April 17th. After walking for three hours we reached our boat at about eleven in the morning. Father Zea packed provisions of clumps of bananas, cassava and chicken with our instruments. We found the river free of shoals, and after a few hours had passed the Garcita raudal whose rapids are easily crossed during high water. We were struck by a succession of great holes, more than 180 feet above the present water-level, that appeared to have been caused by water erosion. The night was clear and beautiful but the plague of mosquitoes near the ground was such that I was unable to record the level of the artificial horizon and lost the opportunity of observing the stars.

The town of Cumana, capital of New Andalusia, lies a mile from the landing-stage or the boca battery where we stepped ashore after crossing the bar of the Manzanares river. We had to traverse a vast plain (el salado) between the Guaiqueri dwellings and the coast. The reverberation from the parched land increased the intense heat. The thermometer, plunged into the white sand, reached 37.7'C. The first plant we gathered from American soil was the Avicennia tomentosa (Mangle prieto), which scarcely reaches 2 feet high here. This shrub, with the sesuvium, the yellow gomphrena and the cacti, covered a ground saturated with soda salts; they belong to the scant social plants like European heaths, and in the torrid zone thrive only on the seashore and high in the Andean plateaux.