by Victor Von Hagen

Humboldt and Bonpland

The Orinoco sprawls across the map of Venezuela like a mighty fishhook, the shank flattened out to form its delta, the point struck thousands of miles somewhere in that shadowy, mystical highland of Brazilian Guiana. Midway between its two extreme points is its largest tributary, the Apure, a river, which drains most of the Venezuelan Ilanos. And on its banks, eighty miles from its junction with the Orinoco and waiting to descend it, were Humboldt and Bonpland.

The tangled bearded Capuchins, upon reading a letter of introduction from the Bishop of Caracas, set their Indian charges to work and within three days had transformed a thirty-foot dugout into a sailing vessel that was to carry the explorers up to the border of Brazil. The help of the monks was invaluable since the Supreme Ruler of the Orinoco was God. Or, since God did not exercise direct control, the agents of God, the Capuchin, the Franciscan, the Jesuit fathers, controlled the river. For centuries they had exercised spiritual and, when occasion demanded, material control over the Orinoco and its inhabitants.

The president of the Capuchin missions gave them a guide through whom they might find the "canal" that connected the Orinoco with the Negro." You will go down the Rio Apure," he said, until it joins the Orinoco: thence you will go up the Orinoco, past the missions of Atabapo... When the force of the current of black waters hinders you from advancing, you will be conducted out of the bed of the river, through forests, which you will find inundated...Two monks who are settled in these jungles will furnish you with the means of having your canoes drawn overland...If your canoe be not broken you will descend into the Rio Negro... There you will the canal."

By most of the monks who had traveled on the river, the connection was accepted as a fact. Since pre-Colombian times the Indians had known and used the waterway between these two of South America's greatest rivers. It was known to most of the missionaries operating on these rivers in the eighteenth century. Charles-Marie del a Condamine could write with conviction: The fact of the connection between the Orinoco and the Amazon Rivers is no longer admits of doubt." But where, geographically was this point? It was this question that Humboldt proposed to answer.

Arrowsmith, the celebrated nineteenth-century English cartographer, had put a great inland lake into his maps, a lake seventy miles in breadth, which was supposed to lie between the Amazon and the Orinoco. This imaginary lake has persisted since the time of Raleigh and his dream of El Dorado. In a sketch map made by that Elizabethan, the Amazon and the Orinoco appear as great rivers running parallel to each other, connecting nowhere and separated by an enormous inland lake looking something like a shriveled appendix. This body of water, which no one ever saw, was called the Lake of Manoa. These geographical misconceptions had persisted down to Humboldt's time. Arrowsmith had even advanced the supposition that the Lake of Manoa was the source of the Orinoco River. It was all too evident how little was really known about the geography of South America.

It was Columbus who had discovered the mouth of the Orinoco. The current it produced between the mainland and the asphaltic island of Trinidad was so powerful that his ships, with all their canvases spread and a westerly breeze, could scarcely make their way against it. This desolate and fearful spot he called the Golfo Triste: the Bay of Sadness. When he saw the body of milky water pouring into the blue pellucid Atlantic, he exclaimed: "Such an enormous body of fresh water could only be collected from a river having a long course; the land therefore, which supplied it must be a continent, and not an island.

But what continent? Asia of course! "The grateful coolness of the evening air, the ethereal purity of the starry firmament", writes Antonio de Herrera in his Historia General, "the balmy fragrance of flowers, wafted to the Admiral by the land breeze, all led him to suppose that he was approaching the Garden of Eden."

A century later Sir Walter Raleigh was undertaking a gigantic expedition up the Orinoco "to the large, rich, and beautiful empire of Guiana and the Golden City of Manoa." Actually the lake of El Dorado lay on a conical summit in the eastern cordillera of Colombia, at eight thousand feet altitude, and was not more than a mile in diameter. But this little tarn was transferred by Raleigh's wonder-filled brain 2,000 miles eastward. Many an English merchant and many a prince lost their fortunes on that expedition, seduced by the honeyed words of "... wearied feet, travelling ye know not whither, soon, soon it seemed to you, you must come forth on some conspicuous hilltop, and but a little way further, against the setting sun, descry the spires of El Dorado."

