On leaving Spain I had promised to join his expedition wherever I could reach it. Bonpland, as active and optimistic as usual, and I immediately decided to split our herbals into three lots to avoid the risk of losing what had taken so much trouble to collect on the banks of the Orinoco, Atabapo and Río Negro. We sent one collection by way of England to Germany, another via Càdiz to France, and the third we left in Havana. We had reason to congratulate ourselves on this prudence. Each collection contained virtually the same species; if the cases were taken by pirates there were instructions to send them to Sir Joseph Banks or to the natural history museum in Paris. Luckily I did not send my manuscripts to Càdiz with our friend and fellow traveler Father Juan Gonzalez, who left Cuba soon after us but whose vessel sank off Africa, with the loss of all life. We lost duplicates of our herbal collection, and all the insects Bonpland had gathered. For over two years we did not receive one letter from Europe; and those we got in the following three years never mentioned earlier letters. You may easily guess how nervous I was about sending a journal with my astronomical observations and barometrical measurements when I had not had the patience to make a copy. After visiting New Granada, Peru and Mexico I happened to be reading a scientific journal in the public library in Philadelphia and saw: 'M. de Humboldt's manuscripts have arrived at his brother's house in Paris via Spain. I could scarcely suppress an exclamation of joy.

We left San Fernando on the 30th of March at four in the afternoon. The heat was suffocating; the thermometer marked 34'C in the shade despite a strong south-east wind. This wind prevented us from setting our sails. During our journey along the Apure, the Orinoco and the Rio Negro we were accompanied by the brother-in-law of the governor of the Barinas province, Don Nicolas Soto, recently arrived from Cadiz. To get to know land worthy of a European's curiosity he decided to spend seventy-four days with us in a narrow lancha, invaded by mosquitoes. The right bank of the Apure is somewhat better cultivated than the left bank where the Yaruro Indians have built huts with reeds and palm-leaf stalks. They live from hunting and fishing, and are skilled in hunting the jaguar whose skins, called 'tiger skins', reach Spain thanks to them. Some of these Indians have been baptized, but they never go to church. They are considered to be wild because they want to remain independent. Other Yaruro tribes accept missionary discipline. The people of this tribe look like a branch of the Mongol family. Their look is serious; their eyes elongated, their cheek-bones high and with a prominent nose.

At the end of April Bonpland and I had completed the observations we intended to make at the northern extreme of the torrid zone and were about to leave for Veracruz with Admiral Ariztizabal's fleet. But we were misled by false information concerning Captain Baudin's journey and decided to forgo our plan of passing Mexico on our way to the Philippine Islands. A newspaper announced that the two French sloops, the Géographie and the Naturaliste, had set sail for Cape Horn and would call in at Chile and Peru on their way to New Holland. This news shook me. I was reminded of my original intention in Paris when I had asked the Directorate to hasten Captain Baudin's departure. (138)

It took us three days to reach the Cari Carib missions. The ground was not as cracked by the drought as in the Calabozo plains. A few showers had revived the vegetation. We saw a few fan palms (Corypha tectorum), rhopalas (Chaparro) and malpighias with leathery, shiny leaves growing far apart from each other. From far off you recognize where there might be water from groups of mauritia palms. It was the season in which they are loaded with enormous clusters of red fruit looking like fir-cones. Our monkeys loved this fruit, which tasted like overripe apples. The monkeys were carried with our baggage on the backs of mules and did all they could to reach the clusters hanging over their heads. The plains seemed to ripple from the mirages. When, after travelling for an hour, we reached those palms standing like masts on the horizon, we were amazed to realize how many things are linked to the existence of one single plant. The wind, losing its force as it strikes leaves and branches, piles sand round the trunks. The smell of fruit and the bright green of the leaves attract passing birds that like to sway on the arrow-like branches of the palms. All around you hear a murmur of sound. Oppressed by the heat, and used to the bleak silence of the llanos, you think you feel cooler just by hearing the sound of branches swaying. Insects and worms, so rare in the llanos, thrive here so that even one stunted tree, which no traveler would have noticed in the Orinoco jungles, spreads life around it in the desert.