more beautiful country, nor more lively
prospects; hills so raised here and there over the valleys; the river
winding into divers branches; the plains adjoining without bush or
stubble, all fair green grass; the ground of hard sand, easy to march
on, either for horse or foot; the deer crossing in every path; the birds
towards the evening singing on every tree with a thousand several tunes;
cranes and herons of white, crimson, and carnation, perching in the
river's side; the air fresh with a gentle easterly wind; and every
stone that we stooped to take up promised either gold or silver by his
complexion. Your Lordship shall see of many sorts, and I hope some of
them cannot be bettered under the sun; and yet we had no means but with
our daggers and fingers to tear them out here and there, the rocks being
most hard of that mineral spar aforesaid, which is like a flint, and is
altogether as hard or harder, and besides the veins lie a fathom or
two deep in the rocks. But we wanted all things requisite save only our
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