We have always spoken of this river as if at its lowest, for fear lest we should convey an exaggerated impression of its capabilities for navigation.

Instead of from five to fifteen feet, it was now from fifteen to thirty feet, or more, deep.

All the sandbanks and many of the islands had disappeared, and before us rolled a river capable, as one of our naval friends thought, of carrying a gunboat.

Some of the sandy islands are annually swept away, and the quantities of sand carried down are prodigious.
The process by which a delta, extending eighty or one hundred miles from the sea, has been formed may be seen going on at the present day--the coarser particles of sand are driven out into the ocean, just in the same way as we see they are over banks in the beds of torrents.

The finer portions are caught by the returning tide, and, accumulating by successive ebbs and flows, become, with the decaying vegetation, arrested by the mangrove roots.