The chain of mountains limited on the south by Lake Tacarigua forms, you could say, the northern boundary of the great basin of the plains or savannahs of Caracas. From the Aragua valleys you reach the savannahs over the Guigue and Tucutenemo mountains. Moving from a region peopled and embellished by agriculture you find a vast desert. Accustomed to rocks and shaded valleys, the traveller contemplates with astonishment those plains without trees, those immense tracts of land that seem to climb to the horizon.84
We left the Aragua valleys before sunset on the 6th of March. We crossed a richly cultivated plain, bordering the south-westerly banks of Lake Valencia, along ground recently uncovered by receding water. The fertility of the earth, planted with gourds, water melons and bananas, amazed us. The distant howling of monkeys announced dawn. Opposite a clump of trees in the middle of the plain we caught sight of several bands of araguatoes (Simia ursina) who, as if in procession, passed very slowly from one branch to another. After the male followed several females, many with young on their backs. Due to their life-style howling monkeys all look alike, even those belonging to different species. It is striking how uniform their movements are. When the branches of two trees are too far apart, the male that guides his troop hangs on his prehensile tail and swings in the air until he reaches the nearest branch. Then all the band repeat the same operation in the same place. It is almost superfluous to add how dubious Ulloa’s85 assertion is that the araguatoes form a kind of chain in order to reach the opposite bank of a river. During five years we had ample opportunity to observe thousands of these animals: for this reason we have no confidence in statements possibly invented by Europeans themselves, although missionary Indians repeat them as if they come from their own traditions. The further man is from civilization, the more he enjoys astonishing people while recounting the marvels of his country. He says he has seen what he imagines may have been seen by others. Every Indian is a hunter and the stories of hunters borrow from the imagination the more intelligent the hunted animal appears to be. Hence so many fictions in Europe about the foxes, monkeys, crows and condors in the Andes.
The Indians claim that when howler monkeys fill the jungles with their howls there is always one that leads the howling. Their observation is correct. You generally hear one solitary and intense voice, replaced by another at a different pitch. Indians also assert that when an araguato female is about to give birth, the chorus of howling stops until the new monkey is born. I was not able to prove this, but I have observed that the howling ceases for a few minutes when something unexpected happens, like when a wounded monkey claims the attention of the troop. Our guides seriously assured us that ‘To cure asthma you must drink out of the bony drum of the araguato’s hyoid bone.’ Having such a loud voice this animal is thought to impart a curing effect from its larynx to the water drunk out of it. Such is the people’s science, which sometimes resembles the ancients’.
We spent the night in the village of Guigue. We lodged with an old sergeant from Murcia. To prove he had studied with the Jesuits he recited to us the history of the creation in Latin. He knew the names of Augustus, Tiberius and Diocletian, and while enjoying the agreeably cool nights on his banana plantation interested himself in all that had happened in the times of the Roman emperors. He asked us for a remedy for his painful gout. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘that a zambo from Valencia, a famous curioso, could cure me, but the zambo would expect to be treated as an equal, and that I cannot do with a man of his colour. I prefer to remain as I am.’
San Luis de Cura or, as it is more usually called, Villa de Cura, lies in a very barren valley. Apart from a few fruit trees the region is without vegetation. The meseta is dry and several rivers lose themselves in cracks in the ground. Cura is more a village than a town. We lodged with a family that had been persecuted by the government after the 1797 revolution in Caracas. After years in prison, one of their sons had been taken to Havana, where he lived locked in a fort. How pleased his mother was when she heard that we were bound for Havana after visiting the Orinoco. She handed me five piastres – ‘all her savings’. I tried to hand them back, but how could I wound the delicacy of a woman happy with her self-imposed sacrifice! All the society in the village met in the evening to look at a magic lantern showing sights of the great European cities; the Tuileries palace and the statue of the Great Elector in Berlin. How odd to see our native city in a magic lantern some 2,000 leagues away!
After bathing in the fresh clear water of the San Juan river at two in the morning, we set off on the road for Mesa de Paja. The llanos at that time were infested with bandits, so other travellers joined us to form a kind of caravan. The route was downhill for several hours.
