The WHEN we survey the actual state of our colonial possessions, almost the only source of trade which our foreign policy has left us, we are filled with shame, discomfort, and alarm. revolutionary principles of our present Government, and the injustice and spoliation, which are the offspring of those principles, have filled all the corners of our vast colonial empire with brooding discontent. In this ominous state of things, we turn our eyes with eager solicitude to every source from whence our declining commerce may be refreshed; and we fain would persuade ourselves, that, as Providence has furnished the physical world with a grand restorative : in the law of compensation, so the Peru as it is a Residence in Lima, &c. By Archibald Smith, M.D. Two Volumes. London: Bentley. * If these countries should become settled, a large capital might be very profitably employed in fishing establishments, both in Chile and Peru. The length of a whaling voyage, and the expense in the same proportion, would then be reduced from three, four, and even five years, to one; for a very few weeks would carry the vessels to the scene of action and bring them back again. The oil, in greater or smaller quantities, as it happened to be ready, would be an acceptable freight for homeward-bound ships; and there would be no occasion to keep large expensive vessels for years at sea, in the hope, often frustrated, of completing their cargoes. This it is, we believe, that makes the whale fishery of these distant seas a hazardous enterprise; but this should seem to be in a great measure remedied by the plan we propose. We have not room to show the other advantages which it embraces. There is one, however, which we cannot but advert te, for in our apprehension, it is of the first importance, namely, the comparative healthiness, both moral and physical, which it would ensure to the seaman. Instead of being estranged and cut off, as it were, from the benignant influences of civilised life, he would have his home and family near at hand, and it would be the duty as well as the interest of his employer to watch over its welfare. The advantage, in point of bodily health, of a short voyage over a long one is too obvious to be insisted on. Our brethren of the United States, to our shame, seem almost to have monopolized this trade; and, what is still more observable, they carry it on principally with British capital. In the Washington Army and Navy Chronicle, for VOL. XLV. NO. CCLXXXI, T ting promontory is the haunt of the furry seal. With what astonishing rapidity has our commerce with the United States, especially since their independence, increased in magnitude and importance! And yet our commerce with Spanish America, if duly fostered, would, in the course of time, be still more important-not only because its productions are intrinsically of greater value, but because we should be the carriers of them; a condition of transcendent consideration to England, whose greatness, nay, whose vital principle, lies wholly in her marine. Out of the various indefinite mass of South American productions, let us take an instance or two from each individual of that majestic triplet which supplies all the wants and luxuries of human life-the vegetable, animal, and mineral kingdoms: from the first we take cotton and sugar-from the second, wool-from the third, the precious metals. When we consider that, of 330 millions of pounds of cotton which are annually imported into Great Britain, 270 come from the United States, we cannot fail to perceive how much we are concerned in cultivating the friendship of a cotton-growing people. Perù alone,† if capital and 1837, the number of vessels at sea, on the 1st January of that year, employed in the South Atlantic and Pacific fisheries, is stated at 256. The number of seamen employed 10,000—and the amount of capital invested 7,000,000 of dollars. See the appendix to Dr Smith's work, vol. ii. p. 288, where the North American whale fishery in the Pacific alone is estimated at 12,500,000 dollars. * We have here stated rather what was and what should be, than what is; for the North American sealers have nearly exterminated the whole race of fur seals. It is greatly to be desired that Englishmen should form establishments in the Pacific for the prosecution of this trade. Under their fostering care, with the aid of good laws, enforced by the proper naval authorities, by which unseasonable and indiscriminate butchery would be prevented, it would soon become a fruitful and perennial source of gain. The Russians have so protected the Fox islands in the North Pacific, that their fur company collects annually upwards of half a million of the best skins, and might probably collect many more without injury to the fishery. The fish (commonly called the