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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The Crocodile Performed The Same Movement, But Much More
Slowly Than The Dog, Which Succeeded In Gaining The Shore.
The crocodiles of the Apure find abundant food in the chiguires
(thick-nosed tapirs),* which live fifty or sixty together in troops on
the banks of the river.
(* Cavia capybara, Linn. The word chiguire
belongs to the language of the Palenkas and the Cumanagotos. The
Spaniards call this animal guardatinaja; the Caribs, capigua; the
Tamanacs, cappiva; and the Maypures, chiato. According to Azara, it is
known at Buenos Ayres by the Indian names of capiygua and capiguara.
These various denominations show a striking analogy between the
languages of the Orinoco and those of the Rio de la Plata.) These
animals, as large as our pigs, have no weapons of defence; they swim
somewhat better than they run: yet they become the prey of the
crocodiles in the water, and of the tigers on land. It is difficult to
conceive, how, being thus persecuted by two powerful enemies, they
become so numerous; but they breed with the same rapidity as the
little cavies or guinea-pigs, which come to us from Brazil.
We stopped below the mouth of the Cano de la Tigrera, in a sinuosity
called la Vuelta del Joval, to measure the velocity of the water at
its surface. It was not more than 3.2 feet* in a second, which gives
2.56 feet for the mean velocity. (* In order to measure the velocity
of the surface of a river, I generally measured on the beach a base of
250 feet, and observed with the chronometer the time that a floating
body, abandoned to the current, required to reach this distance.) The
height of the barometer indicated barely a slope of seventeen inches
in a mile of nine hundred and fifty toises. The velocity is the
simultaneous effect of the slope of the ground, and the accumulation
of the waters by the swelling of the upper parts of the river. We were
again surrounded by chiguires, which swim like dogs, raising their
heads and necks above the water. We saw with surprise a large
crocodile on the opposite shore, motionless, and sleeping in the midst
of these nibbling animals. It awoke at the approach of our canoe, and
went into the water slowly, without frightening the chiguires. Our
Indians accounted for this indifference by the stupidity of the
animals, but it is more probable that the chiguires know by long
experience, that the crocodile of the Apure and the Orinoco does not
attack upon land, unless he finds the object he would seize
immediately in his way, at the instant when he throws himself into the
water.
Near the Joval nature assumes an awful and extremely wild aspect. We
there saw the largest jaguar we had ever met with. The natives
themselves were astonished at its prodigious length, which surpassed
that of any Bengal tiger I had ever seen in the museums of Europe. The
animal lay stretched beneath the shade of a large zamang.* (* A
species of mimosa.) It had just killed a chiguire, but had not yet
touched its prey, on which it kept one of its paws.
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