From Pole to Pole

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Meanwhile Pizarro ruled in the conquered kingdom. Close to the coast he
founded Lima, which was afterwards for a long period the residence of
the Spanish viceroy, and is now, with nearly 150,000 inhabitants, still
the capital of Peru. It has a large number of monasteries and churches,
and a stately cathedral. The port town, Callao, was almost totally
destroyed a hundred and sixty-six years ago by a tidal wave, which
drowned the inhabitants and swept away the houses; but it gradually
regained its prosperity, and now has 50,000 inhabitants.

At length, however, Pizarro roused a formidable insurrection by his
cruelty, and while he was besieged in Lima his three brothers were shut
up in Cuzco. Just then Almagro returned from the Atacama desert,
defeated the Peruvians, seized Cuzco, and made the three Pizarro
brothers prisoners. But the fourth brother, the conqueror, succeeded in
effecting their liberation and in capturing Almagro, who was at once
sent to the gallows. A few years later, however, Almagro's friends
wreaked vengeance on Pizarro; a score of conspirators rushed into the
governor's palace and made their way with drawn swords into the room
where Pizarro was surrounded by some friends and servants. Most of these
jumped through the window; the rest were cut down. Pizarro defended
himself bravely, but after killing four of his assailants he fell to the
ground, and with a loud voice asked to be allowed to make his
confession. While he was making the sign of the cross on the ground, a
sword was thrust into his throat.

The murdered Inca king is an emblem of bleeding South America. All was
done, it was pretended, in order to spread enlightenment and
Christianity, but in reality the children of the country were lured to
destruction, deluded to fill Spanish coffers with gold, and then in
requital were persecuted to death. Civilisation had no part in the
matter; it was only a question of robbery and greed of gain, and when
these desires were satisfied, the descendants of the Incas might be
swept off the earth.

THE AMAZONS RIVER

In Peru the largest river of the world takes its source, and streams
northwards among the verdant _cordilleras_ of the Andes. Wheat waves on
its banks, and here and there stands a funereal tower or a ruin from
Inca times. Small rafts take the place of bridges, and at high water the
river rushes foaming furiously through the valley.

And then it suddenly turns eastwards and cuts its way with unbridled
fury through the eastern ridges of the Andes. The water forces itself
through ravines barely 50 yards wide and dashes with a deafening roar
over falls and rapids. Sometimes the river rests from its labours,
expanding to a width of two or three furlongs. Crystal affluents hurry
down from the snow-fields of the Andes to join it. It takes its tribute
of water from mountain and forest, and is indeed a majestic stream when
it leaves the last hills behind.

The source of the Amazons was discovered in 1535 by Maranon, a Spanish
soldier. Vicente Pinzon had discovered its mouth in the year 1500. But
Maranon, on the one hand, had no notion where the river emerged into the
sea, and Pinzon, on the other, knew not where the headwaters purled
through the valley. It was reserved for another Spaniard to solve the
problem. Let us follow Orellana on his adventurous journey.

Gonzalo Pizarro served under his brother, the conqueror, in northern
Peru. There he heard of rich gold countries in the east, and decided to
seek them. With an army of 350 Spanish cavalry and infantry, as well as
4000 Indians, he set out from Quito and marched over the Andes past the
foot of Cotopaxi to the lowlands of the Napo River.

It was a reckless enterprise. The Indians were frozen to death in crowds
on the great heights. Instead of gold, nothing was found but wearisome
savannahs and swamps, and dismal forests soaked with two months' rain.
Instead of useful domestic animals, no creature was seen but the
thick-skinned tapir, which, with a long beak-like nose, crops plants and
leaves and frequents swampy tracts in the heart of the primeval forest.
The few natives were hostile.

When the troop reached the Napo River on New Year's Day, 1540, Pizarro
decided to send the bold seaman Orellana on in front down the river to
look for people and provisions, for famine with all its tortures
threatened them.

A camp was set up and a wharf constructed. A small brigantine for sails
and oars was hastily put together, and Orellana stepped on board with a
crew of fifty men, and the boat was borne down the strong current.