Raleigh and his men sailed up the Orinoco in small boats. As they advanced, the wind failed them and they were forced to paddle against the powerful current. The crews grew weak as the river "ran more violently against them." But Raleigh refused to return yet, "lest the world would laugh us to scorn." Some hundreds of miles upstream they attacked the Spanish fort of San Tomas, a castle which sat most strategically upon a mass of rock dominating the river. There in the struggle Raleigh lost his son, and there he set in motion, although he did not know it, the mechanism that would deprive him of his handsome head. He was stirred to poetical heights by what he saw on the Orinoco; of it he wrote:

"Guiana is a country that hath yet her maidenhood. The face of the earth hath not been torn; the graves have not yet been opened for gold. It hath never been entered by any army of strength and never conquered by a Christian prince. Men shall find here more rich and beautiful cities, more temples adorned with gold than either Cortes found in Mexico or Pizarro in Peru and the shining glory of this conquest will eclipse all those of the Spanish nation. I never saw a more beautiful country, nor more lively prospects; hills raised here and there, over the valleys, the river winding into different branches, plains without bush or stubble, all fair green grass, deer crossing our path, the birds toward evening singing on every side a thousand different tunes, herons of white, crimson, and carnation perching on the riverside, the air fresh with a gentle wind..."

No foreigner in colonial times again wrote of the Orinoco; Spain plugged up the gap. The missions took over; the Franciscans and the Capuchins and the Jesuits ruled the roost, and the Indians, unmolested by competing conquistadores, gradually settled down to a relatively peaceful relationship with the agents of God.

Then, in 1745, Padre Jose Gumilla wrote his fantastic book, El Orinoco illustrado y defendido. In it he denied with vehemence the existence of the Rio Negro and Orinoco canal in haughty words: " El Orinoco (no) hemos visto entrar ni salir (el) alto Rio Negro" ("We have seen the Orinoco (neither) enter nor leave (the) Upper Rio Negro"). But La Condamine in his discourse before the Acadamie des Sciences insisted there was a canal that linked the whole of the Amazon and Orinoco valleys. This stirred the Spanish government, which sent out an expedition under a Captain Solano in 1754. He proposed to look for the connecting link, but of his 325 men, only thirteen returned; and so the geographical controversy lay waiting for its solution by Alexander von Humboldt. Was there a connection between these rivers or was their not? If so where did it lie? The questions would soon be answered, for Humboldt and Bonpland were poised on the banks of the Apure waiting for the moment to set off.

Their launch was a sad imitation of that in which Cleopatra once sailed. Two and one-half feet wide, their ark had been made more commodious by a sort of latticework which the Capuchins had constructed over its gunwales so as to extend its width beyond its thick sides. It had a roof intended to be large enough to cover their persons; but their legs stuck far out, to be wet by the rains and bitten by the insects. On the latticework floor there were oxhides and, to lend a jungle note, an enormous jaguar skin. While the black-cowled Capuchins lined the bank and looked with satisfaction on their handiwork, the Indians brought food for the expedition. There were eggs wrapped in banana leaves, plantains, live chickens with their feet tied together, large cassava cakes, toasted cacao beans, all piled in the forward part of the canoe where the four Indian paddlers stood. In the palm-plaited "cabin" the Capuchins placed oranges, tamarinds, and for the dark days ahead some bottles of sherry. For trade goods (money was unknown to the Upper Orinoco Indians) they brought tobacco in broad dark leaves, fishing tackle, firearms, and casks of brandy. On March 30, 1800, while Napoleon was being proclaimed First Counsul, the expedition set off to discover the canal that connected the Orinoco and the Amazon valleys. As their pilot, standing in the stern, sent the canoe out into the torrent of yellow water, the Capuchins lined the banks and shouted: "Vaya, vaya con Dios." (Go, go with God")

