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The entrance of the harbour of Rio de Janeiro is narrow for about a quarter of a mile; it thence widens into a secure basin, which at the town is five miles in breadth, and extends inland beyond the reach of the eye: several fruitful islets are scattered on each side, which, covered with loaded orange-trees, almost realize the fiction of the gardens of the Hesperides.
The shores which surround the harbour are vastly mountainous, forming abrupt and craggy precipices of the most wild and extraordinary shapes. Nature seems to have sported in the formation of this her last work, and to have combined all the fanciful forms, which she scattered more sparingly over the old continent. The entrance of the
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