
The proteaceae,* (* Rhopalas, which characterise the vegetation of the
Llanos.) crotons, agaves, and the great tribe of the cactuses, which
inhabit exclusively the New World, disappear gradually, as we ascend
the Orinoco above the Apure and the Meta. It is, however, the shade
and humidity, rather than the distance from the coast, which oppose
the migration of the cactuses southward. We found forests of them
mingled with crotons, covering a great space of arid land to the east
of the Andes, in the province of Bracamoros, towards the Upper
Maranon. The arborescent ferns seem to fail entirely near the
cataracts of the Orinoco; we found no species as far as San Fernando
de Atabapo, that is, to the confluence of the Orinoco and the
Guaviare.
Having now examined the vicinity of the Atures, it remains for me to
speak of the rapids themselves, which occur in a part of the valley
where the bed of the river, deeply ingulfed, has almost inaccessible
banks. It was only in a very few spots that we could enter the Orinoco
to bathe, between the two cataracts, in coves where the waters have
eddies of little velocity. Persons who have dwelt in the Alps, the
Pyrenees, or even the Cordilleras, so celebrated for the fractures and
the vestiges of destruction which they display at every step, can
scarcely picture to themselves, from a mere narration, the state of
the bed of the river. It is traversed, in an extent of more than five
miles, by innumerable dikes of rock, forming so many natural dams, so
many barriers resembling those of the Dnieper, which the ancients
designated by the name of phragmoi. The space between the rocky dikes
of the Orinoco is filled with islands of different dimensions; some
hilly, divided into several peaks, and two or three hundred toises in
length, others small, low, and like mere shoals. These islands divide
the river into a number of torrents, which boil up as they break
against the rocks. The jaguas and cucuritos with plumy leaves, with
which all the islands are covered, seem like groves of palm-trees
rising from the foamy surface of the waters. The Indians, whose task
it is to pass the boats empty over the raudales, distinguish every
shelf, and every rock, by a particular name. On entering from the
south you find first the Leap of the Toucan (Salto del Piapoco); and
between the islands of Avaguri and Javariveni is the Raudal of
Javariveni, where, on our return from Rio Negro, we passed some hours
amid the rapids, waiting for our boat. A great part of the river
appeared dry. Blocks of granite are heaped together, as in the
moraines which the glaciers of Switzerland drive before them. The
river is ingulfed in caverns; and in one of these caverns we heard the
water roll at once over our heads and beneath our feet. The Orinoco
seems divided into a multitude of arms or torrents, each of which
seeks to force a passage through the rocks. We were struck with the
little water to be seen in the bed of the river, the frequency of
subterraneous falls, and the tumult of the waters breaking on the
rocks in foam.
Cuncta fremunt undis; ac multo murmure montis
Spumeus invictis canescit fluctibus amnis.*
(* Lucan, Pharsalia lib 10 v 132.)
Having passed the Raudal of Javariveni (I name here only the principal
falls) we come to the Raudal of Canucari, formed by a ledge of rocks
uniting the islands of Surupamana and Uirapuri. When the dikes, or
natural dams, are only two or three feet high, the Indians venture to
descend them in boats. In going up the river, they swim on before, and
if, after many vain efforts, they succeed in fixing a rope to one of
the points of rock that crown the dike, they then, by means of that
rope, draw the bark to the top of the raudal. The bark, during this
arduous task, often fills with water; at other times it is stove
against the rocks, and the Indians, their bodies bruised and bleeding,
extricate themselves with difficulty from the whirlpools, and reach,
by swimming, the nearest island. When the steps or rocky barriers are
very high, and entirely bar the river, light boats are carried on
shore, and with the help of branches of trees placed under them to
serve as rollers, they are drawn as far as the place where the river
again becomes navigable. This operation is seldom necessary when the
water is high. We cannot speak of the cataracts of the Orinoco without
recalling to mind the manner heretofore employed for descending the
cataracts of the Nile, of which Seneca has left us a description
probably more poetical than accurate. I shall cite the passage, which
traces with fidelity what may be seen every day at Atures, Maypures,
and in some pongos of the Amazon. "Two men embark in a small boat; one
steers, and the other empties it as it fills with water. Long buffeted
by the rapids, the whirlpools, and the contrary currents, they pass
through the narrowest channels, avoid the shoals, and rush down the
whole river, guiding the course of the boat in its accelerated fall."
(Nat. Quaest. lib 4 cap 2 edit. Elzev. tome 2 page 609.)
In hydrographic descriptions of countries, the vague names of
cataracts, cascades, falls, and rapids,* (* The corresponding terms in
use among the people of South America, are saltos, chorros, pongos,
cachoeiras, and raudales.) denoting those tumultuous movements of
water which arise from very different circumstances, are generally
confounded with one another. Sometimes a whole river precipitating
itself from a great height, and by one single fall, renders navigation
impossible. Such is the majestic fall of the Rio Tequendama, which I
have represented in my Views of the Cordilleras; such are the falls of
Niagara and of the Rhine, much less remarkable for their elevation,
than for the mass of water they contain. Sometimes stony dikes of
small height succeed each other at great distances, and form distinct
falls; such are the cachoeiras of the Rio Negro and the Rio Madeira,
the saltos of the Rio Cauca, and the greater part of the pongos that
are found in the Upper Maranon, from the confluence of the Chinchipe
to the village of San Borja. The highest and most formidable of these
pongos, which are descended on rafts, that of Mayasi, is however only
three feet in height. Sometimes small rocky dikes are so near each
other that they form for several miles an uninterrupted succession of
cascades and whirlpools (chorros and remolinos); these are properly
what are called rapids (raudales). Such are the yellalas, or rapids of
the River Zaire,* or Congo, which Captain Tuckey has recently made
known to us (* Voyage to explore the River Zaire, 1818, pages 152,
327, 340. What the inhabitants of Upper Egypt and Nubia call chellal
in the Nile, is called yellala in the River Congo. This analogy
between words signifying rapids is remarkable, on account of the
enormous distance of the yellalas of the Congo from the chellal and
djenadel of the Nile. Did the word chellal penetrate with the Moors
into the west of Africa? If, with Burckhardt, we consider the origin
of this word as Arabic (Travels in Nubia, 1819), it must be derived
from the root challa, to disperse, which forms chelil, water falling
through a narrow channel.); the rapids of the Orange River in Africa,
above Pella; and the falls of the Missouri, which are four leagues in
length, where the river issues from the Rocky Mountains. Such also are
the cataracts of Atures and Maypures; the only cataracts which,
situated in the equinoctial region of the New World, are adorned with
the noble growth of palm-trees. At all seasons they exhibit the aspect
of cascades, and present the greatest obstacles to the navigation of
the Orinoco, while the rapids of the Ohio and of Upper Egypt are
scarcely visible at the period of floods. A solitary cataract, like
Niagara, or the cascade of Terni, affords a grand but single picture,
varying only as the observer changes his place. Rapids, on the
contrary, especially when adorned with large trees, embellish a
landscape during a length of several leagues. Sometimes the tumultuous
movement of the waters is caused only by extraordinary contractions of
the beds of the rivers. Such is the angostura of Carare, in the river
Magdalena, a strait that impedes communication between Santa Fe de
Bogota and the coast of Carthagena; and such is the pongo of
Manseriche, in the Upper Maranon.