198 MR. SPRUCE'S BOTANICAL EXCURSION 
hunger, the only eatables being pirarucá and farinha, except on saints’ 
days, when an ox is killed, and the flesh sold in the market. Mr. King 
had been a sufferer from diarrhea during the voyage: the disease was 
now aggravated by eating salt fish and drinking the muddy water of 
the Amazon, and assumed a dysenteric form. I also began to be 
similarly affected; still this did not prevent us from doing our usual 
amount of work, though not with equal ease and pleasure. The cliffs 
by the river took a good deal of looking over: here we gathered a 
few Ferns, a fine pendulous Lycopodium, some Eriocaulonee, and 
numerous plants of higher Orders. The shores of the small Lago de 
Obidos, at the foot of the Serra d’Escamas, yielded us some marsh . 
plants, among others a few much resembling Lastre@a Oreopteris in 
habit and in the position of the sori, but scentless, and with the 
indusium beautifully ciliated ; several trees, of the Orders Huphorbiacee, 
Melastomacee, &c., and some fine shrubby Solanee, Rubiaceae, Legu- 
minose, and Laurinee. In the dense forest was a good deal of a 
Bytineracea, called Cacao-rana by the Indians, and bearing leaves and 
flowers rather like those of the true Cacao, but a tall slender tree, leafy 
only at the summit. We twice penetrated a long way into the primitive 
forest, but it was too dense and gloomy to produce many flowers. 
At Obidos I met a Spanish gentleman, settled at Faro, a small town 
westward of Obidos, on the river Nhamundá, who informed me that 
Victoria regia grew abundantly in some lakes in that neighbourhood, 
and promised to send me seeds of it. I heard, too, from several 
persons, of the same plant inhabiting lakes on the shores of the Rio 
Trombétas. Before leaving England I had determined on ascending 
the Trombétas if practicable; but when I set out from Santarem I had 
no serious intention of doing this for the present, the accounts I 
received there being so very discouraging, and the rainy season being 
close at hand. I was told that beyond a short distance from the mouth 
there were no inhabitants ; that those who went up the river at certain 
seasons in search of Castanhas, &c., were constant sufferers from a 
violent intermittent fever, called seigoexs ; that no one had ever suc- 
ceeded in getting far up the river; and that two Frenchmen who 
.  essayed to pass that way into Dutch Guiana, a few years ago, were 
never afterwards heard of. But, in conversing with Major Da Gama 
. onthe subject, I found that he had himself ascended the Trombétas 
-as far as the mouth of the Cuminà, about twelve months before; and 
