feasting and carousing; and who repudiated
all their male children, preserving to themselves
only the female, to be their heiresses and
successors. The Amazons had much gold
plates and crescents, which they exchanged
against certain green stones, called piedras del
higado, and held as amulets against nervous
diseases and liver complaints, fevers, and snake-
bites. These stones are yet to be found, though
rarely. They are green, cylindrical, about two
or three inches long, and perforated. They
were regarded much as the fairy pennies and
various witch stones of our northern
superstitions were regarded; and perhaps, like
them, were witnesses of an elder and extinct
civilisation. Raleigh does not pretend to
have seen any of the Amazons himself: but
he saw, instead, glorious Indian girls of the
Canibal tribe, sold by their parents to the
Spaniards for four or five hatchets, which
Canibal, or more properly Carib, girls the
Spaniards sold afterwards for fifty or a hundred
crowns. They seem to have touched
the Englishman's fancy even more than he
liked to say: perhaps he was not unmindful
of what jealous eyes would read his words of
praise. He saw, too, what filled him with as
much, if with a different kind of admiration;
—the hammocks, or brasill beds, which the
women wove from the cotton-plant, or the
silk grass (bromelia), or from the fibres of
the palm. But he was looking for gold,
and he cared little in comparison for all the
plants and fruits which have been, in fact,
the great gain to us of those new countries:
hoarding up instead every tradition of gold
as the hope which was to guide him, and
laying more store by the "hard white sparre
which the Spaniards called al madre del oro"
(quartz), than by the more subtle riches at
his feet. The great inland lake, the city of
Manoa burning with gold, and the auriferous
rocks of Guiana— none of which existed—
were Sir Walter's dreams and objects: he
never thought of what the cotton-plant
would do for man, nor to what extent a
future trade in the various kinds of farinaceous
food would be carried on, nor the
revolution of food and habits that lay in the
sugar-canes of the steaming savannahs.  All
these were indirect and subtle benefits; and
no man cares for the indirect when looking
to the fame and gain of the positive and
direct.

He saw the Tiuitiuas, or, as we call them,
the Waraus Indians, "a verie goodlie people,
and verie valiant,"  with the most manly and
deliberate speech of any nation whatsoever.
These Tiuitiuas dwelt in winter upon trees,
slinging their hammocks among the branches,
to escape the inundations of the river: but
in the .summer they lived on the ground, like
other folk. He mentions their use of the
tops of the palmetto, or mountain cabbage,
for bread; their refusing to eat anything
but what is wild and natural, disdaining all
food that has been cultivated by man; their
love of tobacco, skill in boat-building, and
peculiar method of showing their love to
their dead chiefs, by beating their bones into
powder, which then the wives and friends
mingled with their drink. He saw the
gorgeous flocks of parrots and macaws feeding
on the manicole palm, which no traveller to
South America and the West Indies can fail to
notice; "birds of all colours, some carnation,
some crimson, orange, tawney, purple, green,
watched, and of all other sorts, both simple
and mixt;"  he saw, on either side of the river,
the most beautiful country that ever his eyes
beheld,— deer coming down to feed by the
water's edge, as if they had been used to a
keeper's call: and he saw the Lagertos,
which modern English call alligators and
caimans. He lost a young negro by one of
these monsters. The negro, "a very proper
young fellow,"  had jumped overboard for a
swim in the warm, calm river, when he was
seized by an alligator, and devoured in the
sight of all. He saw all this, but it was not
what he wanted to see; and he and his men
toiled up the Manamo with hopes that
gradually slackened and faded, as the hour of
fulfilment seemed receding farther and
farther each day.

When his courage and the fortitude of his
men had almost come to an end, he met with
four canoes coming down the river. He
instantly gave chase, and captured the larger
two, which had run themselves ashore; but
the smaller turned up a creek, and so were
lost; for he could not follow them on water,
and it was useless to attempt their pursuit
on land. In the captured canoes was found
a great store of bread, which Raleigh says was
more welcome to them than anything on
earth could have been, excepting gold; and
of this even the capture gave them additional
hope; for the canoes had aboard of them
three Spaniards— a cavallero, a soldier, and
a refiner—all of whom escaped, but left
behind the refiner's basket, with quicksilver,
saltpetre, and the like.

After some help from the Indians, whom
they seem in turn to have well treated and
not oppressed, Raleigh and his men continued
their journey until they entered the Orinoco
—the leading hope of their long travel.

Sailing up, still going westward, Raleigh
was struck with the "blew metalline colour"
of the rocks, which he took to be of steel ore;
but which, as yet, have been found to contain
only manganese and oxide of iron, with
(supposed) carbon and supercarburetted
iron.  The red earth, too, attracted his
notice, and he met with various unknown
tribes of Indians, who lighted a fire by
rubbing two sticks together, and among
whom he specially mentions the Aroras, who
were as black as negroes, very valiant, and
who used the famous poisoned arrows. The
poison of those arrows is yet partially a
mystery; but it is proved, at least, that
neither snakes' teeth nor stinging ants have