At Mesa de Paja we entered the basin of the llanos. The sun was almost at its highest point. On the ground we recorded a temperature of 48 °C to 50 °C in the sterile parts without vegetation. At the height of our heads, as we were riding the mules, we did not feel the slightest breath of air; but in the midst of that apparent calm small dust whirls were continually raised by air currents arising from the difference in temperature between the bare sand and the grass. These sand winds increased the suffocating heat. The plains surrounding us seemed to reach the sky and looked to us like an ocean covered with seaweed. Sky and land merged. Through the dry mist and vapours you could make out, in the distance, trunks of palm trees. Stripped of their leaves these trunks looked like ship masts on the horizon.
The monotony of these steppes is imposing, sad and oppressive. Everything appears motionless; only now and then from a distance does the shadow of a small cloud promising rain move across the sky. The first glimpse of the plains is no less surprising than that of the Andean chain. It is hard to get accustomed to the views on the Venezuelan and Casanare plains, or to the pampas of Buenos Aires and the chaco when, for twenty to thirty days without stopping, you feel you are on the surface of an ocean. The plains of eastern and northern Europe can give only a pallid image of the immense South American llanos.
The llanos and pampas of South America are really steppes. During the rainy season they appear beautifully green, but in the dry season they look more like deserts. The grass dries out and turns to dust; the ground cracks, crocodiles and snakes bury themselves in the dried mud waiting for the first rains of spring to wake them from prolonged lethargy.
Rivers have only a slight, often imperceptible fall. When the wind blows, or the Orinoco floods, the rivers disemboguing in it are pushed backward. In the Arauca you often see the current going the wrong way. Indians have paddled a whole day downstream when in reality they have been going upstream. Between the descending and ascending waters lie large stagnant tracts, and dangerous whirlpools are formed.
The most typical characteristic of the South American savannahs or steppes is the total absence of hills, the perfect flatness of the land. That is why the Spanish conquistadores did not call them deserts, savannahs or meadows but plains, los llanos. Often in an area of 600 square kilometres no part of the ground rises more than 1 metre high.
Despite the apparent uniformity of the ground the llanos offer two kinds of inequalities that cannot escape the attentive traveller. The first are called bancos (banks); they are in reality shoals in the basin of the steppes, rising some 4 to 5 feet above the plains. These banks can reach some 3 to 4 leagues in length; they are completely smooth and horizontal, and can only be recognized when you examine their edges. The second inequality can only be detected by geodesical or barometric measurements, or else by the flow of a river; they are called mesa, or tables. They are small flats, or convex elevations, that rise imperceptibly some metres high to divide the waters between the Orinoco and the northern Terra Firma coast. Only the gentle curvature of the savannah forms this division.
The infinite monotony of the llanos; the extreme rarity of inhabitants; the difficulties of travelling in such heat and in an atmosphere darkened by dust; the perspective of the horizon, which constantly retreats before the traveller; the few scattered palms that are so similar that one despairs of ever reaching them, and confuses them with others further afield; all these aspects together make the stranger looking at the llanos think they are far larger than they are.86
After spending two nights on horseback, and having vainly looked for shade under tufts of the mauritia palms, we arrived before nightfall at the small farm called Alligator (El Cayman), also called La Guadalupe. It is a hato de ganado, that is, an isolated house on the steppes, surrounded by small huts covered in reeds and skins. Cattle, oxen, horses and mules are not penned in; they wander freely in a space of several square leagues. Nowhere do you see any enclosures. Men, naked to the waist, and armed with lances, ride the savannahs to inspect the animals, to bring back those that have strayed too far off, and to brand with a hot iron those still not branded with the owner’s mark. These coloured men, called peones llaneros, are partly freed and partly enslaved. There is no race more constantly exposed to the devouring fire of the tropical sun than this one. They eat meat dried in the sun, and barely salted. Even their horses eat this. Always in the saddle, they do not ever try to walk a few paces. On the farm we found an old negro slave in charge while his master was away. We were told about herds of several thousand cows grazing the steppes, and yet it was impossible to get a bowl of milk. We were offered a yellowish, muddy and fetid water drawn from a nearby stagnant pool in bowls made of tutuma fruit. The laziness of the llano inhabitants is such that they cannot be bothered to dig wells, even though they know that 9 feet down you can everywhere find fine springs under a stratUm of conglomerate or red sandstone. After suffering half a year of flooding, you are then exposed to another half of painful drought. The old negro warned us to cover the jug with a cloth and to drink the water through a filter so as not to smell the stink, and not to swallow the fine yellowish clay in the water. We did not know then that we would follow his instructions for months on end. The Orinoco waters are just as charged with particles of earth, and are even fetid in creeks, where dead crocodiles rot on sandbanks, half buried in the slime.
