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In the inns of Spain we dread the sound of guitars from the next apartment; on the Orinoco, where the traveller's resting-place is the open beach, or beneath the shelter of a solitary tree, his slumbers are disturbed by a serenade from the forest. We set sail before sunrise, on the 2nd of April.
Then it is interrupted by the grasslands of the Orinoco, but revives again in still greater magnificence in the Guianas. Thence it stretches not only along the coast but far into the little known interior of the Great Amazon basin, while southward it borders all the coast as far as southern Brazil.
To keep these Guahibos in awe, the Capuchin missionaries, who succeeded the Jesuits in the government of the Missions of the Orinoco, formed the project of founding a city at the mouth of the Meta, under the name of the Villa de San Carlos.
But with these facilities offered to him, he sails in June, 1799, from Corunna, whence he reaches Teneriffe, makes short explorations of that island, ascending the peak, and sailing straightway to America, where he lands in Cumana in the month of July, and employs the first year and a half in the exploration of the basin of the Orinoco and its connection with the Amazon.
Two more lie amid the valleys of the Andes, frozen to death by the fierce slaty hail which sweeps down from the condor's eyrie; four more were drowned at one of the rapids of the Orinoco; five or six more wounded men are left behind at another rapid among friendly Indians, to be recovered when they can be: perhaps never.
The part of that chain containing the sources of the Orinoco has not yet been explored; but its prolongation more to the east, between the meridian of the military post of Guirior and the Rupunuri, a tributary of the Essequibo, is known to me through the travels of the Spaniards Antonio Santos and Nicolas Rodriguez, and also by the geodesic labours of two Portuguese, Pontes and Almeida.
The noble Moriche palm delights in wet, at least in Trinidad and on the lower Orinoco: but Schomburgk describes forests of them if, indeed, it be the same species as growing in the mountains of Guiana up to an altitude of four thousand feet.
"Bring me the waters of three or four great rivers of these countries," an old Indian of the mission of Javita said to us; "on tasting each of them I will tell you, without fear of mistake, whence it was taken; whether it comes from a white or black river; the Orinoco or the Atabapo, the Paragua or the Guaviare."
Venezuela, the eastern part of the republic of Columbia, would not, even with nine millions, have a more considerable population than Old Spain; and can it be doubted that that part of Venezuela which is most fertile and easy of cultivation, that is, the 10,000 square leagues remaining after deducting the Llanos and the almost impenetrable forests between the Orinoco and the Cassiquiare, could support in the fine climate of the tropics as many inhabitants as 10,000 square leagues of Estramadura, the Castiles, and other provinces of the table-land of Spain?
Ojeda sailed on May 20, 1499; made a landfall some hundreds of miles to the eastward of the Orinoco, coasted thence as far as the island of Trinidad, and sailed along the northern coast of the peninsula of Paria until he came to a country where the natives built their hots on piles in the water, and to which he gave the name of Venezuela.
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