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Updated: June 1, 2025
A score of Indians warded us, mighty strangers in bonds, and we heard the rest up at the fort where they were searching and pillaging. Guarico, and the men there? We found that out when at last they were done with La Navidad and they and we were put on the march. We came to where had been Guarico, and truly for long we had smelled the burning of it, as we had heard the crying and shouting.
Now I was strong and wandered in the forest, though never far from that cliff and cavern. It was settled between us that in five days I should go down with Guarin to Guacanagari. He proposed that I should be taken formally into the tribe. They had a ceremony of adoption, and after that Juan Lepe would be Guarico.
It was a story of Caonabo, cacique of Maguana that ran into the great mountains of Cibao, that cacique of whom we had already heard as being like Caribs. Caonabo had sent quite secretly two of his brothers to Guacanagari. He had heard ill of the strangers and thought they were demons, not gods! He advised the cacique of Guarico to surprise them while they slept and slay them.
The Indians came freely to the fort, but Diego de Arana made a good alcayde and he would not have mere crowding within our wooden wall. Half of our thirty-eight, permitted at a time to wander, could not crowd Guarico. But in himself each Spaniard seemed a giant. At first a good giant, profoundly interesting. But I was to see pleased interest become a painful interest. Women.
Gold, valor, comradeship and eyes resting appraisingly upon young Guarico women there upon the silver beach with Guarico men. I heard one cry "Master Juan Lepe!" and turning found Luis Torres. We embraced, we were so glad each to see the other. My hidalgos were gone, but before I could question Luis or he me, there bore down upon us, coming together like birds, half a dozen friars.
We were to learn over and over again that "Indians" could do that, travel very silently, creatures of the forest who took by surprise. Well, Guarico was destroyed, and Guacanagari and Guarin fled, and in all Hispaniola were only two Spaniards, and we saw no sail upon the sea, no sail at all! WE turned from the sea. Thick forest came between us and it. We were going with Caonabo to the mountains.
Now the Indians were back. They had gone a long way until the high mountains were just before them, and there they heard news from the last folk who might be called Guarico and the first folk who might be called Maguana. The mighty strangers had gone on up into the mountains and Caonabo had put them to death. "To death!"
We remembered our first Christmas in this world, by Guarico in Hispaniola, when the Santa Maria sank. Again we found a harbor, and we lay there between dead and alive, until early January. We sailed and on Epiphany Day entered a river that we knew to be in golden Veragua. The Admiral called it the Bethlehem. Gold again, gold!
We passed the mouth of the Apurito, and coasted the island of the same name, formed by the Apure and the Guarico. This island is in fact only a very low spot of ground, bordered by two great rivers, both of which, at a little distance from each other, fall into the Orinoco, after having formed a junction below San Fernando by the first bifurcation of the Apure.
Early in the morning we pursued our way over low grounds, often inundated. In the season of rains, a boat may be navigated, as on a lake, between the Guarico and the Apure. We arrived on the 27th of March at the Villa de San Fernando, the capital of the Mission of the Capuchins in the province of Varinas.
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