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Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, During the Year 1799-1804 — Volume 3

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Title: Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, During the Year 1799-1804 — Volume 3

Author: Alexander von Humboldt
        Aimé Bonpland

Translator: Thomasina Ross


        
Release date: January 1, 2005 [eBook #7254]
                Most recently updated: August 18, 2012

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7254

Credits: Produced by Sue Asschers


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PERSONAL NARRATIVE OF TRAVELS TO THE EQUINOCTIAL REGIONS OF AMERICA, DURING THE YEAR 1799-1804 — VOLUME 3 ***




Produced by Sue Asschers










BOHN'S SCIENTIFIC LIBRARY.


HUMBOLDT'S PERSONAL NARRATIVE

VOLUME 3.

PERSONAL NARRATIVE OF TRAVELS TO THE EQUINOCTIAL REGIONS OF AMERICA
DURING THE YEARS 1799-1804

BY

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT AND AIME BONPLAND.

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH OF
ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT
AND EDITED BY
THOMASINA ROSS.

IN THREE VOLUMES

VOLUME 3.


LONDON.

GEORGE BELL & SONS.
1908.
LONDON: PORTUGAL STREET, LINCOLN'S INN.
CAMBRIDGE: DEIGHTON, BELL AND CO.
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN CO.
BOMBAY: A.H. WHEELER AND CO.


***

The longitudes mentioned in the text refer always to the meridian of
the Observatory of Paris.

The real is about 6 1/2 English pence.

The agrarian measure, called caballeria, is eighteen cordels, (each
cordel includes twenty-four varas) or 432 square varas; consequently,
as 1 vara = 0.835m., according to Rodriguez, a caballeria is 186,624
square varas, or 130,118 square metres, or thirty-two and two-tenths
English acres.

20 leagues to a degree.

5000 varas = 4150 metres.

3403 square toises = 1.29 hectare.

An acre = 4044 square metres.

Five hundred acres = fifteen and a half caballerias.

Sugar-houses are thought to be very considerable that yield 2000 cases
annually, or 32,000 arrobas (nearly 368,000 kilogrammes.)

An arroba of 25 Spanish pounds = 11.49 kilogrammes.

A quintal = 45.97 kilogrammes.

A tarea of wood = one hundred and sixty cubic feet.




VOLUME 3.


CONTENTS.


CHAPTER 3.25.

SPANISH GUIANA.--ANGOSTURA.--PALM-INHABITING TRIBES.--MISSIONS OF THE
CAPUCHINS.--THE LAGUNA PARIME.--EL DORADO.--LEGENDARY TALES OF THE
EARLY VOYAGERS.


CHAPTER 3.26.

THE LLANOS DEL PAO, OR EASTERN PART OF THE PLAINS OF
VENEZUELA.--MISSIONS OF THE CARIBS.--LAST VISIT TO THE COAST OF NUEVA
BARCELONA, CUMANA, AND ARAYA.


CHAPTER 3.27.

POLITICAL STATE OF THE PROVINCES OF VENEZUELA.--EXTENT OF
TERRITORY.--POPULATION.--NATURAL PRODUCTIONS.--EXTERNAL
TRADE.--COMMUNICATIONS BETWEEN THE DIFFERENT PROVINCES COMPRISING THE
REPUBLIC OF COLUMBIA.


CHAPTER 3.28.

PASSAGE FROM THE COAST OF VENEZUELA TO THE HAVANA.--GENERAL VIEW OF
THE POPULATION OF THE WEST INDIA ISLANDS, COMPARED WITH THE POPULATION
OF THE NEW CONTINENT, WITH RESPECT TO DIVERSITY OF RACES, PERSONAL
LIBERTY, LANGUAGE, AND WORSHIP.


CHAPTER 3.29.

POLITICAL ESSAY ON THE ISLAND OF CUBA.--THE HAVANNAH.--HILLS OF
GUANAVACOA, CONSIDERED IN THEIR GEOLOGICAL RELATIONS.--VALLEY OF LOS
GUINES, BATABANO, AND PORT OF TRINIDAD.--THE KING AND QUEEN'S GARDENS.


CHAPTER 3.30.

PASSAGE FROM TRINIDAD DE CUBA TO RIO SINU.--CARTHAGENA.--AIR VOLCANOES
OF TURBACO.--CANAL OF MAHATES.


CHAPTER 3.31.

CUBA AND THE SLAVE TRADE.


CHAPTER 3.32.

GEOGNOSTIC DESCRIPTION OF SOUTH AMERICA, NORTH OF THE RIVER AMAZON,
AND EAST OF THE MERIDIAN OF THE SIERRA NEVADA DE MERIDA.


INDEX.


***



PERSONAL NARRATIVE OF A JOURNEY TO THE EQUINOCTIAL REGIONS OF THE NEW
CONTINENT.

VOLUME 3.


CHAPTER 3.25.

SPANISH GUIANA.
ANGOSTURA.
PALM-INHABITING TRIBES.
MISSIONS OF THE CAPUCHINS.
THE LAGUNA PARIME.
EL DORADO.
LEGENDARY TALES OF THE EARLY VOYAGERS.

I shall commence this chapter by a description of Spanish Guiana
(Provincia de la Guyana), which is a part of the ancient Capitania
general of Caracas. Since the end of the sixteenth century three towns
have successively borne the name of St. Thomas of Guiana. The first
was situated opposite to the island of Faxardo, at the confluence of
the Carony and the Orinoco, and was destroyed* by the Dutch, under the
command of Captain Adrian Janson, in 1579. (* The first of the voyages
undertaken at Raleigh's expense was in 1595; the second, that of
Laurence Keymis, in 1596; the third, described by Thomas Masham, in
1597; and the fourth, in 1617. The first and last only were performed
by Raleigh in person. This celebrated man was beheaded on October the
29th, 1618. It is therefore the second town of Santo Tomas, now called
Vieja Guyana, which existed in the time of Raleigh.) The second,
founded by Antonio de Berrio in 1591, near twelve leagues east of the
mouth of the Carony, made a courageous resistance to Sir Walter
Raleigh, whom the Spanish writers of the conquest know only by the
name of the pirate Reali. The third town, now the capital of the
province, is fifty leagues west of the confluence of the Carony. It
was begun in 1764, under the Governor Don Joacquin Moreno de Mendoza,
and is distinguished in the public documents from the second town,
vulgarly called the fortress (el castillo, las fortalezas), or Old
Guayana (Vieja Guayana), by the name of Santo Thome de la Nueva
Guayana. This name being very long, that of Angostura* (the strait)
has been commonly substituted for it. (* Europe has learnt the
existence of the town of Angostura by the trade carried on by the
Catalonians in the Carony bark, which is the beneficial bark of the
Bonplanda trifoliata. This bark, coming from Nueva Guiana, was called
corteza or cascarilla del Angostura (Cortex Angosturae). Botanists so
little guessed the origin of this geographical denomination that they
began by writing Augustura, and then Augusta.)

Angostura, the longitude and latitude of which I have already
indicated from astronomical observations, stands at the foot of a hill
of amphibolic schist* bare of vegetation. (* Hornblendschiefer.) The
streets are regular, and for the most part parallel with the course of
the river. Several of the houses are built on the bare rock; and here,
as at Carichana, and in many other parts of the missions, the action
of black and strong strata, when strongly heated by the rays of the
sun upon the atmosphere, is considered injurious to health. I think
the small pools of stagnant water (lagunas y anegadizos), which extend
behind the town in the direction of south-east, are more to be feared.
The houses of Angostura are lofty and convenient; they are for the
most part built of stone; which proves that the inhabitants have but
little dread of earthquakes. But unhappily this security is not
founded on induction from any precise data. It is true that the shore
of Nueva Andalusia sometimes undergoes very violent shocks, without
the commotion being propagated across the Llanos. The fatal
catastrophe of Cumana, on the 4th of February, 1797, was not felt at
Angostura; but in the great earthquake of 1766, which destroyed the
same city, the granitic soil of the two banks of the Orinoco was
agitated as far as the Raudales of Atures and Maypures. South of these
Raudales shocks are sometimes felt, which are confined to the basin of
the Upper Orinoco and the Rio Negro. They appear to depend on a
volcanic focus distant from that of the Caribbee Islands. We were told
by the missionaries at Javita and San Fernando de Atabapo that in 1798
violent earthquakes took place between the Guaviare and the Rio Negro,
which were not propagated on the north towards Maypures. We cannot be
sufficiently attentive to whatever relates to the simultaneity of the
oscillations, and to the independence of the movements in contiguous
ground. Everything seems to prove that the propagation of the
commotion is not superficial, but depends on very deep crevices that
terminate in different centres of action.

The scenery around the town of Angostura is little varied; but the
view of the river, which forms a vast canal, stretching from
south-west to north-east, is singularly majestic.