Dark and silent woods stood on both sides. No villages, no human beings
were seen. Tall trees stood on the bank like triumphal arches, and from
their boughs hung lianas serving as rope ladders and swings for sportive
monkeys with prehensile tails. Day after day the vessel glided farther
into this humid land never before seen by white men. The Spaniards
looked in vain for natives, and their eyes tried in vain to pierce the
green murkiness between the tree trunks. The men showed increasing
uneasiness; but Orellana sat quietly at the helm, gave his orders to the
rowers, and had the sail hoisted to catch the breeze that swept over the
water.

No camping-places on points of the bank, no huts roofed with palm leaves
or grass, no smoke indicated the vicinity of Indians. In a thicket by a
brook lay a boa constrictor, a snake allied to the python of the Old
World, in easy, elegant coils, digesting a small rodent somewhat like a
hare and called an agouti. At the margin of the bank some water-hogs
wallowed in the sodden earth full of roots, and under a vault of thorny
bushes lay their worst enemy, the jaguar, in ambush, his eyes glowing
like fire.

At length the country became more open. Frightened Indians appeared on
the bank, and their huts peeped through the forest avenues. Orellana
moored his boat and landed with his men. The savages were quiet, and
received the Spaniards trustingly, so the latter stayed for a time and
collected all the provisions they could obtain. The Indians spoke of a
great water in the south which could be reached in ten days.

The fifty Spaniards were now in excellent spirits, and set to work
eagerly to construct another smaller sailing vessel. When this was done,
Orellana filled both his boats with provisions, manned the larger with
thirty and the smaller with twenty men, and continued his wonderful
journey, which was to furnish the explanation of the great river system
of tropical America. Around him stretched the greatest tropical lowland
of the world, before him ran the most voluminous river of the earth. He
saw nothing but forest and water, a bewitched country. He had no
equipment beyond that which was afforded by the Napo's banks, and his
men grumbled daily at the long, dangerous voyage.

[Illustration: PLATE XXXVI. INDIAN HUTS ON THE AMAZONS RIVER.]

After ten days the two boats came to the "great water," where the Napo
yields its tribute to the Amazons River. The latter was then rising
fast, and when it is at its height, in June and July, the water lies
forty feet above its low water-level. Farther down the difference tends
to disappear, for the northern tributaries come from the equator, where
it rains at all seasons, while the southern rise at different times
according to the widely separated regions where their sources lie. To
travel from the foot of the _cordilleras_ to the mouth the high water of
the main river takes two months.

The Spaniards felt as if they were carried over a boundless lake. Where
the banks are low the forests are flooded for miles, and the trees stand
up out of the water. Then the wild animals fly to safer districts, and
only water birds and forest birds remain, with such four-footed animals
as spend all their lives in trees. The fifty men noticed that certain
stretches on the banks were never reached by the high water, and it was
only at these places that the Indians built their huts, just as the
indiarubber gatherers do at the present day (Plate XXXIV.).

When the high water retired, large patches of the loose, sodden banks
were undermined, and fell into the river, weighed down by the huge trees
they supported. Islands of timber, roots, earth, and lianas were carried
away by the current. Some stranded on shallows in the middle of the
river, others grounded at projections of the bank, and other rubbish was
piled up against them till the whole mass broke away and danced down the
river towards the sea. Here the men had to be careful, for at any moment
the boats might capsize against a grounded tree trunk. Deep pools also
were found, and the current ran at the rate of 2-1/2 feet a second, and
they often had the help of the wind.

They soon learned to know by the changed appearance of the forest where
they could land. Where the royal crowns of foliaged trees reared their
waving canopy above the palms they could be sure of finding dry ground;
but if the palms with verdant luxuriance raised their plumes above low
brushwood, they might be sure that the bank was flooded by the river.

If the voyage on the capricious river was dangerous, the Spaniards were
still more disturbed by Indians, who came paddling up in their canoes
and showered poisoned arrows on the boats. To get through in safety, the
explorers had to avoid the banks as much as possible.

At the end of May they drifted past the mouth of the Rio Negro, which
discharges a large volume of water, for it collects streams from
Venezuela and Guiana, and from the wet _llanos_, or open plains, north
of the Amazons River. Where the great tributary is divided by islands it
attains a breadth of as much as thirty miles.

Here Orellana stayed several weeks with friendly Indians, who lived in
pretty huts under the boughs of bananas. The vessels were repaired, and
provisions taken on board--maize, chickens, turtles, and fish. There
were swarms of edible turtles, and the Indians caught them and collected
their eggs; and the fish were abundant and various--no wonder, when two
thousand species of fish live in the basin of the Amazons.

