The military establishment of this frontier consists of seventeen soldiers, ten of whom are detached in neighboring missions. The humidity is such that hardly four rifles work. The Portuguese have twenty-five better-dressed and better-armed men in the fort of San Jose de Maravitanos. In the San Carlos mission we found a garita, or square house, built with unbaked bricks, with six rooms. The fort, or as they prefer to call it, the Castillo de San Felipe, is on the right bank of the Río Negro, vis-à-vis San Carlos. The commander showed some scruples, and refused to allow Bonpland and myself to visit the fort as our passports clearly stated we could measure mountains and perform trigonometric operations on land, but we could not see inside fortified places. Our fellow traveler, Don Nicolás Soto, a Spanish officer, was luckier, and was allowed to cross the river.

In America, from the Eskimos to the Orinoco banks, from the burning plains to the icy Strait of Magellan, mother tongues, quite different in terms of their roots, share the same physiognomy. We recognize striking analogies in grammatical structure, not only in the more learned languages like that of the Incas, the Aymara, the Guaranu, Cora and Mexican, but also in the more primitive ones. It is thanks to this structural analogy rather than words in common that the mission Indian learns another American language more easily than a metropolitan one. In the Orinoco jungle I have met the dullest Indians who speak two or three languages.

Francisco Lozano, a laborer who lived in this village, presented a curious physiological phenomenon that struck our imagination, but did not contradict any laws of organic nature. This man breast-fed a child with his own milk. When the mother fell ill, the father, to pacify the child, took it to bed and pressed it to his nipples. Lozano, then thirty-two years old, had never noticed before that he had milk, but the irritation of the nipple sucked by the child caused liquid to accumulate. The milk was thick and very sweet. The father, astonished at how his breasts increased, suckled his child two or three times a day for five months. He attracted his neighbors' attention but, unlike someone living in Europe, never thought of exploiting this curiosity. We saw the certificate, drawn up on the spot, that attested this remarkable fact; eyewitnesses are still living. We were assured that during the breast-feeding the child received no other food but his father's milk. Lozano, away from Arenas when we visited, came to see us at Cumanà, accompanied by his son of already thirteen or fourteen. Bonpland carefully examined the father's breasts and found them wrinkled, like those of a woman who has suckled. (49)

The little village of Uruana is harder to govern than most other missions. The Otomacs are restless, noisy, and extreme in their passions. They not only adore the fermented liquors of cassava, maize and palm wine, but also get very drunk, to the point of madness, with niopo powder. They gather the long pods of a mimosa, which we have made known as Acacia niopo; they cut them into little pieces, dampen them and let them ferment. When the macerated plants turn black they are crushed into a paste and mixed with cassava flour and lime obtained from burning the shell of a helix. They cook this mass on a grill of hardwood above a fire. The hardened pate looks like little cakes. When they want to use it they crumble it into a powder and put it on a small plate. The Otomac holds this plate with one hand while through his nose, along the forked bone of a bird whose two extremities end up in his nostrils, he breathes in the niopo. I sent some niopo and all the necessary instruments to Fourcroy in Paris. Niopo is so stimulating that a tiny portion produces violent sneezing in those not used to it. Father Gumilla wrote: 'The diabolic powder of the Otomacs makes them drunk through their nostrils, deprives them of reason for several hours, and makes them mad in battle.

April 26th. We advanced only 2 or 3 leagues, and spent the night on a rock near the Indian plantations or conucos of Guapasoso. As the river floods and spills over into the jungle, you lose sight of the banks and can moor only to a rock or small tableland rising above the water. In these granite rocks I found no cavity (druse), no crystallized substance, not even rock crystal, and no trace of pyrites or other metallic substances. I mention this detail on account of the chimerical ideas that have spread following Berrio's and Raleigh's voyages about 'the immense riches of the great and fine empire Guiana'. (111)

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?').

While Bonpland worked day and night dividing our herbal collections, thousands of obstacles prevented our departure from Havana. No ship would take us to Porto Bello or Cartagena. People seemed to enjoy exaggerating the difficulties faced crossing the isthmus and the time it takes to go by ship from Guayaquil to Lima. They reproached me for not continuing to explore those vast rich Spanish American lands that for over fifty years had not been open to any foreign travelers. Finding no boat I had to hire a Catalonian sloop anchored at Batabanò to take me to Porto Bello or Cartagena, depending on how the Santa Marta gales might blow. The prosperity of Havana, and its mercantile links with pacific ports, allowed me to procure funds for several years. I was able to exchange my revenues in Prussia for a part of General Don Gonzalo O'Farrill's: who was Minister to the Spanish Court in Prussia. On the 6th of March the sloop I had hired was ready to sail.