We had hardly unpacked our instruments before we freed our mules and let them, as is said here, ‘find water on the savannah’. There are small pools around the farm and animals find them guided by instinct, by the sight of scattered tufts of mauritia palms, by the sensation of humidity that gives rise to small air currents in an otherwise calm atmosphere. When these stagnant ponds are far off, and the farm-hands are too lazy to lead the animals to their natural watering-holes, they are locked for five or six hours in a very hot stable, and then released. Excessive thirst increases their instinctive cleverness. As soon as you open the stable doors you see the horses, and especially the mules, far more intelligent than horses, rush off into the savannah. Tails in the air, heads back, they rush into the wind, stopping for a while to explore around them, following less their sight than their sense of smell, until they finally announce by neighing that water has been found. All these movements are more successfully carried out by horses born on the llanos who have enjoyed the freedom of wild herds than by those coming from the coast, descendants of domestic horses. With most animals, as with man, the alertness of the senses diminishes after years of work, after domestic habits and the progress of culture.
We followed our mules as they sought one of these stagnant ponds that give muddy water, which hardly satisfied our thirst. We were covered in dust, and tanned by the sand wind, which burns the skin more than the sun. We were desperate to have a bathe but we found only a pool of stagnating water surrounded by palms. The water was muddy, but to our surprise cooler than the air. Used as we were on this long journey to bathing every time we could, often several times a day, we did not hesitate to throw ourselves into the pool. We had hardly begun to enjoy the cool water when we heard a noise on the far bank that made us leap out. It was a crocodile slipping into the mud. It would have been unwise to spend the night in that muddy place.
We had gone scarcely more than a quarter of a league away from the farm, yet we walked for more than an hour on our way back without reaching it. Too late we saw that we had been going in the wrong direction. We had left as the day ended, before the stars had come out, and had proceeded haphazardly into the plains. As usual we had our compass. It would have been easy to find our direction from the position of Canopus and the Southern Cross; but the means were useless because we were uncertain whether we had gone east or south when we left the small farm. We tried to return to our bathing place, and walked for another three quarters of an hour without finding the stagnant pond. We often thought we saw fire on the horizon; it was a star rising, its image magnified by vapours. After wandering for a long time on the savannah we decided to sit down on a palm trunk in a dry place surrounded by short grass; for Europeans who have recently arrived fear water snakes more than they do jaguars. We did not fool ourselves into believing that our guides, whose indolence we well knew, would come looking for us before preparing and eating their food. The more unsure we were about our situation, the more pleasing it was eventually to hear horse hooves approaching from afar. It was an Indian, with his lance, doing his rodeo, that is, rounding up cattle. The sight of two white men saying they were lost made him think it was a trick. It was hard to convince him of our sincerity. He eventually agreed to lead us to the Alligator farm, but without slowing down his trotting horse. Our guides assured us that ‘they were already getting worried about us’, and to justify their worry had made a long list of people who had been lost in the llanos and found completely worn out. It is clear that danger exists only for those far from any farm or, as had happened recently, for those robbed by bandits and tied to a palm tree.
To avoid suffering the heat of day we left at two in the morning, hoping to reach Calabozo, a busy little town in the middle of the llanos, by midday. The appearance of the countryside remained always the same. There was no moon, but the great mass of stars decorating the southern skies lit up part of our path. This imposing spectacle of the starry vault stretching out over our heads, this fresh breeze blowing over the plains at night, the rippling of the grass wherever it is long, all reminded us of the surface of an ocean. This illusion increased especially (and we did not tire of the repetition of this sight) when the sun’s disc showed on the horizon, doubling itself through refraction, and soon losing its flattened form, rising quickly towards the zenith.