Shortly afterwards they glided past the mouth of the Madeira, a mile and
a half broad, which discharges a volume of water little inferior to that
of the main river. For the Madeira has its sources far to the south, and
descends partly from the _cordilleras_ of Peru and Bolivia, partly from
the plateau of Brazil.

Woods and no end of water, month after month! The heat is the same all
the year round--not very excessive, seldom 104 deg., but still oppressive
and enervating because of the humidity of the air. Yet the voyage was
not monotonous. Leaning against the masts and gunwale, or leisurely
moving the oars, the soldiers could observe the dolphins leaping in the
river, the sudden darts of the alligators as they hunted the fish
through the water, or the clumsy movements of the manati, one of the
Sirenia, as it cropped grass at the edge of the bank, to the danger of
the eel-like lung fish, which sometimes goes up on to dry land.
Sometimes they saw the Indians in light canoes pursue manatis and
alligators with harpoons for the sake of their flesh, and perhaps they
felt a shiver at the sight of the huge water-snakes of the Amazons
River.

On they went through the immense forest which extends from the foot of
the Andes and the sources of the Madeira to the mouths of the
Orinoco--through this dense, rank carpet which covers all the lowlands
of Brazil with its teeming and superabundant life, and which is so
bountifully watered by tropical rains and flooded rivers. All the rain
that falls on the _llanos_ and the _selvas_ (as the wooded plains are
called) makes its way through innumerable affluents to the Amazons and
enters the sea through its trumpet-shaped mouth. The river, with its
forests, is like a cornucopia of vast, wild, irrepressible nature, where
life breathes and pulsates, where it bubbles and ripples, seethes and
ferments in the soft productive soil, where animals swarm, and beetles
and butterflies are more numerous than anywhere else on our earth, and
are clad in the most gorgeous hues of the tropics. There old trees on
the bank are undermined and washed away, while others decay in the
sultry recesses of the forest. There the earth is constantly fertilised
by the manure of animals and their corpses and by dead vegetation, and
there new generations are continually rising up from the graves in
nature's inexhaustible kingdom.

The Spaniards had no time to make excursions into the country from their
camps. It is difficult to make one's way through this intricate, ragged
network of climbing plants between trunks, boughs, bushes, and
undergrowth. In the interior, far away from the waterways, and
especially between some of the southern tributaries, lie forests unknown
and untrodden since heathen times. Perhaps there are Indian tribes among
them who have not yet heard that America has been discovered, and who
may congratulate themselves that the forests are too much for the white
men.

There palms predominate in a peaceful Eden, and at their feet flourish
ferns with stems as hard as wood. In the bamboo clumps the jaguars play
with their cubs, and on the outskirts of the swamps the peccary, a sort
of small pig, jumps on his long, supple legs. A dark-green gloom
prevails under the tall bay-trees, and their stems stand under their
crowns like the columns of a church nave. There thrive mimosas and
various species of fig, and climbing palms are not ashamed of their
inquisitiveness.

See this tree 200 feet high, with its round, hard fruits as large as a
child's head! When they are ripe they fall, and the shell opens to let
out the triangular seeds which we call Brazil nuts.

Look at the indiarubber tree with its light-coloured stem, its
light-green foliage, and its white sap, which, when congealed, rolls
round motor wheels through streets and roads.

Here again is a tree that every one knows about. It grows to a height of
50 feet, and bears large, smooth, leathery leaves, but its blossoms
issue from the stem and not among the foliage. Its cucumber-shaped
orange fruits ripen at almost all seasons in the perpetual summer of the
Amazons. In the fruit the seeds lie in rows. The tree grows wild in the
forests, but was cultivated by the Indians before the arrival of white
men, and they prepared from it a drink which they called "chocolatl." It
was bitter, but the addition of sugar and vanilla made it palatable.
This tree is called the cocoa-tree.

Still better known and more popular is another drink--coffee. The
coffee-tree is not found in the primeval forests, but in plantations,
and even there it is a guest, for its native country is Kaffa in
Abyssinia, and coffee came from Arabia to Europe through Constantinople.
Now Brazil produces three-fourths of all the world's coffee, and in all
thousands of millions of pounds of coffee are consumed yearly.

