very early in the morning," before the sun
rose, they shoved off from the mooring-place. They rowed all day,
suffering much from the mosquitoes, but made little progress. The river
was fallen very low, so that they were rowing or poling over a series of
pools joined by shallow rapids. To each side of them were stretches of
black, alluvial mud, already springing green with shrubs and
water-plants. Every now and then, as they rowed on, on the dim,
sluggish, silent, steaming river, they butted a sleeping alligator as he
sunned in the shallows, or were stopped by a fallen tree, brought by the
summer floods and left to rot there. At twilight, when the crying of the
birds became more intense and the monkeys gathered to their screaming in
the treetops, the boats drew up to the bank at a planter's station, or
wayside shrine, known as Cruz de Juan Gallego. Here they went ashore to
sleep, still gnawed with famine, and faint with the hard day's rowing.
The guides told Henry Morgan that after another two leagues they might
leave the boats, and push through the woods on foot.

Early the next morning the admiral decided to leave the boats, for with
his men so faint from hunger he thought it dangerous to tax them with a
labour so severe as rowing. He left 160 men to protect the fleet, giving
them the strictest orders to remain aboard. "No man," he commanded,
"upon any pretext whatsoever, should dare to leave the boats and go
ashore." The woods there were so dark and thick that a Spanish garrison
might have lain within 100 yards of the fleet, and cut off any
stragglers who landed. Having given his orders, he chose out a gang of
macheteros, or men carrying the sharp sword-like machetes, to march
ahead of the main body, to cut a trackway in the pulpy green stuff. They
then set forward through the forest, over their ankles in swampy mud, up
to their knees sometimes in rotting leaves, clambering over giant tree
trunks, wading through stagnant brooks, staggering and slipping and
swearing, faint with famine; a very desperate gang of cut-throats. As
they marched, the things called garapatadas, or wood-ticks, of which
some six sorts flourish there, dropped down upon them in scores, to add
their burning bites to the venom of the mosquitoes. In a moist
atmosphere of at least 90 deg., with heavy arms to carry, that march must
have been terrible. Even the buccaneers, men hardened to the climate,
could not endure it: they straggled back to the boats