WILD PIKE-APPLES. 
433 
apple forms the ornament of the fields near the Havannah, 
where it is planted in parallel rows; on the sides of the 
Duida it embellishes the turf of the savannahs, lifting its 
yellow fruit, crowned with a tuft of silvery leaves, above 
the setaria, the paspalum, and a few cyperaceae. This plant, 
which the Indians of the Orinoco call ana-curua, has been 
propagated since the sixteenth centui-y in the interior of 
China,* and some English travellers found it recently, toge- 
ther with other plants indubitably American (maize, cassava, 
tobacco, and pimento), on the banks of the liiver Congo, in 
Africa. 
There is no missionary at Esmeralda ; the monk appointed 
to celebrate mass in that hamlet is settled at Santa Barbara, 
more than fifty leagues distant ; and he visits this spot but 
five or six times in a year. We were cordially received by 
an old officer, who tock us for Catalonian shopkeepers, and 
who supposed that trade had led to the missions. On seeing 
packages of paper intended for drying our plants, he smiled 
at our simple ignorance. “ You come,” said he, “ to a country 
where this kind of merchandise has no sale ; we write little 
here ; and the dried leaves of maize, the platano (plantain- 
tree), and the vljaho (heliconia), serve us, like paper in Eu- 
rope, to wrap up needles, fish-hooks, and other little articles 
of which we are careful.” This old officer united in his 
person the civil and ecclesiastical authority. He taught the 
children, I will not say the Catechism, but the Eosary ; he 
rang the bells to amuse himself; and impelled by ardent zeal 
for the service of the church, he sometimes used his chorister’s 
w and in a manner not very agreeable to the natives. 
Notwithstanding the small extent of the mission, three 
Indian languages arc spoken at Esmeralda; the Idapi- 
manare, tho Catarapenno, and the Maquiritan. The last of 
these prevails on the Upper Orinoco, from the confluence of 
* No doubt remains of the American origin of the Bromelia ananas. 
See Cayley’s Life of Raleigh, vol. i, p. 61. Gili, vol. i, p. 210, 330. 
Robert Brown, Geogr. Observ. on the Plants of the River Congo, 1818, 
P- 50. 
t The Arivirianos of the banks of the Ventuari speak a dialect of the 
language of the Maquiritares. The latter live, jointly with a tribe of the 
Macos, in the savannahs that are by the Padf-mo. They are so numerous, 
that they have even given their name to this tribulary »tre nn of th» 
Orinoco. 
VOL. IX. 2 F 