The vanilla plant, also, is one of the wonderful inmates of the forests.
In order that the wild plants which are indigenous in the mountain
forests of Mexico and Peru may produce fruit, the pollen must be carried
by insects. Many years ago the plant was transported to the island of
Reunion in the Indian Ocean, where it throve capitally, but bore no
fruit. The helpful insects of its native country were absent. Then
artificial fertilisation with pollen was successfully attempted, and now
Reunion supplies most of the vanilla in the world's markets.

Think again of all the animals which live in the forest and its
outskirts towards the savannahs! There is the singular opossum, and
there is the sluggish, scaly armadillo, which loves the detestable
termites--those white ants which, with their sharp mandibles, gnaw to
pieces paper, clothes, wood, the whole house in fact. Then there is the
climbing sloth, with its round monkey head and large curved claws. All
day long it remains sleepily hanging under a bough, and only wakes up
when night falls. It lives only on trees and eats leaves. In far-back
ages there were sloths as large as rhinoceroses and elephants. We have,
too, the raccoon in a greyish-yellow coat, also a nocturnal animal,
which sleeps during the day in a hollow tree. He lives on small mammals
and birds, eggs and fruits, but before he swallows his food he cleans it
well, generally in water.

There is a perpetual gloom under the crowns of the foliaged trees and
palms. It is the home of shadows. Only lianas, these parasites of the
vegetable kingdom, raise their stems above the dusky vault to open their
calyces in the sun. Round them flutter innumerable butterflies in gaudy
colours. On the border between sunlight and shade scream droll parrots,
and busy pigeons steer their way among the trees on rustling wings.
There humming-birds dart like arrows through the air. They are small,
dainty birds with breast, neck, and head shining like metal with the
brightest, most vivid colouring. They build their nests carefully with
vegetable fibres and moss, and their beaks are long and fine as a reed.
There is a humming-bird which does not grow longer than an inch and a
half, and weighs little more than fifteen grains.

We must now go back to see how Orellana got on with his two brigantines.

Below the mouth of the Madeira he landed once on the northern bank in a
region inhabited only by tall Amazons, from whom the river received its
name. But the tale of Amazons was really a sailor's romance, just as the
Spaniards dreamed of Eldorado, or the land of gold.

On they went and the river never ended. During their voyage they saw in
lakes by the bank, well sheltered and exposed to the sun, the grandest
of all flowers, the _Victoria regia_ of the water-lily family, floating
on the water. Its leaves measure six feet in diameter, and the blossoms
are more than a foot across. The flowers open only two evenings, first
white and then purple.

Between the mouths of the mighty tributaries Tapajos and Xingu the
Spaniards saw the great grassy plains stretching up to the river. They
only just escaped cannibals on the northern bank. Warned by friendly
Indians, they were on their guard against the _piroroca_, the mysterious
bore, fifteen feet high, which is connected with the flow of the tide
and rushes up the river twice a month from the sea, devastating
everything. Finally they came to the northern mouth of the Amazons
River, having traversed 2500 out of the 3600 miles of its length.

Here Orellana decked his vessels over and sailed out to sea, making for
the West Indies along the coasts of Guiana and Venezuela. Even after the
coast was lost to sight he still sailed in yellow, muddy, fresh water,
and he was far to the north before he came to blue-green sea-water. For
three hundred miles from the mouth the fresh river water overlies the
salt. At Christmas he dropped his anchor on the coast of San Domingo,
and his grand exploit was achieved.

V

IN THE SOUTH SEAS

ALBATROSSES AND WHALES

Like the sting on the scorpion's poison gland, Tierra del Fuego, the
most southern land of America, juts out into the southern sea. It is
separated from the mainland by the sound which bears the name of the
intrepid Magellan. In the primeval forests of the interior grow
evergreen beeches, and there copper-brown Indians of the Ona tribe
formerly held unlimited sway. Like their brethren all over the New
World, they have been thrust out by white men and are doomed to
extinction. They were only sojourners on the coasts of Tierra del Fuego,
and their term has expired. Only a few now remain, but they still retain
the old characteristics of their race, are powerfully built, warlike and
brave, live at feud with their neighbours, and kindle their camp fires
in the woods, on the shores of lakes, or on the coast.

Many a sailing vessel has come to grief in the Straits of Magellan. The
channel is dangerous, and has a bad reputation for violent squalls,
which beat down suddenly over the precipitous cliffs. It is safer to
keep to the open sea and sail to the south of the islands of Tierra del
Fuego. Here the surges of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans roar together
against the high cliffs of Cape Horn.

