I was wofully tired and sleepy. I did not at all know the etiquette of gambling! And I thought the loser must not be a “quitter”—even if the extent of her losses was only “dos reales,” or twenty-five cents. So I played on until at midnight the game was declared over.

It is well that virtue is its own reward, as it has no other, for I was told the next morning by a husband who had had a perfectly good night’s sleep—that I was a very foolish person indeed to sit up playing cards with those men, and that the loser could always stop: it was the winner who must not propose it.

The negroes from the Pitch Lake always came down on Saturday nights and serenaded us with wild Creole airs, and at the sound of the quaterns and violins huge hairy tarantulas would come forth from their hiding-places in our rooms and creep briskly here and there over walls and floor. We were greatly interested in this effect of the vibrations of sound, but we never bothered the great creatures in their strange “tarentelles,” and they paid no attention to us. The venomous effect of the bites of all these eight or hundred-legged beings is greatly exaggerated, and there is absolutely no serious danger to a healthy person with good red blood in his veins; in some of the half-starved, rum-drinking natives the scratch of a pin would induce blood-poisoning.

Labor was easily secured in Guanoco. The morning after our arrival we expressed a wish to employ a boy to act as attendant, carrying camera, gun, butterfly net, etc., when we went on our long tramps. One of the young men at headquarters went to the door and called “muchacho,” and at once a small boy appeared. I should have judged his age to be between eleven and twelve; but he himself did not know. He said his grandmother was “keeping his age.” A charming idea is that Venezuelan custom of having some responsible member of the family keep all the ages. Think of being able to say truthfully that you really do not know how old you are! But then a Venezuelan woman never confesses to more than twenty-seven, no matter what may have been the flight of time.

Our small servant’s name proved to be Maximiliano Romero, and with supreme self possession, boldly spitting to the right and left, he professed himself willing to enter our service. Like a true Venezuelan he used expectoration to punctuate all his remarks. What a quaint little figure he was, topped by a huge straw hat with a high peaked crown; the hat the work of the little brown hands of Max himself, for he was a hat-maker by profession. His face was alert but very grave. He rarely smiled, but when he did it was in no half-hearted way, but with an abandon of childish glee. I found myself devoting a good deal of valuable time to trying to bring into being that charming smile of Maximiliano’s. One never knew just what would touch the right chord. Once he went off into gales of merriment at the escape of a lizard which we were trying to photograph. He always saw the funny side of our mishaps.

Max showed plainly in what esteem he held naturalists. The first day he went out with us he was neatly dressed in dark blue jeans. When he appeared on the second morning we did not recognize him. A small ragamuffin stood before us, stamping like a pony to drive away the flies, which hovered about his ankles. His clothes were a mass of rags—it was impossible to say what had been the original color or material. Max had taken our measure and decided that people who tramped through the “bush” as we did were not worthy of anything better than rags.

Sometimes in the jungle we would meet Indian women who, living far in the interior, were on their way to Guanoco to buy machetes, fish-hooks and other articles of civilization. They would always stop and make friends with us, with child-like curiosity asking where we came from, and why we wanted birds and lizards and butterflies, and murmuring the words dear to every woman’s heart in all lands, “Que jovencita!” which literally translated is “What a young little thing!” Very simple-hearted are these poor Indian women and so hard are their lives that at a very early age do they cease to be jovencita.

We would often meet the wandering tribes of Guarauno Indians, who live nearly always upon the march, carrying all their worldly possessions upon their backs and sleeping wherever night happens to find them. They very rarely knew even a word of Spanish and shunned any intercourse with strangers, scorning the inventions of civilization and using the poisoned arrows of their ancestors.

One Sunday morning one of the laborers at the near-by Pitch Lake, bearing the pious name of José de Jesus Zamoro, came into headquarters to invite us to a dance that afternoon at his house. The house of Zamoro had nothing particularly to recommend it as a ballroom; for the floor was of dirt, the ceiling low and the walls windowless. But it was crowded; the air stifling and the dancers dripping with perspiration. The music was wild and strange, the man who shook the maracas—an instrument consisting of two gourds filled with dried seeds which is shaken in time to the music—often breaking into a weird song, making up the words as he went along, with some joke about each dancer. As the songster’s zeal waxed high he described himself as being so great that “where he stood the earth trembled.”

Between dances the ladies’ last partners were supposed to take them into the next room where drinks were for sale. This was the explanation of Zamoro’s zeal for dances: music and dance hall were free, but a substantial profit came from the drinks.

