Upon landing in Pernambuco, I found Dr. Loudon, a Scotch physician resident in that city, awaiting my arrival, who kindly invited me to remain with him during my stay; and as he had then been sixteen years in the place, and was acquainted with most of the influential people, both foreign and Brazilian, I derived much advantage from his friendship, more particularly so, as he was very partial to the pursuit of natural history. Shortly after my arrival I delivered the letters of recommendation given me by Mr. Hamilton, the British Minister at the court of Rio, to Mr. Watts, the Consul, who obligingly offered to introduce me to the President of the province, Senhor Vicente Thomaz Pires de Figueredo Comargo. The permission to wait upon his Excellency having been given a few days afterwards, I accompanied Mr. Watts to the palace, together with Dr. Loudon, who was a personal friend of the President. He received me with great kindness, and when the object of my visit to the country was explained to him, he promised to afford all the assistance in his power, and, in the meantime, gave me a letter to Dr. Serpa, the Professor of Botany and Curator of the Botanic Garden at Olinda.
I was accompanied in my visit to Olinda by Mr. Nash, a young Englishman, to whom I was indebted for many acts of kindness during my visit at Pernambuco. There are three routes to Olinda from Recife; one along the shore, which is seldom taken on account of the loose sandy nature of the soil, and the complete exposure of the traveller to the sun. Another is by canoes, up the stream before mentioned by which the surplus water from a large lake behind Olinda is discharged into the sea; this stream runs parallel with the shore, from which it is separated by a high sand-bank, and is fringed on each side by a strip of mangroves, the mud in which they grow emitting at low tide a very disagreeable effluvium, and abounding in crabs of various sizes and colours, while clouds of mosquitos always hover around and harbour among the branches. The third route, which we pursued, runs parallel with the river, at a considerable distance inland. This road is quite level, and at both ends are seen several fine country houses, though much of it passes through uncultivated, and often marshy land. Occasionally it is enclosed by Mimosa hedges, in which is seen a slender kind of Jasmine (Jasminum Bahiense, DC.), whose white flowers at the early hour we passed were perfuming the air with their delightful fragrance. The road-side was gay with the large pale yellow flowers of Turnera trioniflora, and the delicate pink heads of a sensitive plant. Several different kinds of this latter plant grow very abundantly all over the northern parts of Brazil. Shelley has truly said, that
“The sensitive plant has no bright flower,
Radiance and odour are not its dower,”—
yet there are few in the whole range of the vegetable kingdom, which are so much an object of curiosity to all observers, or of so much interest to the physiologist. On approaching Olinda, I was delighted to find the surface of the lake—which abounds in alligators—covered with thousands of the splendid large white blossoms and broad floating leaves of a water-lily (Nymphæa ampla, DC.), and intermingled with them, the yellow flowers of Limnocharis Commersonii, and a large Utricularia.
The Botanic Garden is situated in a hollow, behind the town of Olinda, and, though of considerable size, has only a portion of it under cultivation; the residence of the Professor stands nearly in the centre. We found Dr. Serpa in his study, a rather large apartment, which he uses also as a lecture-room; he appeared to be about sixty years of age, and we were impressed with his agreeable manners and intelligence. Besides his other duties, he had the principal medical practice in Olinda. A few French works on Botany, Natural History, Agriculture, and Medicine, composed the chief part of his limited library. It was here that I first saw the ‘Flora Fluminensis,’ a work published at the expense of the Brazilian government. The drawings from which the plates were executed, were prepared at Rio de Janeiro about the end of the last century, under the direction of a Jesuit of the name of Vellozo. It cost £70,000, and, to use the words of Dr. Von Martius, is “a strange publication, which may be held up as an example of an ill-advised literary undertaking, and on so great a scale that it ought never to have been commenced. Eleven huge volumes, with about fifteen hundred plates, constitute this bulky work, whose usefulness is, alas! not in proportion to the expense it occasioned.”[4] The Doctor accompanied us in a walk round the Garden, which I found to contain little worthy of notice; a few European medicinal plants, struggling for existence, and some large Indian trees, being its principal productions; among the latter, however, were fine specimens of the Mango, Tamarind, Cinnamon, and the Date-Palm. He had lately received from the interior, plants of a species of Ipecacuanha, the roots of which form an article of export from Pernambuco, and the living specimens which I obtained from him are now growing freely in the stoves of the Glasgow Botanic Garden. They appear different from the one figured and described by St. Hilaire, from the south of Brazil, and will, I suspect, prove to be a distinct, though nearly related species. Leaving the garden, we walked a little way into the country, where I hoped to meet with something more interesting; and in this expectation I was not disappointed, as many new plants were added to my collections. On the dry bushy hills in this neighbourhood a wild fruit-tree grows very plentifully; it is the Mangába of the Brazilians, and the Hancornia speciosa of botanists; it is a small tree belonging to the Natural Order Apocyneæ, the small leaves and drooping branches of which give it somewhat the resemblance of the weeping birch. The fruit is about the size of a large plum, of a yellow colour, but streaked a little with red on one side, and the flavour is most delicious.
