Founded in 1555, under the government of Villacinda, by Alonso Díaz Moreno, Nueva Valencia is twelve years older than Caracas Some justifiably regret that Valencia has not become the capital of the country. Its situation on the plain, next to a lake, recalls Mexico City. If you consider the easy communications offered by the Aragua valleys with the plains and rivers entering the Orinoco; if you accept the possibility of opening up navigation into the interior through the Pao and Portuguesa rivers as far as the Orinoco mouth, the Casiquiare and the Amazon, you realize that the capital of the vast Venezuelan provinces would have been better placed next to the superb Puerto Cabello, under a pure, serene sky, and not next to the barely sheltered bay of La Guaira, in a temperate but always misty valley.

We took nine days to travel the 95 leagues from the island of Cucuruparu to the capital of Guiana, commonly called Angostura. We rarely spent the night on land, but the plague of mosquitoes was diminishing. On the morning of the 9th of June we met many boats filled with merchandise going up the Orinoco by sail towards the Apure. It is a much frequented trade route between Angostura and Torunos. Our travelling companion, Don Nicolas Soto, brother-in-law of the governor of Barinas, took this route to return to his family. During the great floods months are lost struggling against the currents. Boatmen are forced to moor to tree trunks and haul themselves up river. In this winding river they can take days just to advance 200 to 300 toises.

As the missionaries struggle to penetrate the jungles and gain the Indian land, so white colonists try, in their turn, to invade missionary land. In this long-drawn-out struggle the secular arm continually tends to take over those Indians tamed by the missions, and missionaries are replaced by priests. Whites and mestizos, favored by corregidores, have established themselves among the Indians. The missions are transformed into Spanish villages and the Indians soon forget even the memory of their own language. So civilization slowly works its way inland from the coast, sometimes hindered by human passions.

Guessing from some signs on an old Portuguese map, the captain of thePizarro thought we were opposite a small fort built north of Teguise, thecapital of Lanzarote. Mistaking some basaltic crags for a castle he salutedit properly by hoisting the Spanish flag and sending a boat with an officerto the supposed fort to find out if the English were lurking in these waters. We were not a little surprisedto discover that the land we took for the coast of Lanzarote was the smallisland of Graciosa, and that for several leagues around there was not asound of life.

The treatment of the copper-colored Indians was accompanied by the same acts of inhumanity that later were meted out to the black Africans, with the same consequences of making both conquered and conquering wilder. From that time wars between the Indians became more common; prisoners were dragged from the interior to the coasts to be sold to whites who chained them to their boats. Yet the Spaniards at that period, and long after, were one of the most civilized nations of Europe. The light that art and literature shed over Italy was reflected on every nation whose language stemmed from the same source as that of Dante and Petrarch. One might have expected a general sweetening of manners as the natural consequence of this noble awakening of the mind, this soaring of the imagination. But across the seas, wherever the thirst for riches led to the abuse of power, the nations of Europe have always displayed the same characteristics. The noble century of Leo X was marked in the New World by acts of cruelty that belonged to a barbaric past.

That the Cross is nearly perpendicular when it passes the meridian is known to all who inhabit the Tropics. It has been observed at which hour of the night, in different seasons, the Cross is erect or inclined. How often have we heard our guides exclaim in the savannahs of Venezuela or in the desert stretching from Lima to Trujillo, 'Midnight is past, the Cross begins to bend! How those words reminded me of that moving scene where Paul and Virginie, seated near the source of the river Lataniers, chat together for the last time, and where the old man, at the sight of the Southern Cross, warns them that it is time to separate!

The Indians who go harvesting take thousands of dried or lightly cooked eggs away to their villages. Our towers always had some in baskets or cotton bags. When they are well preserved the taste is not too bad. They showed us large turtle shells emptied by jaguars, who wait for the turtles on the beach where the eggs are laid. They attack them on the sand. To eat them they turn them upside down so that the undershell is right-side up. In this position the turtles cannot right themselves, and as jaguars turn many more over than they can eat in one night the Indians avail themselves of the cats' greed and cunning. If you think how hard it is for a travelling naturalist to pull the turtle's body out without separating it from the cuirass of the shell you can only admire the litheness of the jaguar's paw as it empties the two-sided shield of the arrau as if the muscular ligaments had been severed by a surgeon. The jaguar chases turtles into the water, even digs up the eggs, and, along with the crocodile, heron and gallinazo vulture, is one of the cruellest enemies of the newborn turtles. When the first rains come called 'turtle rains' (peje canepori) - the wild Indians go along the Orinoco banks with their poisoned arrows and kill the turtles as they warm themselves in the sun.