his health. After a five-week journey Robert arrived at the port of La Guayra in Venezuela on 23 July 1824. He investigated building a breakwater and pier at the harbour, and a railway to Caracas. A railway linking Caracas to its port was an ambitious project as Caracas is nearly 1,000 meters above sea level: one was not completed until the 1880s. Stephenson had potential backers for his railway in London, but he concluded that while the cost of a pier, estimated at £6,000, would be sustainable, that of a breakwater or railway would not. He travelled overland to Bogotá, arriving on 19 January 1825. Travelling onward, Robert found the heavier equipment at Honda on the Magdalena River; there was no way to get it to the mines as the only route was a narrow and steep path. The mines were another from Mariquita, and Stephenson set up home at Santa Ana in a bungalow. The Mining Association sent Cornish miners to work the mine, but they proved difficult to manage and drank so heavily that only two-thirds were available for work on any given day. They refused to accept that Stephenson, who had not been brought up in Cornwall, could know anything about mining. Hiss contract ended on 16 July 1827. He travelled to Cartagena to see if he could walk across the Panama Isthmus, but this proved too difficult. While waiting for a ship to New York, he met the railway pioneer Richard Trevithick, who had been looking for South American gold and silver in the mines of Peru and Costa Rica, and gave him £50 so he could buy passage home. Stephenson caught a ship to New York; en route this picked up shipwrecked survivors that were so weak they had to be winched aboard, before the ship he was on sank in another storm. Everyone was saved, but Stephenson lost his money and luggage. He noticed that one second-class passenger was given priority over first-class passengers in the lifeboats: the captain later said privately that he and the passenger were Freemasons and had sworn an oath to show such preference to each other in times of peril. Stephenson was impressed and became a Freemason in New York. Wishing to see something of North America, he and four other Englishmen walked the to Montreal via Niagara Falls. He returned to New York, caught the packet Pacific across