INTRODUCTION 



Rev. J. C. FLETCHER, 



AUTHOK OF "brazil AND BBAZILIANI 



In this day of many voyages, in the Old World and the 

 New, it is refreshing to find an luitrodden path. Central 

 Africa has been more fully explored than that region of 

 Equatorial America which lies in the midst of the Western 

 Andes and upon the slopes of these mountain monarchs 

 which look toward the Atlantic. In this century one can 

 almost count upon his hand the travelers who have written 

 of their journeys in this unknown region. Our own Hern- 

 don and Gibbon descended — the one the Peruvian and the 

 other the Bolivian waters — the affluents of the Amazon, 

 beginning their voyage where the streams were mere* chan- 

 nels for canoes, and finishing it where the great river ap- 

 pears a fresh-water ocean. Mr. Church, the artist, made 

 the sketches for his famous "Heart of the Andes" where 

 the headwaters of the Amazon are rivulets. But no one 

 whose language is the English has journeyed down and 

 described the voyage from the plateaux of Ecuador to the 

 Atlantic Ocean until Professor Orton and his party accom- 

 ]:>lished this feat in 1868. Yet it was over this very route 

 that the King of Waters (as the Amazon is called by tlie 

 aborigines) was originally discovered. The auri sacra 

 fatnes^ which in 1541 urged the adventurous Gonzalo Pi- 