When the waters are high, the river inundates the quays; and it
sometimes happens that, even in the town, imprudent persons become the
prey of crocodiles. I shall transcribe from my journal a fact that
took place during M. Bonpland's illness. A Guaykeri Indian, from the
island of La Margareta, was anchoring his canoe in a cove where there
were not three feet of water. A very fierce crocodile, which
habitually haunted that spot, seized him by the leg, and withdrew from
the shore, remaining on the surface of the water. The cries of the
Indian drew together a crowd of spectators. This unfortunate man was
first seen seeking, with astonishing presence of mind, for a knife
which he had in his pocket. Not being able to find it, he seized the
head of the crocodile and thrust his fingers into its eyes. No man in
the hot regions of America is ignorant that this carnivorous reptile,
covered with a buckler of hard and dry scales, is extremely sensitive
in the only parts of his body which are soft and unprotected, such as
the eyes, the hollow underneath the shoulders, the nostrils, and
beneath the lower jaw, where there are two glands of musk. The
Guaykeri Indian was less fortunate than the negro of Mungo Park, and
the girl of Uritucu, whom I mentioned in a former part of this work,
for the crocodile did not open its jaws and lose hold of its prey. The
animal, overcome by pain, plunged to the bottom of the river, and,
after having drowned the Indian, came up to the surface of the water,
dragging the dead body to an island opposite the port. A great number
of the inhabitants of Angostura witnessed this melancholy spectacle.

The crocodile, owing to the structure of its larynx, of the hyoidal
bone, and of the folds of its tongue, can seize, though not swallow,
its prey under water; thus when a man disappears, the animal is
usually perceived some hours after devouring its prey on a
neighbouring beach. The number of individuals who perish annually, the
victims of their own imprudence and of the ferocity of these reptiles,
is much greater than is believed in Europe. It is particularly so in
villages where the neighbouring grounds are often inundated. The same
crocodiles remain long in the same places. They become from year to
year more daring, especially, as the Indians assert, if they have once
tasted of human flesh. These animals are so wary, that they are killed
with difficulty. A ball does not pierce their skin; and the shot is
only mortal when it penetrates the throat or a part beneath the
shoulder. The Indians, who know little of the use of fire-arms, attack
the crocodile with lances, after the animal has been caught with large
pointed iron hooks, baited with pieces of meat, and fastened by a
chain to the trunk of a tree. They do not approach the animal till it
has struggled a long time to disengage itself from the iron fixed in
the upper jaw. There is little probability that a country in which a
labyrinth of rivers without number brings every day new bands of
crocodiles from the eastern back of the Andes, by the Meta and the
Apure, toward the coast of Spanish Guiana, should ever be delivered
from these reptiles. All that will be gained by civilization will be
to render them more timid and more easily put to flight.

Affecting instances are related of African slaves, who have exposed
their lives to save those of their masters, who had fallen into the
jaws of a crocodile. A few years ago, between Uritucu and the Mission
de Abaxo, a negro, hearing the cries of his master, flew to the spot,
armed with a long knife (machete), and plunged into the river. He
forced the crocodile, by putting out his eyes, to let go his prey and
to plunge under the water. The slave bore his expiring master to the
shore; but all succour was unavailing to restore him to life. He had
died of suffocation, for his wounds were not deep. The crocodile, like
the dog, appears not to close its jaws firmly while swimming.

The inhabitants of the banks of the Orinoco and its tributary streams
discourse continually on the dangers to which they are exposed. They
have marked the manners of the crocodile, as the torero has studied
the manners of the bull. When they are assailed, they put in practice,
with that presence of mind and that resignation which characterize the
Indians, the Zamboes, and copper-coloured men in general, the counsels
they have heard from their infancy. In countries where nature is so
powerful and so terrible, man is constantly prepared for danger. We
have mentioned before the answer of the young Indian girl, who
delivered herself from the jaws of the crocodile: "I knew he would let
me go if I thrust my fingers into his eyes." This girl belonged to the
indigent class of the people, in whom the habits of physical want
augment energy of character; but how can we avoid being surprised to
observe in the countries convulsed by terrible earthquakes, on the
table-land of the province of Quito, women belonging to the highest
classes of society display in the moment of peril, the same calm, the
same reflecting intrepidity? I shall mention one example only in
support of this assertion. On the 4th of February, 1797, when 35,000
Indians perished in the space of a few minutes, a young mother saved
herself and her children, crying out to them to extend their arms at
the moment when the cracked ground was ready to swallow them up. When
this courageous woman heard the astonishment that was expressed at a
presence of mind so extraordinary, she answered, with great
simplicity, "I had been told in my infancy: if the earthquake surprise
you in a house, place yourself under a doorway that communicates from
one apartment to another; if you be in the open air and feel the
ground opening beneath you, extend both your arms, and try to support
yourself on the edge of the crevice." Thus, in savage regions or in
countries exposed to frequent convulsions, man is prepared to struggle
with the beasts of the forest, to deliver himself from the jaws of the
crocodile, and to escape from the conflict of the elements.

The town of Angostura, in the early years of its foundation, had no
direct communication with the mother-country. The inhabitants were
contented with carrying on a trifling contraband trade in dried meat
and tobacco with the West India Islands, and with the Dutch colony of
Essequibo, by the Rio Carony. Neither wine, oil, nor flour, three
articles of importation the most sought after, was received directly
from Spain. Some merchants, in 1771, sent the first schooner to Cadiz;
and since that period a direct exchange of commodities with the ports
of Andalusia and Catalonia has become extremely active. The population
of Angostura,* after having been a long time languishing, has much
increased since 1785. (* Angostura, or Santo Thome de la Nueva
Guayana, in 1768, had only 500 inhabitants. Caulin page 63. They were
numbered in 1780 and the result was 1513 (455 Whites, 449 Blacks, 363
Mulattoes and Zamboes, and 246 Indians). The population in the year
1789 rose to 4590; and in 1800 to 6600 souls. Official Lists
manuscript. The capital of the English colony of Demerara, the town of
Stabroek, the name of which is scarcely known in Europe, is only fifty
leagues distant, south-east of the mouths of the Orinoco. It contains,
according to Bolingbroke, nearly 10,000 inhabitants.) At the time of
my abode in Guiana, however, it was far from being equal to that of
Stabroek, the nearest English town. The mouths of the Orinoco have an
advantage over every other part in Terra Firma. They afford the most
prompt communications with the Peninsula. The voyage from Cadiz to
Punta Barima is performed sometimes in eighteen or twenty days. The
return to Europe takes from thirty to thirty-five days. These mouths
being placed to windward of all the islands, the vessels of Angostura
can maintain a more advantageous commerce with the West Indies than La
Guayra and Porto Cabello. The merchants of Caracas, therefore, have
been always jealous of the progress of industry in Spanish Guiana; and
Caracas having been hitherto the seat of the supreme government, the
port of Angostura has been treated with still less favour than the
ports of Cumana and Nueva Barcelona. With respect to the inland trade,
the most active is that of the province of Varinas, which sends mules,
cacao, indigo, cotton, and sugar to Angostura; and in return receives
generos, that is, the products of the manufacturing industry of
Europe. I have seen long boats (lanchas) set off, the cargoes of which
were valued at eight or ten thousand piastres. These boats went first
up the Orinoco to Cabruta; then along the Apure to San Vicente; and
finally, on the Rio Santo Domingo, as far as Torunos, which is the
port of Varinas Nuevas. The little town of San Fernando de Apure, of
which I have already given a description, is the magazine of this
river-trade, which might become more considerable by the introduction
of steamboats.

I have now described the country through which we passed during a
voyage of five hundred leagues; it remains for me to make known the
small space of three degrees fifty-two minutes of longitude, that
separates the present capital from the mouth of the Orinoco. Exact
knowledge of the delta and the course of the Rio Carony is at once
interesting to hydrography and to European commerce.

