The word 'Guaiqueri', like the words 'Peru' and 'Peruvian', owes its origin to a simple mistake. When Christopher Columbus's companions reached Margarita Island, on whose northern tip these Indians still live, they found several Indians fishing with harpoons, throwing these sharp-pointed sticks tied with string at the fish. Columbus's men asked the Indians in the Haitian language what their name was, but the Indians thought the foreigners referred to their harpoons made of the hard and heavy wood of the macana palm and answered: 'Guaike, guaike', meaning 'pointed stick'. These Guaiqueri are an intelligent and civilized tribe of fishermen, notably different from the wild Guarano from the Orinoco who build their houses up in the mauritia palm trees.

On the point of leaving we were surrounded by those inhabitants who called themselves whites and Spaniards. They begged us to ask the Angostura Government to let them return to the llanos, or at least to the Rio Negro missions. 'However serious our crimes, they said, 'we have expiated them after twenty years of hell in this swarm of mosquitoes. I pleaded their case in a report to the government on the industrial and commercial state of these countries.

From my earliest days I felt the urge to travel to distant lands seldom visited by Europeans. This urge characterizes a moment when our lifeseems to open before us like a limitless horizon in which nothing attractsus more than intense mental thrills and images of positive danger. I was brought up in a country that has norelations with either of the Indies, and I lived in mountains far from thesea and famous for their working mines, yet I felt an increasing passionfor the sea and a yearning to travel far overseas. What we glean from travelers' vivid descriptions has aspecial charm; whatever is far off and suggestive excites our imagination;such pleasures tempt us far more than anything we may daily experience inthe narrow circle of sedentary life. My taste for botanizing and the study of geology, with the chance of atrip to Holland, England and France accompanied by Georg Forster, who waslucky enough to travel with Captain Cook on his second world tour, helpeddetermine the travel plans I had been hatching since I was eighteen years old. What attracted me about thetorrid zone was no longer the promise of a wandering life full ofadventures, but a desire to see with my own eyes a grand, wild nature richin every conceivable natural product, andthe prospect of collecting facts that might contribute to the progress ofscience. Personal circumstances prevented me from carrying out theseabsorbing plans, and for six years I had the leisure to prepare myself forthe observations I would make in the New World by travelling through several European countries and exploring theAlps, whose structure I would later compare with the Andes between Quitoand Peru.

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.