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Updated: June 28, 2025
Gumilla being one of the most credulous travellers we know, it almost perplexes us to credit facts which even he has thought fit to reject. In Sennaar, according to Burckhardt, it is equally esteemed, and sold in the markets. The little village of Uruana is more difficult to govern than most of the other missions. The Ottomacs are a restless, turbulent people, with unbridled passions.
Why the rivers would be crowded; and it would be true what old Father Gumilla once asserted, that "It would be as difficult to count the grains of sand on the shores of the Orinoco, as to count the immense number of tortoises that inhabit its margins and waters.
The law of the increase and decrease of the Orinoco is more difficult to determine with respect to space, or to the magnitude of the oscillations, than with regard to time, or the period of the maxima and minima. Hippisley, Expedition to the Orinoco page 38. Gumilla volume 1 pages 56 to 59. Depons volume 3 page 301.
"How comfortable must people be in the moon!" said a Salive Indian to Father Gumilla; "she looks so beautiful and so clear, that she must be free from mosquitos." These words, which denote the infancy of a people, are very remarkable. The satellite of the earth appears to all savage nations the abode of the blessed, the country of abundance.
In proportion as the activity of commerce increases in these countries traversed by immense rivers, the towns situated at their confluence will necessarily become bustling ports, depots of merchandise, and centre points of civilization. Father Gumilla confesses, that in his time no person had any knowledge of the course of the Orinoco above the mouth of the Guaviare.
Father Gumilla believes them to be arraus that were not able to lay their eggs the preceding year. In general large animals multiply less considerably than the smaller ones. The labour of collecting the eggs, and preparing the oil, occupies three weeks. It is at this period only that the missionaries have any communication with the coast and the civilized neighbouring countries.
The smoke of tobacco drives away our gnats, while it is employed in vain against the zancudos. If the application of fat and astringent* substances preserved the inhabitants of these countries from the torment of insects, as Father Gumilla alleges, why has not the custom of painting the skin become general on these shores?
This conflict is very violent, but far from being so dangerous as Father Gumilla describes. We passed the Punta Curiquima, which is an isolated mass of quartzose granite, a small promontory composed of rounded blocks. There, on the right bank of the Orinoco, Father Rotella founded, in the time of the Jesuits, a Mission of the Palenka and Viriviri or Guire Indians.
Father Gumilla has preserved the names of several German and Spanish Jesuits, who in 1734 fell victims to their zeal for religion, by the hands of the Caribs on the now desert banks of the Vichada.
Father Gumilla himself; whom Bouguer met at Carthagena, confessed that he had been deceived; and he read to Father Gili, a short time before his death, a supplement to his history of the Orinoco, intended for a new edition, in which he recounts pleasantly the manner in which he had been undeceived.
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