When a vessel coming from sea would enter the principal mouth of the
Orinoco, the Boca de Navios, it should make the land at the Punta
Barima. The right or southern bank is the highest: the granitic rock
pierces the marshy soil at a small distance in the interior, between
the Cano Barima, the Aquire, and the Cuyuni. The left, or northern
bank of the Orinoco, which stretches along the delta towards the Boca
de Mariusas and the Punta Baxa, is very low, and is distinguishable at
a distance only by the clumps of moriche palm-trees which embellish
the passage. This is the sago-tree* of the country (* The nutritious
fecula or medullary flour of the sago-trees is found principally in a
group of palms which M. Kunth has distinguished by the name of
calameae. It is collected, however, in the Indian Archipelago, as an
article of trade, from the trunks of the Cycas revoluta, the Phoenix
farinifera, the Corypha umbraculifera, and the Caryota urens.
(Ainslie, Materia Medica of Hindostan, Madras 1813.)) The quantity of
nutritious matter which the real sago-tree of Asia affords (Sagus
Rumphii, or Metroxylon sagu, Roxb.) exceeds that which is furnished by
any other plant useful to man. One trunk of a tree in its fifteenth
year sometimes yields six hundred pounds weight of sago, or meal (for
the word sago signifies meal in the dialect of Amboyna). Mr. Crawfurd,
who resided a long time in the Indian Archipelago, calculates that an
English acre could contain four hundred and thirty-five sago-trees,
which would yield one hundred and twenty thousand five hundred pounds
avoirdupois of fecula, or more than eight thousand pounds yearly.
History of the Indian Archipelago volume 1 pages 387 and 393. This
produce is triple that of corn, and double that of potatoes in France.
But the plantain produces, on the same surface of land, still more
alimentary substance than the sago-tree.); it yields the flour of
which the yuruma bread is made; and far from being a palm-tree of the
shore, like the Chamaerops humilis, the common cocoa-tree, and the
lodoicea of Commerson, is found as a palm-tree of the marshes as far
as the sources of the Orinoco.* (* I dwell much on these divisions of
the great and fine families of palms according to the distribution of
the species: first, in dry places, or inland plains, Corypha tectorum;
second, on the sea-coast, Chamaerops humilis, Cocos nucifera, Corypha
maritima, Lodoicea seychellarum, Labill.; third, in the fresh-water
marshes, Sagus Rumphii, Mauritia flexuosa; and 4th, in the alpine
regions, between seven and fifteen hundred toises high, Ceroxylon
andicola, Oreodoxa frigida, Kunthia montana. This last group of palmae
montanae, which rises in the Andes of Guanacas nearly to the limit of
perpetual snow, was, I believe, entirely unknown before our travels in
America. (Nov. Gen. volume 1 page 317; Semanario de Santa Fe de Bogota
1819 Number 21 page 163.) In the season of inundations these clumps of
mauritia, with their leaves in the form of a fan, have the appearance
of a forest rising from the bosom of the waters. The navigator, in
proceeding along the channels of the delta of the Orinoco at night,
sees with surprise the summit of the palm-trees illumined by large
fires. These are the habitations of the Guaraons (Tivitivas and
Waraweties of Raleigh* (* The Indian name of the tribe of Uaraus
(Guaraunos of the Spaniards) may be recognized in the Warawety
(Ouarauoty) of Raleigh, one of the branches of the Tivitivas. See
Discovery of Guiana, 1576 page 90 and the sketch of the habitations of
the Guaraons, in Raleghi brevis Descrip. Guianae, 1594 tab 4.)), which
are suspended from the trunks of trees. These tribes hang up mats in
the air, which they fill with earth, and kindle, on a layer of moist
clay, the fire necessary for their household wants. They have owed
their liberty and their political independence for ages to the quaking
and swampy soil, which they pass over in the time of drought, and on
which they alone know how to walk in security to their solitude in the
delta of the Orinoco; to their abode on the trees where religious
enthusiasm will probably never lead any American stylites.* (* This
sect was founded by Simeon Sisanites, a native of Syria. He passed
thirty-seven years in mystic contemplation, on five pillars, the last
of which was thirty-six cubits high. The sancti columnares attempted
to establish their aerial cloisters in the country of Treves, in
Germany; but the bishops opposed these extravagant and perilous
enterprises. Mosheim, Instit. Hist. Eccles page 192. See Humboldt's
Views of Nature (Bohn) pages 13 and 136.) I have already mentioned in
another place that the mauritia palm-tree, the tree of life of the
missionaries, not only affords the Guaraons a safe dwelling during the
risings of the Orinoco, but that its shelly fruit, its farinaceous
pith, its juice, abounding in saccharine matter, and the fibres of its
petioles, furnish them with food, wine,* and thread proper for making
cords and weaving hammocks. (* The use of this moriche wine however is
not very common. The Guaraons prefer in general a beverage of
fermented honey.) These customs of the Indians of the delta of the
Orinoco were found formerly in the Gulf of Darien (Uraba), and in the
greater part of the inundated lands between the Guarapiche and the
mouths of the Amazon. It is curious to observe in the lowest degree of
human civilization the existence of a whole tribe depending on one
single species of palm-tree, similar to those insects which feed on
one and the same flower, or on one and the same part of a plant.

The navigation of the river, whether vessels arrive by the Boca de
Navios, or risk entering the labyrinth of the bocas chicas, requires
various precautions, according as the waters are high or low. The
regularity of these periodical risings of the Orinoco has been long an
object of admiration to travellers, as the overflowings of the Nile
furnished the philosophers of antiquity with a problem difficult to
solve. The Orinoco and the Nile, contrary to the direction of the
Ganges, the Indus, the Rio de la Plata, and the Euphrates, flow alike
from the south toward the north; but the sources of the Orinoco are
five or six degrees nearer to the equator than those of the Nile.
Observing every day the accidental variations of the atmosphere, we
find it difficult to persuade ourselves that in a great space of time
the effects of these variations mutually compensate each other: that
in a long succession of years the averages of the temperature of the
humidity, and of the barometric pressure, differ so little from month
to month; and that nature, notwithstanding the multitude of partial
perturbations, follows a constant type in the series of meteorological
phenomena. Great rivers unite in one receptacle the waters which a
surface of several thousand square leagues receives. However unequal
may be the quantity of rain that falls during several successive
years, in such or such a valley, the swellings of rivers that have a
very long course are little affected by these local variations. The
swellings represent the average of the humidity that reigns in the
whole basin; they follow annually the same progression because their
commencement and their duration depend also on the mean of the
periods, apparently extremely variable, of the beginning and end of
the rains in the different latitudes through which the principal trunk
and its various tributary streams flow. Hence it follows that the
periodical oscillations of rivers are, like the equality of
temperature of caverns and springs, a sensible indication of the
regular distribution of humidity and heat, which takes place from year
to year on a considerable extent of land. They strike the imagination
of the vulgar; as order everywhere astonishes, when we cannot easily
ascend to first causes. Rivers that belong entirely to the torrid zone
display in their periodical movements that wonderful regularity which
is peculiar to a region where the same wind brings almost always
strata of air of the same temperature; and where the change of the sun
in its declination causes every year at the same period a rupture of
equilibrium in the electric intensity, in the cessation of the
breezes, and the commencement of the season of rains. The Orinoco, the
Rio Magdalena, and the Congo or Zaire are the only great rivers of the
equinoctial region of the globe, which, rising near the equator, have
their mouths in a much higher latitude, though still within the
tropics. The Nile and the Rio de la Plata direct their course, in the
two opposite hemispheres, from the torrid zone towards the temperate.*
(* In Asia, the Ganges, the Burrampooter, and the majestic rivers of
Indo-China direct their course towards the equator. The former flow
from the temperate to the torrid zone. This circumstance of courses
pursuing opposite directions (towards the equator, and towards the
temperate climates) has an influence on the period and the height of
the risings, on the nature and variety of the productions on the banks
of the rivers, on the less or greater activity of trade; and, I may
add, from what we know of the nations of Egypt, Merce, and India, on
the progress of civilization along the valleys of the rivers.)

As long as, confounding the Rio Paragua of Esmeralda with the Rio
Guaviare, the sources of the Orinoco were sought towards the
south-west, on the eastern back of the Andes, the risings of this
river were attributed to a periodical melting of the snows. This
reasoning was as far from the truth as that in which the Nile was
formerly supposed to be swelled by the waters of the snows of
Abyssinia. The Cordilleras of New Grenada, near which the western
tributary streams of the Orinoco, the Guaviare, the Meta, and the
Apure take their rise, enter no more into the limit of perpetual
snows, with the sole exception of the Paramos of Chita and Mucuchies,
than the Alps of Abyssinia. Snowy mountains are much more rare in the
torrid zone than is generally admitted; and the melting of the snows,
which is not copious there at any season, does not at all increase at
the time of the inundations of the Orinoco.

