THE CAPITAL OF ECUADOR. On the west coast of South America is found the perfection of sea-travel--fine ships, fair weather, and a still sea. Although one floats under, or rather over, the equator, the atmosphere is cool, the breezes delicious, and the water as smooth as a duck-pond. The Pacific Navigation Company is a British institution, founded by an American, Mr. William Wheelwright, of New York, which has been sending vessels from Panama to Liverpool, through the Straits of Magellan, for over forty years, and has not only a monopoly of transportation on the coast, but subsidies from the British Government and the various South American States whose ports it enters. It charges enormous rates for freight and passengers, the tariff from Valparaiso being forty dollars per ton for freight and two hundred and ninety-seven dollars per head for passengers for a distance about as great as from New York to Liverpool; but the company gives its patrons the best the country affords, and until the recent steam greyhounds were turned out to race across the ocean, had the finest and largest ships afloat. One set of vessels run from Panama to Valparaiso, where a change is made to another set, built for heavy seas, which go through the Straits of Magellan, via Rio de Janeiro, to Liverpool. Those which ply along the west coast from Panama southward are built for fair weather and tropical seas, with open decks and airy state-rooms, through which the breezes bring refreshing coolness. Such vessels would not live long in the Atlantic nor in the Caribbean Sea, but find no heavy weather [Illustration: ALONG THE COAST.] on the Pacific, where the wind is “never strong enough to ruffle the fur on a cat’s back,” as the sailors say, and ships sail in a perpetual calm. The trip to Chili, however, is long and tiresome, lasting twenty-five days. Less than half the time is spent at sea, as there are thirty-eight ports at which the vessels, under the company’s contracts, are obliged to call. Guayaquil, the commercial metropolis of Ecuador, and next to Callao, Peru, and Valparaiso, Chili, the most important place on the coast, is the first stopping-place, four days from Panama. Although the westernmost city of South America, Guayaquil has about the same longitude as Washington, and is only two degrees south of the equator. It is sixty miles from the sea, on a river which looks like the Mississippi at New Orleans, and stretches along the low banks for more than two miles.