On the 14th of September we descended the Cocollar towards the San Antonio mission. The road passes at first through savannahs strewn with huge calcareous blocks, and then enters a thick jungle. Having crossed two steep passes we saw before us a pretty valley, some 5 to 6 leagues long from east to west. Here lie the San Antonio and Guanaguana missions. The first is famous for its little brick church, with two towers and Doric columns, in a tolerable style. The prefect of the Capuchins finished building it in less than two summers, despite using only Indians from his village. The moulding of the capitals on the columns, the cornices and the frieze, decorated with suns and arabesques, were all modeled from clay mixed with ground brick. The provincial governor disapproved of such luxury in a mission and the church remained unfinished, much to the regret of the fathers. The Indians in San Antonio did not complain at all, indeed they secretly approved the governor's decision, as it favored their natural laziness.

In the mountainous regions we have just crossed, Indians form half the population of the provinces of Cumanà and New Barcelona. Their number can be calculated at some 60,000, of which some 24, live in New Andalusia. The Indians of Cumanà do not all live in the mission villages. Some are dispersed around the cities, along the coasts, attracted by fishing, and some in the small farms on the llanos or plains. Some 15, Indians, all belonging to the Chaima tribe, live in the Aragonese Capuchin missions we visited. However, their villages are not as densely populated as in New Barcelona province. Their average population is only 500 to 600, while more to the west, in the Franciscan missions of Piritu, there are Indian villages with up to 3, inhabitants. If I calculated the Indian population in the provinces of Cumanà and New Barcelona to be some 60, I included only those living on Terra Firma, not the Guaiquerí on Margarita Island, nor the great number of independent Guaraunos living in the Orinoco delta islands. Their number is estimated, perhaps exaggeratedly, at some 6, to 8,000. Apart from Guaraunos families seen now and then in the marshes (Los Morichales), which are covered with moriche palms, for the last thirty years there have been no wild Indians living in New Andalusia.

The result of my labors have long since been published. My map of the Magdalena river appeared in 1816. Till then no traveler had ever described New Granada, and the public, except in Spain, knew how to navigate the Magdalena only from some lines traced by Bouguer. (142) Travel books have multiplied, and political events have drawn travelers to countries with free institutions who publish their journals too hurriedly on returning to Europe. They have described the towns they visited and stayed in, as well as the beautiful landscape; they give information about the people, the means of travel in boat, on mule or on men's backs. Though these works have familiarized the Old World with Spanish America, the absence of a proper knowledge of Spanish and the little care taken to establish the names of rivers, places and tribes have led to extraordinary mistakes. (143)

In 1797 the San Fernando missionary had led his men to the banks of the Guaviare river on one of those hostile incursions banned both by religion and Spanish law. They found a Guahiba mother with three children in a hut, two of whom were not yet adults. They were busy preparing cassava flour. Resistance was impossible; their father had gone out fishing, so the mother tried to run off with children. She had just reached the savannah when the Indians, who hunt people the way whites hunt blacks in Africa, caught her. The mother and children were tied up and brought back to the river bank. The monks were waiting for this expedition to end, without suffering any of the dangers. Had the mother resisted the Indians would have killed her; anything is allowed in this hunting of souls (conquista espiritual), and it is especially children that are captured and treated as poitos or slaves in the Christian missions. They brought the prisoners to San Fernando, hoping that the mother would not find her way back by land to her home. Separated from those children who had gone fishing with their father the day she was kidnapped, this poor woman began to show signs of the deepest despair. She wanted to bring those children in the power of the missionaries back home, and several times ran off with them from the San Fernando village but the Indians hunted her down each time. After severely punishing her the missionary took the cruel decision of separating the mother from her two infants. She was led alone to a mission on the Río Negro, up the Atabapo river. Loosely tied up, she sat ill the bow of the boat. She had not been told where she was going; but she guessed by the sun's position that she was being taken away from her house and native land. She managed to break her bonds and jumped into the water and swam to the river bank. The current pushed her to a bank of rock, which is named after her today. She climbed up and walked into the jungle. But the head of the mission ordered his Indians to follow and capture her. She was again caught by the evening. She was stretched out on the rock (the Piedra de la Madre) where she was beaten with manatee whips. Her hands tied up behind her back with the strong cords of the mavacure, she was then dragged to the Javita mission and thrown into one of the inns called casas del rey. It was the rainy season and the night was very dark. Impenetrable forests separate the Javita and San Fernando missions some 25 leagues apart in a straight line. The only known route was by river. Nobody ever tried to go by land from one mission to another, even if only a few leagues away. But this did not prevent a mother separated from her children. Her children were at San Fernando so she had to find them, rescue them from Christians, and bring them back to their father on the Guaviare. The Guahiba woman was not closely supervised in the inn. As her hands were bloodied the Javita Indians had loosened her bindings. With her teeth she managed to break the cords, and she disappeared into the night. On the fourth day she was seen prowling round the hut where her children were being kept at the San Fernando mission. This woman had just carried out, added the monk telling us this sad story, 'something that the toughest Indian would not have even considered. She had crossed the jungle in a season when the sky is continuously covered with cloud, when the sun appears. only for a few minutes for days on end. Had she followed the flow of water? But flooding had forced her to walk far from the river, in the middle of jungles where the river is imperceptible. How many times must she have been blocked by thorny liana growing round trees! How many times must she have swum across streams! What on earth could this luckless woman have eaten during her four days' walk? She said that she had eaten only those large black ants called vachacos that climb up trees and hang resinous nests from branches. We pressed the missionary to tell us whether the Guahiba woman had finally enjoyed peace and happiness with her family. He did not want to satisfy our curiosity. But on our return from the Río Negro we learned that this Indian woman was not even left to recover from her wounds before she was again separated from her children, and sent to a mission on the Upper Orinoco. She died by refusing to eat food, as do all Indians when faced with great calamities. (112)

