The sea-crossing from Santa Cruz to Cumana, the most eastern part of the New Continent, was indescribably beautiful. We cut the Tropic of Cancer on the 27th and, despite the Pizarro not being a fast sailer, took only twenty days to cover the 900 leagues that separate the African coast from the New World. Some land birds, blown out to sea by the strong wind, followed us for a few days.

April 27th. The night was beautiful; black clouds crossed the sky with surprising speed. Guapasoso's latitude was 3.53'55". The black waters served as my horizon. I was all the more delighted to make this observation as in the white-water rivers from the Apure to the Orinoco we had been cruelly bitten by mosquitoes, as Bonpland recorded the hours with the chronometer, and I myself adjusted the horizon. At two we left the Guapasoso conucos, going south and upstream as the river, at least that part of it free of trees, began to narrow. At sunrise it started to rain. In these forests we no longer heard the cries of the howler monkeys. Dolphins, or toninas, played by the side of our boat. At about midday we passed the mouth of the Ipurichapano river, and a little later the granite rock called Piedra del Tigre. We later regretted not resting near this rock as we had some problems trying to find a spot of dry land large enough upon which to light a fire and set up our hammocks and instruments.

After two days near the Atures cataract we were happy to load the canoe again and leave a place where the temperature was usually 29°C by day and 26°C at night. All day we were horribly tormented by mosquitoes and jejenes, tiny venomous flies (or simuliums), and all night by zancudos, another kind of mosquito feared even by the Indians. Our hands began to swell, and this swelling increased until we reached the banks of the Temi. The means found to escape these insects are often quite original. The kind missionary Father Zea, all his life tormented by mosquitoes, had built a small room near his church, up on a scaffolding of palm trunks, where you could breathe more freely. At night we climbed up a ladder to dry our plants and write our diary. The missionary had correctly observed that the insects preferred the lower levels, that is, from the ground up to some 15 feet. At Maypures the Indians leave their villages at night and sleep near the cataracts because the mosquitoes seem to avoid air loaded with vapors.

We left the Conorichite mouth and the Davipe mission and at sunset reached the island of Dapa, picturesquely situated in the middle of the river. We were amazed to find cultivated ground and, on top of a hill, an Indian hut. Four Indians sat round a small brushwood fire eating a kind of white paste spotted with black that aroused our curiosity. These black spots proved to be vachacos, large ants, whose abdomen resemble lumps of grease. They had been dried and blackened by smoking We saw several bags of ants hanging above the fire. These good people paid little attention to us, yet there were more than fourteen Indians lying completely naked in hammocks hung one above the other in the hut. When Father Zea arrived they received him joyously. Two young Indian women came down from their hammocks to make cassava cakes for us. Through an interpreter we asked them if the land on the island was fertile. They answered saying that cassava grew poorly but that it was a good place for ants. Vachacos were the subsistence diet of Río Negro and Guianan Indians. They are not eaten out of greed but because, in the missionary's terms, the fat is very nutritious. When the cakes were ready, Father Zea, whose fever seemed to increase rather than decrease his appetite, asked for a bag of smoked ants to be brought to him. Then he mixed these crushed insects into the cassava flour and urged us to taste. It tasted rather like rancid butter mixed with breadcrumbs. The cassava was not acid, but vestiges of our European prejudices restrained us from praising what the missionary called an excellent ant pâté".

Over night the Orinoco had swollen and its faster current took us in ten hours the 13 leagues from the mouth of the Mataveni to the higher Maypures cataract, reminding us where we had camped coming up river. From the mouth of the Atabapo to that of the Apure we enjoyed travelling through a country in which we had long lived. We were just as squashed in the canoe and were stung by the same mosquitoes, but the certainty that in a few weeks our suffering would end kept our spirits up.

The treatment of the copper-colored Indians was accompanied by the same acts of inhumanity that later were meted out to the black Africans, with the same consequences of making both conquered and conquering wilder. From that time wars between the Indians became more common; prisoners were dragged from the interior to the coasts to be sold to whites who chained them to their boats. Yet the Spaniards at that period, and long after, were one of the most civilized nations of Europe. The light that art and literature shed over Italy was reflected on every nation whose language stemmed from the same source as that of Dante and Petrarch. One might have expected a general sweetening of manners as the natural consequence of this noble awakening of the mind, this soaring of the imagination. But across the seas, wherever the thirst for riches led to the abuse of power, the nations of Europe have always displayed the same characteristics. The noble century of Leo X was marked in the New World by acts of cruelty that belonged to a barbaric past.