Two Intelligent And Enterprising Men, Don Antonio Santos And Captain Bareto, Had Established, With The Aid Of The Miquiritares, A Chain Of Military Posts On This Line From Esmeralda To The Rio Erevato.

These posts consisted of block-houses (casas fuertes), mounted with swivels, such as I have already mentioned.

The soldiers, left to themselves, exercised all kinds of vexations on the natives (Indians of peace), who had cultivated pieces of ground around the casas fuertes; and the consequence was that, in 1776, several tribes formed a league against the Spaniards. All the military posts were attacked on the same night, on a line of nearly fifty leagues in length. The houses were burnt, and many soldiers massacred; a very small number only owing their preservation to the pity of the Indian women. This nocturnal expedition is still mentioned with horror. It was concerted in the most profound secrecy, and executed with that spirit of unity which the natives of America, skilled in concealing their hostile passions, well know how to practise in whatever concerns their common interests. Since 1776 no attempt has been made to re-establish the road which leads by land from the Upper to the Lower Orinoco, and no white man has been able to pass from Esmeralda to the Erevato. It is certain, however, that in the mountainous lands, between the sources of the Padamo and the Ventuari (near the sites called by the Indians Aurichapa, Ichuana, and Irique) there are many spots where the climate is temperate, and where there are pasturages capable of feeding numerous herds of cattle. The military posts were very useful in preventing the incursions of the Caribs, who, from time to time carried off slaves, though in very small numbers, between the Erevato and the Padamo. They would have resisted the attacks of the natives, if, instead of leaving them isolated and solely to the control of the soldiery, they had been formed into communities, and governed like the villages of neophyte Indians.

We left the mission of Esmeralda on the 23rd of May. Without being positively ill, we felt ourselves in a state of languor and weakness, caused by the torment of insects, bad food, and a long voyage, in narrow and damp boats. We did not go up the Orinoco beyond the mouth of the Rio Guapo, which we should have done, if we could have attempted to reach the sources of the river. There remains a distance of fifteen leagues from the Guapo to the Raudal of the Guaharibos. At this cataract, which is passed on a bridge of lianas, Indians are posted armed with bows and arrows to prevent the whites, or those who come from their territory from advancing westward. How could we hope to pass a point where the commander of the Rio Negro, Don Francisco Bovadilla, was stopped when, accompanied by his soldiers, he tried to penetrate beyond the Gehette?* (* See above.) The carnage then made among the natives has rendered them more distrustful, and more averse to the inhabitants of the missions. It must be remembered that the Orinoco had hitherto offered to geographers two distinct problems, alike important, the situation of its sources, and the mode of its communication with the Amazon. The latter problem formed the object of the journey which I have described; with respect to the discovery of its sources, that remains to be done by the Spanish and Portuguese governments.

Our canoe was not ready to receive us till near three o'clock in the afternoon. It had been filled with innumerable swarms of ants during the navigation of the Cassiquiare; and the toldo, or roof of palm-leaves, beneath which we were again doomed to remain stretched out during twenty-two days, was with difficulty cleared of these insects. We employed part of the morning in repeating to the inhabitants of Esmeralda the questions we had already put to them, respecting the existence of a lake towards the east. We showed copies of the maps of Surville and La Cruz to old soldiers, who had been posted in the mission ever since its first establishment. They laughed at the supposed communication of the Orinoco with the Rio Idapa, and at the White Sea, which the former river was represented to cross. What we politely call geographical fictions they termed lies of the old world (mentiras de por alla). These good people could not comprehend how men, in making the map of a country which they had never visited, could pretend to know things in minute detail, of which persons who lived on the spot were ignorant. The lake Parima, the Sierra Mey, and the springs which separate at the point where they issue from the earth, were entirely unknown at Esmeralda. We were repeatedly assured that no one had ever been to the east of the Raudal of the Guaharibos; and that beyond that point, according to the opinion of some of the natives, the Orinoco descends like a small torrent from a group of mountains, inhabited by the Coroto Indians. Father Gili, who was living on the banks of the Orinoco when the expedition of the boundaries arrived, says expressly that Don Apollinario Diez was sent in 1765 to attempt the discovery of the source of the Orinoco; that he found the river, east of Esmeralda, full of shoals; that he returned for want of provision; and that he learned nothing, absolutely nothing, of the existence of a lake. This statement perfectly accords with what I heard myself thirty-five years later at Esmeralda. The probability of a fact is powerfully shaken when it can be proved to be totally unknown on the very spot where it ought to be known best; and when those by whom the existence of the lake is affirmed contradict each other, not in the least essential circumstances, but in all that are the most important.

When travellers judge only by their own sensations they differ from each other respecting the abundance of the mosquitos as they do respecting the progressive increase or diminution of the temperature. The state of our organs, the motion of the air, its degree of humidity or dryness, its electric intensity, a thousand circumstances contribute at once to make us suffer more or less from the heat and the insects.

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