Here is part of Sir Walter R.'s account of Indians in the northern part of S. America.......




Of these people those that dwell upon the branches of the Orinoque, called Capuri, and Macureo, are for the most part carpenters of canoas; for they make the most and fairest canoas; and sell them into Guiana for gold and into Trinidad for Tabacco, in the excessive taking whereof they exceed all nations.
On the banks of these rivers were divers sorts of fruits good to eat, flowers and trees of such variety as were sufficient to make ten volumes of Herbals; we relieved ourselves many times with the fruits of the country, and sometimes with fowl and fish. We say birds of all colours, some carnation, some crimson, orange-tawny, purple, watchet (pale blue), and of all other sorts, both simple and mixed, and it was unto us a great good-passing of the time to behold them, besides the relief we found by killing some store of them with our fowling-pieces; without which, having little or no bread, and less drink, but only the thick and trouble water of the river, we had been in a very hard case.
Upon this river there were great store of fowl, and of many sorts; we saw in it divers sorts of strange fishes, and of marvelous bigness, but for lagartos (alligators) it exceeded, for there were thousands of those ugly serpents and the people call it, for the abundance of them, the River of Lagartos, in their language. I had a negro, a very proper young fellow, who leaping out of the galley to swim in the mouth of this river, was in all our sights taken and devoured with one of those lagartos.