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#26 Laranjeiras Valley near Sebastianopolis, the city of Rio
de Janeiro.
Latin translation by
Ben Hennelly
This picture too is owed to the skilled hand of Thomas Ender, my dear
friend and companion, who sketched it at the site itself. It was chosen
not so much because it seems to depict especially well the plant life
of the location, as because it enables you to carefully inspect the
outlines and shapes of the great Monte
Corcovado, and to peer into, as it were, the valleys and defiles into which that ridge magnificently erected from masses of granite,
lord of the entire suburban province, is sundered and lowered; at the
same time, I refer the reader back to what was said about Corcovado in the commentaries on etching #19 and 20.
When you have proceeded southward from the center of Sebastianopolis along the seashore, beyond the lovely hill adorned with the church of Nossa Senhora da Gloria you will come to the suburb Catete.
Descending from the west from Mt. Corcovado, the exceedingly
lovely Laranjeiras Valley comes down to meet this road, which is marked by many pleasant
country-houses and gardens; you see the upper part of Laranjeiras here. In 1817, when the picture was sketched,
only a few houses or gardens occupied this valley.
Most of all, black women
busied themselves in number there, washing their clothes, whitened with
mule dung, in the fresh water of the river Ribeirao de Catete;
even still they followed the ways and customs of their homeland, so
that they offered a visitor a living picture of how African women behave.
Now that the number of inhabitants has grown, things are different.
As my good friend Dr. Stephan has informed me, small holdings, called chacaras have been built up with very lovely country-houses.
Where a group of women has taken a seat on the right side of the picture
under the shadow of a wall, a large house now stands, and the valley's
plain has been transformed into a spacious open area, with a happily
leaping spring, or Chafariz
do Machado in the middle, whose basin is made of fine-grained granite from the neighboring hills, thoroughly polished. The house visible
in the elevated location is now a school founded by a British teacher,
many of which flourish in the city.
The sides of the valley, at that time covered with shrubs and low growing
forest, have now for the most part been converted into meadows, which  produce the grass Capim needed to feed horses, or into gardens or coffee nurseries. But the
aged granite rocks powerfully resist human cultivation, and have only
yielded a little through the labor of workmen, so that thus far they
give room in their flat, sunlit spaces to many very beautiful Nopaleae,
where they put forth bright, though quickly wilting flowers, or they
admit tufts of Peperomia
incana, which I first here collected for myself. On the other
hand, the moist, shaded spaces among the rocks offer the botanist an
abundance of mosses, hepatic mosses, ferns and several pleasantly flowering Gesneraceae. Higher
up, on the steep promontories of Corcovado,
thrives a low-growing, dense forest or thicket, which grows and increases
the farther you pass beyond the narrow passages to the body proper of
the ridge. Here too the rock, which lower down was granite or foliaceous
granite of a fine grain, changes into a red, coarse-grained granite noteworthy for the crystals of feldspar it contains.
The two trees that the
artist has portrayed on the left are Carioca
Papaya, which has been disseminated by cultivation throughout
all of tropical America, and Guarea
purgans St. Hil., which the indigenous call Jito;
its bark, which possesses a purgative force, seems in places to be used
in household medicine.
#26 of 42 expedition commentaries
 
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