The cause of the periodical swellings of the Orinoco acts equally on
all the rivers that take rise in the torrid zone. After the vernal
equinox, the cessation of the breezes announces the season of rains.
The increase of the rivers (which may be considered as natural
pluviometers) is in proportion to the quantity of water that falls in
the different regions. This quantity, in the centre of the forests of
the Upper Orinoco and the Rio Negro, appeared to me to exceed 90 or
100 inches annually. Such of the natives, therefore, as have lived
beneath the misty sky of the Esmeralda and the Atabapo, know, without
the smallest notion of natural philosophy, what Eudoxus and
Eratosthenes knew heretofore,* that the inundations of the great
rivers are owing solely to the equatorial rains. (* Strabo lib. 17
page 789. Diod. Sic. lib. l c. 5.) The following is the usual progress
of the oscillations of the Orinoco. Immediately after the vernal
equinox (the people say on the 25th of March) the commencement of the
rising is perceived. It is at first only an inch in twenty-four hours;
sometimes the river again sinks in April; it attains its maximum in
July; remains at the same level from the end of July till the 25th of
August; and then decreases progressively, but more slowly than it
increased. It is at its minimum in January and February. In both
worlds the rivers of the northern torrid zone attain the greatest
height nearly at the same period. The Ganges, the Niger, and the
Gambia reach the maximum, like the Orinoco, in the month of August.*
(* Nearly forty or fifty days after the summer solstice.) The Nile is
two months later, either on account of some local circumstances in the
climate of Abyssinia, or of the length of its course, from the country
of Berber, or 17.5 degrees of latitude, to the bifurcation of the
delta. The Arabian geographers assert that in Sennaar and in Abyssinia
the Nile begins to swell in the month of April (nearly as the
Orinoco); the rise, however, does not become sensible at Cairo till
toward the summer solstice; and the water attains its greatest height
at the end of the month of September.* (* Nearly eighty or ninety days
after the summer solstice.) The river keeps at the same level till the
middle of October; and is at its minimum in April and May, a period
when the rivers of Guiana begin to swell anew. It may be seen from
this rapid statement, that, notwithstanding the retardation caused by
the form of the natural channels, and by local climatic circumstances,
the great phenomenon of the oscillations of the rivers of the torrid
zone is everywhere the same. In the two zodiacs vulgarly called the
Tartar and Chaldean, or Egyptian (in the zodiac which contains the
sign of the Rat, an in that which contains those of the Fishes and
Aquarius), particular constellations are consecrated to the periodical
overflowings of the rivers. Real cycles, divisions of time, have been
gradually transformed into divisions of space; but the generality of
the physical phenomena of the risings seems to prove that the zodiac
which has been transmitted to us by the Greeks, and which, by the
precession of the equinoxes, becomes an historical monument of high
antiquity, may have taken birth far from Thebes, and from the sacred
valley of the Nile. In the zodiacs of the New World--in the Mexican,
for instance, of which we discover the vestiges in the signs of the
days, and the periodical series which they compose--there are also
signs of rain and of inundation corresponding to the Chou (Rat) of the
Chinese* and Thibetan cycle of Tse, and to the Fishes and Aquarius of
the dodecatemorion. (* The figure of water itself is often substituted
for that of the Rat (Arvicola) in the Tartar zodiac. The Rat takes the
place of Aquarius. Gaubil, Obs. Mathem. volume 3 page 33.) These two
Mexican signs are Water (Atl) and Cipactli, the sea-monster furnished
with a horn. This animal is at once the Antelope-fish of the Hindoos,
the Capricorn of our zodiac, the Deucalion of the Greeks, and the Noah
(Coxcox) of the Azteks.* (* Coxcox bears also the denomination of
Teo-Cipactli, in which the root god or divine is added to the name of
the sign Cipactli. It is the man of the Fourth Age; who, at the fourth
destruction of the world (the last renovation of nature), saved
himself with his wife, and reached the mountain of Colhuacan.
According to the commentator Germanicus, Deucalion was placed in
Aquarius; but the three signs of the Fishes, Aquarius and Capricorn
(the Antelope-fish) were heretofore intimately linked together. The
animal, which, after having long inhabited the waters, takes the form
of an antelope, and climbs the mountains, reminds people, whose
restless imagination seizes the most remote similitudes, of the
ancient traditions of Menou, of Noah, and of those Deucalions
celebrated among the Scythians and the Thessalians. As the Tartarian
and Mexican zodiacs contain the signs of the Monkey and the Tiger,
they, no doubt, originated in the torrid zone. With the Muyscas,
inhabitants of New Grenada, the first sign, as in eastern Asia, was
that of water, figured by a Frog. It is also remarkable that the
astrological worship of the Muyscas came to the table-land of Bogota
from the eastern side, from the plains of San Juan, which extend
toward the Guaviare and the Orinoco.) Thus we find the general results
of comparative hydrography in the astrological monuments, the
divisions of time and the religious traditions of nations the most
remote from each other in their situation and in their degree of
intellectual advancement.

As the equatorial rains take place in the flat country when the sun
passes through the zenith of the place, that is, when its declination
becomes homonymous with the zone comprised between the equator and one
of the tropics, the waters of the Amazon sink, while those of the
Orinoco rise perceptibly. In a very judicious discussion on the origin
of the Rio Congo,* (* Voyage to the Zaire page 17.) the attention of
philosophers has been already called to the modifications which the
periods of the risings must undergo in the course of a river, the
sources and the mouth of which are not on the same side of the
equinoctial line.* (* Among the rivers of America this is the case
with the Rio Negro, the Rio Branco, and the Jupura.) The hydraulic
systems of the Orinoco and the Amazon furnish a combination of
circumstances still more extraordinary. They are united by the Rio
Negro and the Cassiquiare, a branch of the Orinoco; it is a navigable
line, between two great basins of rivers, that is crossed by the
equator. The river Amazon, according to the information which I
obtained on its banks, is much less regular in the periods of its
oscillations than the Orinoco; it generally begins, however, to
increase in December, and attains its maximum of height in March.* (*
Nearly seventy or eighty days after our winter solstice, which is the
summer solstice of the southern hemisphere.) It sinks from the month
of May, and is at its minimum of height in the months of July and
August, at the time when the Lower Orinoco inundates all the
surrounding land. As no river of America can cross the equator from
south to north, on account of the general configuration of the ground,
the risings of the Orinoco have an influence on the Amazon; but those
of the Amazon do not alter the progress of the oscillations of the
Orinoco. It results from these data, that in the two basins of the
Amazon and the Orinoco, the concave and convex summits of the curve of
progressive increase and decrease correspond very regularly with each
other, since they exhibit the difference of six months, which results
from the situation of the rivers in opposite hemispheres. The
commencement of the risings only is less tardy in the Orinoco. This
river increases sensibly as soon as the sun has crossed the equator;
in the Amazon, on the contrary, the risings do not commence till two
months after the equinox. It is known that in the forests north of the
line the rains are earlier than in the less woody plains of the
southern torrid zone. To this local cause is joined another, which
acts perhaps equally on the tardy swellings of the Nile. The Amazon
receives a great part of its waters from the Cordillera of the Andes,
where the seasons, as everywhere among mountains, follow a peculiar
type, most frequently opposite to that of the low regions.

The law of the increase and decrease of the Orinoco is more difficult
to determine with respect to space, or to the magnitude of the
oscillations, than with regard to time, or the period of the maxima
and minima. Having been able to measure but imperfectly the risings of
the river, I report, not without hesitation, estimates that differ
much from each other.* (* Tuckey, Maritime Geogr. volume 4 page 309.
Hippisley, Expedition to the Orinoco page 38. Gumilla volume 1 pages
56 to 59. Depons volume 3 page 301. The greatest height of the rise of
the Mississippi is, at Natchez, fifty-five English feet. This river
(the largest perhaps of the whole temperate zone) is at its maximum
from February to May; at its minimum in August and September.
Ellicott, Journal of an Expedition to the Ohio.) Foreign pilots admit
ninety feet for the ordinary rise in the Lower Orinoco. M. Depons, who
has in general collected very accurate notions during his stay at
Caracas, fixes it at thirteen fathoms. The heights naturally vary
according to the breadth of the bed and the number of tributary
streams which the principal trunk receives.

The people believe that every five years the Orinoco rises three feet
higher than common; but the idea of this cycle does not rest on any
precise measures. We know by the testimony of antiquity, that the
oscillations of the Nile have been sensibly the same with respect to
their height and duration for thousands of years; which is a proof,
well worthy of attention, that the mean state of the humidity and the
temperature does not vary in that vast basin. Will this constancy in
physical phenomena, this equilibrium of the elements, be preserved in
the New World also after some ages of cultivation? I think we may
reply in the affirmative; for the united efforts of man cannot fail to
have an influence on the general causes on which the climate of Guiana
depends.

According to the barometric height of San Fernando de Apure, I find
from that town to the Boca de Navios the slope of the Apure and the
Lower Orinoco to be three inches and a quarter to a nautical mile of
nine hundred and fifty toises.* (* The Apure itself has a slope of
thirteen inches to the mile.) We may be surprised at the strength of
the current in a slope so little perceptible; but I shall remind the
reader on this occasion, that, according to measurements made by order
of Mr. Hastings, the Ganges was found, in a course of sixty miles
(comprising the windings,) to have also only four inches fall to a
mile; that the mean swiftness of this river is, in the seasons of
drought, three miles an hour, and in those of rains six or eight
miles. The strength of the current, therefore, in the Ganges as in the
Orinoco, depends less on the slope of the bed, than on the
accumulation of the higher waters, caused by the abundance of the
rains, and the number of tributary streams. European colonists have
already been settled for two hundred and fifty years on the banks of
the Orinoco; and during this long period of time, according to a
tradition which has been propagated from generation to generation, the
periodical oscillations of the river (the time of the beginning of the
rising, and that when it attains its maximum) have never been retarded
more than twelve or fifteen days.

