The pilots trusted the ship's log more than my time- keeper, and smiled at my prediction that we would soon sight land, sure that we still had two to three days of sailing. It was with great satisfaction that on the 13th, at about six in the morning, high land was seen through the mist by someone from the mast. A strong wind blew and the sea was very rough. Every now and then heavy drops of rain fell. Everything pointed to a difficult situation. The captain intended to pass through the channel that separates the islands of Tobago and Trinidad and, knowing that our corvette was slow to turn, feared the south wind and the approach to the Boca del Dragon.

Despite the size of the Esmeralda mission three languages are spoken: Catarpen, Idapaminare and Maquiritare. This last is the dominant language of the Upper Orinoco, like Carin in the Lower[Orinoco], Otomac near the Apure, and Tamanac and Maypure at the Great Cataracts. It was strange to see many zambos, mulattos and other colored people who, through vanity, call themselves Spaniards, and think that they are white because they are not red like the Indians. These people lead a miserable life; most of them had been banished to here (desterrados). To found a territory in the interior as quickly as possible, in order to keep the Portuguese out, Solano had rounded up as many vagabonds and criminals as he could and sent them to the Upper Orinoco where they lived with the unhappy Indians lured from the jungle. A mineralogical error had made Esmeralda famous. The Duida and Maraguaca granite holds superficial seams of a pretty rock crystal, sometimes quite transparent and sometimes colored by chlorite or mixed with actonite and mistaken for diamonds and emeralds. In those mountains, so close to the sources of the Orinoco, everybody dreamed of El Dorado, which could not be far off, with Lake Parime and the ruins of the great city of Manoa.

April 3rd. Since leaving San Fernando we had not met one boat on the beautiful river. Everything suggested the most profound solitude. In the morning the Indians had caught with a hook the fish called caribe or caribito locally as no other fish is more avid for blood. (93) It attacks bathers and swimmers by biting large chunks of flesh out of them. When one is slightly wounded it is difficult to leave the water without getting more wounds. Indians are terrified of the caribe fish and several showed us wounds on their calfs and thighs, deep scars made by these little fish that the Maypure call umati. They live at the bottom of rivers, but as soon as a few drops of blood are spilled in the water they reach the surface in their thousands. When you consider the numbers of these fish, of which the most voracious and cruel are but 4 to 5 inches long, the triangular shape of their sharp, cutting teeth, and the width of their retractile mouths you cannot doubt the fear that the caribe inspires in the river inhabitants. In places on the river when the water was clear and no fish could be seen we threw bits of bloodied meat in, and within minutes a cloud of caribes came to fight for their food. I described and drew this fish on the spot. The caribito has a very agreeable taste. As one does not dare bathe when it is around you can regard it as the greatest scourge of this climate where mosquito bites and skin irritation make a bath so necessary.

The banks of the Manzanares are very attractive, shaded by mimosas, erythrinas, ceibas and other gigantic trees. A river whose temperature descends during the floods to as low as 22'C when the air is 30'C to 35'C is a blessing in a country where the heat is excessive all year round and one wants to bathe several times a day. Children spend a good part of their lives in this water; everybody, including the richest women, knows how to swim. In a country where people live so close to nature the most important question people ask each other on first meeting is whether the river water is fresher than it was the day before. There are several ways of bathing. Each evening we visited a group of respectable people in the Guaiqueri suburb. In the moonlight they would install chairs by the water; men and women were lightly dressed as if at European spas, and would spend hours smoking cigars and chatting with their families and strangers, according to the habits of the place, about the dryness, the heavy rains and the excessive luxury of Caracas and Havana ladies. Nobody worried about the small but rare crocodiles that approach humans without attacking, although dolphins swim upstream and scare bathers by spouting water.

We took the opportunity to use the boat to survey the land around the large bay. words can evoke the feelings of a naturalist who first steps on soiloutside Europe. So many objects call for his attention that it is hard toorder his impressions. At each step he thinks he is coming across something new, and in his excitement he doesnot recognize things that commonly feature in botanical gardens and naturalhistory collections. Two hundred yards off the Coast we saw a man fishingwith a rod. We turned the boat towards him but he fled and hid behind a rock. It took our sailors someeffort to capture him. The sight of the corvette, the thunder of ourcannons in such a solitary place - possibly visited only by pirates - thelaunching of our boat, all this terrified the poor fisherman. He informed us that the island of Graciosa on whichwe had landed was separated from Lanzarote by a small channel called El Río. He offered to guide us to Los Colorados harbor to find outabout the blockade at Tenerife but, when the man assured us that for weeks he had not seen any ships out at sea, captain decided to set sail for Santa Cruz.

We left Caracas on the 7th of February, on a fresh afternoon, ready to begin our journey to the Orinoco. The memory of this period is today more painful than it was years ago. In those remote countries our friends have lost their lives in the bloody revolutions that gave them freedom and then alternatively deprived them of it. (76) The house where we lived is now a heap of rubble. Terrible earthquakes have transformed the shape of the ground; the city I described has disappeared. On the same spot, on the fissured ground, another city is slowly being built. The ruins, tombs for a large population, have already turned into shelter for human beings.

We left San Fernando on the 30th of March at four in the afternoon. The heat was suffocating; the thermometer marked 34'C in the shade despite a strong south-east wind. This wind prevented us from setting our sails. During our journey along the Apure, the Orinoco and the Rio Negro we were accompanied by the brother-in-law of the governor of the Barinas province, Don Nicolas Soto, recently arrived from Cadiz. To get to know land worthy of a European's curiosity he decided to spend seventy-four days with us in a narrow lancha, invaded by mosquitoes. The right bank of the Apure is somewhat better cultivated than the left bank where the Yaruro Indians have built huts with reeds and palm-leaf stalks. They live from hunting and fishing, and are skilled in hunting the jaguar whose skins, called 'tiger skins', reach Spain thanks to them. Some of these Indians have been baptized, but they never go to church. They are considered to be wild because they want to remain independent. Other Yaruro tribes accept missionary discipline. The people of this tribe look like a branch of the Mongol family. Their look is serious; their eyes elongated, their cheek-bones high and with a prominent nose.