Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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Now The Jaguar - The Beautiful Panther Of
America - Appears Upon The Shore; And Now The Hocco,* (* Ceyx Alector,
The Peacock-Pheasant; C. Pauxi, The Cashew-Bird.) With Its Black
Plumage And Tufted Head, Moves Slowly Along The Sausos.
Animals of the
most different classes succeed each other.
"Esse como en el Paradiso,"
"It is just as it was in Paradise," said our pilot, an old Indian of
the Missions. Everything, indeed, in these regions recalls to mind the
state of the primitive world with its innocence and felicity. But in
carefully observing the manners of animals among themselves, we see
that they mutually avoid and fear each other. The golden age has
ceased; and in this Paradise of the American forests, as well as
everywhere else, sad and long experience has taught all beings that
benignity is seldom found in alliance with strength.
When the shore is of considerable breadth, the hedge of sauso remains
at a distance from the river. In the intermediate space we see
crocodiles, sometimes to the number of eight or ten, stretched on the
sand. Motionless, with their jaws wide open, they repose by each
other, without displaying any of those marks of affection observed in
other animals living in society. The troop separates as soon as they
quit the shore. It is, however, probably composed of one male only,
and many females; for as M. Descourtils, who has so much studied the
crocodiles of St. Domingo, observed to me, the males are rare, because
they kill one another in fighting during the season of their loves.
These monstrous creatures are so numerous, that throughout the whole
course of the river we had almost at every instant five or six in
view. Yet at this period the swelling of the Rio Apure was scarcely
perceived; and consequently hundreds of crocodiles were still buried
in the mud of the savannahs. About four in the afternoon we stopped to
measure a dead crocodile which had been cast ashore. It was only
sixteen feet eight inches long; some days after M. Bonpland found
another, a male, twenty-two feet three inches long. In every zone, in
America as in Egypt, this animal attains the same size. The species so
abundant in the Apure, the Orinoco,* (* It is the arua of the Tamanac
Indians, the amana of the Maypure Indians, the Crocodilus acutus of
Cuvier.) and the Rio de la Magdalena, is not a cayman, but a real
crocodile, analogous to that of the Nile, having feet dentated at the
external edges. When it is recollected that the male enters the age of
puberty only at ten years, and that its length is then eight feet, we
may presume that the crocodile measured by M. Bonpland was at least
twenty-eight years old. The Indians told us, that at San Fernando
scarcely a year passes, without two or three grown-up persons,
particularly women who fetch water from the river, being drowned by
these carnivorous reptiles. They related to us the history of a young
girl of Uritucu, who by singular intrepidity and presence of mind,
saved herself from the jaws of a crocodile.
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