- Nor kill the winding snake, thy foes they eat.
- Thus, on the mangrove-banks of Guayaquil,1
- Child of the rocky desert, sea-like stream, [70]
- With studious care, the American preserves
- The gallinazo,2 else that sea-like stream
- (Whence traffic pours her bounties on mankind)
- Dread alligators3 would alone possess.
- Thy foes, the teeth-fil’d Ibbos4 also love; [75]
- Nor thou their wayward appetite restrain.
VER. 69. mangrove-banks] This tree, which botanists call Rizophora, grows in marshy soils, and on the sides of rivers; and, as the branches take root, they frequently render narrow streams impassable to boats. Oysters often adhere to their roots, &c. The French name of this strange water-shrub is Paltuvier. The species meant here is the red mangrove.
VER. 74. Dread alligators] This dreadful animal is amphibious, and seldom lays fewer than 100 eggs. These she carefully covers with sand. But, notwithstanding this precaution, the gallinazo (a large species of carrion-crow) conceals itself among the thick boughs of the neighbouring trees, and thus often discovers the hoard of the alligator, which she no sooner leaves, than the gallinazo souses down upon it, and greedily scraping off the sand, regales on its contents. Nor is the male alligator less an enemy to the increase of his own horrid brood, than these useful birds; for, when Instinct prompts the female to let her young fry out by breaking the eggs, he never fails to accompany her, and to devour as many of them as he can: So that the mother scarce ever escapes into the river with more than five out of all her hundred. Thus providence doubly prevents the otherwise immense propagation of that voracious animal, on the banks of the river Guayaquil; for the gallinazo is not always found, where alligators are. Ulloa.
VER. 75. teeth-fil’d Ibbos] Or Ebbos, as they are more commonly called, are a numerous nation. Many of them have their teeth filed, and blackened in an extraordinary manner. They make good slaves when bought young; but are, in ge-
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Guayaquil refers to a gulf and river in Ecuador leading to the city of Guayaquil. The modern name of the river is the Rio Guayas. Mangroves are trees of the genus Rhizophora, which contains well over a hundred species, most native to the Old World but some native to the New. Mangroves can thrive in soils of varying levels of salinity and have colonized tropical and subtropical coastlines to form forests and thickets there. ↩︎
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The American black vulture (Coragyps atratus), whose native range includes North, Central, and South America. ↩︎
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The American alligator, Alligator mississippiensis. ↩︎
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Igbo (also Ibo) refers to an ethnic and linguistic group in the Bight of Biafra (now Bight of Bonny) in southern Nigeria. The Bight of Biafra was a major slave-trading region in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, and Igbo came to be a name designation used by slavers and planters. Although he was not Grainger’s contemporary, Olaudah Equiano was a person of Igbo origin. ↩︎