472 A YEAR OF COSTA RICAN NATURAL HISTORY 



Cruz were not far behind. This day (February i), however, 

 in addition to the roosters, I could plainly hear from my bed- 

 room some Congo monkeys roaring in the nearby forest 

 before sunrise. 



Having taken coffee and provided ourselves with some 

 lunch from Sefiora Fonseca and the Chinese store, we walked 

 to the wharf. The steamboat "Castro" arrived late and it 

 was ten instead of nine o'clock when she left. She was less 

 crowded and more comfortable than her sister ship in which 

 we came, but like her had only one deck ; she might have been 

 fifty feet long. She too was one of the "Vapores Correos 

 de la Empresa de Trasportes Maritimes del Golfo de Nicoya 

 de Manuel Barahona y Compania." 



We steamed quickly down the Estero, where the forest 

 reached to the water's edge, and into the Tempisque, 

 attained and left Puerto Humo without sticking on any 

 mud banks, called at Manzanillo at 4.30 P. M. and arrived 

 at Puntarenas about eight. On the Tempisque some cara 

 blanca monkeys watched us from a tree on the very river 

 bank. Near the mouth of the river, the tide, which had been 

 falling since we left Bolson, had uncovered a long sand bank 

 in mid-stream; on it I counted fourteen crocodiles, some of 

 great size, others small, all looking like logs. Another bank 

 farther down held a smaller number of these reptiles. In 

 the Gulf of Nicoya we passed porpoises several times, and 

 some islands where sea birds nest in numbers, which we did 

 not see on the outbound trip because of the darkness. It 

 was very hot while we stopped at Manzanillo, otherwise 

 the weather on river and gulf was comfortable. 



The voyage from Bolson to Puntarenas ended our travels 

 in Guanacaste. This province formerly belonged to Nic- 

 aragua but became a part of Costa Rica in 1820 under the 

 Spanish colonial government. After the Costa Rican decla- 

 ration of independence in November, 1821, the inhabitants 



