To give some variety to my work I have often interrupted the historical narrative with straightforward descriptions. I begin by describing the phenomena as they appeared to me, then I consider their individual relations to the whole.

We walked round the island with the missionary and a pulpero who boasted that he had been visiting the Indians' camp and the pesca de tortugas for over ten years. People come to this part of the Orinoco in the same way we visit fairs in Frankfurt or Beaucaire. We were on a plain of perfectly smooth sand. 'As far as the eye can see, they told us, 'a layer of sand covers the turtle eggs. The missionary had a long pole in his hand. He showed us that by sounding with this pole (vara) he could determine the depth of the stratum of eggs in the same way a miner discovers the limits of a bed of marl, bog iron or coal. By thrusting the pole perpendicularly into the sand he immediately feels, by the lack of resistance, that he has penetrated into the cavity hiding the eggs. We saw that the stratum is generally spread with such uniformity that the pole finds it everywhere in a radius of 10 toises around any given spot. People speak of 'square poles of eggs'; it is like a minefield divided into regularly exploited lots. The stratum of eggs is far from covering the whole island; it is no longer found where land rises abruptly because the turtles cannot climb to these plateaux. I reminded my guides that Father Gumilla's vivid descriptions assured us that the Orinoco beaches have less grains of sand than turtles, and that they were so numerous that if men and tigers did not annually kill thousands of them the turtles would stop boats sailing upstream. 'Son cuentos de frailes, the pulpero from Angostura whispered; for the only travelers in these lands are poor missionaries and what one calls monks' tales here are what in Europe would be called travelers' tales.

As we approached the shoal surrounding Cape Arenas we admired the phosphorescence of the sea. Bands of dolphins enjoyed following our boat. When they broke the surface of the water with their broad tails they diffused a brilliant light that seemed like flames coming from the depths of the ocean. We found ourselves at midnight between some barren, rocky islands in the middle of the sea, forming the Caracas and Chimanas groups. The moon lit up these jagged, fantastic rocks, which had not a trace of vegetation. All these islands are uninhabited, except one where large, fast, brown goats can be found. Our Indian pilot said they tasted delicious. Thirty years back a family of whites settled here and grew maize and cassava. The father outlived his children. As he had become rich he bought two black slaves, who murdered him. Thus the goats ran wild, but not the maize. Maize appears to survive only if looked after by man. Birds destroy all the seeds needed to reproduce. The two slaves escaped punishment, as nothing could be proved. One of the blacks is now the hangman at Cumanà. He betrayed his companion, and obtained pardon by accepting being hangman.

If you compare the Río Negro with the Amazon, the River Plate or the Orinoco it is but a river of the second order. Possessing it has been, for centuries, of great political interest for the Spanish Government because it affords its rivals, the Portuguese, easy access into the Guianan missions to worry the Capitanía-General of Caracas in its southern limits. Three hundred years have passed in pointless territorial disputes. In different times, according to their degree of civilization, people have leaned either on papal authority or on astronomy. As they have generally been keener to prolong this dispute rather than solve it, only nautical science and geography have gained anything. When the affairs of Paraguay and the possession of the Sacramento colony became important for the two Courts of Madrid and Lisbon, commissioners were sent out to study the boundaries of the Orinoco, Amazon and River Plate. Besides the idle, who filled archives with their complaints and lawsuits, there were a few educated engineers and some naval officers acquainted with the means of determining the position of a place. The little we knew up to the of the last century about the geography of the interior of the Continent is due to these hard-working men. It is pleasing to remind ourselves that the sciences gained accidentally from these border commissions, often forgotten by the states that sent them out.

The pilots trusted the ship's log more than my time- keeper, and smiled at my prediction that we would soon sight land, sure that we still had two to three days of sailing. It was with great satisfaction that on the 13th, at about six in the morning, high land was seen through the mist by someone from the mast. A strong wind blew and the sea was very rough. Every now and then heavy drops of rain fell. Everything pointed to a difficult situation. The captain intended to pass through the channel that separates the islands of Tobago and Trinidad and, knowing that our corvette was slow to turn, feared the south wind and the approach to the Boca del Dragon.

The missionary from the Raudales looked after the preparations for our journey rather too well. He worried that there might not be enough Maco and Guahibo Indians on hand who knew the labyrinth of small canals and rapids that form the raudales and cataracts, so at night he put two Indians in the cepo, that is, they were tied to the ground and fastened together between two pieces of wood with a padlock. In the morning we were awoken by the shouts of a young Indian who was being brutally beaten with a whip of manatee skin. His name was Zerepe, an extremely intelligent Indian who later served us well, but at the time refused to travel with us. He had been born in the Atures mission; his father was from the Maco tribe and his mother from the Maypure; he had run off to the jungle (al monte) and lived with wild Indians for years. He had learned several languages, and the missionary used him as an interpreter. Not without difficulty did we obtain his pardon. 'Without severity, we were told, 'you would get nothing'.