“Insects are the curse of tropical climates. The bête-rouge lays the foundation of a tremendous ulcer. In a moment you are covered with ticks. Chigoes bury themselves in your flesh, and hatch a large colony of young chigoes in a few hours. They will not live together, but every chigoe sets up a separate ulcer, and has his own private portion of pus. Flies get entry into your mouth, into your eyes, into your nose; you eat flies, drink flies, and breathe flies. Lizards, cockroaches, and snakes, get into the bed; ants eat up the books; scorpions sting you on the foot. Everything bites, stings, or bruises; every second of your existence you are wounded by some piece of animal life that nobody has ever seen before, except Swammerdam and Meriam. An insect with eleven legs is swimming in your teacup, a nondescript with nine wings is struggling in the small beer, or a caterpillar with several dozen eyes in his belly is hastening over your bread and butter! All nature is alive, and seems to be gathering all her entomological hosts to eat you up, as you are standing, out of your coat, waistcoat, and breeches. Such are the tropics. All this reconciles us to our dews, fogs, vapours, and drizzle—to our apothecaries rushing about with gargles and tinctures—to our old, British, constitutional coughs, sore throats, and swelled faces.” [↑]
[5] “In a region,” says Humboldt, “where travelling is so uncommon, people seem to feel a pleasure in exaggerating to strangers the difficulties arising from the climate, the wild animals and the Indians.” Op. cit., Vol. I, p. 361. [↑]
“More bold a man is, he prevails the more,
Though man nor place he ever saw before.”
—The Odyssey, Book VII, vv. 50, 51. [↑]
[8] Voyages dans l’Amérique du Sud, p. 578, Paris, 1883.
Major Stanley Patterson, writing in the Royal Geographical Journal, Vol. XIII, No. 1, p. 40, 1899, of the Venezuelans living on the Orinoco, declares that “All are avaricious, thriftless, independent, faithless, untruthful, lazy, capable of hard work, quick-tempered, vindictive, changeful and full of laughter. If there are clouds these children of the sun see them not; nothing is really serious to them.” Certain of his adjectives may apply to some of the inhabitants but they surely cannot truthfully be applied to all of them. We found many good people among them and retain the pleasantest recollections of their kindness and hospitality. [↑]
[9] As to the flora of the forests of Venezuelan Guiana one can truthfully say what Richard Schomburgk affirms of the flora of British Guiana. In his Reisen in British Guiana, Vol. II, p. 216, speaking of the plants in the country around Roraima, he writes as follows: “Not only the orchids, but the shrubs and low trees were unknown to me. Every shrub, herb and tree was new to me, if not as to the family, yet as to the species. I stood on the border of an unknown plant-zone, full of wondrous forms which lay as if by magic before me.... Every step revealed something new.”