58 THROUGH THE BRAZILIAN WILDERNESS 



to domestic animals, and are always destructive to fish, 

 and it is good to shoot them. I killed half a dozen, and 

 missed nearly as many more a throbbing boat does not 

 improve one's aim. We passed forests of palms that ex- 

 tended for leagues, and vast marshy meadows, where storks, 

 herons, and ibis were gathered, with flocks of cormorants 

 and darters on the sand-bars, and stilts, skimmers, and 

 clouds of beautiful swaying terns in the foreground. About 

 noon we passed the highest point which the old Spanish con- 

 quistadores and explorers, Irala and Ayolas, had reached in 

 the course of their marvellous journeys in the first half of 

 the sixteenth century at a time when there was not a set- 

 tlement in what is now the United States, and when hardly 

 a single English sea captain had ventured so much as to 

 cross the Atlantic. 



By the following day the country on the east bank had 

 become a vast marshy plain dotted here and there by 

 tree-clad patches of higher land. The morning was rainy; 

 a contrast to the fine weather we had hitherto encountered. 

 We passed wood-yards and cattle-ranches. At one of the 

 latter the owner, an Argentine of Irish parentage, who still 

 spoke English with the accent of the land of his parents' 

 nativity, remarked that this was the first time the Ameri- 

 can flag had been seen on the upper Paraguay; for our 

 gunboat carried it at the masthead. Early in the after- 

 noon, having reached the part where both banks of the 

 river were Brazilian territory, we came to the old colonial 

 Portuguese fort of Coimbra. It stands where two steep 

 hills rise, one on either side of the river, and it guards the 

 water-gorge between them. It was captured by the Para- 

 guayans in the war of nearly half a century ago. Some 



