Concerning the country I have traveled through, I am fully aware of the great advantages enjoyed by those who travel to Greece, Egypt, the banks of the Euphrates, and the Pacific Islands over those who travel to America. In the Old World the nuances and differences between nations form the main focus of the picture. In the New World, man and his productions disappear, so to speak, in the midst of a wild and outsize nature. In the New World the human race has been preserved by a few scarcely civilized tribes, or by the uniform customs and institutions transplanted on to foreign shores by European colonists. Facts about the history of our species, different kinds of government and monuments of art affect us far more than descriptions of vast emptinesses destined for plants and wild animals.

We walked for hours in the shade of these plant vaults that scarcely let us catch glimpses of the blue sky, which appeared to be more of a deep indigo blue because the green, verging on brown, of tropical plants seemed so intense. A great fern tree (perhaps Aspidium caducum) rose above masses of scattered rock. For the first time we saw those nests in the shape of bottles or small bags that hang from the lower branches. They are the work of that clever builder the oriole, whose song blends with the noisy shrieking of parrots and macaws. These last, so well known for their vivid colors, fly around in pairs, while the parrots proper fly in flocks of hundreds. A man must live in these regions, particularly the hot Andean valleys, to understand how these birds can sometimes drown the noise of waterfalls with their voices.

The military establishment of this frontier consists of seventeen soldiers, ten of whom are detached in neighboring missions. The humidity is such that hardly four rifles work. The Portuguese have twenty-five better-dressed and better-armed men in the fort of San Jose de Maravitanos. In the San Carlos mission we found a garita, or square house, built with unbaked bricks, with six rooms. The fort, or as they prefer to call it, the Castillo de San Felipe, is on the right bank of the Río Negro, vis-à-vis San Carlos. The commander showed some scruples, and refused to allow Bonpland and myself to visit the fort as our passports clearly stated we could measure mountains and perform trigonometric operations on land, but we could not see inside fortified places. Our fellow traveler, Don Nicolás Soto, a Spanish officer, was luckier, and was allowed to cross the river.

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 way Havana looks as you enter the port makes it one of the most pleasant and picturesque places on the American equinoctial coasts. (136) Celebrated by travelers from all over the world, this site is not like the luxurious vegetation along the Guayaquil banks, nor the wild majesty of Río de Janeiro's rocky coasts, but the charms that in our climates embellish cultivated nature are here joined to the power and organic vigor of tropical nature. In this sweet blend of impressions, the European forgets the dangers that threaten him in crowded West Indian cities; he tries to seize all the diverse elements in this vast countryside and contemplate the forts that crown the rocks to the east of the port, the inland basin surrounded by villages and farms, the palm trees reaching amazing heights, a town half hidden by a forest of ships' masts and sails. You enter Havana harbor between the Morro fort (Castillo de los Santos Reyes) and the San Salvador de la Punta fort: the opening is barely some 170 to 200 toises wide, and remains like this for one fifth of a mile. Leaving this neck, and the beautiful San Carlos de la Cabaìa castle and the Casa Blanca to the north, you reach the basin shaped like a clover whose great axis, stretching south-south-west to north-north-east, is about 2. miles long. This basin links up with three creeks, one of which, the Atares, is supplied with fresh water. The city of Havana, surrounded by walls, forms a promontory limited to the south by the arsenal; to the north by the Punta fort. Passing some sunken ships, and the Luz shoals, the water becomes some 5 to 6 fathoms deep. The castles defend the town from the west. The rest of the land is filled with suburbs (arrabales or barrios extra muros), which year by year shrink the Field of Mars (Campo de Marte). Havana's great buildings, the cathedral, the Casa del Gobierno, the admiral's house, the arsenal, the correo or post office, and the tobacco factory are less remarkable for their beauty than for their solidity; most of the streets are very narrow and are not yet paved. As stones come from Veracruz, and as transporting them is expensive, someone had recently come up with the strange idea of using tree trunks instead of paving-stones. This project was quickly abandoned, though recently arrived travelers could see fine cahoba (mahogany) tree trunks sunk into the mud. During my stay, few cities in Spanish America could have been more unpleasant due to the lack of a strong local government. You walked around in mud up to your knees, while the amount of four-wheeled carriages or volantes so typical of Havana, carts loaded with sugar cane, and porters who elbowed passers-by made being a pedestrian annoying and humiliating. The stench of tasajo, or poorly dried meat, stank out the houses and tortuous streets. I have been assured that the police have now remedied these inconveniences, and cleaned up the streets. Houses are more aerated; but here, as in ancient European cities, correcting badly planned streets is a slow process.

Despite the indignation of our guides we opened various mapires to study the skulls. They were all typical of the American race, with one or two Caucasian types. We took several skulls with us, as well as a skeleton of a six- or seven-year-old child, and two Atures adults. All these bones, partly painted red, and partly covered in resin, lay in the baskets already described. They made up the whole load of one mule and, as we knew all about the superstitious aversions that Indians have about corpses once they have been buried, we covered the baskets with newly woven mats. But nothing could fool the Indians and their acute sense of smell. Wherever we stopped Indians ran to surround our mules and admire the monkeys we had bought on the Orinoco. But hardly had they touched our luggage than they announced the certain death of the mule that 'carried the dead'. In vain we tried to dissuade them and said the baskets contained crocodile and manatee skeletons. They insisted that they smelled the resin that covered the bones 'of their old relations'. One of the skulls we brought from the Ataruipe cavern has been painted by my old master Blumenbach. But the skeletons of the Indians have been lost with much of our collection in a storm off Africa, where our travelling companion and friend the Franciscan monk Juan Gonzalez also drowned. We left the burial-ground of this extinct race in a sad mood.