The captain’s account of the feeding powers of the Yakuti surpasses, indeed, anything to be found in the narratives of travellers which are proverbial for wonder. “At Tabalak I had a pretty good specimen,” he continues, “of the appetite of a child, whose age could not exceed five years. I had observed it crawling on the floor, and scraping up with its thumb the tallow-grease which fell from a lighted candle, and I inquired in surprise whether it proceeded from hunger or liking of the fat. I was told from neither, but simply from the habit in both Yakuti and Tungousi of eating wherever there is food, and never permitting anything that can be eaten to be lost. I gave the child a candle made of the most impure tallow, a second, and a third—and all were devoured with avidity. The steersman then gave him several pounds of sour frozen butter; this also he immediately consumed. Lastly, a large piece of yellow soap—all went the same road; but as I was convinced that the child would continue to gorge as long as it could receive anything, I begged my companion to desist as I had done. As to the statement of what a man can or will eat, either as to quality or quantity, I am afraid it would be quite incredible. In fact, there is nothing in the way of fish or meat, from whatever animal, however putrid or unwholesome, but they will devour with impunity; and the quantity only varies from what they have to what they can get. I have repeatedly seen a Yakut or a Tungouse devour forty pounds of meat in a day. The effects are very observable upon them, for, from thin and meagre-looking men, they will become perfectly pot-bellied. I have seen three of these gluttons consume a reindeer at one meal.”
These doings of the Siberian Tartars, our young readers will have rightly judged, however, are not among the most praiseworthy or dignified of the “Triumphs of Enterprise;” and we turn, with a sense of relief, to other scenes of adventure.
The grand mountain range of the Andes, or Cordilleras, with its rugged and barren peaks and volcanoes, and destitution of human habitants, sometimes for scores of miles in the traveller’s route, has afforded a striking theme for many writers of their own adventures in South America. Mr. Temple, a traveller in 1825, affords us some exciting views of the perils of his journey from Peru to Buenos Ayres.
In the afternoon of one of these perilous days he had to ascend and descend the highest mountain he had ever yet crossed. After winding for more than two hours up its rugged side, and precisely in the most terrifying spot, the baggage-mule, which was in front, suddenly stopped. “And well it might, poor little wretch, after scrambling with its burden up such fatiguing flights of craggy steps!” exclaims this benevolent-minded traveller; “the narrowness of the path at this spot did not allow room to approach the animal to unload and give it rest. On one side was the solid rock, which drooped over our heads in a half-arch; on the other, a frightful abyss, of not less than two hundred feet perpendicular. Patience was, indeed, requisite here, but the apprehension was, that some traveller or courier might come in the contrary direction, and, as the sun was setting, the consequences could not fail of proving disastrous to either party. At one time, I held a council to deliberate on the prudence of freeing the passage by shooting the mule, and letting it roll, baggage and all, to the bottom. In this I was opposed by the postilion, though another as well as myself was of opinion that it was the only method of rescuing us from our critical situation before nightfall. I never felt so perplexed in my life. We were all useless, helpless, and knew not what to do. After upwards of half an hour—or, apprehension might add a few minutes to this dubious and truly nervous pause—the mule, of its own accord, moved on slowly for about twenty yards, and stopped again; then proceeded, then stopped; and thus, after two hours’ further ascent, we gradually reached the summit. Two or three times I wished, for safety’s sake, to alight, but actually I had not room to do so upon the narrow edge of the tremendous precipice on my left.”
He was less fortunate in his return over the mountains of Tarija. “Cruel was the sight,” says he, “to see us toiling up full fifteen miles continued steep to the summit of the Cordillera, that here forms a ridge round the south-western extremity of the province of Tarija; but crueller by far to behold the wretched, wretched mule, that slipped on the edge of the precipice, and—away! exhibiting ten thousand summersaults, round, round, round! down, down, down! nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand fathoms deep!—certainly not one yard less, according to the scale by which I measured the chasm in my wonder-struck imagination, while I stood in the stirrups straining forward over the ears of my horse (which trembled with alarm), and viewed the microscopic diminution of the mule, as it revolved with accelerated motion to the bottom, carrying with it our whole grand store of provision.”