In the afternoon we returned to Olinda, to dine with another gentleman to whom I also carried letters, Senhor da Cunha. He had been educated in England, and was an intelligent man. After dinner we walked out to see the town, which is very pleasantly situated on an eminence not far from the sea. It is a place of considerable size, and in the olden time must have been a stirring one, particularly as regards the clergy, judging from the number of churches, convents, monasteries, &c. It has now, however, a deserted and desolate appearance, many fine houses being untenanted and falling to decay, and the streets are grown over with grass and weeds. On the outskirts of the seaward side of the town, there are the ruins of a large monastery, which we went to see on account of a hermit who had lived there upwards of seventeen years. We found it to be a very large building, consisting of a church in the centre, still in use, and two wings, containing the apartments formerly inhabited by the friars, which are fast running into decay, particularly those in the south wing. The north wing is in much better repair, having a few good rooms, which are inhabited by some of the students attending a theological and medical school, established in Olinda. Along the corridors, and in some of the larger rooms, are still a few paintings, but in a state of much decay. While surveying this great fabric, we could not help thinking of the contrast it now offers to the times, not long gone by, when its walls re-echoed to the footsteps and prayers of the devotees of a religion, which was then in a much more flourishing state than it now is, over nearly the whole of the empire of Brazil.
It was among the ruins of the south wing that the hermit lived. We visited the room in which he was said to be generally found, but he was not there. We then passed through a small court nearly choked with rubbish, and entered a large dark room, partly filled with old bricks and lime. Upon the floor of this wretched apartment we found him lying, presenting a most miserable appearance. His only covering consisted of a piece of thin black cloth wrapped round his body, his head, arms, legs, and feet being bare. He appeared to be about sixty years of age, but his long grey hair and beard made him look older, perhaps, than he really was. He was moaning and otherwise seemed to be in great agony, and it was with some difficulty he told us that two days before, while walking across the floor of the room above, it gave way, and he was precipitated to the place where we found him extended, and from which he was unable to move. We tried to raise him, but the slightest movement gave him excruciating pain. As some of his bones seemed to be broken, a young man who had accompanied us, went off immediately to procure assistance, and have him taken to the hospital. All the information I could obtain relating to this unfortunate being, was that at one time, he had been an officer in the army, and was now doing penance for a murder he had committed in his youth. We also visited a convent, the nuns belonging to which prepare preserved fruits for sale. Unlike the one I visited at Bahia, we could only speak to, not see, those who were within. The fruit was put upon a shelf of a revolving kind of cupboard, and in this manner sent out to us; the money and empty plates were returned in the same way. Like all the preserves I have met with in the country, those we had here were spoiled with too much sugar.
For the first few days, my walks did not extend much beyond the suburbs of the town. The country being quite flat, the soil sandy, and the dry season having commenced, the herbaceous vegetation in the more exposed situations was beginning to suffer for want of rain. For many miles round the town, the Cocoa-nut and other large Palms grow in the greatest profusion, mixed with fine trees of the Cashew-nut, then loaded with their curious and refreshing fruit of a yellow or reddish colour, and the Jack, the Bread-fruit, and the Orange. Much attention, I observed, is paid to the gardens attached to the houses near the town, many of them being tastefully laid out, and adorned with beautiful shrubs, partly Brazilian and partly of Indian origin. The Mimosa and other hedges, as about Rio, are festooned with climbers, among which the Cow-itch plant (Stizolobium urens) is the most abundant. There is also in many places a large species of Dodder (Cuscuta), which climbs over the hedges with its long yellow cord-like branches, and gives them a most singular appearance. The sea-coast yielded me many curious plants, particularly one part of it about eight miles to the southward of the town, where the soil for some distance inland is very sandy and covered with shrubs. There I found in great plenty a new kind of those curious mossy Cacti (Melocactus depressus, Hook.); it was but a small one, being only about four inches high, and eighteen in circumference.
About a fortnight after my arrival at Pernambuco, Dr. Loudon removed to his country house, situated on the banks of the Rio Capibaribe, about four miles west from Recife; and, as the country round it was chiefly uncultivated, this afforded more ample scope for my researches. The Rio Capibaribe, which empties itself into the harbour at the Recife, is of small size, and is navigable only for canoes to a distance of about ten miles from the town. The navigation for six miles, as far as Monteiro, is very pleasant, and the scenery is rendered more agreeable by the number of villas, surrounded by gardens, which are scattered along its banks. Many of these houses are inhabited during the fine or dry season only, when most of the wealthy citizens resort to them for the benefit of bathing in the river; for, in hot climates, fresh water is preferred, as bathing in salt water generally produces great irritation on the surface of the body, from the salt crystallizing there, unless washed off with fresh water. For the purpose of bathing, each house has a large shed projecting into the river, the tops and sides of which are covered with cocoa-nut leaves. They are mostly rebuilt every year, as they are generally carried away by the floods in the rainy season.