When vessels that draw a good deal of water sail up toward Angostura
in the months of January and February, by favour of the sea-breeze and
the tide, they run the risk of taking the ground. The navigable
channel often changes its breadth and direction; no buoy, however, has
yet been laid down, to indicate any deposit of earth formed in the bed
of the river, where the waters have lost their original velocity.
There exists on the south of Cape Barima, as well by the river of this
name as by the Rio Moroca and several estuaries (esteres) a
communication with the English colony of Essequibo. Small vessels can
penetrate into the interior as far as the Rio Poumaron, on which are
the ancient settlements of Zealand and Middleburg. Heretofore this
communication interested the government of Caracas only on account of
the facility it furnished to an illicit trade; but since Berbice,
Demerara, and Essequibo have fallen into the hands of a more powerful
neighbour, it fixes the attention of the Spanish Americans as being
connected with the security of their frontiers. Rivers which have a
course parallel to the coast, and are nowhere farther distant from it
than five or six nautical miles, characterize the whole of the shore
between the Orinoco and the Amazon.

Ten leagues distant from Cape Barima, the great bed of the Orinoco is
divided for the first time into two branches of two thousand toises in
breadth. They are known by the Indian names of Zacupana and Imataca.
The first, which is the northernmost, communicates on the west of the
islands Congrejos and del Burro with the bocas chicas of Lauran,
Nuina, and Mariusas. As the Isla del Burro disappears in the time of
great inundations, it is unhappily not suited to fortifications. The
southern bank of the brazo Imataca is cut by a labyrinth of little
channels, into which the Rio Imataca and the Rio Aquire flow. A long
series of little granitic hills rises in the fertile savannahs between
the Imataca and the Cuyuni; it is a prolongation of the Cordilleras of
Parima, which, bounding the horizon south of Angostura, forms the
celebrated cataracts of the Rio Caroni, and approaches the Orinoco
like a projecting cape near the little fort of Vieja Guyana. The
populous missions of the Caribbee and Guiana Indians, governed by the
Catalonian Capuchins, lie near the sources of the Imataca and the
Aquire. The easternmost of these missions are those of Miamu, Camamu,
and Palmar, situate in a hilly country, which extends towards
Tupuquen, Santa Maria, and the Villa de Upata. Going up the Rio
Aquire, and directing your course across the pastures towards the
south, you reach the mission of Belem de Tumeremo, and thence the
confluence of the Curumu with the Rio Cuyuni, where the Spanish post
or destacamento de Cuyuni was formerly established. I enter into this
topographical detail because the Rio Cuyuni, or Cuduvini, runs
parallel to the Orinoco from west to east, through an extent of 2.5 or
3 degrees of longitude,* and furnishes an excellent natural boundary
between the territory of Caracas and that of English Guiana. (*
Including the Rio Juruam, one of the principal branches of the Cuyuni.
The Dutch military post is five leagues west of the union of Cuyuni
with the Essequibo, where the former river receives the Mazuruni.)

The two great branches of the Orinoco, the Zacupana and the Imataca,
remain separate for fourteen leagues: on going up farther, the waters
of the river are found united* in a single channel extremely broad. (*
At this point of union are found two villages of Guaraons. They also
bear the names of Imataca and Zacupana.) This channel is near eight
leagues long; at its western extremity a second bifurcation appears;
and as the summit of the delta is in the northern branch of the
bifurcated river, this part of the Orinoco is highly important for the
military defence of the country. All the channels* that terminate in
the bocas chicas, rise from the same point of the trunk of the
Orinoco. (* Cano de Manamo grande, Cano de Manamo chico, Cano
Pedernales, Cano Macareo, Cano Cutupiti, Cano Macuona, Cano grande de
Mariusas, etc. The last three branches form by their union the sinuous
channel called the Vuelta del Torno.) The branch (Cano Manamo) that
separates from it near the village of San Rafael has no ramification
till after a course of three or four leagues; and by placing a small
fort above the island of Chaguanes, Angostura might be defended
against an enemy that should attempt to penetrate by one of the bocas
chicas. In my time the station of the gun-boats was east of San
Rafael, near the northern bank of the Orinoco. This is the point which
vessels must pass in sailing up toward Angostura by the northern
channel, that of San Rafael, which is the broadest but the most
shallow.

Six leagues above the point where the Orinoco sends off a branch to
the bocas chicas is placed an ancient fort (los Castillos de la Vieja
or Antigua Guayana,) the first construction of which goes back to the
sixteenth century. In this spot the bed of the river is studded with
rocky islands; and it is asserted that its breadth is nearly six
hundred and fifty toises. The town is almost destroyed, but the
fortifications subsist, and are well worthy the attention of the
government of Terra Firma. There is a magnificent view from the
battery established on a bluff north-west of the ancient town, which,
at the period of great inundations, is entirely surrounded with water.
Pools that communicate with the Orinoco form natural basins, adapted
for the reception of vessels that want repairs.

After having passed the little forts of Vieja Guayana, the bed of the
Orinoco again widens. The state of cultivation of the country on the
two banks affords a striking contrast. On the north is seen the desert
part of the province of Cumana, steppes (Llanos) destitute of
habitations, and extending beyond the sources of the Rio Mamo, toward
the tableland or mesa of Guanipa. On the south we find three populous
villages belonging to the missions of Carony, namely, San Miguel de
Uriala, San Felix and San Joaquin. The last of these villages, situate
on the banks of the Carony, immediately below the great cataract, is
considered as the embarcadero of the Catalonian missions. On
navigating more to the east, between the mouth of the Carony and
Angostura, the pilot should avoid the rocks of Guarampo, the sandbank
of Mamo, and the Piedra del Rosario. From the numerous materials which
I brought home, and from astronomical discussions, the principal
results of which I have indicated above, I have constructed a map of
the country bounded by the delta of the Orinoco, the Carony, and the
Cuyuni. This part of Guiana, from its proximity to the coast, will
some day offer the greatest attraction to European settlers.

The whole population of this vast province in its present state is,
with the exception of a few Spanish parishes, scattered on the banks
of the Lower Orinoco, and subject to two monastic governments.
Estimating the number of the inhabitants of Guiana, who do not live in
savage independence, at thirty-five thousand, we find nearly
twenty-four thousand settled in the missions, and thus withdrawn as it
were from the direct influence of the secular arm. At the period of my
voyage, the territory of the Observantin monks of St. Francis
contained seven thousand three hundred inhabitants, and that of the
Capuchinos Catalanes seventeen thousand; an astonishing disproportion,
when we reflect on the smallness of the latter territory compared to
the vast banks of the Upper Orinoco, the Atabapo, the Cassiquiare and
the Rio Negro. It results from these statements that nearly two-thirds
of the population of a province of sixteen thousand eight hundred
square leagues are found concentrated between the Rio Imataca and the
town of Santo Thome del Angostura, on a space of ground only
fifty-five leagues in length, and thirty in breadth. Both of these
monastic governments are equally inaccessible to Whites, and form
status in statu. The first, that of the Observantins, I have described
from my own observations; it remains for me to record here the notions
I could procure respecting the second of these governments, that of
the Catalonian Capuchins. Fatal civil dissensions and epidemic fevers
have of late years diminished the long-increasing prosperity of the
missions of the Carony; but, notwithstanding these losses, the region
which we are going to examine is still highly interesting with respect
to political economy.

