TO RIO JANEIRO. 33 
part of the town is composed of rough stone houses, covered with 
palm leaves. The streets are wide, and in the centre is a large 
public square, the middle of which is occupied by a small wooden 
monument said to be emblematical of royalty ! A chapel, jail, and 
barracks constitute the principal public buildings. The fort, which 
flanks the town, is almost entirely in decay. This is the case with 
almost every thing we saw here : the place is indeed little better 
than an African town. The houses are of stone, one story high, 
partly thatched, and others tiled. Their interior presents only a 
few articles of absolute necessity. Of comfort and cleanliness, in 
our sense of the words, they have no idea. The houses and streets 
are filthy in the extreme, and in both of them, pigs, fowls, and 
monkeys appear to claim, and really possess, equal rights with the 
occupants and owner. 
The population is made up of an intermixture of descendants 
from the Portuguese, natives, and negroes from the adjacent coast. 
The Negro race seems to predominate, woolly hair, flat noses, and 
thick lips being most frequently met with. The number of inha- 
bitants in St. Jago is about thirty thousand. Porto Praya contains 
two thousand three hundred, of which number one hundred are 
native Portuguese. 
The language spoken, is a jargon formed by a mixture of the 
Portuguese and Negro dialects. Most of the blacks speak their 
native tongue. Mr. Hale, our philologist, obtained here a vocabu- 
lary of the Mandingo language, and found it to agree with that 
given by Mungo Park. 
The officers of this garrison were, like the governor, all black. 
The latter made a brilliant appearance, dressed in a military frock 
coat, red sash, two large silver epaulettes, and a military cross on 
his breast. He w 7 as quite good-looking, although extremely cor- 
pulent, and speaks both French and Spanish well. He was very 
civil and attentive. Fruit, bread, cheese, and wines were handed 
about. Some of the wine was made on the island of Fogo, and 
resembled the light Italian wines. The cheese also was made here 
from goats' milk, and resembled the Spanish cheese. After doing 
ample justice to his excellency's good fare, we proceeded to view 
the lions of the place. 
The first and greatest of these is the fountain, or common watering 
place of the town, above half a mile distant by the path, in a valley to 
the west of the town, and almost immediately under it. The fountain 