squid), which is the food of these valuable animals, abounds in the seas that wash the Falkland Islands-South Shetland, South Orkney, and South Georgia-the island of Tierra del Fuego, of Juan Fernandez, Masafuero, S. Feliz, and S. Ambrosio, off the coast of Chile-all the islands and rocks off the coast of Peru from Mexilones to Payta, and certain uninhabited parts of the coast itself. Also the islands of Guadaloupe, off the coast of California, and the Fox Islands to the north of Japan. Upon all these islands and coasts, with the exception of the Fox Islands, the fur seals, as we have already observed, have been nearly exterminated; which is the more to be regretted, to speak merely in a commercial sense, since their fur has become peculiarly valuable as a substitute for beaver in the manufacture of hats, muffs, &c. So much so, that a good skin, as we have been informed, will now sell in the United States for a Spanish doubloon. To give an instance of the rigorous industry of the North American sealers, we have heard it stated, on very good authority, that, between the years 1794 and 1804, they killed in the small island of Masafuero alone three millions of fur seals, which they sold in China for ten millions of dollars. †The British trade with Peru may be considered as equal to the trade of all other nations with that country: the total value of imports being eight millions, and the British something more than four millions of dollars. This amount, it may be presumed, will soon be increased by the China and Manilla trade, which is now thrown open to British subjects, and which has hitherto been monopolized by the Americans, and upon the same agreeable terms as the whale fishery-that is, principally on British capital. The annual amount of this trade with Peru alone, and for her consumption, is 500,000; with the whole Pacific it falls little short of two millions of dollars, which may be computed as an increase of 40 per cent on the capital invested in China and Manilla. skill commensurate to its powers of production were employed, would be sufficient to counterbalance this fearful preponderance. The cotton plant is indigenous to its climate, and, what is worthy of remark, it continues for years; whereas, in the United States, if we mistake not, it is an annual. What a vast difference this must make in the expense of cultivation! The same do we say of sugar: if justice were done to the Peruvian cane, its rich exuberance would leave us nothing to regret in the loss of our Eastern and Western possessions but the shame of losing them. Of wool, to instance still in the same favoured country, the mountain pastures of Peru are capable of supplying any imaginable quantity and we understand that, from its similarity to the wool of England, it has a peculiar merit in our market. It is likely, moreover, to be improved; for Merino rams have been lately introduced from New South Wales, and as the absurd prejudices which have hitherto checked its exportation are giving way before the influence of a more enlightened policy, there is no saying to what extent this interesting commerce may be pursued. Of the precious metals it were surely unnecessary to point out the transcendent importance, both to this and every other country. After the late convulsion which shook England and the United States to their centre, and was felt more or less throughout the civilised globe, no paper will be tolerated any where that is not convertible into gold and silver; and bankers must consequently hold in hand a much larger supply thereof than heretofore. The demand for gold and silver, therefore, must daily increase, and in the same proportion must that country rise in importance, from whence only it can be supplied, namely, Spanish America. But Spanish America, ever since the inauspicious declaration of its independence, has been vibrating between profligate misrule and the wildest anarchy-between intestine commotion and foreign war; nor does there seem to be any probability of its settling on its centre. Consequently, all its rich treasures are locked upthey are little better than sealed fountains, and the streams which should have irrigated and fertilised the world, have either ceased to flow, or are wasted at their source. Shame to England-the only country that could have staid the plague, and yet has witnessed its desolating course with indifference, although thousands of her own children are numbered among its victims! England, we repeat, is the only country that can stay the plague; because the enormous mortgage debt due by Spanish America to British subjects gives her an exclusive right to interfere. Let her rise, then, for a while, from her crouching ambiguous policy, and, assuming the generous dignity of better days, let her step forth, in the exercise