The missions of the Catalonian Capuchins, which in 1804 contained at
least sixty thousand head of cattle grazing in the savannahs, extend
from the eastern banks of the Carony and the Paragua as far as the
banks of the Imataca, the Curumu, and the Cuyuni; at the south-east
they border on English Guiana, or the colony of Essequibo; and toward
the south, in going up the desert banks of the Paragua and the
Paraguamasi, and crossing the Cordillera of Pacaraimo, they touch the
Portuguese settlements on the Rio Branco. The whole of this country is
open, full of fine savannahs, and no way resembling that through which
we passed on the Upper Orinoco. The forests become impenetrable only
on advancing toward the south; on the north are meadows intersected
with woody hills. The most picturesque scenes lie near the falls of
the Carony, and in that chain of mountains, two hundred and fifty
toises high, which separates the tributary streams of the Orinoco from
those of the Cuyuni. There are situate the Villa de Upata,* the
capital of the missions, Santa Maria, and Cupapui. (* Founded in 1762.
Population in 1797, 657 souls; in 1803, 769 souls. The most populous
villages of these missions, Alta Gracia, Cupapui, Santa Rosa de Cura,
and Guri, had between 600 and 900 inhabitants in 1797; but in 1818
epidemic fevers diminished the population more than a third. In some
missions these diseases have swept away nearly half of the
inhabitants.) Small table-lands afford a healthy and temperate
climate. Cacao, rice, cotton, indigo, and sugar grow in abundance
wherever a virgin soil, covered with a thick coat of grasses, is
subjected to cultivation. The first Christian settlements in those
countries are not, I believe, of an earlier date than 1721. The
elements of which the present population is composed are the three
Indian races of the Guayanos, the Caribs and the Guaycas. The last are
a people of mountaineers and are far from being so diminutive in size
as the Guaycas whom we found at Esmeralda. It is difficult to fix them
to the soil; and the three most modern missions in which they have
been collected, those of Cura, Curucuy, and Arechica, are already
destroyed. The Guayanos, who early in the sixteenth century gave their
name to the whole of that vast province, are less intelligent but
milder; and more easy, if not to civilize, at least to subjugate, than
the Caribs. Their language appears to belong to the great branch of
the Caribbee and Tamanac tongues. It displays the same analogies of
roots and grammatical forms, which are observed between the Sanscrit,
the Persian, the Greek, and the German. It is not easy to fix the
forms of what is indefinite by its nature; and to agree on the
differences which should be admitted between dialects, derivative
languages and mother-tongues. The Jesuits of Paraguay have made known
to us another tribe of Guayanos* in the southern hemisphere, living in
the thick forests of Parana. (* They are also called Guananas, or
Gualachas.) Though it cannot be denied in general that in consequence
of distant migrations,* (* Like the celebrated migrations of the
Omaguas, or Omeguas.) the nations that are settled north and south of
the Amazon have had communications with each other, I will not decide
whether the Guayanos of Parana and of Uruguay exhibit any other
relation to those of Carony, than that of an homonomy, which is
perhaps only accidental.

The most considerable Christian settlements are now concentrated
between the mountains of Santa Maria, the mission of San Miguel and
the eastern bank of the Carony, from San Buenaventura as far as Guri
and the embarcadero of San Joaquin; a space of ground which has not
more than four hundred and sixty square leagues of surface. The
savannahs to the east and south are almost uninhabited; we find there
only the solitary missions of Belem, Tumuremo, Tupuquen, Puedpa, and
Santa Clara. It were to be wished that the spots preferred for
cultivation were distant from the rivers where the land is higher and
the air more favourable to health. The Rio Carony, the waters of
which, of an admirable clearness, are not well stocked with fish, is
free from shoals from the Villa de Barceloneta, a little above the
confluence of the Paragua, as far as the village of Guri. Farther
north it winds between innumerable islands and rocks; and only the
small boats of the Caribs venture to navigate amid these raudales, or
rapids of the Carony. Happily the river is often divided into several
branches; and consequently that can be chosen which, according to the
height of the waters, presents the fewest whirlpools and shoals. The
great fall, celebrated for the picturesque beauty of its situation, is
a little above the village of Aguacaqua, or Carony, which in my time
had a population of seven hundred Indians. This cascade is said to be
from fifteen to twenty feet high; but the bar does not cross the whole
bed of the river, which is more than three hundred feet broad. When
the population is more extended toward the east, it will avail itself
of the course of the small rivers Imataca and Aquire, the navigation
of which is pretty free from danger. The monks, who like to keep
themselves isolated, in order to withdraw from the eye of the secular
power, have been hitherto unwilling to settle on the banks of the
Orinoco. It is, however, by this river only, or by the Cuyuni and the
Essequibo, that the missions of Carony can export their productions.
The latter way has not yet been tried, though several Christian
settlements* are formed on one of the principal tributary streams of
the Cuyuni, the Rio Juruario. (* Guacipati, Tupuquen, Angel de la
Custodia, and Cura, where the military post of the frontiers was
stationed in 1800, which had been anciently placed at the confluence
of the Cuyuni and the Curumu.) This stream furnishes, at the period of
the great swellings, the remarkable phenomenon of a bifurcation. It
communicates by the Juraricuima and the Aurapa with the Rio Carony; so
that the land comprised between the Orinoco, the sea, the Cuyuni, and
the Carony, becomes a real island. Formidable rapids impede the
navigation of the Upper Cuyuni; and hence of late an attempt has been
made to open a road to the colony of Essequibo much more to the
south-east, in order to fall in with the Cuyuni much below the mouth
of the Curumu.

The whole of this southern territory is traversed by hordes of
independent Caribs; the feeble remains of that warlike people who were
so formidable to the missionaries till 1733 and 1735, at which period
the respectable bishop Gervais de Labrid,* (* Consecrated a bishop for
the four parts of the world (obispo para las quatro partes del mundo)
by pope Benedict XIII.) canon of the metropolitan chapter of Lyon,
Father Lopez, and several other ecclesiastics, perished by the hands
of the Caribs. These dangers, too frequent formerly, exist no longer,
either in the missions of Carony, or in those of the Orinoco; but the
independent Caribs continue, on account of their connection with the
Dutch colonists of Essequibo, an object of mistrust and hatred to the
government of Guiana. These tribes favour the contraband trade along
the coast, and by the channels or estuaries that join the Rio Barima
to the Rio Moroca; they carry off the cattle belonging to the
missionaries, and excite the Indians recently converted, and living
within the sound of the bell, to return to the forests. The free
hordes have everywhere a powerful interest in opposing the progress of
cultivation and the encroachments of the Whites. The Caribs and the
Aruacas procure fire-arms at Essequibo and Demerara; and when the
traffic of American slaves (poitos) was most active, adventurers of
Dutch origin took part in these incursions on the Paragua, the
Erevato, and the Ventuario. Man-hunting took place on these banks, as
heretofore (and probably still) on those of the Senegal and the
Gambia. In both worlds Europeans have employed the same artifices, and
committed the same atrocities, to maintain a trade that dishonours
humanity. The missionaries of the Carony and the Orinoco attribute all
the evils they suffer from the independent Caribs to the hatred of
their neighbours, the Calvinist preachers of Essequibo. Their works
are therefore filled with complaints of the secta diabolica de Calvino
y de Lutero, and against the heretics of Dutch Guiana, who also think
fit sometimes to go on missions, and spread the germs of social life
among the savages.

Of all the vegetable productions of those countries, that which the
industry of the Catalonian Capuchins has rendered the most celebrated
is the tree that furnishes the Cortex angosturae, which is erroneously
designated by the name of cinchona of Carony. We were fortunate enough
to make it first known as a new genus distinct from the cinchona, and
belonging to the family of meliaceae, or of zanthoxylus. This salutary
drug of South America was formerly attributed to the Brucea ferruginea
which grows in Abyssinia, to the Magnolia glauca, and to the Magnolia
plumieri. During the dangerous disease of M. Bonpland, M. Ravago sent
a confidential person to the missions of Carony, to procure for us, by
favour of the Capuchins of Upata, branches of the tree in flower which
we wished to be able to describe. We obtained very fine specimens, the
leaves of which, eighteen inches long, diffused an agreeable aromatic
smell. We soon perceived that the cuspare (the indigenous name of the
cascarilla or corteza del Angostura) forms a new genus; and on sending
the plants of the Orinoco to M. Willdenouw, I begged he would dedicate
this plant to M. Bonpland. The tree, known at present by the name of
Bonplandia trifoliata, grows at the distance of five or six leagues
from the eastern bank of the Carony, at the foot of the hills that
surround the missions Capapui, Upata and Alta Gracia. The Caribbee
Indians make use of an infusion of the bark of the cuspare, which they
consider as a strengthening remedy. M. Bonpland discovered the same
tree west of Cumana, in the gulf of Santa Fe, where it may become one
of the articles of exportation from New Andalusia.