Here they were obliged to leave the poor animal to its fate, which there was no doubt would be that of being devoured by condors. But a far more serious accident befel Mr. Temple a few days after this. A favourite horse that he had purchased on his journey to Potosi got loose, and galloping off after a herd of his own species speedily disappeared, and was never recovered. His apostrophe to this animal is a specimen of fine benevolent sentiment. “My horse,” said I to myself, “my best horse, my favourite horse, my companion, my friend, for so long a time, on journeys of so many hundred miles, carrying me up and down mountains, along the edge of precipices, across rivers and torrents, where the safety of the rider so often depended solely on the worthiness of the animal—to lose thee now in a moment of so much need, in a manner so unexpected, and so provokingly accidental, aggravated my loss. The constant care I took of thee proves the value I set on thy merits. At the end of many a wearisome journey, accommodation and comfort for thee were invariably my first consideration, let mine be what they might. Not even the severity of the past night could induce me to deprive thee of thy rug for my own gratification. And must I now suddenly say farewell? Then farewell, my trusty friend! A thousand dollars are in that portmanteau: had I lost every one of them, they must, indeed, have occasioned regret; but never could they have excited such a feeling of sorrow as thou hast, my best, my favourite horse—farewell!”
If we wished to depicture the earth as it must have appeared to primeval travellers, Humboldt, the most sagacious of adventurers, seems to assure us that South America approaches nearest to such a picture. “In this part of the new continent,” he remarks, “surrounded by dense forests of boundless extent, we almost accustomed ourselves to regard men as not being essential to the order of nature. The earth is loaded with plants, and nothing impedes their free development. An immense layer of mould manifests the uninterrupted action of organic powers. The crocodiles and the boas are masters of the river; the jaguar, the pecari, the dante, and the monkeys traverse the forest without fear and without danger: there they dwell as in an ancient inheritance. This aspect of animated nature, in which man is nothing, has something in it strange and sad. To this we reconcile ourselves with difficulty on the ocean and amid the sands of Africa, though in these scenes, where nothing recals to mind our fields, our woods, and our streams, we are less astonished at the vast solitude through which we pass. Here, in a fertile country, adorned with eternal verdure, we seek in vain the traces of the power of man; we seem to be transported into a world different from that which gave us birth.”
Of the suffering to be encountered by adventurers in these regions, we are assured, however, by Humboldt, the chief source does not consist in the presence of crocodiles or serpents, jaguars or monkeys. The dread of these sinks into nothing when compared to the plaga de la moscas—the torment of insects. “However accustomed,” says Humboldt, “you may be to endure pain without complaint—however lively an interest you may take in the object of your researches—it is impossible not to be constantly disturbed by the musquetoes, zaucudoes, jejeus, and tempraneroes that cover the face and hands, pierce the clothes with their long sucker in the shape of a needle, and getting into the mouth and nostrils set you coughing and sneezing whenever you attempt to speak in the open air. I doubt whether there be a country on earth where man is exposed to more cruel torments in the rainy seasons, when the lower strata of the air to the height of fifteen or twenty feet are filled with venomous insects like a condensed vapour.”
This terrific account of the American mosquito is confirmed by Mr. Hood, one of the companions of Captain Franklin, in the intrepid attempt to reach the North Pole by overland journey. “We had sometimes procured a little rest,” he observes, “by closing the tent and burning wood or flashing gunpowder within, the smoke driving the musquitoes into the crannies of the ground. But this remedy was now ineffectual, though we employed it so perseveringly as to hazard suffocation. They swarmed under our blankets, goring us with their envenomed trunks and steeping our clothes in blood. We rose at daylight in a fever, and our misery was unmitigated during our whole stay. The food of the mosquito is blood, which it can extract by penetrating the hide of a buffalo; and if it is not disturbed it gorges itself so as to swell its body into a transparent globe. The wound does not swell, like that of the African mosquito, but it is infinitely more painful; and when multiplied an hundred-fold, and continued for so many successive days, it becomes an evil of such magnitude that cold, famine, and every other concomitant of an inhospitable climate, must yield pre-eminence to it. It chases the buffalo to the plains, irritating him to madness; and the reindeer to the sea-shore, from which they do not return till the scourge has ceased.”
Captain Back, whose Arctic Land Expedition has made his name memorable, confirms these accounts. After describing the difficulties of himself and party in dragging their baggage and provisions, and even their canoe, up high, steep, and rugged ridges, over swamps of thick stunted firs, and open spaces barren and desolate, on which “crag was piled on crag to the height of two thousand feet from the base,” he adds these descriptive sentences of the insect plague: “The laborious duty which had been thus performed was rendered doubly severe by the combined attack of myriads of sandflies and mosquitoes, which made our faces stream with blood. There is certainly no form of wretchedness among those to which the chequered life of a traveller is exposed, at once so great and so humiliating, as the torture inflicted by these puny blood-suckers. To avoid them is impossible; and as for defending himself, though for a time he may go on crushing by thousands, he cannot long maintain the unequal conflict, so that at last, subdued by pain and fatigue, he throws himself in despair with his face to the earth, and, half suffocated in his blanket, groans away a few hours of sleepless rest.”