The Orinoco is divided like Caesar's Gallia ominis, into three parts. The main part, from the delta westward 400 miles, is wide, deep and swift flowing, navigable for deep-drafted vessels up to the little town of Caicara. It flows through open level Ilanos crowned with gigantic out-thrusts of rock that look like castles. Here are shifting sandbars on which the unwary may be marooned and exposed to sudden, unannounced chubascos that sweep down with the force of a hurricane. Above Ciacara village is the Rio Apure, which drains most of the northwestern Venezuela and rolls down to make its juncture with the Orinoco. The Apure is choked with ugly boulders around which the waters seethe and spin and boil. The third part of the Orinoco comes directly from the south, flowing from the jungle-studded sierras of Mount Duida, which is its source, 300 miles to the Mission of San Fernando de Atabapo, then nearly as far again to its junction with the Apure. Over a thousand miles in length, formed of thirty-six monstrous tributaries and over two thousand streams and rivulets, the Rio Orinoco extends its hydrographic system over 270,000 square miles, almost the area of the Kingdom of Spain.

Down the largest of the tributaries, the Apure, the small lancha was being tossed about like a pea in a paper bag. Even though the Indian crew was skilful, the boat, crudely fashioned, was clumsy. At every turn in the mile-wide river the explorers thought themselves in imminent danger of being swamped.

Then the river, falling less rapidly and leaving the raudales behind, spread out and grew calm. The Ilanos, which were its banks, became spotted with red-leafed suasco bushes and tall top-heavy palms, and animal life became more common. As they swept along, great flocks of rose-winged flamingos, blacklegged spoonbills and snow-white egrets darkened the sky in wide-flung sweeps. Aime Bonpland had never seen so many birds in all his life. His head was thrown back, watching the endless flights, until his neck pained. Sky, savannah, and river were now animated by living forms. "Animals of different nature," observed Humboldt, "succeeded one another. Alligators Appeared on banks, motionless, with their mouths open, while by them and near to them capybaras, the large, web-footed rodents that swim like dogs and feed on roots, appeared in bewildering herds, even lying among the alligators, seeming to know that these repulsive reptiles do not attack on land. Tapirs broke through the tall grass and slipped down to the Apure to drink." The toothless pilot, noting their interest in the animals, added his part; with a wave of his chocolate-brown arm he shouted: "It is just like paradise." But it was less like a paradise and more like the environs of the Styx as they approached the junction of the Orinoco.

An immense plain of water, current-tossed and wind-swept, something like a shoreless lake, shot up before them. White-topped waves rose to a height of several feet, caused by the conflicting currents and winds. As they tossed over this inland sea, the air was rent with cries of herons and spoonbills, flying from one side to another. The paddling was growing difficult; the Indians hoisted a sail. It caught the trades, but hardly sufficed against the current. And now the mountains appeared on the shore, bursting through the Ilanos and casting a funereal darkness over the bare landscape. Three thousand or more feet high, rugged and forbidding, the verdureless mountains were a succession of peaks, domes, crags, and precipices, shadowed by a long, block-shaped bulk, beyond which were other jumbled peaks receding into the leaden horizon.

By April 17, two weeks from their starting-point, they came to their first "punto de la civilizacion," the Mission of the Concepcion de Ubrbana on the Orinoco. The flat llanos had now disappeared; hills, bare and bald, were the dominant theme, pouring down, steep and precipitous, to the rivers edge. A thin gallery of forsest still fringed the banks, but the tablelands broke into sheer cliffs, "isolated bosses, knobs, and smoothly polished domes... monstrous rocks were thrown here and there in utter confusion." It was a weird, fascinating region.

At La Urbana their pilot and paddlers from the Apure turned back; they would have to get others who knew the streams ahead. While they raised this contingent, Bonpland went into the forest and was soon lost in an endless variety of new plants. He collected palms, orchids, grasses and bamboos. He picked up the leaves of the achiote bush; there among the Cassias and Dioscoreas the botanic soul of Aime unfolded like a star lily.

Having lost their boat with the pilot, they purchased a new canoe and got the Indians to fashion them a palm plaited carroza at the stern - a sort of barrel shaped contrivance in which men and goods were protected from alternate fiercely pelting rain and murderous sun. At La Urbana, too, they acquired a greater asset: they had the pleasure of a companion in the person of Padre Bernardo Zea, who wishing to visit some other Padres on the river, begged permission to join them. The explorers acquired an open sesame on the river in his person.

