Natural history -- Nicaragua; Nicaragua -- Description and travel
AFTER breakfast we again continued our voyage up the river, and
passed the mouth of the San Carlos, another large stream running
down from the interior of Costa Rica. Soon after we heard some wild
pigs (Dicoteles tajacu) or Wari, as they are called by the natives,
striking their teeth together in the wood, and one of the boatmen
leaping on shore soon shot one, which he brought on board after
cutting out a gland on its back that emits a musky odour, and we
afterwards had it cooked for our dinner. These Wari go in herds of
from fifty to one hundred. They are said to assist each other
against the attacks of the jaguar, but that wary animal is too
intelligent for them. He sits quietly upon a branch of a tree until
the Wari come underneath; then jumping down kills one by breaking
its neck; leaps up into the tree again and waits there until the
herd depart, when he comes down and feeds on the slaughtered Wari
in quietness. We shortly afterwards passed one of the large boats
called bungos, that carry down to Greytown the produce of the
country and take up merchandise and flour. This one was laden with
cattle and india-rubber. The bungos are flat-bottomed boats, about
forty feet long and nine feet wide. There is generally a little
cabin, roofed over at the stern, in which the wife of the captain
lives. The bungo is poled along by twelve bungo-men, who have
usually only one suit of clothes each, which they do not wear
during the day, but keep stowed away under the cargo that it may be
dry to put on at night. Their bronzed, glistening, naked bodies, as
they ply their long poles together in unison, and chant some
Spanish boat-song, is one of the things that linger in the memory
of the traveller up the San Juan. Our boatmen paddled and poled
until eleven at night, when we reached Machuca, a settlement
consisting of a single house, just below the rapids of the same
name, seventy-miles above Greytown.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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