Guiana is within comparatively easy reach of Europe and the United States. It cannot be doubted that, in the future, it will more and more become a resort of travel, and possibly of much greater settlement and development. Its bad name will be lost: its virtues brought to the front. * * * * * South of the Guiana region and of the Orinoco lies the great region of the Amazon Valley, which we shall now traverse. FOOTNOTES: [4] Readers of Kingsley's grand _Westward Ho!_ will remember the description of La Guayra and the coast here too. [5] The emissary was instructed to suggest the interesting trade policy of a "goods for goods" exchange: a policy which in Latin America and elsewhere might have an important future. [6] This natural canal has been well described in _The Flowing Road_, by Caspar Whitney. [7] _Venezuela_, op. cit. [8] Cf. _Colombia_, op. cit. Also _Venezuela_. [9] _Venezuela_, op. cit. [10] _Colombia_, op. cit. [11] _Venezuela_, op. cit. [12] _Venezuela_, op. cit. [13] There is an indication that British Guiana is itself awakening to the need for exerting itself, in order to bring itself before the notice of a somnolent Mother Country. A deputation arrived in England from the colony in the middle of 1919 charged with the purpose of interviewing the Secretaries for the Colonies and Indian Government, and they went through a course of dinners, meetings and lectures, in which the customary excellent speeches were made. Certain of the speakers made the asservations that British Guiana "could supply all the meat, except mutton, consumed in the Mother Country," and sugar and minerals received equal notice, whilst gold, diamonds and bauxite--an ore of aluminium--were also dangled, metaphorically speaking, before the Imperial-minded diners. To produce these excellent matters, five thousand settlers per annum are required, the word settler being employed as a well-meaning term for coloured labour. There must be a flow of British capital too. But British capital has not very readily been forthcoming. It can be spared for enterprises anywhere in Spanish America, even "wild-cat" schemes, but not for Guiana, apparently. [14] _Guiana, British, Dutch and French_, Rodway, South American Series, a most interesting and valuable work. [15] _Guiana_, op. cit. [16] _Guiana_, op. cit. CHAPTER XI THE AMAZON VALLEY IN COLOMBIA, ECUADOR, VENEZUELA, BOLIVIA, PERU, BRAZIL The River Amazon, whilst it has not the classic interest of the Nile, nevertheless appeals to the imagination in a way that that now well-mapped and travelled waterway may not--in its still mysterious and gloomy solitudes, traversing the largest areas of virgin forests on the face of the globe, spreading its vast and numberless arms over an area unexceeded in size by any other river.