As the sun rose the plains came alive. Cattle, lying down at night by ponds or at the foot of moriche and rhopala palms, regrouped, and the solitudes became populated with horses, mules and oxen that live here not like wild animals but free, without fixed abode, scorning man’s care. In this torrid zone the bulls, although of Spanish pedigree like those on the cold tablelands of Quito, are tame. The traveller is never in danger of being attacked or chased, contrary to what often happened during our wanderings in the Andes. Near Calabozo we saw herds of roebucks grazing peacefully with the horses and oxen. They are called matacanes; their meat is very tasty. They are larger than our deer and have a very sleek skin of a dark brown with white spots. Their horns seem to be simple points and they are not shy. We saw some completely white ones in the groups of thirty to forty that we observed.
Besides the scattered trunk of the palma de cobija we found real groves (palmares) in which the corypha is mixed with a tree of the proteaceous family called chaparro by the Indians, which is a new species of rhopala, with hard, crackling leaves. The little groves of rhopala are called chaparrales and it is easy to see that in a vast plain where only two or three kinds of tree grow that the chaparro, which gives shade, is deemed of great value. South of Guayaval other palms predominate: the piritu (Bactris speciosa) and the mauritia (Mauritia flexuosa), celebrated as the árbol de la vida. This last is the sago tree of America: it gives flour, wine, fibres to weave hammocks, baskets, nets and clothes. Its fruit, shaped like a pine-cone and covered in scales, tastes rather like an apple, and when ripe is yellow inside and red outside. Howler monkeys love them, and the Guaramo Indians, whose existence is closely linked to this palm, make a fermented liquor that is acid and refreshing.
On the La Mesa road, near Calabozo, it was extremely hot. The temperature of the air rose considerably as soon as the wind blew. The air was full of dust, and when there were gusts the thermometer reached 40 °C and 41 °C. We moved forward slowly as it would have been dangerous to leave the mules transporting our instruments behind. Our guides advised us to line our hats with rhopala leaves to mitigate the effect of the sun’s rays on our heads. In fact it was quite a relief, and later we bore this in mind.
It is hard to formulate exactly how many cattle there are on the llanos of Caracas, Barcelona, Cumaná and Spanish Guiana. Monsieur Depons, who has lived longer in Caracas than I have, and whose statistics are generally correct, calculates that in these vast plains, from the mouth of the Orinoco to Lake Maracaibo, there are 1,200,000 oxen, 180,000 horses and 90,000 mules. He worked out a value of 5 million francs for the produce of these herds, including exportation and the price of leather in the country. In the Buenos Aires pampas there are, so we believe, some 12 million cows and 3 million horses, not counting the animals without owners.
I shall not hazard any general evaluations as they are too vague by nature; but I will observe that in the Caracas llanos owners of the great hatos have no idea how many animals they have. They count only the young animals branded every year with the sign of their herd. The richer owners brand up to 14,000 animals a year, and sell 5,000 to 6,000. According to official documents the export of leather in all the Capitanía-General of Caracas reaches 174,000 oxhides and 11,500 goat hides. When one remembers that these figures come from custom registers and do not include contraband one is tempted to think that the calculation of 1,200,000 oxen wandering in the llanos is far too low.
In Calabozo, in the middle of the llanos, we found an electric machine with great discs, electrophori, batteries and electrometers; an apparatus as complete as any found in Europe. These objects had not been bought in America but made by a man who had never seen any instruments, who had never been able to consult anybody, and who knew about electricity only from reading Sigaud de la Fond’s Traité and Franklin’s Mémoires. Carlos del Pozo, this man’s name, had begun by making cylindrical electrical machines using large glass jars, and cutting off their necks. Years later he managed to get two plates from Philadelphia to make a disc machine to obtain greater electric effects. It is easy to guess how difficult it must have been for Sr Pozo to succeed once the first works on electricity fell into his hands, and how he managed to work everything out for himself. Up to then he had enjoyed astonishing uneducated people with his experiments, and had never travelled out of the llanos. Our stay in Calabozo gave him altogether another kind of pleasure. He must have set some value on two travellers who could compare his apparatus with European ones. With me I had electrometers mounted in straw, pith-balls and gold leaf, as well as a small Leyden jar that could be charged by rubbing, following Ingenhousz’s method, which I used for physiological tests. Pozo could not hide his joy when for the first time he saw instruments that he had not made but which appeared to copy his. We also showed him the effects of the contact of different metals on the nerves of frogs. The names of Galvani and Volta had not yet echoed in these vast solitudes.
