On the 13th of July we reached the village of Can, the first of the Carib missions dependent on the Observance monks from the Piritu college. As usual we stayed in the convent, that is, with the parish priest. Apart from passports issued by the Captain-General of the province, we also carried recommendations from bishops and the director of the Orinoco missions. From the coasts of New California to Valdivia and the mouth of the River Plate, along 2, leagues, you can overcome all obstacles by appealing to the protection of the American clergy. Their power is too well entrenched for a new order of things to break out for a long time. Our host could hardly believe how 'people born in northern Europe could arrive in his village from the frontiers with Brazil by the Río Negro, and not by the Cumanà coast'. Although affable, he was also extremely curious, like everyone who meets travelers who are not Spanish. He was sure that the minerals we carried contained gold, and that the plants we had dried were medicinal. Here, as in many parts of Europe, sciences interest people only if they bring immediate and practical benefit.

A dreadful accident almost made me put off my Orinoco journey, or postpone it for a long time. On the 27th of October, the night before the eclipse, we were strolling along the gulf shore as usual, to take some fresh air and observe high tide. Its highest point in this area was no more than 12 to 13 inches. It was eight at night and the breeze had not begun. The sky was overcast and during this dead calm it was extremely hot. We were crossing the beach that separates the landing-stage from the Guaiquerí Indian village. I heard somebody walking behind me; as I turned I saw a tall man, the color of a mulatto, and naked to the waist. Just above my head he was holding a macana, a huge stick made of palm-tree wood, enlarged at the end like a club. I avoided his blow by leaping to the left. Bonpland, walking at my right, was less lucky. He had noticed the mulatto later than I had; he received the blow above his temple and fell to the ground. We were alone, unarmed, some half a league from any houses, in a vast plain bordered by the sea. The mulatto, instead of attacking me, turned back slowly to grab Bonpland's hat, which had softened the blow and fallen far from us. Terrified at seeing my travelling companion on the ground and for a few seconds unconscious I was worried only about him. I helped him up; pain and anger doubled his strength. We made for the mulatto who, either due to that cowardice typical of his race or because he saw some men far off on the beach, rushed off into the tunal, a coppice of cacti and tree aviccenia. Luck had him fall as he was running, and Bonpland, who had reached him first, began fighting with him, exposing himself to great danger. The mulatto pulled out a long knife from his trousers, and in such an unequal fight we would surely have been wounded if some Basque merchants taking the fresh air on the beach had not come to our aid. Seeing himself surrounded the mulatto gave up all idea of defending himself: then he managed to escape again and we followed him for a long time through the thorny cacti until he threw himself exhausted into a cow shed from where he let himself be quietly led off to prison.

April 29th. The air was cooler, and without zancudos, but the clouds blocked out all the stars. I begin to miss the Lower Orinoco as the strong current slowed our progress. We stopped for most of the day, looking for plants. It was night when we reached the San Baltasar mission or, as the monks call it, la divina pastora de Baltasar de Atabapo. We lodged with a Catalan missionary, a lively and friendly man who, in the middle of the jungle, displayed the activities of his people. He had planted a wonderful orchard where European figs grew with persea, and lemon trees with mamey. The village was built with a regularity typical of Protestant Germany or America. Here we saw for the first time that white and spongy substance which I have made known as dapicho and zapis. We saw that this stuff was similar to elastic resin. But through sign language the Indians made us think that it came from under ground so we first thought that maybe it was a fossil rubber. A Poimisano Indian was sitting by a fire in the missionary hut transforming dapicho into black rubber. He had stuck several bits on to thin sticks and was roasting it by the fire like meat. As it melts and becomes elastic the dapicho blackens. The Indian then beat the black mass with a club made of Brazil-wood and then kneaded the dapicho into small balls some 3 to 4 inches thick, and let them cool. The balls appear identical to rubber though the surface remains slightly sticky. At San Baltasar they are not used for the game of pelota that Indians play in Uruana and Encaramada but are cut up and used as more effective corks than those made from cork itself. In front of the Casa de los Solteros - the house where men lived - the missionary showed us a drum made from a hollow cylinder of wood. This drum was beaten with great lumps of dapicho serving as drumsticks. The drum has openings that could be blocked by hand to vary the sounds, and was hanging on two light supports. Wild Indians love noisy music. Drums and botutos, the baked-earth before trumpets, are indispensable instruments when Indians decide to play music and make a show.

We spent only one day at San Fernando de Atabapo, despite the village, with its pirijao palms and their peach-like fruit, promising us a delightful refuge. Tame pauxis (Crax alector) ran round the Indian huts; in one of which we saw a very rare monkey that lives on the banks of the Guaviare. It is called the caparro, which I have made known in my Observations on Zoology and Comparative Anatomy. Its hair is grey and extremely soft to touch. It has a round head, and a sweet, agreeable expression.

April 10th. We were unable to set sail until ten in the morning. It was hard to adapt to the new pirogue, which we saw as a new prison. To make it wider at the back of the boat we made branches into a kind of trellis, which stuck out on both sides. Unfortunately the leaf roof of this lattice-work was so low that you either had to lie down, and consequently saw nothing, or you had to stay hunched over. The need to transport pirogues across rapids, and even from one river to another, and the fear of giving too much hold to the wind by raising the toldo made this construction necessary for the little boats going up the Río Negro. The roof was designed for four people stretched Out on the deck or lattice-work, but your legs stuck far out, and when it rained half your body got wet. Worse still, you lie on oxhides or tiger skins, and the branches under the skins hurt you when you lie down. The front of the boat was filled with the Indian rowers, armed with 3-foot-long paddles in the form of spoons. They are all naked, sitting in twos, and row beautifully together. Their songs are sad and monotonous. The little cages with our birds and monkeys, increasing as we went on, were tied to the toldo and the prow. It was our travelling zoo. Despite losses due to accidents and sunstroke, we counted fourteen little animals when we came back from the Casiquiare. Every night when we established camp, our zoo and instruments occupied the middle; around them we hung our hammocks, then the Indians' hammocks and, outside, the fires we thought indispensable to scare off jaguars. At sunrise our caged monkeys answered the cries of the jungle monkeys.

The ground of the island rises to form an amphitheatre and, as in Peru and Mexico, contains in miniature all the possible climates, from African heat to alpine cold. (14) The mean temperatures of Santa Cruz, the port of Orotava, Orotava itself and La Laguna form a descending series. In southern Europe the change of seasons is too strongly felt to offer the same advantages. Tenerife on the other hand, on the threshold of the Tropics and a few days' journey from Spain, benefits from a good part of what nature has lavished in the Tropics. Its flora include the beautiful and imposing bananas and palms. He who is able to feel nature's beauty finds in this precious island a far more effective remedy than the climate. Nowhere else in the world seems more appropriate to dissipate melancholy and restore peace to troubled minds than Tenerife and Madeira. These effects are due not only to the magnificent situation and to the purity of air, but above all to the absence of slavery, which so deeply revolts us in all those places where Europeans have brought what they call their 'enlightenment and their 'commerce' to their colonies