Beyond LaUrbana monstrous black rocks loomed before them. These were the sinister stones of Paluas. The lancha cut through the raging rapids, ripped past the black domes and the veritable labyrinth of inky steppes. As they whirled by this Stygian scene, Humboldt could think of nothing more fitting than the lines:

Through me you pass into eternal pain,

Through me among the people lost for aye,

All hope abandon, ye who enter here.

"All hope abandon," at least all hope of comfort, for these malevolent cliffs of Paluas marked the entrance into a region of tiny insect fiends that extracted a blood tribute: puimes set upon them at once. An insect small enough to fly through a needle's eye, it could sting like a wasp and its puncture left behind a tiny globule of blood. Mosquitoes, flies, gnats, chiggers, ants followed and were described briefly by the Padre as "la plaga."

The plague was unusual even for the natives. One old Indian exclaimed: "How comfortable must be the people on the moon! She looks so beautiful. She must be free of mosquitoes."

Up, up, up the Orinocco they went, insects or no, paddling when they could, using ropes when the water was too swift, pushing in the narrows and portaging round the great roaring raudales. Up they went to the foaming junction of the Rio Meta. The union of the two rivers Humboldt declared was a "great spectacle." Great rock castles, black and forbidding, rose three thousand feet over the tossing, stormy meeting place of the Meta and the Orinoco. The force of the tow streams created so many crosscurrents and backwaters that the lancha was virtually suspended in the center of the raging river torrents. Unable to make headway there, the pilot put the boat in to shore, taking advantage of the back current thrown up along the bank. But they could no longer avoid the inevitable. To go up the river they had to enter the rapids.

The river grew frightfully turbulent. They came to the famous and much feared raudales - the rapids of the Maipures. As they approached the rapids, which seethed and boiled as in a cauldron, the bowman sang out: " Vamos con Dios." (We go with God).

It was the final chant before they hit the boiling raudal. The boat was tossed about. The monkeys screeched, the canoe shook violently and they hit calm waters again. Humboldt and Bonpland breathed normally once more.

About the extensive Maipures Rapids there are endless stretches of open savanna, broken by abrupt hills, some almost devoid of vegetation, others heavily forested; lines of forest followed the streams. They were more and more yagua palms, graceful, slim trunked trees with drooping fronds, as well as chiquichiqui palms and the palos de aciete, big smooth, yellow barked trees that yielded an oil used in commerce. And in the background great barren outcrops of granite lay in nearly horizontal masses. This was one of Humboldts collecting stations. They spent three days there in the small village erected by Jose Solano in 1754. They collected plants while their canoe was pulled through the rapids and their equipment brought on the backs of Indians around the cataracts. Here Bonpland added greatly to his plant collections. But the plague of insects was so overpowering that he was unable to arrange his specimens until the Indians suggested that he bring his plant to their giant conical oven. So Bonpland, as Humboldt recounted, " with courage and patience crawled into the hot hornito to be free of the insect plague, and there pressed thousands of plants."

Above the rapids of the Maipures, on their way once more, they passed the Rio Sipapo, little different from the thousand and one streams that pour into the Orinoco, but Padre Bernardo Zea gave it great importance: "It is the country of the Rayas Indians, whose mouths are said to be in their navels."

Now Humboldt and Bonpland, who had seen a cow tree, and electric eels, and spoonbills, were in a most receptive mood, but not for Indians with their mouths at their navels. "Of a certainty," said the Indian pilot, "there are such Indians." He claimed to have seen these acephali with his own eyes.

The Padre said that the Indians were called Rayas because they were like stingrays, whose mouths were near their tails. Humboldt was duly sceptical. The myth, thanks to his irony, has long been relegated to the realm of fable. A plausible explanation of the story is that the Rayas wore wide headresses that covered their entire heads and shoulders, and painted faces about their navels. It was Sir Walter Raleigh who first began the nonsense by speaking of "Ewaipahomas, the headless warriors."

