Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The Berbice River in 1884. PART I. [N the 6th O6lober, 1884, I started from Georgetown for a two months’ natural history expedition on the River Berbice and its tributaries. Chiefly having in view the following objects, viz.: to obtain information of the fauna in the neighbourhood of the falls, and to make journeys into the interior of the country away from the river banks for the purpose of gaining some fresh knowledge about this part of the colony which at present is almost a terra incognita. On the evening of the jth I arrived at plantation Friendship, where the river steamer anchors for the night, and on the following day started to go higher up taking with me three Arawak Indians, who had been procured by Mr. PATOIR to form part of the crew for my expedition. I had secured the services of Mr. BARNARD Leps, a well known resident of the river and a first rate bird-stuffer, whose duties were to accompany me as captain and to give me assistance in the procuring and skinning natural history specimens; it was indeed a disappointment when he told me, almost at the last moment, that it would be impossible for him to travel in consequence of the sudden sickness of one of his relatives. In his place I afterwards engaged Mr. EDWARD Patoir the son of my host at Pln; Friendship who undertook to aft as captain and perform all the necessary skinning work. As the steamer passed Zeelandia I was joined by Mr. J. W. GLADSTONE who was of the greatest service to me, and who did his best, in the face of considerable difficulties, to enable me to make a satisfactory start on the expedition. At Maria Henrietta, where Mr. GLADSTONE has a large house, I landed with the three Indians, my captain remaining on the steamer with the stores in order to take them to Koomaka Downs, where he …
