both sides the river. Mr. Maw considered these people to be the true descendants of the Incas, who had retreated before the Spaniards to the Montana or the woods, as they differed from the other Indians almost as much as they do from Europeans. They are tall well-made figures, their complexion a tawny yellow, their hair lighter than that of the other Indians, and their whole appearance bears a resemblance to the drawings of the Peruvians put forth at the time of the Spanish conquest. They are said to be cheerful and industrious; they collect cocoa, sarsaparilla, and vanilla, which grow wild in the woods; and they cultivate maize, yucas, plantains, carrobas, and papayas. The river supplies them with sea-cows, turtle, and plenty of good fish. Mr. Maw saw here what he supposed to be a vein of coal; but Mr. Smyth says it is only a vein of dark-blue clay, and that there is no rockformation in the bank.

From Pebas to Tabatinga, the frontier town between the dominions of Peru and Brazil, no village occurs of any note, the last on the Peruvian line of the river being Loreto, a miserable spot with about fifty inhabitants; but even here,' says Mr. Maw, 'the genuine hospitality which we had, with few exceptions, experienced throughout Peru, was not wanting.' All the villages, at which both our travellers had touched, are the remains of those missions, in the province of Los Maynas, in which, at the latter end of the seventeenth century, more than fifteen thousand Indian families enjoyed, under the mild sway of the Jesuits, the blessings of a settled and peaceful life.

'Content and cheerful piety were found
Within those humble walls.

From youth to age

The simple dwellers paced their even round

Of duty, not desiring to engage

Upon the busy world's contentious stage,

Whose ways they wisely had been trained to dread;
Their inoffensive lives in pupilage

Perpetually but peacefully they led,

From all tempations saved, and sure of daily bread.

८ They on the Jesuit, who was nothing loth,
Reposed alike their conscience and their cares;
And he with equal faith the trust of both
Accepted and discharged. The bliss was theirs
Of that entire dependence which prepares
Entire submission let what may befall;
And his whole careful course of life declares
That for their good he holds them all in thrall,

Their father and their friend, priest, ruler, all in all.'—
Tale of Paraguay.
The immense plain, intersected by numberless streams, which

our

our two travellers had looked down upon from the last ridge of the Cordilleras,

'Where 'mid a pathless world of wood,

Gathering a thousand rivers on his way,
Huge Orellana rolls his affluent flood;'

-that fertile and boundless region these holy men regarded as their patrimony, the great river as their high road, and the innumerable tributary streams as so many bye-roads by which they were to enter and possess it—such is the language of their own historian. The difficulties and the dangers of the service, in which these indefatigable men were engaged-the heroic qualities and religious virtues, which alone could have induced them to enter upon the labour, or supported them under it—must for ever command the admiration of mankind. There might have been some mixture of vain glory, perhaps ambition, yet ambition should be made of sterner stuff.' Benevolence towards the poor American savages was the avowed object, but in the execution of their plans, the temporal concerns of the converted were deemed of comparatively little importance-they thought of and taught scarcely anything but what seemed directly conducive to the spiritual welfare of their Indian vassals-and hence, when the order was abolished and the instructors removed, the societies they had so happily established were as so many ropes of sand, and the work of two centuries was destroyed in one generation. The wiser and the not less benevolent system of the Moravian missionaries, by which their disciples are taught to appreciate, and to provide for, the comforts and conveniences of life, would, if here adopted, have had the effect of keeping together the American Indians, and of preventing them from relapsing into their former state of barbarism, from which the present feeble and scanty missions, starved and neglected by the several revolutionary leaders, hold out but faint hopes of reclaiming them.

In point of fact, however, nothing short of the strenuous daring of the Jesuits could have made any head against that wretched jealousy which subsisted between the old governments of Spain and Portugal respecting their South American dominions; and which, by sedulously repressing every attempt at improvement, at length chained down the natives of that magnificent country in the deplorable state of ignorance which now seems likely to be perpetuated under its new masters. The route by the mighty Amazon, which ought to have been made not only the highway of the two nations, but of all Europe, was a forbidden channel of communication, carefully guarded against their own subjects as well as strangers; and the result is before our eyes:—its shores at this day are almost a desolate wilderness.

'The

'The shores of the Marañon,' says Mr. Smyth,' are generally low from the Ucayali to the Rio Negro, and, excepting where they are broken by the mouths of tributary streams, present one continued mass of forest trees matted together with creepers, some of which are very beautiful. The appearance is at first very striking, but when the charm of novelty has ceased, grows very wearisome from its monotonous character.'Smyth, p. 266.

Mr. Maw and his companion, on leaving Tabatinga in their miserable raft, were forsaken by their Indians, and for three days and nights were left to the mercy of this immense flood and its unknown dangers, dropping down with a current of three to four miles an hour, without having seen one human being during all this time. The nights, he says, were pitch dark.'

We continued drifting, wishing somewhat anxiously, but scarcely hoping, that we might see lights from some pueblo, or hear the watchdogs bark. Despondency would have been useless, and we said little to each other as we sat on different thwarts, with the sweeps in our hands pulling or tending the boat; still our situation was becoming somewhat critical, inasmuch as our stock of provisions was getting low. Moreover, if we had passed Fonte Boa, we might pass Egas, and then when were we to go? The accounts we had received of the river were mostly erroneous. It was not without difficulty we could get any tolerable account of one station from another that was next to it, and the maps I had with me were not to be relied on. We looked out and listened attentively; but the noise of beetles, the hoarse croakings of innumerable frogs, by the distinctness or faintness of whose voices we judged our distance from the bank when drifting, and, occasionally, the loud mournful kind of crow of the night bird, which on a former occasion Mr. Hinde had pronounced to be game, and which from his great inclination for sporting, I had named "Mr. Hinde's friend," were all that we heard. The note of this bird would not, at any time, tend to elevate the spirits; and at that moment Mr. Hinde would have had my free consent to annihilate the whole species. We at one time saw a light, apparently about the height which the light of a house would be, and about a third or a quarter of a mile above us on the river. We at first thought it might be a fire-fly, but it was too large and steady; then a star, although few if any others were visible; still it was too large and distinct, and did not alter its elevation: we then supposed it to be some kind of "ignis fatuus," but I am not aware what it was; our attention was called to manage the boat, and we lost sight of it.'-Maw, pp. 254-256.

