We sailed up the Essequibo for a hundred miles in a small schooner of
thirty tons, and occasionally took to canoes or coorials to visit the
creeks. We then went up a part of the Mazaroony river, and saw also the
unexplored Coioony: these three rivers join their waters about one
hundred miles from the mouth of the Essequibo. In sailing or paddling up
the stream, the breadth is so great, and the wooded islands so numerous,
that it appears as if we navigated a large lake. The Dutch in former
times had cotton, indigo, and cocoa estates up the Essequibo, beyond
their capital Kykoveral, on an island at the forks or junction of the
three rivers. Now, beyond the islands at the mouth of the Essequibo
there are no estates, and the mighty forest has obliterated all traces
of former cultivation. Solitude and silence are on either hand, not a
vestige of the dwellings of the Hollanders being to be seen; and only
occasionally in struggling through the entangled brushwood one stumbles
over a marble tombstone brought from the shores of the Zuyderzee.

At every turn of the river we discovered objects of great interest.
The dense and nearly impenetrable forest itself occupied our chief
attention; magnificent trees, altogether new to us, were anchored to
the ground by bush-rope, convolvuli, and parasitical plants of every
variety. The flowers of these cause the woods to appear as if hung with
garlands. Pre-eminent above the others was the towering and majestic
Mora, its trunk spread out into buttresses; on its top would be seen
the king of the vultures expanding his immense wings to dry after the
dews of night. The very peculiar and romantic cry of the bell-bird, or
campanero, would be heard at intervals; it is white, about the size of a
pigeon, with a leathery excrescence on its forehead, and the sound which
it produces in the lone woods is like that of a convent-bell tolling.

A crash of the reeds and brushwood on the river's bank would be followed