This hope was not totally justified. The youngest passenger attacked by the malignant fever was unluckily the only victim. He was a nineteen-year-old Asturian, the only son of a widow without means. Several circumstances made the death of this sensitive and mild-tempered youth moving. He had embarked against his will; his mother, whom he hoped to help through his work, had sacrificed her tenderness and own interests in order to assure the fortune of her son in the colonies, helping a rich cousin in Cuba. The luckless youth had fallen from the start into a total lethargy, with moments of delirium, and died on the third day. Yellow fever, or black vomit as it is called at Veracruz, does not carry off the sick so frighteningly quickly. Another Asturian, even younger than he, never left his bedside and, more remarkably, never caught the illness. He was following his compatriot to Cuba, to be introduced into his relation's house, on whom they had based all their hopes. It was desperate to see this young man abandon himself to deep grief and curse the advice of those who had sent him to a distant land, alone and without support.

On my arrival at Terra Firma I was struck by the correlation between two natural phenomena: the destruction of Cumanà on the 14th of December 1797 and volcanic eruptions in the smaller West Indian Islands. Something similar happened at Caracas on the 26th of March 1812. In 1797 the volcano on Guadeloupe Island, on the Cumanà coast, seemed to have reacted; fifteen years later another volcano on San Vincente also reacted, and its effects were felt as far as Caracas and the banks of the Apure. Probably both times the center of the eruption was at an enormous depth in the earth, equidistant from the points on the earth's surface that felt the movement. The shock felt at Caracas in December 1811 was the only one that preceded the terrible catastrophe of the 26th of March 1812. In Caracas, and for 90 leagues around, not one drop of rain had fallen for five months up to the destruction of the capital. The 26th of March was a very hot day; there was no wind and no cloud. It was Ascension Day and most people had congregated in the churches. Nothing suggested the horrors to come. At seven minutes past four the first shock was felt. 'It was so violent that the church bells rang, and lasted five to six seconds. It was followed immediately by another lasting ten to twelve seconds when the ground seemed to ripple like boiling water. People thought the quake was over when an infernal din came from under the ground. It was like thunder but louder and longer than any tropical storm. Following this there was a vertical movement lasting three seconds followed by undulations. The shocks coming from these contrary movements tore the city apart. Thousands of people were trapped in the churches and houses. (78)

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.

Travelers know by experience that views from the summits of high mountains are neither as beautiful, picturesque, nor as varied as those from the heights of Vesuvius, Righi or the Poy-de-Dôme. Colossal mountains such as Chimborazo, Antisana or Monte Rosa compose such a huge mass that the richly cultivated plains are seen only at a great distance where a bluish and watery tint spreads over the landscape. The Tenerife peak, due to its narrow shape and local position, combines the advantages of the less high summits with those of the very high. From its top we can see not only the sea to the horizon, but also the forests of Tenerife and the inhabited coastal strips, which seem so close that their shapes and tones stand out in beautiful contrasts. It could be said that the volcano crushes the little island that serves as its base, and that it shoots up from the depths of the seas to a height three times higher than cloud level in summer.

May 13th. We left Mandavaca at half past two in the morning. After six hours of travelling we passed the mouth of the Idapa or Siapa on the east. It rises on the Uturan mountain. It has white waters. Its upper course has been strangely misrepresented on La Cruz's and Surville's maps, which all later maps have imitated. We stopped near the Cunuri raudal. The noise of the little cataract got much louder during the night. Our Indians said that meant certain rain. It fell before sunrise. However, the araguato monkeys' continuous wails had warned us that rain was approaching.

I accepted, and was very politely welcomed by Captain Gamier. He had been as far to the north-west as Vancouver, and was fascinated by all that I told him about the great Atures and Maypures cataracts, about the Orinoco bifurcation and its link with the Amazon. He had followed my progress from reading English newspapers. (134) He introduced me to several of his officers. For over a year I had not met so many well-informed people in one gathering. I was very well treated, and the captain gave me his state room. When you have come from the Casiquiare jungles, with nothing but the company of a narrow circle of missionaries for months, it is a joy to talk to men who have traveled round the world and broadened their minds by seeing so many different things. I left the boat, blessing the career I had devoted my life to.

We walked round the island with the missionary and a pulpero who boasted that he had been visiting the Indians' camp and the pesca de tortugas for over ten years. People come to this part of the Orinoco in the same way we visit fairs in Frankfurt or Beaucaire. We were on a plain of perfectly smooth sand. 'As far as the eye can see, they told us, 'a layer of sand covers the turtle eggs. The missionary had a long pole in his hand. He showed us that by sounding with this pole (vara) he could determine the depth of the stratum of eggs in the same way a miner discovers the limits of a bed of marl, bog iron or coal. By thrusting the pole perpendicularly into the sand he immediately feels, by the lack of resistance, that he has penetrated into the cavity hiding the eggs. We saw that the stratum is generally spread with such uniformity that the pole finds it everywhere in a radius of 10 toises around any given spot. People speak of 'square poles of eggs'; it is like a minefield divided into regularly exploited lots. The stratum of eggs is far from covering the whole island; it is no longer found where land rises abruptly because the turtles cannot climb to these plateaux. I reminded my guides that Father Gumilla's vivid descriptions assured us that the Orinoco beaches have less grains of sand than turtles, and that they were so numerous that if men and tigers did not annually kill thousands of them the turtles would stop boats sailing upstream. 'Son cuentos de frailes, the pulpero from Angostura whispered; for the only travelers in these lands are poor missionaries and what one calls monks' tales here are what in Europe would be called travelers' tales.