It may be remarked, that during these anxious hours they had mis-reckoned the time-the party had actually been a day longer in this forlorn condition than they supposed. No wonder, then, that Madame Godin should have hesitated to say whether the duration of her melancholy sojourn in the forest was nine or ten days.

By

By the confluence of three or four streams a little above Egas, the Amazon at that place had become not less than three miles in width, and deep enough for ships of the line, with a current of from three to five miles an hour. Below this place its volume is still further increased by numerous streams falling into it, particularly the many-mouthed Purus and the Madeira, both from the south, and the Rio Negro from the north-west. From Egas to Para, which is situated near the mouth of one of the branches of the Amazon, the distance is about fifteen hundred miles,—' a distance,' says Mr. Smyth, we had to travel with fifteen dollars in our pockets.'

Though the woods are infested with noxious animals, few of them venture to measure their strength with man. The tiger, as they call it, or onca, of which feline genus there are several species, is the fiercest. He comes down, Mr. Maw says, to hunt for turtle, and turns them on their backs before he commences his feast; after which he makes a meal and goes away, leaving the remainder as provision for future occasions.' The alligator, the same gentleman was repeatedly told, is so much afraid of the tiger, that he allows himself to be hauled out of the water, and to be made a meal of without offering the least resistance, or even attempting to move. He also tells us, that the larger species of onca will attack men, and, having once tasted human flesh and blood, return to hunt for more;' but this we had heard before— and in particular, Mr. Southey has a long and very interesting note upon it in his Tale of Paraguay,' which beautiful poem includes so many exquisite pictures of South American scenery and manners. Serpents of enormous size infest the lakes, but the stories concerning them seem really too marvellous to be credited, even in this marvellous age. Mr. Maw was told of a gentleman having seen one of these creatures whose body was extended across a bridge, while the head was hidden among the bushes on one bank, and the tail was curling on the other side of the river. Mr. Maw does not, however, give credence to the many romantic stories of these demons of the lakes, but Mr. Smyth, testifies to the accounts given of immense serpents in the neighbourhood of the Amazon, and M. de la Condamine was assured that the lake serpents were from twenty-five to thirty feet long, and more than a foot in diameter. Wild boars go in numerous herds, sometimes not less than a hundred, and sloths are found of huge magnitude; but the largest animal is the tapir or anta-which grows to the size of an ox, and, like the hippopotamus, can live either on land or in the water. These woods abound with curassows, vultures, eagles, parrots, paroquets, and tomans; orioles too, are plentiful, all exhibiting that beautiful and brilliant plumage which is so

general

general among the feathered tribes of South America; but though the notes of some few species are soft and plaintive, the greater number utter loud and harsh screams, and very few, if any, an agreeable song.

have

Below Egas, the next great river that adds its contributions to the Amazon, is the Purus, with its four mouths, intersecting a spacious delta. Its sources to the southward are still unknown. In a manuscript account of this part of the country by Padre Andre de Sousa, a Portuguese missionary, which Mr. Smyth picked up at Barra,* near the mouth of the Rio Negro, it is stated that the Purus takes its rise in Peru, and runs parallel to the Madeira. La Condamine sounded the Amazon near the confluence of the Purus, and found no bottom with 103 fathoms. Next follows the Rio Negro from the north-west, an immense river running through a fertile country, better peopled than usual, and abounding with cocoa, vanilla, sarsaparilla, and many other valuable products. The Rio Negro, in any other hands than those of Brazil, would soon become a most valuable possession. It opens a navigable passage through all the northern regions of this splendid country by means of the Cassiquiari, a natural and navigable canal, which, by its bifurcation (as Humbolt calls it) with the Rio Negro and the Orinoco, may be said to unite the latter great river with the Amazon.

'While we were at Barra,' says Mr. Smyth, we met with two Spaniards, who had come from a missionary settlement on the Orinoco by water the whole way to Barra, by descending the Caciquiari, which is the branch of the Orinoco, which, turning to the south, falls into the Rio Negro near San Carlos. They had been employed to escort a priest who had charge of a sum of money for some of the missionary stations on the Orinoco, and, thinking the opportunity a favourable one to make their fortune, had murdered the Padre, seized the money, and fled by the above-mentioned route to Barra.'-Smyth, pp. 294, 295.

-And as these noble Spaniards appear to have made no secret of the transaction, and were suffered to remain wholly unmolested, this Padre is probably not the last that will experience the mettle of their poniards. They assured Mr. Smyth that the Cassiquiari is navigable at all seasons quite up to the point where it leaves the Orinoco. Barra is the first place on the Marañon, or rather on the Rio Negro, that presented any thing like the appearance of a town. It contains about 1000 inhabitants, mostly Indians. Among them were boat-builders, carpenters, and smiths. There is also something like trade; salt-fish, cocoa, coffee, manteca oil, tobacco, Brazil nuts, and wax, are occasionally exported to

* A translation of this paper is given in the last Number of the Transactions of the Royal Geographical Society.

Para;