ITATITE BOATS! EX. 
8G3 
the bcat3 have an enormous triangular sail, somewhat dan- 
gerous in those gusts which issue from the mountain-passes, 
no instance has occurred during thirty years, of one of these 
boats being lost in the passage from Cumana to the coast of 
Caracas. The skill of the Guaiqueria pilots is so great, that 
accidents are very rare, even in the frequent trips they make 
from Cumana to Guadaloupe, or the Danish islands, which 
are surrounded with breakers. These voyages of 120 or 
150 leagues, in an open sea, out of sight of land, are per- 
formed in boats without decks, like those of the ancients, 
without observations of the meridian altitude of the sun, 
without charts, and generally without a compass. The 
Indian pilot directs his course at night by the pole-star, and 
in the daytime by the sun and the wind. I have seen Guai- 
queries and pilots of the Zambo caste, who could find the 
pole-star by the direction of the pointers a and /3 of the 
Great Bear, and they seemed to me to steer less from the 
view of the pole-star itself, than from the line drawn through 
these stare. It is surprising, that at the first sight of land, 
they can find the island of Guadaloupe, Santa Cruz, or Porto 
Rico ; but the compensation of the errors of their course is 
not always equally fortunate. The boats, if they fall to lee- 
ward in making land, beat up with great difficulty to the 
eastward, against the wind and the current. 
We descended rapidly the little river Manzanares, the 
windings of which are marked by cocoa-trees, as the rivers 
of Europe are sometimes bordered by poplars and old wil- 
lows. On the adjacent arid land, the thorny bushes, on 
which by day nothing is visible but dust, glitter during the 
night with thousands of luminous sparks. The number of 
phosphorescent insects augments in the stormy season. The 
traveller in the equinoctial regions is never weary of admiring 
the effect of those reddish and moveable fires, which, being 
reflected by limpid water, blend their radiance with that of 
the starry vault of heaven. 
We quitted the shore of Cumana as if it had long been Our 
home. This was the first land we had trodden in a zone, 
towards which my thoughts had been directed from earliest 
youth. There is a powerful charm in the impression pro- 
duced by the scenery and climate of these regions ; and after 
an abode of a few months we seemed to have lived there 