of her undoubted right, and bid these struggling nations cease from their strife, and compel them to disband their armies, and lay aside their tinsel and their swaggery, until they have paid their debts. Under this wholesome and necessary restraint their feverish throes would soon subside the arts and the virtues of peace would diffuse their purifying and invigorating energies through all the veins of the social body-the profligate military, those irritamenta malorum, would be absorbed by productive labour, and Spanish America would be in a condition to perform the part allotted to it by the Creator, in his universal scheme of beneficence. We were led into this vein of thought by the perusal of Dr Smith's very interesting and instructive work, entitled Peru as it is; and we were about to dismiss it with the commendation which it deserves, when an old and privileged friend of ours, who was for many years resident in Lima, walked into our laboratory. Like most of our countrymen who have become habituated to the seducing climate and gentle ethics of that singular place, he is what he calls a lotophagist— ̓Αλλ ̓ αὐτῇ βέλοντο μετ' ἀνδράσι Λωτοφάγοισι Λωτὸν ἐρεκτόμενοι μενέμεν, νότε τε λαθί 5d21. Odys. 9. v. 96. Or, to use the Limenian figure, which is precisely to the same purport as Homer's, " Na tomado el agua de la Pila"-he has tasted the waters of the fountain, and can never be happy but January, was preceded by a gentle shower of rain."-V. i. p. 7. This is a fact worthy of observation. It is in Lima. Our mutual salutations being concluded, we drew our ample morocco to the fire-side, and lowering our lotophagist softly down into it not unusual for earthquakes, even in "softly down, softly down"-we placed Peru as it is before him, and waited the result. That chair, like the Pythian tripod, as all the world can tell, is full of inspiration, and we had a mind to try its influence upon our friend. But notwithstanding he had the advantage of a subject which of all others was the most agreeable to him, he was pretty considerably dull, as our friends on the other side the water would say, and we knew that his idiosyncracy was not adapted to the meridian of our morocco. However, we took down his commentary as he delivered it, such is the privilege of that chair, with all the authority of the plural number—and thus it runs: The work opens with a description of the peculiarities of the Lima climate-its influence on man and beast -and the atmospheric phenomena as indicated by the barometer, hygrometer, and thermometer. In the inhabited parts of the coast of Peru, the equability and mildness of the climate are remarkable, and we admire the beautiful arrangements whereby a country so near to the equator is constantly refreshed from above and from below, from the mountains and from the sea, so that the summer heat of the valleys of the coast rarely exceeds 82 deg. of Fahrenheit. "On one occasion," says Dr Smith, "when we observed the barometer fall from 29 9-10ths to 29 inches, there had been a smart earthquake, which, though it happened in the usually dry month of * Lima, to be succeeded by the fall of a few rain-drops, and some of the severer shocks by heavy showers. This happened in 1746, when the city was ruined, and Callao buried in the sea; and it was considered, as no doubt it really was, as great a calamity as the earthquake itself. We always fancied that electricity was the agent that precipitated the water on these occasions, against the opinion of some eminent philosophers, and, among others, if we are not mistaken, the celebrated M. Humboldt himself, who maintain that earthquakes are not accompanied by any perceptible increase or diminution of electricity in the atmosphere. But, as water might be precipitated by the simple concussion of the superincumbent air, as it sometimes happens during discharges of artillery, we never ventured beyond a mere conjecture. The fact, however, here recorded, of an earthquake being preceded by rain, and that in the driest season of the year, and in a region where rain is almost unknown, seems to confirm our hypothesis-if not, how was the rain produced? While on the subject of atmospherical phenomena, it may not be impertinent to mention, that gales of wind never reach the shores of Peru, or, to use the nautical expression, they do not "blow home.' O, it is beautiful to stand upon a promontory, and look out upon the sublime Pacific rolling its awful surges in thunder on the beach, while all beyond those stormy ridges is smooth "Na tomado el agua de la pila."