"On that River Sipapo," He wrote, "which is called Caura, are a nation of people whose heads are reported to have their eyes in their shoulders and their mouths in the middle of their breasts and that a long train of hair groweth backward between their shoulders. The son of Topiawari, a lower Orinoco chief, which I brought with me to England, told me that they were the most mighty men of all the land... and had of late slain many hundreds..." Thus Raleigh and his suenos dorados. Shakespeare picked up this legend and made it immortal by writing in Othello:

And of the Cannibals that each other eat,

The Anthrophagi and men whose heads

Do grow beneath their shoulders.

Humboldt met with no acephali; only water, clouds, insects and rain; days of poling and of portage that carried them up, beyond the Jesuit Mission of San Fernando de Atabapo. So they went on day after day. A month had passed and with them hardly aware of it, the Orinoco was transporting them to a new country. Again the words of the Capuchin monk:

"...You will go up and up. First past the Atabapo, the Temi and finally the Tuamini. When the force of the current of the black waters hinder you from advancing, you will be conducted out of the bed of the river... At Yavita you will be furnished with the means of having your canoe drawn overland..." And as he had suggested, so it came to pass.

Thirty-three days after leaving the Capuchin mission at the Rio Apure they had come to rest at the Mission of San Antonio de Yavita. Now, at this point there is a curious phenomenon that explains the connection between the Orinoco and the Amazon. At San Fernando de Atabapo, a distance of about 300 from the confluence of the Apure, the Orinoco makes a right angle eastward, then winds about the hills of the Sierra de Parima until it dissipates itself in a series of rivulets. But halfway between its source and where it turns eastward at Atabapo, there is a branch, the Casiquiare, a stream without a counterpart in the world, " whose existence," in Humboldts words, " had been alternately proved and denied for half a century." The Casiquiare had not a reversible current; it is simply an arm of the Upper Orinoco which, instead of merely wandering around and then joining the mother stream, as do countless other arms and channels, gets lost on a low, wide plain and wanders over into the territory of the Amazon. There it joins the Rio Negro, the largest affluent of the Amazon from the north.

There is still another way to reach the Rio Negro from the Orinoco, and Humboldt took this route so as to encompass the whole country. San Antonio de Yavita is separated from a stream called the Cano Pimichin, in the Rio Negro drainage, only by a neck of land over which canoes can be dragged in portage. This is shorter than the Upper Orinoco-Casiquiare route, and it was for this reason that a mission was established there by the Franciscans.

Padre Ceresco, who had held the mission alone, was beside himself with joy at their arrival. " You will want for nothing at my mission," he told them. "You can have all the plantains and fish you want. At night you are not stung by mosquitoes. The longer you stay the better the chance you have to see your stars. If your canoe is destroyed in the portage, we will build you another... and I Padre Ceresco, shall have the satisfaction of passing some weeks con gente blanc y de razon!..."

Portage rollers were made from the hard lignum vitae wood, and on them the lancha was put when it was pulled from the water. It took twenty-three Indians a full day to drag the empty canoe from one stream to the other. It did not break in the portage, but Humboldt stayed on, as much to please the Padre who maintained this outpost of God as to allow Bonpland time to collect plants. And there were other observations to make. This road for portage had been built only since 1795 and it interested Humboldt. He unpacked his theodolite and began a survey of the ground. He believed that on the spot a canal could be built connecting these two river arms. It would answer the problems of transportation. So Humboldt sat down amid the buzzing flies and languid Indians and wrote a memorial to King Charles of Spain, not only proposing the canal, but furnishing a plan for it, with rough measurements. Nor was the political aspect of geography lost on him. He noticed that in an open-country communication by river assists in a most definite manner to generalize language and customs. Along the rivers there were a uniform economy, monetary exchange, and culture. But on opposite sides of a dense forest the differences would be great. He felt "That the impenetrable forests of the torrid zone increase the dismemberment of a nation; such forests favor the transition of dialects into languages and become the origin of national or tribal hatreds and deep ingrained mistrust..." Finally he philosophizes that "...men avoid because they do not understand one another; they mutually hate because they mutually fear."

