The outlying area of Cumana is as densely populated as the old town. This includes Los Cerritos, where we met with attractive tamarind trees, San Francisco to the south-east, and the place where the Guaiqueri live. The name of this tribe was quite unknown before the conquest. The Indians who use this name used to belong to the Warao who still inhabit the marshy area of the Orinoco delta. Some old men assured me that the language of their ancestors was a Warao dialect, but in Cumana and Margarita not one Indian has spoken anything but Castilian for over a century.

As far back as the sixteenth century travelers have greatly differed in their opinions about chocolatl. Benzoni said, in his crude language, that it is a drink 'fitter for pigs than humans'. The Jesuit Acosta asserts that 'the Spaniards who inhabit America are fond of chocolate to excess . . . Fernando Cortez highly praised chocolate as being an agreeable drink if prepared cold and, especially, as being very nutritious. Cortez's page writes: 'He who has drunk one cup can travel all day without further food, especially in very hot climates. We shall soon celebrate this quality in chocolate in our voyage up the Orinoco. It is easily transported and prepared: as food it is both nutritious and stimulating. (83)

The perpetual cool that prevails in La Laguna makes the city the favorite home for the inhabitants of the Canaries. The residential capital of Tenerife is magnificently placed in a small plain surrounded by gardens at the foot of a hill crowned with laurel, myrtle and strawberry trees. It would be a mistake to rely on some travelers who believe the town lies by a lake. The rain sometimes forms an enormous sheet of water, and a geologist who sees the past rather than the present state of nature in everything would not doubt that the whole plain was once a great lake, now dried up. La Laguna has fallen from its opulence since the erupting volcano destroyed the port of Garachico and Santa Cruz became the trading center of the island. It has no more than 9, inhabitants, with nearly 400 monks distributed in six convents, though some travelers insist half the population wear cassocks. Numerous windmills surround the city, a sign that wheat is cultivated in this high country. The Guanches called wheat at Tenerife tano, at Lanzarote triffa; barley in Gran Canaria was called aramotanoque, and at Lanzarote tamosen. The flour of roasted barley (gofio) and goat's milk constituted the main food of these people about whose origins so many systematic fables have been written.

The chief of one of the pirogues offered to stay on board to guide us as a coastal pilot. He was a most trustworthy Guaiqueri; a keen observer, and led by a genuine thirst for learning he had studied the produce of the sea and land around him. It was fortunate that the first Indian we met on arrival was a man whose knowledge was to prove extremely helpful for our journey's objectives. With great pleasure I record his name as Carlos del Pino, who accompanied us for sixteen months up and down the coast, and into the interior.

We suffered much from the heat, increased by the reverberation from the dry, dusty ground. However, the excessive effect of the sun held no harmful consequences for us. At La Guaira sunstroke and its effects on the brain are feared, especially when yellow fever is beginning to appear. One day I was on the roof of our house observing the meridian point and the temperature difference between the sun and shade when a man came running towards me and begged me to take a drink he had brought along with him. He was a doctor who had been watching me for half an hour out in the sun from his window, without a hat on my head, exposed to the sun's rays. He assured me that coming from northern climes such imprudence would undoubtedly lead that night to an attack of yellow fever if I did not take his medicine. His prediction, however seriously argued, did not alarm me as I had had plenty of time to get acclimatized. But how could l refuse his argument when he was so polite and caring? I swallowed his potion, and the doctor must now have included me in the list of people he had saved from fever that year. (67)

By the morning of the 21st of June we were on our way to the volcano's summit. The day was not fine and the peak's summit, generally visible from Orotava from sunrise to ten at night, was covered in cloud. What links an excursion to the peak with similar ones to Chamonix or Etna is that one is obliged to follow guides, and sees only what has already been seen and described by previous travelers.

It was at the cataracts that we first heard talk about the hairy man of the jungle, called salvaje, who rapes women, builds huts, and sometimes eats human flesh. Neither Indians nor missionaries doubt the existence of this man-shaped monkey, which terrifies them. Father Gili seriously related the story of a lady from San Carlos who praised the gentle character of the man of the jungle. She lived several years with him in great domestic harmony, and only asked hunters to bring her back home because she and her children (rather hairy also) 'were tired of living far from a church'. This legend, taken by missionaries, Spaniards and black Africans from descriptions of the orang-utang, followed us for the five years of our journey. We annoyed people everywhere by being suspicious of the presence of a great anthropomorphic ape in the Americas.