'You cannot imagine, said the old Mandavaca missionary, 'how perverse this familia de indios (family of Indians) is. You accept individuals from another tribe into your mission; they seem tame, honest, good workers; you let them out on a foray (entrada) to capture wild Indians and you can scarcely stop them throttling all they can and hiding pieces of the corpses. We had with us in our pirogue an Indian who had escaped from the Guaisia river. In a few weeks he had become very civilized. At night he helped us prepare our astronomical instruments. He was as cheerful as he was intelligent, and we were ready to employ him. Imagine our disappointment when through an interpreter we heard him say that 'Marimonda monkey meat, although blacker, had the same taste as human meat. He assured us that 'his relations - that is, his tribal brothers -preferred to eat the palms of human hands, as well as those of bears'. As he spoke he gestured to emphasize his brutal greed. We asked this young, pacifistic man through our interpreter if he still felt a desire to 'eat a Cheruvichanena Indian' and he answered calmly that 'in the mission he would eat only what he saw los padres (the fathers) eating'. It is no point reproaching Indians about this abominable practice. In the eyes of a Guaisia Indian, a Cheruvichanena Indian is totally alien to him; to kill one was not morally very different from killing a jaguar. Eating what the fathers ate in the mission was simply convenience. If Indians escape to rejoin their tribes, or are driven by hunger, they quickly fall back into cannibalism.

In the evening we passed the mouth of the Cano del Manati, named after the immense amount of manatees caught there every year. This herbivorous animal of the Cetacea family is called by the Indians apcia and avia, and reaches 10 to 12 feet long. The manatee is plentiful in the Orinoco. We dissected one that was 9 feet long while at Carichana, an Orinocan mission. The manatee eats so much grass that we found its stomach, divided into several cavities, and its intestines (108 feet long) filled with it. Its flesh is very savory, though some prejudice considers it to be unwholesome and fever-producing. Its flesh when dried can last for a year. The clergy consider this mammal a fish, so they eat it at Lent.

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.

At Javita we had the pleasure of meeting a cultured, reasonable monk. We had to stay in his house the four or five days it took to carry our canoe along the Pimichín portage. Delay allowed us to visit the region, as well as rid us of an irritation that had been annoying us for the last two days: an intense itching in the articulations of our fingers and the backs of our hands. The missionary said this came from aradores (literally, 'ploughers') encrusted under our skin. With the aid of a magnifying glass we saw only lines, or whitish parallel furrows, which show why it is called an arador. The monks called for a mulatta who knew how to deal with all the little insects that burrow into human skin, from niguas, nuches and coyas to the arador. She was the curandera, the local doctor. She promised to remove all the insects irritating us, one by one. She heated the tip of a little stick on the fire and dug it into the furrows in our skin. After a long examination she announced, with that pedantic gravity peculiar to colored people, that she had found an arador. I saw a little round bag that could have been the egg of the acaride. I should have been relieved when this clumsy mulatta poked out three or four more of these aradores. But as my skin was full of acarides I lost all patience with an operation that had already lasted until well into the night. The next day a Javita Indian cured us incredibly quickly. He brought a branch of a shrub called uzao, which had little shiny leathery leaves similar to the cassia. With its bark he prepared a cold bluish infusion that smelled of liquorice. When he beat it it became very frothy. Thanks to a washing with this uzao infusion the itching caused by the aradores disappeared. We were never able to find flowers or fruit of this uzao; the shrub seemed to belong to the leguminous family. We dreaded the pain caused by these aradores so much that we took various branches with us right up to San Carlos.