ving credit to
their stories, otherwise you will be apt to be led astray.

Many a ridiculous thing concerning the interior of Guiana has been
propagated and received as true, merely because six or seven Indians,
questioned separately, have agreed in their narrative.

Ask those who live high up in the Demerara, and they will, every one of
them, tell you that there is a nation of Indians with long tails; that
they are very malicious, cruel and ill-natured; and that the Portuguese
have been obliged to stop them off in a certain river, to prevent their
depredations. They have also dreadful stories concerning a horrible
beast, called the watermamma, which, when it happens to take a spite
against a canoe, rises out of the river, and in the most unrelenting
manner possible carries both canoe and Indians down to the bottom with
it, and there destroys them. Ludicrous extravagances; pleasing to those
fond of the marvellous, and excellent matter for a distempered brain.

The misinformed and timid court of policy in Demerara was made the dupe
of a savage, who came down the Essequibo, and gave himself out as king of
a mighty tribe. This naked wild man of the woods seemed to hold the said
court in tolerable contempt, and demanded immense supplies, all which he
got; and moreover, some time after, an invitation to come down the
ensuing year for more, which he took care not to forget.

This noisy chieftain boasted so much of his dynasty and domain, that the
Government was induced to send up an expedition into his territories to
see if he had spoken the truth, and nothing but the truth. It appeared,
however, that his palace was nothing but a hut, the monarch a needy
savage, the heir-apparent nothing to inherit but his father's club and
bow and arrows, and his officers of state wild and uncultivated as the
forests through which they strayed.

There was nothing in the hut of this savage, saving the presents he had
received from Government, but what was barely sufficient to support
existence; nothing that indicated a power to collect a hostile force;
nothing that showed the least progress towards civilisation. All was
rude and barbarous in the extreme, expressive of the utmost poverty and a
scanty population.

You may travel six or seven days without seeing a hut, and when you reach
a settlement it seldom contains more than ten.

The further you advance into the interior the more you are convinced that
it is thinly inhabited.