The Catalonian monks prepare an extract of the Cortex angosturae which
they send to the convents of their province, and which deserves to be
better known in the north of Europe. It is to be hoped that the
febrifuge and anti-dysenteric bark of the bonplandia will continue to
be employed, notwithstanding the introduction of another, described by
the name of False Angostura bark, and often confounded with the
former. This false Angostura, or Angostura pseudo-ferruginea, comes,
it is said, from the Brucea antidysenterica; it acts powerfully on the
nerves, produces violent attacks of tetanus, and contains, according
to the experiments of Pelletier and Caventon, a peculiar alkaline
substance* analogous to morphine and strychnine. (* Brucine. M.
Pelletier has wisely avoided using the word angosturine, because it
might indicate a substance taken from the real Cortex angosturae, or
Bonplandia trifoliata. (Annales de Chimie volume 12 page 117.) We saw
at Peru the barks of two new species of weinmannia and wintera mixed
with those of cinchona; a mixture less dangerous, but still injurious,
on account of the superabundance of tannin and acrid matter contained
in the false cascarilla.) As the tree which yields the real Cortex
angosturae does not grow in great abundance, it is to be wished that
plantations of it were formed. The Catalonian monks are well fitted to
spread this kind of cultivation; they are more economical,
industrious, and active than the other missionaries. They have already
established tan-yards and cotton-spinning in a few villages; and if
they suffer the Indians henceforth to enjoy the fruit of their
labours, they will find great resources in the native population.
Concentered on a small space of land, these monks have the
consciousness of their political importance, and have from time to
time resisted the civil authority, and that of their bishop. The
governors who reside at Angostura have struggled against them with
very unequal success, according as the ministry of Madrid showed a
complaisant deference for the ecclesiastical hierarchy, or sought to
limit its power. In 1768 Don Manuel Centurion carried off twenty
thousand head of cattle from the missionaries, in order to distribute
them among the indigent inhabitants. This liberality, exerted in a
manner not very legal, produced very serious consequences. The
governor was disgraced on the complaint of the Catalonian monks though
he had considerably extended the territory of the missions toward the
south, and founded the Villa de Barceloneta, above the confluence of
the Carony with the Rio Paragua, and the Ciudad de Guirior, near the
union of the Rio Paragua and the Paraguamusi. From that period the
civil administration has carefully avoided all intervention in the
affairs of the Capuchins, whose opulence has been exaggerated like
that of the Jesuits of Paraguay.

The missions of the Carony, by the configuration of their soil* and
the mixture of savannahs and arable lands, unite the advantages of the
Llanos of Calabozo and the valleys of Aragua. (* It appears that the
little table-lands between the mountains of Upata, Cumanu, and
Tupuquen, are more than one hundred and fifty toises above the level
of the sea.) The real wealth of this country is founded on the care of
the herds and the cultivation of colonial produce. It were to be
wished that here, as in the fine and fertile province of Venezuela,
the inhabitants, faithful to the labours of the fields, would not
addict themselves too hastily to the research of mines. The example of
Germany and Mexico proves, no doubt, that the working of metals is not
at all incompatible with a flourishing state of agriculture; but,
according to popular traditions, the banks of the Carony lead to the
lake Dorado and the palace of the gilded man* (* El Dorado, that is,
el rey o hombre dorado. See volume 2.23.): and this lake, and this
palace, being a local fable, it might be dangerous to awaken
remembrances which begin gradually to be effaced. I was assured that
in 1760, the independent Caribs went to Cerro de Pajarcima, a mountain
to the south of Vieja Guayana, to submit the decomposed rock to the
action of washing. The gold-dust collected by this labour was put into
calabashes of the Crescentia cujete and sold to the Dutch at
Essequibo. Still more recently, some Mexican miners, who abused the
credulity of Don Jose Avalo, the intendant of Caracas, undertook a
very considerable work in the centre of the missions of the Rio
Carony, near the town of Upata, in the Cerros del Potrero and de
Chirica. They declared that the whole rock was auriferous;
stamping-mills, brocards, and smelting-furnaces were constructed.
After having expended very large sums, it was discovered that the
pyrites contained no trace whatever of gold. These essays, though
fruitless, served to renew the ancient idea that every shining rock in
Guiana is teeming with gold (una madre del oro). Not contented with
taking the mica-slate to the furnace, strata of amphibolic slates were
shown to me near Angostura, without any mixture of heterogeneous
substances, which had been worked under the whimsical name of black
ore of gold (oro negro).

This is the place to make known, in order to complete the description
of the Orinoco, the principal results of my researches on El Dorado,
the White Sea, or Laguna Parime, and the sources of the Orinoco, as
they are marked in the most recent maps. The idea of an auriferous
earth, eminently rich, has been connected, ever since the end of the
sixteenth century, with that of a great inland lake, which furnishes
at the same time waters to the Orinoco, the Rio Branco and the Rio
Essequibo. I believe, from a more accurate knowledge of the country, a
long and laborious study of the Spanish authors who treat of El
Dorado, and, above all, from comparing a great number of ancient maps,
arranged in chronological order, I have succeeded in discovering the
source of these errors. All fables have some real foundation; that of
El Dorado resembles those myths of antiquity, which, travelling from
country to country, have been successively adapted to different
localities. In the sciences, in order to distinguish truth from error,
it often suffices to retrace the history of opinions, and to follow
their successive developments. The discussion to which I shall devote
the end of this chapter is important, not only because it throws light
on the events of the Conquest, and that long series of disastrous
expeditions made in search of El Dorado, the last of which was in the
year 1775; it also furnishes, in addition to this simply historical
interest, another, more substantial and more generally felt, that of
rectifying the geography of South America, and of disembarrassing the
maps published in our days of those great lakes, and that strange
labyrinth of rivers, placed as if by chance between sixty and
sixty-six degrees of longitude. No man in Europe believes any longer
in the wealth of Guiana and the empire of the Grand Patiti. The town
of Manoa and its palaces covered with plates of massy gold have long
since disappeared; but the geographical apparatus serving to adorn the
fable of El Dorado, the lake Parima, which, similar to the lake of
Mexico, reflected the image of so many sumptuous edifices, has been
religiously preserved by geographers. In the space of three centuries,
the same traditions have been differently modified; from ignorance of
the American languages, rivers have been taken for lakes, and portages
for branches of rivers; one lake, the Cassipa, has been made to
advance five degrees of latitude toward the south, while another, the
Parima or Dorado, has been transported the distance of a hundred
leagues from the western to the eastern bank of the Rio Branco. From
these various changes, the problem we are going to solve has become
much more complicated than is generally supposed. The number of
geographers who discuss the basis of a map, with regard to the three
points of measures, of the comparison of descriptive works, and of the
etymological study* of names, is extremely small. (* I use this
expression, perhaps an improper one, to mark a species of philological
examination, to which the names of rivers, lakes, mountains, and
tribes, must be subjected, in order to discover their identity in a
great number of maps. The apparent diversity of names arises partly
from the difference of the dialects spoken by one and the same family
of people, partly from the imperfection of our European orthography,
and from the extreme negligence with which geographers copy one
another. We recognize with difficulty the Rio Uaupe in the Guaupe or
Guape; the Xie, in the Guaicia; the Raudal de Atures, in Athule; the
Caribbees, in the Calinas and Galibis; the Guaraunos or Uarau, in the
Oaraw-its; etc. It is, however, by similar mutations of letters, that
the Spaniards have made hijo of filius; hambre, of fames; and Felipo
de Urre, and even Utre, of the Conquistador Philip von Huten; that the
Tamanacs in America have substituted choraro for soldado; and the Jews
in China, Ialemeiohang for Jeremiah. Analogy and a certain
etymological tact must guide geographers in researches of this kind,
in which they would be exposed to serious errors, if they were not to
study at the same time the respective situations of the upper and
lower tributary streams of the same river. Our maps of America are
overloaded with names, for which rivers have been created. This desire
of compiling, of filling up vacancies, and of employing, without
investigation, heterogeneous materials, has given our maps of
countries the least visited an appearance of exactness, the falsity of
which is discovered when we arrive on the spot.) Almost all the maps
of South America which have appeared since the year 1775 are, in what
regards the interior of the country, comprised between the steppes of
Venezuela and the river of the Amazons, between the eastern back of
the Andes and the coast of Cayenne, a simple copy of the great Spanish
map of La Cruz Olmedilla. A line, indicating the extent of country
which Don Jose Solano boasted of having discovered and pacified by his
troops and emissaries, was taken for the road followed by that
officer, who never went beyond San Fernando de Atabapo, a village one
hundred and sixty leagues distant from the pretended lake Parima. The
study of the work of Father Caulin, who was the historiographer of the
expedition of Solano, and who states very clearly, from the testimony
of the Indians, how the name of the river Parima gave rise to the
fable of El Dorado, and of an inland sea, has been neglected. No use
either has been made of a map of the Orinoco, three years posterior to
that of La Cruz, and traced by Surville from the collection of true or
hypothetical materials preserved in the archives of the Despacho
universal de Indias. The progress of geography, as manifested on our
maps, is much slower than might be supposed from the number of useful
results which are found scattered in the works of different nations.
Astronomical observations and topographic information accumulate
during a long lapse of years, without being made use of; and from a
principle of stability and preservation, in other respects
praiseworthy, those who construct maps often choose rather to add
nothing, than to sacrifice a lake, a chain of mountains, or an
interbranching of rivers, which have figured there during ages.

