The tunal is considered here and everywhere in the Spanish colonies as crucial to military defense; and when earthworks are raised the engineers propagate the thorny opuntia, as they keep crocodiles in the ditches. In regions where nature is so fertile, man uses the carnivorous reptile and a plant with an armor of thorns to his advantage.

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.

On the morning of the 19th of June we caught sight of the point of Naga, but the Pico de Teide remained invisible. Land stood out vaguely because a thick fog effaced the details. As we approached the natural bay of Santa Cruz we watched the mist, driven by wind, draw near. The sea was very rough, as it usually is in this place. After much sounding we anchored. The fog was so thick that visibility was limited to a few cables' length. Just as we were about to fire the customary salute the fog suddenly dissipated and the Pico de Teide appeared in a clearing above the clouds, illuminated by the first rays of sun, which had not reached us yet. We rushed to the bow of the corvette not to miss this marvelous spectacle, but at that very same moment we saw four English warships hove to near our stern, not far out in the open sea. We had passed them closely by in the thick fog that had prevented us from seeing the peak, and had thus been saved from the danger of being sent back to Europe. It would have been distressing for naturalists to have seen the Tenerife coasts from far off and not to have been able to land on soil crushed by volcanoes. We quickly weighed anchor and the Pizarro approached the fort as closely as possible to be under its protection. Here, two years before in an attempted landing, Admiral Nelson lost his arm to a cannon-ball. The English ships left the bay; a few days earlier they had chased the packet-boat Alcudia, which had left La Coruìa just before we did. It had been forced into Las Palmas harbor, and several passengers were captured while being transferred to Santa Cruz in a launch.

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)

The position of San Fernando on a great navigable river, near the mouth of another river that crosses the whole province of Varinas, is extremely useful for trade. All that is produced in this province, the leathers, cocoa, cotton and top-quality Mijagual indigo, is washed down past this town to the Orinoco mouth. During the rainy season big ships come upstream from Angostura to San Fernando de Apure and along the Santo Domingo river as far as Torunos, the harbor for the town of Barinas. During this season the flooded rivers form a labyrinth of waterways between the Apure, Arauca, Capanaparo and Sinaruco rivers, covering a country of roughly 400 square leagues. At this point the Orinoco, deviating from its course, due not to neighboring mountains but to the rising counter-slopes, turns east instead of following its ancient path in the line of the meridian. If you consider the surface of the earth as a polyhedron formed of variously inclined planes you will see by simply consulting a map that between San Fernando de Apure, Caycara and the mouth of the Meta the intersection of three slopes, higher in the north, west and south, must have caused a considerable depression. In this basin the savannahs can be covered by 12 to 14 feet of water and turned into a great lake after the rains. Villages and farms look as though they are on shoals, rising barely 2 to 3 feet above the water surface. The flooding of the Apure, Meta and Orinoco rivers is also periodic. In the rainy season horses that roam the savannah do not have time to reach the plateaux and they drown in their hundreds. You see mares followed by foals, barely sticking up out of the water, swimming part of the day to eat grass. While swimming they are chased by crocodiles, and some carry crocodile tooth marks on their hides. Horse, mule and cow carcasses attract numberless vultures.

The Río Negro and the Jupura are two tributaries of the Amazon comparable in length to the Danube, whose upper parts belong to Spain and whose lower reaches are occupied by Portugal. In these majestic rivers people have gathered in those places where civilization is most ancient. The banks of the Upper Jupura or Caqueta have been cultivated by missionaries who came down from the mountains of Popayan and Neiva. From Mocoa to the confluence with Caguan there are many Christian settlements, while in the Lower Jupura the Portuguese have founded hardly a few villages. Along the Río Negro, on the other hand, the Spaniards have not been able to rival their neighbors. How can they rely on a people so distanced from has the province of Caracas? Steppes and virtually deserted jungle some 160 leagues thick separate the cultivated parts of the river bank from the four missions of Maroa, Tomo, Davipe and San Carlos.