Amie Bonpland put all his collected plants into well-tied bundles, entrusting them to the hands of the returning Indians, and then, three days later, trailing after the black-gowned monks, they trekked over the jungle trail, following the windings of the forest for hours until they came to the camp at Pimichin. They were now on the Rio Negro.

Alexander von Humboldt

Before them was an ancient boulder-decked country. Between the parallels three and seven degrees north, and east to the Orinoco, stands one of the most ancient geological regions of the world. Untold ages of erosion have worn it down, cut its ranges apart, carved it into confused and fantastic masses. There are mountains and hills, tall isolated peaks, huge flat masses shooting up from rolling prairies, dense jungles. It is a chaotic land, an amazing land, a land covering 200,000 square miles. In it the little Casiquiare River joins both great river systems of the Orinoco and the Amazon.

The morning was cool and beautiful as they floated down to the villages of Solano and San Carlos. In the small grass-thatched adobe huts at Solano, on the left bank of the Casiquiare, Humboldt and Bonpland unpacked their theodolites and sextants, their thermometers and barometers, to set to work to determine astronomically the point of connection of the two systems. But Humboldt was not so close to the stars to forget the ground. He drank in the tropical world like a poet:

"Every object declares the grandeur of the power, the tenderness of Nature, from the boa constrictor, which can swallow a horse, down to the humming-bird, balancing itself on a chalice of a flower." The animals and the birds dominated the picture, and as often as Humboldt took himself into the solitudes at night to use his instruments on the stars, he felt himself eclipsed by the boas, the peccaries, the tapirs, the monkeys, the jaguars, which worked out their destiny with complete disregard for man. "This aspect of animated nature, in which man is nothing, has something in it strange and sad."

At last the determination of the connection of the Rio Negro and the Orinoco was complete. Humboldt determined it as 2 degrees, 0 minutes, 43 seconds north latitude. How exact and estimable this survey was, considering that his chronometers had not been set for years, is seen in a recent survey where, with ratio and perfect time sequences, the same region was determined as 1 degree, 59 minutes, 33.78 seconds north latitude. Humboldt was off a little more than a minute and wrong by only two miles on the Orinoco's length, which he calculated as 1,120 miles in length.

This done Humboldt turned his attention to the last remaining vestige of mapmakers' imagination, the Lake of Guaina. This fabled lake, out of which so many rivers, including the Orinoco, were supposed to arise, was said to be the fabulous city of Manoa, where lived El Dorado, the Golden Inca. With the expedition of Captain Solano, in 1754, the lake of El Dorado came again into prominence; it was then called Lago de Parime.

Humboldt had no difficulty in pronouncing fabulous these monstrous lakes, the sources of rivers and the repositories of gold. "I was able to convince myself on the spot - in the village of Solano and elsewhere - of the following facts, well-known to the missions: that Don Jose Solano did not do more than cross the cataracts of Atures and Maipures... that astronomical instruments were carried neither to the isthmus of the Pimchin and the Rio Negro nor to the Casiquiare..."

"Thus we see," he continues, "that the great Mar de la Parima was reduced by accurate measurements to two or three miles in circumference. The illusion, entertained for nearly two hundred years, which in the last Spanish expedition, in 1775, for the discovery of El Dorado cost several hundred lives, has finally terminated by enriching geography with some few results. In the year 1512 thousands of soldiers perished on the expedition under Ponce de Leon to discover the "Fountain of Youth" on one of the Bahama Islands, called Bimini, which is hardly to be found on any of our maps. This expedition led to the conquest of Florida and to the knowledge of the great oceanic current or Gulf Stream, which flows, through the Bahama straits. The thirst after gold and the desire for rejuvenescence - El Dorado and the Fountain of Youth - stimulated to an almost equal extent the passions of mankind... and geography.

Humboldt would allow no fabulous tale to exist without observing, weighing and dissecting the matter, whether mite or mountain. It is easily understood why all this vast region is known as "Humboldts country." Fifty years later another botanist, Richard Spruce, was to follow his trail, collect where he had collected, and express most humbly "the gratification I naturally feel, finding myself in terra Humboldtiana...I could not look for the first time on the Orinoco without emotion, and I thought of the illustrious voyagers who more than fifty years previously (he was writing in 1854) had explored its course and the vegetable products of its shores."

