Page:The Zoologist, 1st series, vol 1 (1843).djvu/183

Rh out of the revolutionary war, which, according to Canning's rambling speculation, was to give rise to a thousand republics, this true Spaniard fought for King Ferdinand VII. But fortune having declared against him he left the Oronoque, and retired to the island of Santa Cruz, where death closed his mortal career.

The Spaniards, who have more of pleasure than of puritanism in their composition, think it no harm, after they have performed the sacred duties of the day, to enjoy a fine Sunday evening, in gay attire, on the Alameda or public walk, where there is generally a band of music.

I had resorted to the walk attached to Angustura, and was in company with Governor Ynciarté, when he stopped on reaching a certain place, and begged my attention to what he was going to relate. "Don Carlos," said he to me, "mark the opening which leads to the Oronoque. I was on this very spot, a great number of the inhabitants being present, when there suddenly came out of the river an enormous cayman. It seized a man close by me, and carried him off to the water, where it sank with him to appear no more. The attack was so sudden and the animal so tremendous, that none of us had either time or courage to go to the unfortunate man's rescue."

This certainly could not have been one of Master Swainson's "slowpaced, and even timid animals," which "an active boy armed with a small hatchet" might easily have dispatched.

In 1824, I read in one of the newspapers at New York, a detailed account of the death of one of our consul's sons. The youth would bathe in the river Madalena, in opposition to all that the Spaniards could say against so rash an act, on account of the numbers and ferocity of the caymans there. He had not fairly entered the water, when he was seized by a cayman, and disappeared for ever.

How these dismal exhibitions of cayman ferocity, throw utter discredit upon what has been supplied to Lardner's 'Cabinet Cyclopœdia' on Fishes, vol. ii. p. 111 by Swainson! Had he ever seen any thing of the habits of the cayman, surely he would have paused before he informed his readers in Lardner, "we often met with them (caymans) in the same country as Mr. Waterton, (how comes this? Swainson was never either in Spanish or in Dutch Guiana, in which territories only I fell in with the cayman), but they were so timid that had they been disposed to perform such ridiculous feats as that traveller narrates, our compassion for the poor animals would have prevented us."

I have now given, as far as I am able, a true history of the cayman, without any exaggeration, quite free from Swainson's base accusation of my "constant propensity to dress truth in the garb of fiction;" and