As the Waraus of the interior are a timid people and have long since learned to distrust the white man, they remain, as a rule, concealed in the depths of forests that are impassable. They are, however, a quiet, industrious, home-loving people, and are famous among the tribes in this section of Guiana for their beautiful curiaras, or canoes—made from a single log of the cedar, or of a tree called Bioci. Some of these dugouts—the monoxyla of the Greeks—are full fifty feet long and from five to six feet broad and find a ready sale as far south as Demerara.
Far from being a dismal swamp, inhabited only by poor, starving savages, condemned to live on tree tops, and to find food and clothing in a single palm, Sr. Level[30] shows us that the delta is a garden of exceeding richness and that the Indians, if the government did its duty towards them by developing the marvelous resources of their land and by giving its inhabitants, so long neglected, some measure of attention and assistance, would eventually make efficient contributors to the national revenue, and become desirable citizens of the republic.
[2] “The wind then failed me, and I entered a climate where the intensity of the heat was such that I thought both ships and men would have been burned up, and everything suddenly got into such a state of confusion that no man dared go below deck to attend to the securing of the water-cask and the provisions. This heat lasted eight days; on the first day the weather was fine, but on the seven other days it rained and was cloudy, yet we found no alleviation of our distress; so that I certainly believe that if the sun had shone, as on the first day, we should not have been able to escape in anyway.”—Writings of Christopher Columbus, ut sup., pp. 113, 114, and Irving’s Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, Chap. XXIX. [↑]
[4] Eden’s First Three English Books on America, p. 338. [↑]
[5] Chapman’s Odyssey, Bk. VII. [↑]
[6] Called Bois immortelle by the French, and in Spanish bearing the appropriate name of madre de cacao, mother of cacao. [↑]
[7] It was upon the “boughs and spraies” of these trees that Raleigh found “great store of oisters, very salt and wel tasted.” A species of edible oyster is still found on this tree—the Rhizophora Mangle of Linnæus—but, although served on the table in the West Indies, it is far from being as luscious as our “Blue Points” or as large as our “Lynn Havens.” [↑]