It was moving to see the beach where we had first arrived, and where Bonpland had nearly lost his life. Among the cacti stood the Guaiquerí Indian huts. Every part of the landscape was familiar to us, from the forest of cacti to the huts and the giant ceiba, which grew near where we had swum every evening. Our Cumanà friends came to meet the lancha; botanizing had enabled us to meet people from all social classes. They were relieved as there had been news that Bonpland had died of fever on the banks of the Orinoco, and that we had sunk in a storm near the Urana mission.

Our journey from Cuba to the South American coast near the Sinu river took sixteen days. On the 30th of March we doubled Punta Gigantes, and made for the Boca Chica, the present entrance to Cartagena harbor. From there to our anchorage the distance is 7 or 8 miles. We took a pràctico to pilot us but repeatedly touched sandbanks. On landing I learned with great satisfaction that M. Fidalgo's coastal surveying expedition (140) had not yet Set out to sea. This enabled me to fix astronomical positions of several towns on the shore. The passage from Cartagena to Porto Bello, and the isthmus along the Chagres and Cruces rivers, is short and easy. But we were warned that we might stay in Panama a while before finding a boat for Guayaquil, and then it would take ages to sail against the winds and currents. I reluctantly gave up my plan to level the isthmus mountains with my barometer, though I never guessed that as I write today (1827) people would still be ignorant of the height of the ridge dividing the waters of the isthmus. (141) Everybody agreed that a land journey via Bogotà, Popayàn, Quito and Cajamaraca would be better than a sea journey, and would enable us to explore far more. The European preference for the tierras frías, the cold, temperate climate of the Andes, helped us make our decision. The distances were known, but not the time we finally took. We had no idea it would take us eighteen months to cross from Cartagena to Lima. This change in our plan and direction did allow me to trace the map of the Magdalena river, and astronomically determine eighty points inland, collect several thousand new plants and observe volcanoes.

The same reasons that slowed our communications also delayed the publication of our work, which has to be accompanied by a number of engravings and maps. If such difficulties are met when governments are paying, how much worse they are when paid by private individuals. It would have been impossible to overcome these difficulties if the enthusiasm of the editors had not been matched by public reaction. More than two thirds of our work has now been published. The maps of the Orinoco, the Casiquiare and the Magdalena rivers, based on my astronomical observations, together with several hundred plants, have been engraved and are ready to appear. I shall not leave Europe on my Asian journey before I have finished publishing my travels to the New World.

These scattered features of the countryside, this trait of solitude and grandeur, characterizes the course of the Orinoco, one of the greatest New World rivers. Everywhere water, like land, displays its unique characteristics. The Orinoco bed has no similarities with the Meta, Guaviare, Río Negro or Amazon beds. These differences do not depend solely on the width or speed of the current; they derive from a combination of relations easier to grasp on the spot than to define precisely. In the same way, the shape of the waves, the color of the water, the kind of sky and clouds, all help a navigator guess whether he is in the Atlantic, the Mediterranean or in the equinoctial part of the Pacific.

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.

Every day we went botanizing in the Turbaco forests from five in the morning until dark: these long walks would have been a delight in this fertile marshy soil if we had not been devoured by mosquitoes, zancudos, chigoes and numberless insects already described in the Orinoco part of this narrative. In the midst of these wonderful forests, smelling the flowers of the Crinum erubescens and Pancratium littorale, we often came across Indian conucos, little banana and maize plantations where Indians, ever ready to flee from whites, live during the rainy season. This taste for the jungle and isolation typifies the American Indian. Though the Spanish population has mixed with the Indian population in Turbaco, the latter display the same lack of culture as in the Guianan missions. Examining their farming tools, the way they build their bamboo huts, their clothes and crude arts, I ask myself what the copper race has earned by contact with European civilization.

During our stay at Cura we made numerous excursions to the rocky islands in the middle of Lake Valencia, to the hot springs at Mariara, and the high mountain called El Cucurucho de Coco. A narrow, dangerous path leads to the port of Turiamo and the famous coastal cacao plantations. Throughout all our excursions we were surprised not only by the progress of culture but also by the increase in the numbers of the free, hard-working population, used to manual work and too poor to buy slaves. Everywhere whites and mulattos had bought small isolated farms. Our host, whose father enjoyed an income of 40, piastres a year, had more land than he could farm; he distributed plots in the Aragua valley to poor families who wanted to grow cotton. He tried to surround his enormous plantation with free working men, because they wanted to work for themselves, or for others. Count Tovar was busy trying to abolish slavery and hoped to make slaves less necessary for the important estates, and to offer the freed slaves land to become farmers themselves. When he left for Europe he had broken up and rented land around Cura. Four years later, on returning to America, he found fine cotton fields and a little village called Punta Samuro, which we often visited with him. The inhabitants are all mulatto, zambo (80) and freed slaves. The rent is ten piastres a fanega of land; it is paid in cash or cotton. As the small farmers are often in need, they sell their cotton at modest prices. They sell it even before harvest, and this advance is used by the rich landowners to make the poor dependent on them as day workers. The price of labor is less than it is in France. A free man is paid five piastres a month without food, which costs very little as meat and vegetables are abundant. I like quoting these details about colonial agriculture because they prove to Europeans that there is no doubt that sugar, cotton and indigo can be produced by free men, and that the miserable slaves can become peasants, farmers and landowners.