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Updated: May 12, 2025
With them were gallinules and small green herons, and across the pink mist of lotos blossoms just beyond, three egrets drew three lines of purest white and vanished. It was not at all real, this onrush of bird and blossom revealed by the temporary erasing of the driven lines of gray rain. Like a spendthrift in the midst of a winning game, I still watched eagerly and ungratefully for manatees.
During the dry season they live on the sand-banks, employed in catching turtle in the large river; and when the rainy season sets in they retire to these solitudes, whence they sally forth in their canoes to catch manatees and turtle, and fish of many sorts. We were proceeding away from the main stream by a broad water-path, with numberless narrower paths leading off in all directions.
Manatees are harmless. Told you so before. But, say, Dicky boy, why didn't you get there a minute sooner and grab a flipper? He'd be our manatee now, if you had." "More likely he'd have had us, Neddy. You didn't see what he did to me with just one slap of his tail." The boys collected their paddles and swam with the canoe to shoal water, where they lifted it, poured out the water and got aboard.
At the period when the Jesuits governed the Missions of the Lower Orinoco, they assembled every year at Cabruta, below the mouth of the Apure, to have a grand fishing for manatees, with the Indians of their Missions, at the foot of the mountain now called El Capuchino. It has not the fetid smell of whale-oil, or that of the other cetaceous animals which spout water.
What immense numbers of crocodiles, manatees, and boas must have inhabited these vast spaces of land, converted alternately into marshes of stagnant water, and into barren and fissured plains! The more peaceful world which we inhabit has then succeeded to a world of tumult. The bones of mastodons and American elephants are found dispersed on the table-lands of the Andes.
He was there no longer, and it would have been imprudent to have pursued him into the forest, where we must have dispersed, or advanced in single file, amidst the intertwining lianas. In the evening we passed the mouth of the Cano del Manati, thus named on account of the immense quantity of manatees caught there every year.
In vain we told them that they were deceived in their conjectures; and that the baskets contained the bones of crocodiles and manatees; they persisted in repeating that they smelt the resin that surrounded the skeletons, and that they were their old relations.
South of the port of Xagua, several miles from the coast, there are springs of fresh water in the middle of the sea. They are supposed to be owing to a hydrostatic pressure existing in subterraneous channels, communicating with the lofty mountains of Trinidad. Small vessels sometimes take in water there; and, what is well worthy of observation, large manatees remain habitually in those spots.
The officers swaggered in the gayest of uniforms; the men were shoeless, dirty and slovenly. A shooting-trip had been arranged for us: a steam launch on the lake, Indians as carriers, mules, etc. etc., but my friend declined for want of time. Among the fauna of the country are common and black jaguars, tapirs, manatees, peccaries, boas, cougars or pumas, and alligators.
London Zoological Society, vol. 8, 1872-'74. A very brief comparison of the supposed manatees, with a modern artistic representation of that animal, will show the irreconcilable differences between them better than any number of pages of written criticism.
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