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Their average population is only between five or six hundred Indians; while more to the west, in the Missions of the Franciscans of Piritu, we find Indian villages containing two or three thousand inhabitants.
I am unable to determine whether the Piritus, Cocheymas, Chacopatas, Tomuzas, and Topocuares, now confounded in the same villages with the Cumanagotos, and speaking their language, were originally tribes of the same nation. On this spot the village of La Concepcion de Piritu was founded in 1556; it is the chief settlement of the Cumanagoto Missions, known by the name of the Misiones de Piritu.
The Cerro Duida is surrounded with fine pasturage; and if the Observantins of the college of Piritu partook a little of the industry of the Catalonian Capuchins settled on the banks of the Carony, numerous herds would be seen wandering between the Cunucunumo and the Padamo.
How can we now decide, whether the Tomuza and Piritu be of different races, when both speak the Cumanagoto language, which is the prevailing tongue in the western part of the Govierno of Cumana; as the Caribbean and the Chayma are in the southern and eastern parts. A great analogy of physical constitution increases the difficulty of these inquiries.
Among the other Indian tribes, the Chaymas of the mountains of Caripe, the Caribs of the southern savannahs of New Barcelona, and the Cumanagotos in the Missions of Piritu, are most numerous. Some families of Guaraunos have been reduced and dwell in Missions on the left bank of the Orinoco, where the Delta begins.
Salt beef, called tasajo, is the most important article of export from Barcelona. Of nine or ten thousand fanegas furnished by the two provinces conjointly, three thousand only are produced by the salt-works of Araya; the rest is extracted from the sea-water at the Morro of Barcelona, at Pozuelos, at Piritu, and in the Golfo Triste.
Two of the Carib villages in the Missions of Piritu or of Carony, contain more families than four or five of the settlements on the Orinoco.
Had the little islands of Tortuga, Blanquilla, and Orchilla been situated in the group of the Antilles, they would not have remained without traces of cultivation. Vessels of heavy burthen pass between the main land and the most southern of the Piritu Islands. Being very low, their northern point is dreaded by pilots who near the coast in those latitudes.
The temperature of the sea at its surface was 25.9 degrees; but when we were passing through the narrow channel which separates the two Piritu Islands, in three fathoms water, the thermometer was only 24.5 degrees.
For a long period the Franciscan monks settled in Guiana had been desirous of forming a separate republic, and rendering themselves independent of the college of Piritu at Nueva Barcelona.
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