We prolonged our stay in Cartagena as long as our work and my comparisons with Fidalgo's astronomical observations demanded. The company of this excellent sailor and Pombo and Don Ignacio Cavero (once Secretary to Viceroy Gòngora) taught us a lot about statistics. I often quoted Pombo's notes about trade in quinquina and the state of the province of Cartagena's population and agriculture. We also came across a curious collection of drawings, machine models and minerals from New Granada in an artillery officer's house. The Pascua (Easter) processions enabled us to see how civilized the customs of the lower classes are. The temporary altars are decorated with thousands of flowers, including the shiny Plumeria alto and Plumeria rubra. Nothing can be compared with the strangeness of those who took the main parts in the procession. Beggars with crowns of thorns asked for alms, with crucifixes in their hands. They were covered in black cloth and went from house to house having paid the priest a few piastres for the right to collect. Pilate was dressed in a suit of striped silk; the apostles sitting round a long table laid with sweet foods were carried on the shoulders of zambos. At sunset you saw dummies of Jews dressed as Frenchmen, filled with straw and rockets, hanging from strings like our own street lights. People waited for the moment when these judíos (Jews) would be set on fire. They complained that this year the Jews did not burn as well as they had in others because it was so damp. These 'holy recreations' (the name given to this barbarous spectacle) in no way improves manners.

On leaving Spain I had promised to join his expedition wherever I could reach it. Bonpland, as active and optimistic as usual, and I immediately decided to split our herbals into three lots to avoid the risk of losing what had taken so much trouble to collect on the banks of the Orinoco, Atabapo and Río Negro. We sent one collection by way of England to Germany, another via Càdiz to France, and the third we left in Havana. We had reason to congratulate ourselves on this prudence. Each collection contained virtually the same species; if the cases were taken by pirates there were instructions to send them to Sir Joseph Banks or to the natural history museum in Paris. Luckily I did not send my manuscripts to Càdiz with our friend and fellow traveler Father Juan Gonzalez, who left Cuba soon after us but whose vessel sank off Africa, with the loss of all life. We lost duplicates of our herbal collection, and all the insects Bonpland had gathered. For over two years we did not receive one letter from Europe; and those we got in the following three years never mentioned earlier letters. You may easily guess how nervous I was about sending a journal with my astronomical observations and barometrical measurements when I had not had the patience to make a copy. After visiting New Granada, Peru and Mexico I happened to be reading a scientific journal in the public library in Philadelphia and saw: 'M. de Humboldt's manuscripts have arrived at his brother's house in Paris via Spain. I could scarcely suppress an exclamation of joy.

We passed some huts inhabited by mestizos. Each hut stands in the center of an enclosure containing banana trees, papaw trees, sugar cane and maize. The small extent of cultivated land might surprise us until we recall that an acre planted with bananas produces nearly twenty times as much food as the same space sown with cereals. In Europe our wheat, barley and rye cover vast spaces of land; in general arable lands border each other wherever inhabitants live on wheat. It is different in the torrid zone where man obtains food from plants that yield more abundant harvests more quickly. In these favored climates the immense fertility of the soil corresponds to the heat and humidity. A large population can be fed from a small plot of land covered with banana, cassava, yams and maize. The isolation of huts dispersed in the forest indicates to the traveler how fertile nature is.