After the electric apparatus, made by a clever inhabitant of the llanos, nothing interested us more in Calabozo than the gymnoti, living electric apparatuses. I had busied myself daily over many years with the phenomenon of Galvanic electricity and had enthusiastically experimented without knowing what I had discovered; I had built real batteries by placing metal discs on top of each other and alternating them with bits of muscle flesh, or other humid matter, and so was eager, after arriving at Cumaná, to obtain electric eels. We had often been promised them, and had always been deceived. Money means less the further from the coast you go, and there was no way to shake the imperturbable apathy of the people when even money meant nothing!
Under the name of tembladores (‘which make you tremble’) Spaniards confuse all electric fish. There are some in the Caribbean Sea, off the Cumaná coast. The Guaiquerí Indians, the cleverest fishermen in the area, brought us a fish that numbed their hands. This fish swims up the little Manzanares river. It was a new species of ray whose lateral spots are hard to see, and which resembles Galvani’s torpedo. The Cumaná torpedo was very lively, and energetic in its muscular contractions, yet its electric charges were weak. They became stronger when we galvanized the animal in contact with zinc and gold. Other tembladores, proper electric eels, live in the Colorado and Guarapiche rivers and several little streams crossing the Chaima Indian missions. There are many of them in the great South American rivers, the Orinoco, Amazon and Meta, but the strength of the currents and the depths prevent Indians from catching them. They see these fish less often than they feel their electric shocks when they swim in the rivers. But it is in the llanos, especially around Calabozo, between the small farm of Morichal and the missions de arriba and de abaxo, that the stagnant ponds and tributaries of the Orinoco are filled with electric eels. We wanted first to experiment in the house we lived in at Calabozo but the fear of the eel’s electric shock is so exaggerated that for three days nobody would fish any out for us, despite our promising the Indians two piastres for each one. Yet they tell whites that they can touch tembladores without shock if they are chewing tobacco.
Impatient of waiting, and having only obtained uncertain results from a living eel brought to us, we went to the Caño de Bera to experiment on the water’s edge. Early in the morning on the 19th of March we left for the little village of Rastro de Abaxo: from there Indians led us to a stream, which in the dry season forms a muddy pond surrounded by trees, clusia, amyris and mimosa with fragrant flowers. Fishing eels with nets is very difficult because of the extreme agility with which they dive into the mud, like snakes. We did not want to use barbasco, made with roots of Piscidia erythrina, Jacquinia armillaris and other species of phyllanthus which, chucked into the pond, numbs fish. This would have weakened the eel. The Indians decided to fish with their horses, embarbascar con caballos.87 It was hard to imagine this way of fishing; but soon we saw our guides returning from the savannah with a troop of wild horses and mules. There were about thirty of them, and they forced them into the water.
The extraordinary noise made by the stamping of the horses made the fish jump out of the mud and attack. These livid, yellow eels, like great water snakes, swim on the water’s surface and squeeze under the bellies of the horses and mules. A fight between such different animals is a picturesque scene.88 With harpoons and long pointed reeds the Indians tightly circled the pond; some climbed trees whose branches hung over the water’s surface. Screaming and prodding with their reeds they stopped the horses leaving the pond. The eels, dazed by the noise, defended themselves with their electrical charges. For a while it seemed they might win. Several horses collapsed from the shocks received on their most vital organs, and drowned under the water. Others, panting, their manes erect, their eyes anguished, stood up and tried to escape the storm surprising them in the water. They were pushed back by the Indians, but a few managed to escape to the bank, stumbling at each step, falling on to the sand exhausted and numbed from the electric shocks.
In less than two minutes two horses had drowned. The eel is about 5 feet long and presses all its length along the belly of the horse, giving it electric shocks. They attack the heart, intestines and the plexus coeliacus of the abdominal nerves. It is obvious that the shock felt by the horse is worse than that felt by a man touched on one small part. But the horses were probably not killed, just stunned. They drowned because they could not escape from among the other horses and eels.
We were sure that the fishing would end with the death of all the animals used. But gradually the violence of the unequal combat died down, and the tired eels dispersed. They need a long rest and plenty of food to recuperate the lost galvanic energy. The mules and horses seemed less frightened; their manes did not stand on end, and their eyes seemed less terrified. The eels timidly approached the shore of the marshy pond where we fished them with harpoons tied to long strings. While the string is dry the Indians do not feel any shocks. In a few minutes we had five huge eels, only slightly wounded. Later, more were caught.
