In the afternoon of the 23rd I left Vilque for the sheep-farm of Taya-taya, in company with Dr. Don Camillo Chaves the superintendent. The road was crowded with people coming from Arequipa to the fair at Vilque: native shopkeepers, English merchants coming to arrange for their supplies of wool, and a noisy company of arrieros on their way to buy mules, and armed to the teeth with horse-pistols, old guns, and huge daggers, to defend their money-bags. Many of them were good-looking fellows, the older ones bearing signs of hard drinking.
The sheep-farm of Taya-taya,[348] four leagues from Vilque, is a large range of mud-plastered buildings with thatched roofs, built round a large patio, on a bleak plain surrounded by mountains. In the morning a flock of forty llamas were being laden with packs of wool in the patio, at which they were making bitter lamentations. We started early on May 24th, and encountered a cold gale of wind, blowing in icy squalls over the cordillera. I reached the posthouse of Cuevillas in the night, a distance of 45 miles; got as far as the posthouse of Pati the next day; encountered a tremendous gale of wind on the skirts of the volcano of Arequipa, but descended to the valley of Cangallo on the 26th; and rode into the city of Arequipa, with my plants, on the morning of the 27th of May. Mr. Weir arrived from Crucero on the 29th, having, as I expected, found Martel in that town, whose designs were thus baffled. From Sandia to Arequipa is a distance of nearly 300 miles. No opposition was made to my departure from Arequipa, although the local newspaper had something to say afterwards,[349] and on June 1st the plants were safely deposited by the Wardian cases at the port of Islay.
"John of the Fountain" had provided plenty of soil, and by the 3rd all the plants were established in the Wardian cases by Mr. Weir. But the difficulties of getting the plants out of the country were not entirely ended by my escape from Martel and the Juntas Municipales of the interior. The Superintendent of the custom-house of Islay declared it to be illegal to export cascarilla-plants, and refused to allow them to be shipped without an express order from the Minister of Finance and Commerce at Lima. He had probably received intelligence respecting the contents of the cases from Vilque, where all news centres at the time of the fair. This obliged me to go to Lima to obtain the necessary order from Colonel Salcedo, the Minister of Finance, which, after much difficulty, I succeeded in doing, and returned with it to Islay on June 23rd.[350]
Meanwhile, since the plants had been established in the Wardian cases, they had begun to bud and throw out young leaves, which seemed to prove that they had quite recovered from their journey across the arctic climate of the Andes. In the evening of the 23rd the cases were hoisted into a launch, ready to go on board the steamer on the following morning; and during the night attempts were made to bribe the man in charge to bore holes and kill the plants by pouring in boiling water, but without success. On the following day they were safely lodged on board the steamer bound for Panama.
It was impossible not to feel regret that H. M. steamer 'Vixen,' then lying idle at Callao, had not been ordered to take the plants direct across the Pacific to Madras, when a majority would have arrived in perfect order. But this was not to be, and we had to look forward to long voyages, several trans-shipments, and the intense heat of the Red Sea, before this most valuable collection of plants could reach their destination in Southern India.
Yet it could not but be satisfactory to look back upon the extraordinary difficulties we had overcome, the hardships and dangers of the forests, the scarcity of the plants, the bewildering puzzle to find them amidst the dense underwood, the endeavour to stop my journey first at Tambopata and then in Sandia, the rapid flight across unknown parts of the cordillera, and the attempts first to stop and then to destroy the plants at Islay: it was a source of gratification to look back upon all this, and then to see the great majority of the plants budding and looking healthy in the Wardian cases.
The climate at Islay, during the time that the plants remained there, was as follows, from the 1st to the 24th of June:—
| Mean temperature | 69° | Fahr. |
| Mean minimum at night | 60 | |
| Highest temperature observed | 73 | |
| Lowest | 58 | |
| Entire range | 15 |
The temperature is almost exactly the same as that of the Tambopata forests in May; but the forests were always exceedingly moist, while Islay is intensely dry. This, however, was unimportant to the plants in their cases.