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Updated: June 7, 2025
The towns of Angostura, Nueva Barcelona, and Mompox, where from the want of police, the streets, the great squares, and the interior of court-yards are overgrown with brushwood, are sadly celebrated for the abundance of zancudos. People born in the country, whether whites, mulattoes, negroes, or Indians, all suffer from the sting of these insects.
Its hum resembles that of the European gnat, but is louder and more prolonged. The Indians pretend to distinguish the zancudos and the tempraneros by their song; the latter are real twilight insects, while the zancudos are most frequently nocturnal insects, and disappear toward sunrise.
I have observed above, that the crocodiles, and, if not the zancudos, at least the mosquitos, generally shun the black waters. The people assert too, that these waters do not colour the rocks; and that the white rivers have black borders, while the black rivers have white.
Why has no remedy been discovered for the irritation produced by the sting of the zancudos, as well as for that occasioned by the aradores or microscopic acari? In 1755, before the expedition for fixing the boundaries, better known by the name of the expedition of Solano, the whole country between the missions of Javita and San Balthasar was regarded as dependent on Brazil.
The night was extremely dark, and we could not in less than two hours reach the village of Maypures. We were wet to the skin. In proportion as the rain ceased, the zancudos reappeared, with that voracity which tipulary insects always display immediately after a storm.
It does not appear to depend solely on heat of climate, excess of humidity, or the thickness of forests, but on local circumstances that are difficult to characterise. It may be observed that the plague of mosquitos and zancudos is not so general in the torrid zone as is commonly believed.
That portion of the island belongs to the province of Caracas, while the right banks of the Apure and the Orinoco form a part, the one of the province of Varinas, the other of Spanish Guiana. We found no trees to which we could suspend our hammocks, and were obliged to sleep on ox-hides spread on the ground. The boats were too narrow and too full of zancudos to permit us to pass the night in them.
Whatever fortitude be exercised to endure pain without complaint, whatever interest may be felt in the objects of scientific research, it is impossible not to be constantly disturbed by the mosquitos, zancudos, jejens, and tempraneros, that cover the face and hands, pierce the clothes with their long needle-formed suckers, and getting into the mouth and nostrils, occasion coughing and sneezing whenever any attempt is made to speak in the open air.
Thus the celebrity of this villa, and of the emerald-mines of Duida, vanished in a few years; and Esmeralda, on account of the immense number of insects that obscure the air at all seasons of the year, was regarded by the monks as a place of banishment. "Those mosquitos which are called buzzing zancudos, Nature seems to have created for the especial punishment and torture of man."
Sometimes it is used to keep off the "zancudos," or mosquitoes, so numerous and annoying in these regions. Another singular tree was observed, which Guapo called the "marima," or "shirt-tree." The use of this he explained. The tree stands fifty or sixty feet high, with a diameter of from two to three.
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