Reptiles. 155 



out of the revolutionary war, which, according to Canning's rambling 

 speculation, was to give rise to a thousand republics, this true Span- 

 iard fought for King Ferdinand VIT. But fortune having declared 

 against him he left the Oronoque, and retired to the island of Santa 

 Cruz, where death closed his mortal career. 



The Spaniards, who have more of pleasure than of puritanism in 

 their composition, think it no harm, after they have performed the sa- 

 cred duties of the day, to enjoy a fine Sunday evening, in gay attire, on 

 the Alameda or public walk, where there is generally a band of music. 

 I had resorted to the walk attached to Angustura, and was in com- 

 pany with Governor Ynciarte, when he stopped on reaching a certain 

 place, and begged my attention to what he was going to relate. " Don 

 Carlos," said he to me, " mark the opening which leads to the Oro- 

 noque. I was on this very spot, a great number of the inhabitants 

 being present, when there suddenly came out of the river an enormous 

 cayman. It seized a man close by me, and carried him off to the wa- 

 ter, where it sank with him to appear no more. The attack was so 

 sudden and the animal so tremendous, that none of us had either time 

 or courage to go to the unfortunate man's rescue." 



This certainly could not have been one of Master Swainson's " slow- 

 paced, and even timid animals," which " an active boy armed with a 

 small hatchet" might easily have dispatched. 



In 1824, I read in one of the newspapers at New York, a detailed 

 account of the death of one of our consul's sons. The youth would 

 bathe in the river Madalena, in opposition to all that the Spaniards 

 could say against so rash an act, on account of the numbers and fero- 

 city of the caymans there. He had not fairly entered the water, when 

 he was seized by a cayman, and disappeared for ever. 



How these dismal exhibitions of cayman ferocity, throw utter dis- 

 credit upon what has been supplied to Lardner's * Cabinet Cyclopce- 

 dia' on Fishes, vol. ii. p. Ill by Swainson ! Had he ever seen any 

 thing of the habits of the cayman, surely he would have paused before 

 he informed his readers in Lardner, "we often met with them (caymans) 

 in the same country as Mr. Waterton, (how comes this } Swainson 

 was never either in Spanish or in Dutch Guiana, in which territories 

 only I fell in with the cayman), but they were so timid that had they 

 been disposed to perform such ridiculous feats as that traveller nar- 

 rates, our compassion for the poor animals would have prevented us." 

 1 have now given, as far as I am able, a true history of the cayman, 

 without any exaggeration, quite free from Swainson's base accusation 

 of my "constant propensity to dress truth in the garb of fiction;" and 