The water temperature where these animals live is 26ºC to 27ºC. We are assured that their electric energy decreases in colder water. It is remarkable that these animals with electromotive organs are found not in the air but in a fluid that conducts electricity.
The eel is the largest of the electric fish; I have measured one that is 5 feet 3 inches long. Indians say they have seen even longer. A fish 3 feet 6 inches weighed 12 pounds. The eels from the Caño de Bera are of a pretty olive green, with a yellow mixed with red under their heads. Two rows of small yellow stains are placed symmetrically along their backs from the head to the tail. Each stain has an excretory opening. The skin is constantly covered with a mucus, which, as Volta has shown, conducts electricity twenty to thirty times more efficiently than pure water. It is odd that none of the electric fish discovered here are covered in scales.
It would be dangerous to expose yourself to the first shocks from a large excited eel. If by chance you get a shock before the fish is wounded, or exhausted by a long chase, the pain and numbness are so extreme that it is hard to describe the nature of the sensation. I do not remember ever getting such shocks from a Leyden jar as when I mistakenly stepped on a gymnotus just taken out of the water. All day I felt strong pain in my knees and in all my joints. Torpedoes and electric eels cause a twitching of the tendon in the muscle touched by the electric organ, which reaches one’s elbow. With each stroke you feel an internal vibration that lasts two or three seconds, followed by a painful numbness. In the graphic language of the Tamanac Indians the electric eel is called arimna, which means ‘something that deprives you of movement’.
While European naturalists find electric eels extremely interesting, the Indians hate and fear them. However, their flesh is not bad, although most of the body consists of the electric apparatus, which is slimy and disagreeable to eat. The scarcity of fish in the marshes and ponds on the llanos is blamed on the eels. They kill far more than they eat, and Indians told us that when they capture young alligators and electric eels in their tough nets the eels do not appear to be hurt because they paralyse the young alligators before they themselves can be attacked. All the inhabitants of the waters flee the eels. Lizards, turtles and frogs seek ponds free of eels. At Uritici a road had to be redirected as so many mules were being killed by eels as they forded a river.
On the 24th of March we left Calabozo. At about four in the afternoon we found á young naked Indian girl stretched out on her back in the savannah; she seemed to be around twelve or thirteen. She was exhausted with fatigue and thirst, with her eyes, nose and mouth full of sand, and breathing with a rattle in her throat. Next to her there was a jar on its side, half full of sand. Luckily we had a mule carrying water. We revived her by washing her face and making her drink some wine. She was scared when she found herself surrounded by so many people, but she slowly relaxed and talked to our guides. From the position of the sun she reckoned she had fainted and remained unconscious for several hours. Nothing could persuade her to mount one of our mules. She wanted to return to Uritici where she had been a servant on a hacienda whose owner had sacked her after she had suffered a long illness because she could not work as well as before. Our threats and requests were useless; she was hardened to suffering, like all of her race, and lived in the present without fear of the future. She insisted on going to one of the Indian missions near Calabozo. We emptied her jar of sand and filled it with water. Before we had mounted our mules she had set off, and was soon a cloud of sand in the distance.
During the night we forded the Uritici river, home of numerous voracious alligators. We were told that we should not let our dogs drink from the river as alligators often leave the banks and chase dogs. We were shown a hut, or a kind of shed, where our host in Calabozo had had an extraordinary adventure. He was sleeping with a friend on a bench, covered with skins, when at dawn he was woken by a noise and violent shaking. Bits of earth flew about the hut, and suddenly a young alligator climbed up from under their bed and tried to attack a dog sleeping in the doorway; but it could not catch it, and ran to the bank and dived into the water. When they examined the ground under their bed they found it excavated; it was hardened mud where the alligator had spent its summer asleep, as they all do in the llano dry season. The noise of the men and horses, and the smell of dogs, had woken it up. The Indians often find enormous boas,89 which they call uji, or water snakes, in a similar state of lethargy. To revive them they sprinkle the boas with water. They kill them and hang them in a stream, and after they have rotted they make guitar strings from the tendons on their dorsal muscles, which are far better than strings made from howler-monkey guts.