May 10: Those damn Christians

This will be brief, for it's a Walter Raleigh travelogue and, as Raleigh himself says after describing a lot of the country,

He passed by the mouths of many great rivers which fell into Orenoque both from the north and south, which I forbear to name, for tediousness, and because they are more pleasing in describing than reading.

Doesn't that phrase fit almost anyone describing their trip? There's just one passage I want to pull out, because it amused me. Raleigh wants to go up country and the Spaniard who has already made a similar trip is discouraging him (emphasis added):

Berreo was stricken into a great melancholy and sadness, and used all the arguments he could to dissuade me; and also assured the gentlemen of my company that it would be labour lost, and that they should suffer many miseries if they proceeded. And first he delivered that I could not enter any of the rivers with any bark or pinnace, or hardly with any ship’s boat, it was so low, sandy, and full of flats... He further said that none of the country would come to speak with us, but would all fly; and if we followed them to their dwellings, they would burn their own towns. And besides that...we could not in those small boats by any means carry victuals for half the time, and that (which indeed most discouraged my company) the kings and lords of all the borders of Guiana had decreed that none of them should trade with any Christians for gold, because the same would be their own overthrow, and that for the love of gold the Christians meant to conquer and dispossess them of all together.

"Many and the most of these," notes Raleigh, ""I found to be true." He did it anyway, of course.