NEWS FROM THE ANDES AND THE AMAZONS.

New Zealand Spectator and Cook's Strait Guardian, Volume II, Issue 82, 2 May 1846, Page 4

NEWS FROM THE ANDES AND THE AMAZONS.

[From the Atlas, October 25.] An alliance is already on the tapis between the two greatest sovereign seas, for the consummation of which preparations are shortly to be commenced on the grandest scale, in that very neck of land, the Isthmus of Panama, which has so long divided their loves and forbidden the bands of marriage. As Thomas Gray, the founder o\ the railway system, wrote in 1820, and Sir Robert Peel condescended to repeat after him in 1845, that trunk lines should always be "" direct," we shall thus have a grand independent trunk steam line direct to Canton or Calcutta, thus cutting the roundabouts and resting places of Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope as decidedly as the " direct independent" Manchester and London, that is to be, proposes to drop Birmingham and Leicester half way — now out of the way — houses of call. Whilst in Europe we are incessantly taxing wit and science how best to save time and annihilate space between realms and regions far apart, as between districts and denizens of the same home, the march of mind is also invading, although yet at no railway rate, the sluggish soil of Peru, and breathing of glorious projects for bringing the metropolis of that land of the Incas within a month's hail and interchange of visit or compliment with the capitals of the old world. The navigation of the great sea river of the Amaeons to the frontiers of Peru may shortly become a project no longer vaguely talked about, accomplished once in a century as a remarkable exploit, and recorded among the marvels of the age, but a regular affair of every day life, like the entrances and exits of steamers and merchant ships at Liverpool and New York. From a batch of Peruvian journals which have come into our hands, of dates to the latter end of June, we learn that a lively sensation had been created in Lima by the reappearance, as from the dead, of a reverend missionary, named Father Plaza, who for forty years had been labouring in his vocation among the Indian tribes on the shores of the great river Ucayali, the chief affluent of the Maranon or Amazons, of which, indeed, it may be said to be rather the main branch than the tributary stream. So long as Peru remained under the domination of the mother country, the missions among the heathen were supported by an allocation out of the revenues | of the state, and by contributions from ecclesiastical foundations ; but with the revolution in 1 820, which ended in the overthrow of the Spanish rule, all the supplies from those sources failed, and Father Plaza, alone and unassisted, was left to fulfill his duties as best he might. From 1821 to 1834 he remained without any communication with his country, the seat all the while of civil wars and anarchy. Great, therefore, was his rejoicing on the reception of a letter in the latter year from Lieutenant Smith, of our Royal Navy, announcing the intended expedition of himself

and Mr. Lowe, with Messrs. Beltran and Ascarate, two Peruvian officers, into those parts, preparatory to their voyage down the Amazons to the Ocean, as subsequently accomplished. He received the party with all kindness and hospitality, and, by his authority with the Indians, greatly contributed to the success of the enterprise. From that period the communications of Father Plaza were re-established with his ecclesiastical superiors of the missionary college of Ocopa, thus re-assured of his existence. Two other missionary friars were sent to assist him in his labours. With Father Cimini, one of these, he undertook laborious researches for the discovery of the river port of Mayro, which in former times had been found and established, under the Spanish Government, as the convenient seat and centre of missionary and trading intercourse with the aboriginal tribes on the shores and down the streams of the Ucayali and Maranon, At length this important object was attained, the desired port was made out, with its evident remains of the missionary settlement abandoned at the time of the great insurrection of the ** Apostate" (so in monkish language he is designated), Inca Santos Atahualpa. At 74 years of age this venerable prefect of the Ucayali mission, for the first time for a quarter of a century, returns to the haunts of civilized men ; he traverses dreary deserts and scales the towering aerros of the Andes for many hundreds of miles, and, as one risen from the tomb, or the inhabitant of another world, at length reaches and reappears in the city of Lima, from whence so many years before he had taken his departure. There he detailed his discoveries and his great projects to the government, and the legislature then in session. His modest demand of an allocation of 3,000 dollars annually for the re-esta-blishment and re-opening of the ancient route from Pasoo to the Pozuzo, and from thence to the port of Mayro, is conceded at once and with popular applause, and hut for the penury of the Peruvian treasuay, would have been largely augmented. He offers, octogenarian as almost he is, to return and superintend the execution of his ov/n vast and beneficent designs for christianizing and civilizing the nomadic wanderers over trackless regions, magnificently endowed, and virgin with nature's choicests products and exhaustless fertility, and bringing them within the pale of European connexion. Thus Europe will be brought into direct communication with the very heart of the land of the Incas, and, in the passage, with an Amazonian world unknown, through the simple unaided labours of a Christian apostle in the desert. " Our communications with Europe," observes Senor Dianderas, in the Peruvian Congress, " will he carried on by the port of the river Mayro, which flows into the Ucayali and Maranon, and the last (otherwise named the Amazons) into the Atlantic Ocean. By an approximative calculation, a steam vessel starting from the Mayro may arrive at Bordeaux, or at Cadiz, which is almost in the same latitude, in twenty-six days. What a grand prospect for us, that we shall be able to receive a letter from those cities in twenty-six days at Mayro, and from thence to this capital with a delay of only eight days more?" Here we have a direct river navigation of between two and three thousand miles, from the mouth of the Amazons to the foot of the Andes, about to be opened to commerce ; and a sea separation and voyage of four months superseded by a sea and river transit of thirty days. We have already witnessed the arrival in this country of a vessel from the interior of the Amazons, loaded with various native products and woods, on board of which came several native Indians of those parts. The King of the French is, it is said, about to despatch, or may already have despatched, an expedition of discovery, which is to ascend that giant of rivers to all the Textent to which it is navigable. The eyes of all Europe therefore will, ere loog, be concentrated upon the measureless wilds opened by that new river world, where, as the Met -curio Peruano of 1791, a copy of which precious work is now before us, observes, in a relation of the voyage, labours, and discoveries of the missionary, Father Narciso Girbal, along the coast of the same great river, in 1790, the simple natives, on seeing a white man for the first time, were filled with admiration, and " not content with the evidence of their eyes, passed their hands over all parts of his face, more especially the women," to be satisfied of the substantial wonder — A sensibus esse cveatatn, Notitiam veri, neque sensus posse refelli.