Sometimes, and it's the only accident the Indians fear, the canoes break against rocks. Then, their bodies bloodied, the Indians try to escape the whirlpools and swim ashore. In those places where the rocks are very high, or the embankment they are going up crosses the whole river, they roll the boat up on tree trunks.

We waited nearly the whole day in the miserable village of Mahates for the animals carrying our belongings to the landing-stage on the Magdalena river. It was suffocatingly hot; at this time of year there is not a breath of wind. Feeling depressed we lay on the ground in the main square. My barometer had broken and it was the last one I had. I had anticipated measuring the slope of the river and fixing the speed of its current and the position of different stages through astronomical observations. Only travelers know how painful it is to suffer such accidents, which continued to dog me in the Andes and in Mexico; each time this happened I felt the same. Of all the instruments a traveler should carry the barometer is the one, despite all its imperfections, that caused me the most worry and whose loss I felt the most. Only chronometers, which sometimes suddenly and unpredictably change their rates, give rise to the same sense of loss. Indeed, after travelling thousands of leagues over land with astronomical and physical instruments, you are tempted to cry out: 'Lucky are those who travel without instruments that break, without dried plants that get wet, without animal collections that rot; lucky are those who travel the world to see it with their own eyes, trying to understand it, and recollecting the sweet emotions that nature inspires!

It was already dark when we crossed the Orinoco bed for the last time. We meant to spend the night near the small San Rafael fort and begin the journey across the Venezuelan steppes at dawn. Nearly six weeks had passed since our arrival at Angostura, we dearly wanted to reach the Cumanà or Nueva Barcelona coasts to find a boat to take us to Cuba and then on to Mexico. After several months on mosquito-infested rivers in small canoes, a long sea journey excited our imaginations.

Those who have not traveled the great rivers of tropical America, like the Orinoco or the Magdalena, cannot imagine how all day long, ceaselessly, you are tormented by mosquitoes that float in the air, and how this crowd of little animals can make huge stretches of land uninhabitable. However used to the pain you may become, without complaining; however much you try to observe the object you are studying, the mosquitoes, jejenes and zancudos will tear you away as they cover your head and hands, pricking you with their needle-like suckers through your clothes, and climbing into your nose and mouth, making you cough and sneeze whenever you try to talk. In the Orinoco missions the plaga de las moscas, or plague of mosquitoes, is an inexhaustible subject of conversation. When two people meet in the morning the first questions they ask each other are, 'Que le han parecido los zancudos de anoche? and 'Como estamos hoy de mosquitos? ('How were the zancudos last night? and 'How are we for mosquitoes today?').

We did not leave the Pericantral farm until dark. We spent a very uncomfortable night in the narrow, overloaded pirogue. At three in the morning we found ourselves at the mouth of the Manzanares river. As the sun rose we saw the zamuro vultures (Vultur aura) perched in flocks of forty and fifty in the coconut palms. To sleep, these birds line up together on branches like fowl, and are so lazy that they go to sleep ages before sunset and do not wake up until the sun is up. It seems as if the trees with pinnate leaves share this laziness with the birds. The mimosas and tamarinds close their leaves when the sky is clear some twenty-five to thirty-five minutes before sunset, and in the morning do not open them again until the sun is high up.

The sea-crossing from Santa Cruz to Cumana, the most eastern part of the New Continent, was indescribably beautiful. We cut the Tropic of Cancer on the 27th and, despite the Pizarro not being a fast sailer, took only twenty days to cover the 900 leagues that separate the African coast from the New World. Some land birds, blown out to sea by the strong wind, followed us for a few days.