Sugar-cane and salt are supposed to be antidotes, but in reality they are of no avail. He who is unfortunate enough to be wounded by a poisoned arrow from Macoushia will find them of no avail. He has got a deadly foe within him which will allow him but very little time. In a few moments he will be numbered with the dead.
II.—Second Journey
In the year 1816, two days before the vernal equinox, I sailed from Liverpool for Pernambuco, in the southern hemisphere, on the coast of Brazil. Arrived there, I embarked on board of a Portuguese brig for Cayenne in Guiana. On the 14th day after leaving Pernambuco, the brig cast anchor off the island of Cayenne. The entrance is beautiful. To windward, not far off, are two bold wooded islands, called Father and Mother; and near them are others, their children, smaller, though beautiful as their parents.
All along the coast are seen innumerable quantities of snow-white egrets, scarlet curlews, spoonbills, and flamingoes. About a day's journey in the interior is the celebrated national plantation called La Gabrielle, with which no other plantation in the western world can vie. In it are 22,000 clove-trees in full bearing. The black pepper, the cinnamon, and the nutmeg are also in great abundance here.
Not far from the banks of the river Oyapoc, to windward of Cayenne, is a mountain which contains an immense cavern. Here the Cock of the Rock is plentiful. He is about the size of a fantail pigeon, his colour a bright orange and his wings and tail appear as though fringed; his head is adorned with a superb double-feathery crest, edged with purple.
Finding that a beat to the Amazons would be long and tedious, and aware that the season for procuring birds in fine plumage had already set in, I left Cayenne for Paramaribo, went through the interior to Coryntin, stopped a few days in New Amsterdam, and proceeded to Demerara.
Though least in size, the glittering mantle of the humming-bird entitles it to the first place in the list of the birds of the New World. See it darting through the air almost as quick as thought. Now it is within a yard of your face, and then is in an instant gone. Now it flutters from flower to flower. Now it is a ruby, now a topaz, now an emerald, now all burnished gold.
Cayenne and Demerara produce the same humming-birds. On entering the forests the blue and green, the smallest brown, no bigger than the humble bee, with two long feathers in the tail, and the little forked-tail purple-throated humming-birds glitter before you in ever-changing attitudes.
There are three species of toucans in Dememara, and three diminutives, which may be called toucanets. The singular form of these birds makes a lasting impression on the memory. Every species of this family of enormous bill lays its eggs in the hollow trees. You will be at a loss to know for what ends nature has overloaded the head of this bird with such an enormous bill. It is impossible to conjecture.
You would not be long in the forests of Demerara without noticing the woodpeckers. The sound which the largest kind makes in hammering against the bark of the tree is so loud that you would never suppose it to proceed from the efforts of a bird. You would take it to be the woodman, with his axe, striking a sturdy blow, oft repeated. There are fourteen species here, all beautiful, and the greater part of them have their heads ornamented with a fine crest, movable at pleasure.