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march towards the South, but taking a route much more western, following the indication of
some Indians who assured to have seen stone constructions.
With this objective, he moved to Cabo de la Vela, over the coast of the Sea of the
Antilles, and embarked to Santo Domingo, leaving the Lords of Tharis with the Captain
Antonio de Chavez and the Catalan soldiers. Soon, Federmann returned accompanied with
eighty men, thirty horses, equipment and frech aliment, and joined with them, and they
departure to South West, in open contradiction to the instructions of Spira: instead of two
Dominican friars no were three, due to the Lady, Violante of Tharsis, had insisted to travel
disguised in that form, alleging that the «dangers that would lurk her alone in Coro would not
be, surely, fewer than the suffered by her familiars in the expedition», argument htat convinced
the unpredictable Men of Stone.
If the excursion of Spira could be considered as improvised, and scarcely of men and
means, the enterprise of Federmann was simply exiguous: little could do his hundred men and
fifty horses against the untold dangers that lurked in those wild and unknown lands; neither
the small troop of veterans of Santa Marta at the command of captain Rivera alleviated the
situation who joined them in the midst of the journey: such men were lost in the jungle,
discontent to march pointlessly after a wealth that not appeared nowhere. After suffering the
thousand penuries that the tropical forests offer, with their poisonous animals, spiders,
insects, ferocious tigers, and the intricate vegetation which had to be opened completely, the
invaders experienced the cold wind of the high peaks that surrounds the Dupar Valley. And
after the intermission, again in the warm jungle, the plagues, and the wild Indians, who were
harassing them endlessly. Nevertheless, they continued unabashedly to the South, crossing the
Rivers Apure y Meta, apart from thousand minor torrents, and they entered in the actual
territory of Colombia. But such country was out from the concession of the Welser’s and
Federmann’s and he had no right ofr its exploration.
And thenceforth there were no evidences that they were in the right path; the few
Indians that they achieved to capture gave vague indications abot the cities of stone: to the
South, always to the South; but to the South they just found miserable villages and Indians of
peerless savagery, cannibals and heads hunters, aborigines who poisoned their arrows and
spears and followed them tirelessly. Ambushing them continuously, attacking them from the
rearguard when were marching and in the camps at the intermissions. After a year and a half
advancing in that route, decimated, most of men converted to living skeletons covered with
rags, the descision to come back was imposed at the criterion of Ferdermann; otherwise they
could not prevent now the riot of the survivors of their desertion: from the hundred men of his
troop just fifty were still alive, and most of them in a deplorable state.

The Lords of Tharsis, on their part, stayed with stoicism during the campaing and they
only lost three Catalan soldiers; they pretended to go on to the South, but they didn’t find the
way to persuade the German. Finally, before his irrevocable determination, they opted for a
heroic solution, to which Nicolaus could not deny: they will stay there and continue with the
quest. The plan was suicidal, but as any of the sides was disposed to disposed to yield, Nicolaus
Federmann accepted to let them go in secrecy, simulating a straying that would prevent

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