-This is an expression which the Limenians were wont to use with great complacency, and with no little reason, to denote the enchantments of their city, which made all who had once known it unwilling to leave it. But the spell is broken now. It is no longer the city where no one was suffered, in a worldly sense, to be either poor or sorrowful-it is no longer, in short, the City of the Kings. In our travels we have frequently met with individuals who had resided in Lima during its palmy days, and we have always been struck with the affection they retain towards it-they speak like banished men. The "pila," referred to, is a magnificent bronze fountain in the centre of the principal square, whose dimensions we cannot state; but it is very large, of exquisite symmetry and workmanship, and worthy of particular mention. In the time of the Viceroys it was guarded by a sentry day and night, but now its merit seems no longer to be understood. To give an instance of the vulgarizing character of the revolution, we remember to have seen this beautiful fountain painted by order of the Government, on some patriotic occasion, with stripes of red and white, like a groom's waistcoat, from top to bottom. and blue, and birds are basking on its surface, and there's not a wave to wake them from their slumbers! The instances of lunar influences in Peru, p. 14-16, are very remarkable. This effect of the moon is by many persons thought to be a vulgar error, but, for our own part, we find it to be a very painful verity at every full and change. And what is there surprising in it? The moon affects the sea; if it affect the larger mass of fluids, why not the less-for it is through the fluids which they contain that it acts upon vegetable and animal bodies in the former through the circulating sap, in the latter through the circulating blood? "To enumerate no more particulars," says the Doctor, speaking of the temperature of the Peruvian coast, "we think it will be found true, as a general proposition, that, from the desert of Atacama to the land ing-place of Pizarro, on the banks of the Tumbez-from the southern tropic to close upon the line-there is a progressive diminution of atmospherical humidity."— Vol. ii. p. 206. This phenomenon may be explained, we think, by the fact that the breeze which prevails along the whole of this coast passes, with the exception of a few and comparatively narrow valleys, over nothing but hot sandy deserts, and, of course, is continually losing more and more of its moisture, until, as it draws near to Tumbez, it begins to be saturated with the damps which for ever hang upon the equator. If the prevailing wind were from the north instead of the south, the whole coast of Peru would be a continuous forest. The general effect of the Lima cli mate, we are told at p. 17, is to ener vate and degrade; this is the effect in a greater or less degree of all uniform climates; "the equability of the temperature of the air," says Arbuthnot, "rendered the Asiatics lazy;" but we believe, with our author, that it is nowhere so remarkable as in Lima. Indeed, the inhabitants seem to pride themselves upon it, as a pedagogue is wont to pride himself upon his "emollit mores nec sinit esse feros" -a line which we have hated, by the by, and not without reason, from our earliest youth. They seem to look upon this domesticating quality of their atmosphere as a discipline of their own. When an European arrives among them, in what is vulgarly called rude health-and rude it does certainly appear to the effeminate Limeno-they survey him with a smile and a dejale, luego caerá". which may be Englished in the words of the old song "Never mind him, let him beBy and by he'll follow thee." When that ferocious and truculent old Viceroy Amat arrived in Lima, the following pasquinado was put up in the great square-" aqui se amansan leones"-"lions tamed here;" and it is said that they one day brought the matter to the test, by throwing a line across the street, where his carriage was waiting at the palace gates, so as to stop his way. But how tame and how patient was the lion become! He merely ordered his coachman to turn round and take the opposite direction. Stories such as these the Limenos delight to tell, accounting the achievements of their climate as triumphs of their own.* From the At vol. i. p. 198, our author very truly observes, that the Limenos find a compensation for all the ills which the Revolution has brought upon them in their delicious climate, to which he applies with singular felicity old Homer's description of the Elysian fields. But we should have been better pleased if he had given us a translation of his own, instead of Pope's, which, however melodious, and in that respect it is inimitable, does nevertheless omit the very points wherein the similitude chiefly consists. His modesty has bequeathed us the task of supplying the deficiency. Τῆ περ ῥηίση βιοτὴ πέλει ἀνθρωποισιν, Οὐ νιφετὸς, ἔτ ̓ ἄρ ̓ χειμὼν πολὺς, ετέ ποτ' ὄμβρος, No child of labour there, with feverish head, |