Humboldt was famed then - but not in May 1800. On the shores of these desolate rivers he was thought to be a spy; and when a barefooted soldier of a Brazilian garrison saw him look through his telescope, he was certain of it. Suddenly at night Humboldt was arrested. He had followed his observations, his papers, his instruments, and his person. When asked what he had been doing, Humboldt explained that he was trying to prove that the River Casiquiare joined the Orinoco and the Amazon together.

"By the Good Mother!" roared the Portuguese Commandant. "You have come all the way from Germany to do this?" No one in the missions for half a century has doubted the communications between these two rivers!"

"Yes, yes," said Humboldt, "I know that. But the importance of my work is to fix, by means of astronomical observations, the course of the Casiquiare and particularly the point of its entrance into the Rio Negro and that of the bifurcation of the Orinoco..."

The Commandant stood there in amazement. He could not conceive of a man of sense making so fatiguing a journey "to measure lands that did not belong to him..."

The Commander knew his duty. Humboldt and his papers had to be conducted down the Amazon to Para, and on across the Atlantic to Lisbon. Now the matter had become serious. If this Dumkopf has his way, he would ruin the whole expedition. Padre Zea intervened. Amie Bonpland, towering and threatening, prepared to fall upon the hapless Commandant. At last he agreed to send a soldier two thousand miles to Para for instructions. But instructions never came. And gradually the storm passed and Humboldt was released. Half a century later Humboldt was still laughing at the contretemps. In 1855 he was made a Knight of the great Brazilian Order on account of his arbitration between Brazil and Venezuela respecting a large section of Amazonian territory. "Formerly," he laughingly wrote, "they intended in Rio de Janeiro to arrest me as a dangerous spy and to send me back to Europe; the order drawn for the purpose is still shown there as a curiosity. Now they make me an arbitrator. I, of course, decided for Brazil," he went on ironically, "because I wanted the large decoration; the Republic of Venezuela had none to confer."

Like a tropical storm the suspicions blew over and the expedition now threaded its way down the boulder-strewn river and back to the Orinoco. They did not return the way they came, which would have occasioned a four mile portage, but continued down the Casiquiare canal, passing little villages like Capybara, a collection of scattered leaf huts in a low-lying forest where great beds of balsa wood stood like a phalanx. Gradually the water was becoming less black as they neared the confluence of the Orinoco. Opposite this point where the Orinoco forms its bifurcation with the Casiquiare was Mount Druida. Humboldt was in ecstasy:

"Here soars high above the clouds the mighty peak of the Yeonnamari or Duida, a mountain that presents one of the grandest spectacles in the natural scenery of the tropical world. Its altitude, according to my trigonometrical observation, is 8,800 feet... Its southern slope is a treeless, grassy plain, redolent with the odor of pineapples, whose fragrance scents the humid evening air. Among lowly meadow plants rise the juicy stems of the arona, whose golden-yellow fruits gleam from the midst of a bluish-green diadem of leaves. Where, the mountain springs break forth beneath the grass covering, rise isolated groups of lofty palms..."

As he left this almost fabulous Cerro Duida, whose sides glittered like silver when the setting sun fell upon it, Humboldt declared that no person would ever reach its summit but in this he was wrong, for American scientists a hundred years later scaled it.

Humboldt and Bonpland had collected many species of animals and 16,000 pressed plant specimens in triplicate, animal skins, bird skins, bark specimens and geological specimens which had reached such proportions that they were forced to sit in the rain while their collections were protected by the overhanging barroza. Actually they were usually unmindful of these discomforts. Had they not laid open a section of the New World which had been closed for three hundred years? Had they not traveled eighteen hundred miles on its rivers? They had located the exact position of the Orinoco- Negro canal; they had dispelled the legends of the fabulous Lake of Manoa; they had discovered numerous medicinal plants; they had laid the groundwork for the botany of South America. Manatees, electric eels, howling monkeys, cow trees, alligators - it had all been worth while. They had been in the Americas a little less than a year, and in that short space of time they had made known more than had been unearthed in centuries.