desires and good will to have performed more if it had pleased God. To
be short, when both our companies returned, each of them brought also
several sorts of stones that appeared very fair, but were such as they
found loose on the ground, and were for the most part but coloured,
and had not any gold fixed in them. Yet such as had no judgment or
experience kept all that glistered, and would not be persuaded but it
was rich because of the lustre; and brought of those, and of marcasite
withal, from Trinidad, and have delivered of those stones to be tried
in many places, and have thereby bred an opinion that all the rest is of
the same. Yet some of these stones I shewed afterward to a Spaniard
of the Caracas, who told me that it was El Madre del Oro, that is, the
mother of gold, and that the mine was farther in the ground.

But it shall be found a weak policy in me, either to betray myself or
my country with imaginations; neither am I so far in love with that
lodging, watching, care, peril, diseases, ill savours, bad fare, and
many other mischiefs that accompany these voyages, as to woo myself
again into any of them, were I not assured that the sun covereth not
so much riches in any part of the earth. Captain Whiddon, and our
chirurgeon, Nicholas Millechamp, brought me a kind of stones like
sapphires; what they may prove I know not. I shewed them to some of the
Orenoqueponi, and they promised to bring me to a mountain that had of
them very large pieces growing diamond-wise; whether it be crystal of
the mountain, Bristol diamond, or sapphire, I do not yet know, but
I hope the best; sure I am that the place is as likely as those from
whence all the rich stones are brought, and in the same height or very
near. On the left hand of this river Caroli are seated those nations
which I called Iwarawaqueri before remembered, which are enemies to the
Epuremei; and on the head of it, adjoining to the great lake Cassipa,
are situated those other nations which also resist Inga, and the