By Lieut. L. Gibbon U. S. N.
Lith. of P.S. Duval & Co. Phil.
HOUSED IN MOJOS.
The beef was tough and insipid; yucas watery. The correjidores particularly fancied boiled cabbage, baked plantains and yucas served as bread, except on particular occasions, when corn-cake, made of grain mashed into paste between two stones, was presented. The corn is raised on the pampa near the river banks, and the stones sold in market, after being transported from Yuracares.
A row of large glasses containing chicha was set in the middle of the table, to which the government officials paid particular attention. One of the young men at the table had the goitre very badly, though the swelling was so low down on his neck that he could tie his cravat over it, which gave him a most strange expression. We attribute the insipid taste of the beef of dinner, and the swelling in this man's neck, to the same cause—the want of salt.
The coffee was excellent, but the tobacco not so good as some we found in Cochabamba from Santa Cruz, where the plant grows under a drier climate.
Don Antonio de Barras Cordoza, a native of Pará in Brazil, came to see us. Don Antonio seems a clever person. He had more resolution in the expression of his face than any man we had met with, while he looked as if he had seen some hard service as a sailor on the Amazon. The quick and pleasant flash of his eye, when I told him I wanted to descend the Madeira and Amazon to Pará, gave me hopes. He told me he had been seven months on his voyage here from Borba on the Madeira river; that he had dragged his boats over the land on rollers by several of the falls on the Madeira, unloading his cargo at the foot of each fall, and, after carrying it by the fall, launched his boat and embarked again. His father had made a trip of the same kind some years before. He advised me not to take a Mojos canoe or crew; that the boat would be broken among the rocks, and that the Indians of Bolivia were so inexperienced they would be of no use to me, even if they did not desert me as soon as they came within the sound of the roaring of the waters of the first fall, as they had already done with some Bolivians who attempted to descend the river with them. It was very clear that our only way was to give up all idea of aid from the canoemen of Bolivia in this respect, and look to Brazil. The prefect might order men to descend the Madeira, and we might go at once; but Indians are unwilling to go a great distance from home. One month to them is considered a long voyage, therefore they would want to return in that time; but, by Don Antonio's account, it will take them at least seven months to return alone. The Indians keep count of the number of days absent from their wives by cutting a small notch in the handle of their paddles every seventh day, and a crew that returns with over four notches has been absent a long time from Trinidad, it is thought.
Don Antonio explained to me how it was that the canoes of Mojos were not fitted for the route down the Madeira. They are all hewn or dug out of one stick, long and narrow. When the crew drag the canoe over shallows in the river, she may lodge on a rock under the centre; the heavy weights fore and aft, on a boat forty feet long, break her back in two. The heft, as well as the length of these canoes, make them unmanageable among the rapids. When we come to navigate the land, he said, she might go along as well as other boats, but they were unfit for the waters of the Madeira.
Don Antonio was a trader; he had brought up a cargo of fancy glassware; liquors of different kinds—French wines, brandy, gin, and sweet wines. The Indians drink chicha; they are unaccustomed to the taste of good wine, and care little for it; they also use earthenware. For four months he has been here with goods exposed to view in a house on the corner of the square. He has sold but little. The iron he brought sells at eighteen and twenty cents the pound. He has but a few pounds that is not sold. Sweet oil is used among the few creoles, but they refuse to take it by the bottle; so he retails it out, six cents a wineglassful.