Who listens to this song, who gazes with royal disdain down over the
spray, who wonders why the breakers have been there for thousands of
years pounding against gates that never open, who soars at this moment
with outspread wings over Cape Horn--who but the albatross, the largest
of all storm birds, the boldest and most unwearied of all the winged
inhabitants of the realm of air?

Look at him well, for in a second he will be gone. You see that he is
as large as a swan, has a short, thick neck, a large head with a
powerful pink and yellowish bill, and that he is quite white except
where his wing feathers are black. His wings are wonders of creation.
When he folds them, they cling close to the body and seem to disappear;
but now he has spread them out, and they measure twelve feet from tip to
tip. They are long and narrow, thin and finely formed as a sword blade.
He moves them with amazing steadiness, and excels all other birds in
strength and endurance. No bird has such an elegant and majestic flight.
He spreads his wings like sails with taut sheets, and soars at a
whistling pace up against the wind. Follow him with your eyes hour after
hour in the hardest wind, and you will see that he makes a scarcely
perceptible beat of his wings only every seventh minute, keeping them
between whiles perfectly still. That is his secret. All his skill
consists in his manner of holding his wings expanded and the inclination
he gives to his excellent monoplane in relation to his body and the
wind. Everything else, change of elevation, and movement forwards with
or against the wind, is managed by the wind itself. When he wishes to
rise from the surface of the sea he spreads his wings, turns towards the
wind, and lets it lift him up. Then he soars in elegant curves and
glides up the invisible hills of the atmosphere.

Most noteworthy is the perfect freedom of the albatross. He shuns the
mainland and breeds on solitary islands; he can scarcely move on the
ground, and when he is forced to alight he waddles clumsily along like a
swan. He comes in contact with the earth only at the nest, where the hen
sits on her single egg and tucks her white head under her wing.
Otherwise he does not touch the ground. He finds his food on the surface
of the sea, and spends three-fourths of his life in the air. There he
soars about from sea to sea like a satellite to the earth, moving freely
and lightly round the heavy globe as it rolls through space.

He is not restricted to any particular course, no distance is too great
for him; he simply rests on his wings and sweeps easily from ocean to
ocean. He is, however, rarer in the Atlantic than in the Pacific Ocean,
and he avoids the heat of equatorial regions. He sails in any other
direction he pleases, where he has most prospect of satisfying his
voracious appetite.

What do you think of an albatross which was caught on a vessel and
marked so that it might be recognised again, and which then followed the
vessel for six days and nights watching for any refuse thrown out? The
ship was in the open sea and was sailing twelve knots an hour, but the
albatross did not tire. Nay, he made circles of miles round the vessel
at a considerable height. On board the ship the watch was changed time
after time, for man must rest and sleep, but the albatross needed
neither sleep nor rest. He had no one to whom he could entrust the
management of his wings while he slept at night. He kept awake for a
week without showing any signs of weariness. He flew on and on,
sometimes disappearing astern, and an hour later appearing again and
sweeping down on the vessel from the front. That it was the same
albatross was proved by the mark painted on the breast. Only on the
seventh day did he leave the ship, dissatisfied with the fare set before
him. He was then hundreds of miles from the nearest coast.

Just think of all the wonderful and remarkable sights he must witness on
his airy course! He sees everything that takes place on the decks of
large sailing vessels, and the smoke rising out of the steamers'
funnels. He marks the clumsy movements of the twenty-feet-long
sea-elephants on the gravel shore of the islands of South Georgia, east
of Cape Horn, and sees the black or grey backs of whales rolling on the
surface of the water.

Perhaps he has some time wandered away northwards over the Atlantic and
seen whalers attack the blue whale--the largest animal now living in the
world, for it often attains to a length of 90 feet. At the present day
whalers use strongly built, swift, and easily handled steam-launches,
and shoot the harpoon out from the bow with a pivoted gun. In the head
of the harpoon is a pointed shell which explodes in the body of the
whale, dealing a mortal wound, and at the butt end a thick rope is
secured. The vessel follows the whale until it is dead. Then it is
hauled up with a steam winch and towed to a whaling station in some bay
on the coast, where it is flitched. Then the oil is boiled out, poured
into casks, and sent to market.

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