We stopped to observe the howler monkeys, which move in lines across the intricate branches linking the jungle trees in packs of thirty and forty. While watching this new spectacle we met a group of Indians on their way to the Caripe mountains. They were completely naked, like most Indians in these lands. Behind them came the women, laden with heavy packs, while all the men and boys were armed with bows and arrows. They walked in silence, staring at the ground. We would have liked to ask them if the Santa Cruz mission, where we hoped to spend the night, was far off. We were exhausted, and thirsty. The heat was increasing as the storm approached, and we had not found any springs. As the Indians invariably answered si padre and no padre we thought they understood a little Spanish. In their eyes every white is a monk, a padre. In the missions the color of the skin characterizes the monk more than the color of his habit. When we asked those Indians if Santa Cruz was far off they answered si or no so arbitrarily that we could make no sense of their answers. This made us angry, for their smiles and gestures showed that they would have liked to direct us as the jungle became thicker and thicker. We had to leave them; our guides, who spoke the Chaima language, lagged behind as the loaded mules kept falling into ravines.

The San Fernando missionary, with whom we stayed two days, lived in a village that appears slightly more prosperous than others we had stayed in on our journey, yet still had only 226 inhabitants. (109) We found some traces of agriculture; every Indian has his own cacao plantation, which gives a good crop by the fifth year but stops fruiting earlier than in the Aragua valleys. Around San Fernando there are some savannahs with good pasture but only some seven or eight cows remain from a vast herd left behind by the frontier expedition. The Indians are a little more civilized than in the other missions. Surprisingly, we came across an Indian blacksmith.

The city, dominated by the fort, lies at the foot of a hill without greenery. Not one bell-tower nor one dome attract the traveler from afar; just a few tamarind trees and coconut and date palms stand out above the flat-roofed houses. The surrounding plains, especially near the sea, appear sad, dusty and arid, while fresh, luxuriant vegetation marks out the winding river that divides the city from its outskirts and the European settlers from the copper-colored Indians. The isolated, bare and white San Antonio mountain, with its fort, reflects a great mass of light and heat: it is made of breccia, whose strata contain fossil marine life. Far away towards the south you can make out a dark curtain of mountains. They are the high calcareous New Andalusian alps, topped with sandstone and other recent geological formations. Majestic forests cover this inland mountain chain linked along a forested valley with the salty, clayey and bare ground around Cumana. In the gulf and on its shores you can see flocks of fishing herons and gannets, awkward, heavy birds, which, like swans, sail along the water with their wings raised. Nearer the inhabited areas, you can count thousands of gallinazo vultures, veritable flying jackals, ceaselessly picking at carcasses. A gulf whose depths contain hot thermal springs divides the secondary from the primary and schistose rocks of the Araya peninsula. The two coasts are bathed by a calm blue sea lightly rippled by a constant breeze. A dry, pure sky, only lightly clouded at sunset, lies above the sea, over a peninsula devoid of trees and above the Cumana plains, while one sees storms building up and bursting into fertile downpours around the inland mountain peaks.