Note 28 — Chapter II · TRINIDAD AND THE ORINOCO

Sir Robert Schomburgk, who, as Her Majesty’s commissioner to survey the boundaries of British Guiana, explored the delta in 1841—and some months of his sojourn there was during the rainy season—states explicitly, that not in a single instance did he find Indians dwelling on trees. “We can well suppose that the numerous fires which were made in each hut, and the reflection of which was the stronger in consequence of the stream of vapor around the summit of trees in those moist regions, illuminated at night the adjacent trees; but the fire itself was scarcely ever made on the top of a tree. The inundation rises at the delta seldom higher than three or four feet above the banks of the rivers;”—not twenty or thirty feet, as Raleigh asserts—“and if the immediate neighborhood of the sea and the level nature of the land be considered, this is an enormous rise.”28