In some places, the enemy set fire to the grass and shrubbery, which in that climate grow with extreme luxuriance; by which means many of this miserable expedition perished. Not quite thirty out of the whole number got safe back to the town of St. Thomas. That place was in a deplorable state, suffering at once from a contagious disease and from a scarcity of provisions. To add to the distress, about a hundred persons more had just arrived from Trinidad. They came of necessity; for there were no longer supplies of food at Trinidad to sustain them. But they came with high-raised hopes, only repining at their ill luck in not having been in the first expedition, by which they supposed the first spoils of Eldorado had already been shared. They arrived like skeletons at a city of death. Not only were provisions scarce, but the supply of salt had altogether failed; and, without it, health in that climate cannot be preserved. To add to their misery, the shoes had all been consumed, and the country was infested by that insect (the chigua) which burrows in the feet, and attacks the flesh wherever the slightest wound gives it access. The torment occasioned by these insects was such, that the men willingly submitted to the only remedy they knew of, and had the sores cauterized with hot iron. Among those who had come from Spain to enter upon this land of promise, there was a "beata," or pious woman, who had been attached to a convent in Madrid, and accompanied a married daughter and her husband on this unhappy adventure, and devoted herself to the service of the sick. Some of the women, and she among them, looking upon the governor, Berrio, as the cause of their miseries, and thinking, that, as long as he lived, there was no hope of their escaping from this fatal place, resolved to murder him, and provided themselves with knives for the purpose. The indignation against him was so general, that they hesitated not to impart their design to one of the friars; and, luckily for Berrio, he interposed his influence to prevent it. One of the women who had sold her possessions in Spain to join the expedition made her way to the governor when the officers and friars were with him, and, emptying upon the ground before him a bag which contained one hundred and fifty doubloons, said, "Tyrant, take what is left, since you have brought us here to die." Berrio replied, with less of anger than of distress in his countenance, "I gave no orders to Domingo de Vera that he should bring more than three hundred men." He offered no opposition to the departure of such as would. Many who had strength or resolution enough trusted themselves to the river in such canoes as they could find, without boatmen or pilot, and endeavored to make their way back to Trinidad; some perishing by the hands of the natives, others by drowning, others by hunger, on the marshy shores which they reached. Vera soon died of a painful disease in Trinidad; and Berrio did not long survive him. Such