April 27th. The night was beautiful; black clouds crossed the sky with surprising speed. Guapasoso's latitude was 3.53'55". The black waters served as my horizon. I was all the more delighted to make this observation as in the white-water rivers from the Apure to the Orinoco we had been cruelly bitten by mosquitoes, as Bonpland recorded the hours with the chronometer, and I myself adjusted the horizon. At two we left the Guapasoso conucos, going south and upstream as the river, at least that part of it free of trees, began to narrow. At sunrise it started to rain. In these forests we no longer heard the cries of the howler monkeys. Dolphins, or toninas, played by the side of our boat. At about midday we passed the mouth of the Ipurichapano river, and a little later the granite rock called Piedra del Tigre. We later regretted not resting near this rock as we had some problems trying to find a spot of dry land large enough upon which to light a fire and set up our hammocks and instruments.

Travelers know by experience that views from the summits of high mountains are neither as beautiful, picturesque, nor as varied as those from the heights of Vesuvius, Righi or the Poy-de-Dôme. Colossal mountains such as Chimborazo, Antisana or Monte Rosa compose such a huge mass that the richly cultivated plains are seen only at a great distance where a bluish and watery tint spreads over the landscape. The Tenerife peak, due to its narrow shape and local position, combines the advantages of the less high summits with those of the very high. From its top we can see not only the sea to the horizon, but also the forests of Tenerife and the inhabited coastal strips, which seem so close that their shapes and tones stand out in beautiful contrasts. It could be said that the volcano crushes the little island that serves as its base, and that it shoots up from the depths of the seas to a height three times higher than cloud level in summer.

May 13th. We left Mandavaca at half past two in the morning. After six hours of travelling we passed the mouth of the Idapa or Siapa on the east. It rises on the Uturan mountain. It has white waters. Its upper course has been strangely misrepresented on La Cruz's and Surville's maps, which all later maps have imitated. We stopped near the Cunuri raudal. The noise of the little cataract got much louder during the night. Our Indians said that meant certain rain. It fell before sunrise. However, the araguato monkeys' continuous wails had warned us that rain was approaching.

I accepted, and was very politely welcomed by Captain Gamier. He had been as far to the north-west as Vancouver, and was fascinated by all that I told him about the great Atures and Maypures cataracts, about the Orinoco bifurcation and its link with the Amazon. He had followed my progress from reading English newspapers. (134) He introduced me to several of his officers. For over a year I had not met so many well-informed people in one gathering. I was very well treated, and the captain gave me his state room. When you have come from the Casiquiare jungles, with nothing but the company of a narrow circle of missionaries for months, it is a joy to talk to men who have traveled round the world and broadened their minds by seeing so many different things. I left the boat, blessing the career I had devoted my life to.

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.

Because there are no records kept in Cumana, and thanks to the persistent destructive activity of the termites, the white ants, no documents older than 150 years remain in the archives, thus making it hard to know the exact dates for the earlier earthquakes. We know only that 1766 was most fatal for the settlers and most remarkable for the natural history of the country. There had been a drought for over fifteen months when on the 21st of October 1766 the city of Cumana was completely destroyed. Every year that date is celebrated by a religious service and a solemn procession. All the houses collapsed in a few minutes, and every hour for fourteen months tremors were felt. In several areas in the province the earth opened up and vomited out sulphurous water. During 1766 and 1767 the Cumana inhabitants camped out in the streets and began rebuilding only when the tremors slowed down to a few a month. While the earth continually rocked it felt as if the air was about to dissolve into water. Formidable rainstorms swelled the river; the year was extraordinarily fertile, and the Indians, whose frail shacks survive the most violent earthquakes, celebrated with dances of joy following an ancient superstition about the destruction of the old world and the birth of a new one.

Having outlined the general aim, I will now briefly glance at the collections and observations we made. The maritime war during our stay in America made communications with Europe very uncertain and, in order for us to avoid losses, forced us to make three different collections. The first we sent to Spain and France, the second to the United States and England, and the third, the most considerable, remained constantly with us. Towards the end of our journey this last collection formed forty-two boxes containing a herbal of 6, equinoctial plants, seeds, shells and insects, and geological specimens from Chimborazo, New Granada and the banks of the Amazon, never seen in Europe before. After our journey up the Orinoco, we left a part of this collection in Cuba in order to pick it up on our return from Peru and Mexico. The rest followed us for five years along the Andes chain, across New Spain, from the Pacific shores to the West Indian seas. The carrying of these objects, and the minute care they required, created unbelievable difficulties, quite unknown in the wildest parts of Europe. Our progress was often held up by having to drag after us for five and six months at a time from twelve to twenty loaded mules, change these mules every eight to ten days, and oversee the Indians employed on these caravans. Often, to add new geological specimens to our collections, we had to throw away others collected long before. Such sacrifices were no less painful than what we lost through accidents. We learned too late that the warm humidity and the frequent falls of our mules prevented us from preserving our hastily prepared animal skins and the fish and reptiles in alcohol. I note these banal details to show that we had no means of bringing back many of the objects of zoological and comparative anatomical interest whose descriptions and drawings we have published. Despite these obstacles, and the expenses entailed, I was pleased that I had decided before leaving to send duplicates of all we had collected to Europe. It is worth repeating that in seas infested with pirates a traveler can only be sure of what he takes with him. Only a few duplicates that we sent from America were saved, most fell into the hands of people ignorant of the sciences. When a ship is held in a foreign port, boxes containing dried plants or stones are merely forgotten, and not sent on as indicated to scientific men. Our geological collections taken in the Pacific had a happier fate. We are for their safety to the generous work of Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society of London, who, in the middle of Europe's political turmoils, has struggled ceaselessly to consolidate the ties that unite scientific men of all nations.