They Had Endeavoured, As Usual, To Alarm Us By Stories Of Boas (Traga-Venado), Vipers And The Attacks Of Jaguars;

But during a long residence among the Chayma Indians of the Orinoco we were habituated to these exaggerations, which arise

Less from the credulity of the natives, than from the pleasure they take in tormenting the whites. Quitting the coast of Zapote, covered with mangroves,* (* Rhizophora mangle.) we entered a forest remarkable for a great variety of palm-trees. We saw the trunks of the Corozo del Sinu* pressed against each other, which formed heretofore our species Alfonsia, yielding oil in abundance (* In Spanish America palm-trees with leaves the most different in kind and species are called Corozo: the Corozo del Sinu, with a short, thick, glossy trunk, is the Elaeis melanococca of Martius, Palm. page 64 tab. 33, 55. I cannot believe it to be identical with the Elaeis guineensis (Herbal of Congo River page 37) since it vegetates spontaneously in the forests of the Rio Sinu. The Corozo of Caripe is slender, small and covered with thorns; it approaches the Cocos aculeata of Jacquin. The Corozo de los Marinos of the valley of Cauca, one of the tallest palm-trees, is the Cocus butyracea of Linnaeus.); the Cocos butyracea, called here palma dolce or palma real, and very different from the palma real of the island of Cuba; the palma amarga, with fan-leaves that serve to cover the roofs of houses, and the latta,* (* Perhaps of the species of Aiphanes.) resembling the small piritu palm-tree of the Orinoco. This variety of palm-trees was remarked by the first Conquistadores.* (* Pedro de Cieca de Leon, a native of Seville, who travelled in 1531, at the age of thirteen years, in the countries I have described, observes that Las tierras comarcanas del Rio Cenu y del Golfo de Uraba estan llena de unos palmares muy grandes y espessos, que son unos arboles gruessos, y llevan unas ramas como palma de datiles. [The lands adjacent to the Rio Cenu and the Gulf of Uraba are full of very tall, spreading palm-trees. They are of vast size and are branched like the date-palm.] See La Cronica del Peru nuevamenta escrita, Antwerp 1554 pages 21 and 204.) The Alfonsia, or rather the species of Elais, which we had nowhere else seen, is only six feet high, with a very large trunk; and the fecundity of its spathes is such that they contain more than 200,000 flowers. Although a great number of those flowers (one tree bearing 600,000 at the same time) never come to maturity,* the soil remains covered with a thick layer of fruits. (* I have carefully counted how many flowers are contained in a square inch on each amentum, from 100 to 120 of which are found united in one spathe.) We often made a similar observation under the shade of the mauritia palm-tree, the Cocos butyracea, the Seje and the Pihiguao of the Atabapo.

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