Turning, we are for “the Amazones,” and then back again, up the great coast of the mainland. Here is the “Oronoque” and many a lesser stream: the Wannary, “shallow, craggy and foul, the land soft and quaggy,” and “therefore thereabouts not inhabited but with that vermin Crocodile, of which there are in this place abundance”; and the Caperwaka with an island in it where there is rich quarry for fo’c’s’le hunters—“such multitudes of parrots and other fine feathered fowls, that you cannot hear each other speak for their noise; there are many apes on this island, and other creatures, which I omit here to mention.” At the Roca Islands “are no beasts but some few fowls, which they call Flamingoes, having long legs almost like storks, with orange-coloured feathers, and great crooked bills.” All along to Caracas a captain must be on the alert because of “the boisterous winds that blow there,” the “Turnadoes,” that “cause a great overflowing of water.” And “the land is very high, some say as high as Teneriffe. You have there an extraordinary hollow sea, therefore those that would anchor on this coast do best to run a little westward ... where you may lie quiet and secure.” Down through the “Gulph of Venezula” “the country is full of brooks and rivulets; the people, ugly, thin, and ill-favoured, going naked, are frightful to behold.” But “there is much gold brought from thence, and some costly stones of several virtues,” and “in the country are many tygers and bears.” Rio de la Hacha, as we know, was “formerly a rich place by reason of the pearl fishing and other trading. On the east side of the river lies a bank which must be shunned,” as was successfully accomplished by Captain John Hawkins when he outwitted the Don and watered his ship at the enemy’s wells—perhaps that Jesus of Lubec he was to lose by Spanish treachery at San Juan d’Ulloa. And the river Trato, with its mouth blocked by “march land and Sea Cows,” runs “South a long way into the bowels of the country near the golden mines of Canea.” Gold and more gold, and here, in the old days, was bloody work done by Spain which, in turn, was pillaged by England and France. One Captain Long made a smug show of setting up “English colours by consent of the Indian natives,” but on a certain reef “Captain Long had like to have lost His Majesty’s Ship the Rupert prize.” And between the keys called the Sambello and main “used to be the rendezvous of the French buccaneers,” as off Andero and Catalina “the French used to lie with their privateers and plague the Spaniards to leeward, especially those at Porto Bello and Nombre de Dios.” At Lake Nicaragua “is a thing may be called a wonder; some of the trees can scarcely be fathomed by fifteen men; that is the body of the tree; which thing is confirmed by many.” And it was such a tree that Drake climbed when first he looked upon the slow surge of the Pacific and swore the oath that was to disturb Spain’s comfortable looting of the South Seas.