The ball gowns had but one beauty—that of originality. There was always an unfortunate hiatus between bodices and skirts, which was partly concealed by the long straight black hair which hung down the backs of the women. The shoes were in a piteous condition, never the right size, very seldom mates and not infrequently both were for the same foot. But all the skirts had trains and all ears bore ear-rings. We were told that these women often danced all day and all night, until they became perfectly dazed, their feet moving mechanically in time to the music of the national dance—the joropa, which is a cross between a clog dance and a waltz.

We saw dancing the women whose curiara had so narrowly escaped a fatal collision with our sloop in the Guarapiche. The Captain had said they were leaving Maturin “to operate some speculation in Guanoco—perhaps even to find husbands.” And here among so many men, for the population of Guanoco was chiefly composed of men employed at the lake, surely there was hope, even for adventuresses so black and uncouth as these. Here also we met one of Guanoco’s most amusing characters, a big black Trinidad negro. He was full of the superiority of one who had seen the world; for he had once been to England as stateroom steward on one of the big steamers. He now dropped his h’s, called his wife “Lady Mackáy” and on Sundays wore a monocle.

It was twilight as we walked home through the little settlement. At one of the huts two little naked babies were playing “rock-a-by” in the great curved sheaths which protect the blossom of the moriche, or eta palm. At another a child came out and sang a little Spanish song for us—all about her sins and the confession she must make to the priest, the refrain being “Mi penetencia! mi penetencia!” and she sang it with her small hands clasped and her head devoutly bowed. A few coins made the wee penitent superlatively happy. Her mother must have taught her the song, for in Guanoco there was no priest, no school, no doctor. The two young West Indians at headquarters (neither much more than twenty years old) officiated at all funerals, being Catholic or Protestant, in Spanish or English, as the case demanded. They prescribed for all diseases, from the prevalent fever to the woman who was suffering greatly but could give no more definite description of her trouble than that she had a “pain that walked.”

I could never understand the fever so common at Guanoco: for I never knew a place more free from mosquitoes and from insects of every description. We were continually in the sun and often in the rain, yet we both kept in perfect health.

The women of the village had converted a small open shed into a chapel, with an altar, on which were all the offerings they could make, a few candles, some bits of gilt paper and tinsel, a rude wooden cross and a wretched little chromo of the Virgin. Here, as we passed, we saw the women kneeling, for where else could they take their troubles!

At last our Venezuelan experiences were a thing of the past, and we were homeward bound, leaving behind us the dear delightful never-know-what’s-going-to-happen life; and realizing, as our ship cut her way through the countless “knots” of dashing waves, that as Maximiliano had said with a shake of his head, when we laughingly asked him if he did not want to go with us, “esta tan léjos”—it is so far!

Much has happened at Guanoco since the days of our visit.

Very soon after our departure, Castro fearing the smouldering revolutionary plots in Trinidad, ordered all the ports of eastern Venezuela closed. Later came the deadly bubonic plague sealing for many months all the ports of the unfortunate country. Then indeed trouble descended upon poor little Guanoco. It was an essentially non-agricultural part of the country. The one industry had been the digging of pitch, the company’s boat plying between Guanoco and Trinidad having brought all necessary supplies. Now with all communication cut off the people were in a piteous condition.

In the revolution of the Wheel of Fate—which whirls so rapidly in Venezuela,—the Lugo family had been deposed and a new Venezuelan administrator appointed in their place. Having known the Lugos, I like to think that they would have been less heartless than their successor, who, so the report goes, sold what supplies there were to the starving people at cruelly exorbitant prices.

No matter how much one may love Nature, one cannot help feeling how unmoved she is in the face of suffering. Human beings might starve and sicken and die at Guanoco, but the sunshine would be just as warm and glowing and the wind in the palm trees just as musical as ever.

With the cutting off of communication between Venezuela and Trinidad, Captain Truxillo’s occupation was gone. The “Josefa Jacinta” no longer plied busily back and forth between Port of Spain and Maturin, driving a brisk trade in hammocks, groceries and hides; and so at last she passed from the possession of Captain Truxillo to that of some more prosperous trader who could afford to wait for the reopening of commerce.

For a year our old Captain watched his little vessel guided out of the harbor of Port of Spain, with a strange hand at the helm, and a strange voice in command. Then one day she sailed away never to return—but to be run aground and lost on a desolate and lonely part of the Venezuelan coast.

What became of her new Captain and crew we never heard. We knew only that the “Josefa Jacinta” was lost, and that we could never sail her again, except on dream caños in a phantom wilderness.