a holiday for the Indians, who give themselves up to games, dancing,
and drinking; and it is also a holiday for the alligators of the
river, who hold high revelry on the remains of the amphibians.
Turtles, or turtle eggs, are an object of very considerable trade
throughout the Amazonian basin. It is these chelonians whom they
“turn”–that is to say, put on their backs–when they come from
laying their eggs, and whom they preserve alive, keeping them in
palisaded pools like fish-pools, or attaching them to a stake by a
cord just long enough to allow them to go and come on the land or
under the water. In this way they always have the meat of these
animals fresh.
They proceed differently with the little turtles which are just
hatched. There is no need to pack them or tie them up. Their shell is
still soft, their flesh extremely tender, and after they have cooked
them they eat them just like oysters. In this form large quantities
are consumed.
However, this is not the most general use to which the chelonian eggs
are put in the provinces of Amazones and Para. The manufacture of
_”manteigna de tartaruga,”_ or turtle butter, which will bear
comparison with the best products of Normandy or Brittany, does not
take less every year that from two hundred and fifty to three hundred
millions of eggs. But the turtles are innumerable all along the
river, and they deposit their eggs on the sands of the beach in
incalculable quantities. However, on account of the destruction
caused not only by the natives, but by the water-fowl from the side,
the urubus in the air, and the alligators in the river, their number
has been so diminished that for every little turtle a Brazilian
pataque, or about a franc, has to be paid.
On the morrow, at daybreak, Benito, Fragoso, and a few Indians took a
pirogue and landed on the beach of one of the large islands which
they had passed during the night. It was not necessary for the
jangada to halt. They knew they could catch her up.
On the shore they saw the little hillocks which indicated the places
where, that very night, each packet of eggs had been deposited in the
trench in groups of from one hundred and sixty to one hundred and
ninety. These there was no wish to get out. But an earlier laying had
taken place two months before, the eggs had hatched under the action
of the heat stored in the sand, and already several thousands of
little turtles were running about the beach.
The hunters were therefore in luck. The pirogue was filled with these
interesting amphibians, and they arrived just in time for breakfast.
The booty was divided between the passengers and crew of the jangada,
and if any lasted till the evening it did not last any longer.
In the morning of the 7th of July they were before San Jose de
Matura, a town situated near a small river filled up with long grass,
and on the borders of which a legend says that Indians with tails
once existed.
In the morning of the 8th of July they caught sight of the village of
San Antonio, two or three little houses lost in the trees at the
mouth of the Iça, or Putumayo, which is about nine hundred meters
wide.
The Putumayo is one of the most important affluents of the Amazon.
Here in the sixteenth century missions were founded by the Spaniards,
which were afterward destroyed by the Portuguese, and not a trace of
them now remains.
Representatives of different tribes of Indians are found in the
neighborhood, which are easily recognizable by the differences in
their tattoo marks.
The Iça is a body of water coming from the east of the Pasto
Mountains to the northeast of Quito, through the finest forests of
wild cacao-trees. Navigable for a distance of a hundred and forty
leagues for steamers of not greater draught than six feet, it may one
day become one of the chief waterways in the west of America.
The bad weather was at last met with. It did not show itself in