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Long may ye flourish, peaceful and liberal inhabitants of Demerara. Your doors are ever open to harbour the harbourless; your purses never shut to the wants of the distressed: many a ruined fugitive from the Oroonoque will bless your kindness to him in the hour of need, when flying from the woes of civil discord, without food or raiment, he begged for shelter underneath your roof.
Augustino; so that he found he was got upon the coast of Guiana, or the north part of Brazil, beyond the river Amazons, toward that of the river Oroonoque, commonly called the Great River; and began to consult with me what course he should take, for the ship was leaky and very much disabled, add he was going directly back to the coast of Brazil.
We beat about a great while, and went on shore on several islands in the mouth of the great river Oroonoque, but none for my purpose: only this I learnt by my coasting the shore, that I was under one great mistake before, viz. that the continent which I thought I saw from the island I lived in, was really no continent, but a long island, or rather a ridge of islands reaching from one to the other side of the extended mouth of that great river; and that the savages who came to my island, were not properly those which we call Caribbees, but islanders, and other barbarians of the same kind, who inhabited something nearer to our side than the rest.
It has been already remarked that in the extensive wilds of Demerara and Essequibo, far away from any European settlement, there is a tribe of Indians who are known by the name of Macoushi. Though the wourali poison is used by all the South American savages betwixt the Amazons and the Oroonoque, still this tribe makes it stronger than any of the rest.
I strongly suspect that the dirty yellow-white of the belly and thighs has originally been pure white, and that it has come to its present colour by means of the bird darting down upon its prey in the mud. But this is mere conjecture. Here, too, close to the river, I frequently saw the bird called sun-bird by the English colonists and tirana by the Spaniards in the Oroonoque.
One Sunday evening, some years ago, as I was walking with Don Felipe de Ynciarte, Governor of Angustura, on the bank of the Oroonoque, "Stop here a minute or two, Don Carlos," said he to me, "while I recount a sad accident.
There was scarcely a cloud to intercept the sun's rays. I saw several scarlet aras, anhingas and ducks, but could not get a shot at them. The parrots crossed the river in innumerable quantities, always flying in pairs. Here, too, I saw the sun-bird, called tirana by the Spaniards in the Oroonoque, and shot one of them. The black and white scarlet-headed finch was very common here.
This I understand to be no more than the sets of the tide, as going out, or coming in; but I afterwards understood it was occasioned by the great draught and reflux of the mighty river Oroonoque; in the mouth of which river, as I thought afterwards, our island lay; and that this land, which I perceived to the W. and N.W. was the great island Trinidad, on the north point of the mouth of the river.
The French call it “l’enfant perdu.” As you pass the islands, the stately hills on the main, ornamented with ever-verdant foliage, show you that this is by far the sublimest scenery on the sea-coast, from the Amazons to the Oroonoque.
I asked him the names of the several nations of his sort of people, but could get no other name than Caribs; from whence I easily understood, that these were the Caribees, which our maps place on that part of America which reaches from the mouth of the river Oroonoque to Guinea, and onwards to St. Martha.
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