The fabulous traditions of El Dorado and the lake Parima having been
diversely modified according to the aspect of the countries to which
they were to be adapted, we must distinguish what they contain that is
real from what is merely imaginary. To avoid entering here into minute
particulars, I shall begin first to call the attention of the reader
to those spots which have been, at various periods, the theatre of the
expeditions undertaken for the discovery of El Dorado. When we have
learnt to know the aspect of the country, and the local circumstances,
such as they can now be described, it will be easy to conceive how the
different hypotheses recorded on our maps have taken rise by degrees,
and have modified each other. To oppose an error, it is sufficient to
recall to mind the variable forms in which we have seen it appear at
different periods.

Till the middle of the eighteenth century, all that vast space of land
comprised between the mountains of French Guiana and the forests of
the Upper Orinoco, between the sources of the Carony and the River
Amazon (from 0 to 4 degrees of north latitude, and from 57 to 68
degrees of longitude), was so little known that geographers could
place in it lakes where they pleased, create communications between
rivers, and figure chains of mountains more or less lofty. They have
made full use of this liberty; and the situation of lakes, as well as
the course and branches of rivers, has been varied in so many ways
that it would not be surprising if among the great number of maps some
were found that trace the real state of things. The field of
hypotheses is now singularly narrowed. I have determined the longitude
of Esmeralda in the Upper Orinoco; more to the east amid the plains of
Parima (a land as unknown as Wangara and Dar-Saley, in Africa), a band
of twenty leagues broad has been travelled over from north to south
along the banks of the Rio Carony and the Rio Branco in the longitude
of sixty-three degrees. This is the perilous road which was taken by
Don Antonio Santos in going from Santo Thome del Angostura to Rio
Negro and the Amazon; by this road also the colonists of Surinam
communicated very recently with the inhabitants of Grand Para. This
road divides the terra incognita of Parima into two unequal portions;
and fixes limits at the same time to the sources of the Orinoco, which
it is no longer possible to carry back indefinitely toward the east,
without supposing that the bed of the Rio Branco, which flows from
north to south, is crossed by the bed of the Upper Orinoco, which
flows from east to west. If we follow the course of the Rio Branco, or
that strip of cultivated land which is dependent on the Capitania
General of Grand Para, we see lakes, partly imaginary and partly
enlarged by geographers, forming two distinct groups. The first of
these groups includes the lakes which they place between the Esmeralda
and the Rio Branco; and to the second belong those that are supposed
to lie between the Rio Branco and the mountains of Dutch and French
Guiana. It results from this sketch that the question whether there
exists a lake Parima on the east of the Rio Branco is altogether
foreign to the problem of the sources of the Orinoco.

Beside the country which we have just noticed (the Dorado de la
Parime, traversed by the Rio Branco), another part of America is
found, two hundred and sixty leagues toward the west, near the eastern
back of the Cordillera of the Andes, equally celebrated in the
expeditions to El Dorado. This is the Mesopotamia between the Caqueta,
the Rio Negro, the Uaupes, and the Yurubesh, of which I have already
given a particular account; it is the Dorado of the Omaguas which
contains Lake Manoa of Father Acunha, the Laguna de oro of the Guanes
and the auriferous land whence Father Fritz received plates of beaten
gold in his mission on the Amazon, toward the end of the seventeenth
century.

The first and above all the most celebrated enterprises attempted in
search of El Dorado were directed toward the eastern back of the Andes
of New Grenada. Fired with the ideas which an Indian of Tacunga had
given of the wealth of the king or zaque of Cundirumarca, Sebastian de
Belalcazar, in 1535, sent his captains Anasco and Ampudia, to discover
the valley of El Dorado,* twelve days' journey from Guallabamba,
consequently in the mountains between Pasto and Popayan. (* El valle
del Dorado. Pineda relates: que mas adelante de la provincia de la
Canela se hallan tierras muy ricas, adonde andaban los hombres armados
de piecas y joyas de oro, y que no havia sierra, ni montana. [Beyond
the province of Canela there are found very rich countries (though
without mountains) in which the natives are adorned with trinkets and
plates of gold.] Herrera dec. 5 lib. 10 cap. 14 and dec. 6 lib. 8 cap.
6 Geogr. Blaviana volume 11 page 261. Southey tome 1 pages 78 and
373.) The information which Pedro de Anasco had obtained from the
natives, joined to that which was received subsequently (1536) by Diaz
de Pineda, who had discovered the provinces of Quixos and Canela,
between the Rio Napo and the Rio Pastaca, gave birth to the idea that
on the east of the Nevados of Tunguragua, Cayambe, and Popayan, were
vast plains, abounding in precious metals, and where the inhabitants
were covered with armour of massy gold. Gonzales Pizarro, in searching
for these treasures, discovered accidentally, in 1539, the
cinnamon-trees of America (Laurus cinnamomoides, Mut.); and Francisco
de Orellana went down the Napo, to reach the river Amazon. Since that
period expeditions were undertaken at the same time from Venezuela,
New Grenada, Quito, Peru, and even from Brazil and the Rio de la
Plata,* for the conquest of El Dorado. (* Nuno de Chaves went from the
Ciudad de la Asumpcion, situate on Rio Paraguay, to discover, in the
latitude of 24 degrees south, the vast empire of El Dorado, which was
everywhere supposed to lie on the eastern back of the Andes.) Those of
which the remembrance have been best preserved, and which have most
contributed to spread the fable of the riches of the Manaos, the
Omaguas, and the Guaypes, as well as the existence of the lagunas de
oro, and the town of the gilded king (Grand Patiti, Grand Moxo, Grand
Paru, or Enim), are the incursions made to the south of the Guaviare,
the Rio Fragua, and the Caqueta. Orellana, having found idols of massy
gold, had fixed men's ideas on an auriferous land between the Papamene
and the Guaviare. His narrative, and those of the voyages of Jorge de
Espira (George von Speier), Hernan Perez de Quesada, and Felipe de
Urre (Philip von Huten), undertaken in 1536, 1542, and 1545, furnish,
amid much exaggeration, proofs of very exact local knowledge.* (* We
may be surprised to see, that the expedition of Huten is passed over
in absolute silence by Herrera (dec. 7 lib. 10 cap. 7 volume 4 238).
Fray Pedro Simon gives the whole particulars of it, true or fabulous;
but he composed his work from materials that were unknown to Herrera.)
When these are examined merely in a geographical point of view, we
perceive the constant desire of the first conquistadores to reach the
land comprised between the sources of the Rio Negro, of the Uaupes
(Guape), and of the Jupura or Caqueta. This is the land which, in
order to distinguish it from El Dorado de la Parime, we have called El
Dorado des Omaguas.* (* In 1560 Pedro de Ursua even took the title of
Governador del Dorado y de Omagua. Fray Pedro Simon volume 6 chapter
10 page 430.) No doubt the whole country between the Amazon and the
Orinoco was vaguely known by the name of las Provincias del Dorado;
but in this vast extent of forests, savannahs, and mountains, the
progress of those who sought the great lake with auriferous banks, and
the town of the gilded king, was directed towards two points only, on
the north-east and south-west of the Rio Negro; that is, to Parima (or
the isthmus between the Carony, the Essequibo, and the Rio Branco),
and to the ancient abode of the Manaos, the inhabitants of the banks
of the Yurubesh. I have just mentioned the situation of the latter
spot, which is celebrated in the history of the conquest from 1535 to
1560; and it remains for me to speak of the configuration of the
country between the Spanish missions of the Rio Carony, and the
Portuguese missions of the Rio Branco or Parima. This is the country
lying near the Lower Orinoco, the Esmeralda, and French and Dutch
Guiana, on which, since the end of the sixteenth century, the
enterprises and exaggerated narratives of Raleigh have shed so bright
a splendour.

From the general disposition of the course of the Orinoco, directed
successively towards the west, the north, and the east, its mouth lies
almost in the same meridian as its sources: so that by proceeding from
Vieja Guyana to the south the traveller passes through the whole of
the country in which geographers have successively placed an inland
sea (Mar Blanco), and the different lakes which are connected with the
El Dorado de la Parime. We find first the Rio Carony, which is formed
by the union of two branches of almost equal magnitude, the Carony
properly so called, and the Rio Paragua. The missionaries of Piritu
call the latter river a lake (laguna): it is full of shoals, and
little cascades; but, passing through a country entirely flat, it is
subject at the same time to great inundations, and its real bed (su
verdadera caxa) can scarcely be discovered. The natives have given it
the name of Paragua or Parava, which means in the Caribbee language
sea, or great lake. These local circumstances and this denomination no
doubt have given rise to the idea of transforming the Rio Paragua, a
tributary stream of the Carony, into a lake called Cassipa, on account
of the Cassipagotos,* who lived in those countries. (* Raleigh pages
64 and 69. I always quote, when the contrary is not expressly said,
the original edition of 1596. Have these tribes of Cassipagtos,
Epuremei, and Orinoqueponi, so often mentioned by Raleigh,
disappeared? or did some misapprehension give rise to these
denominations? I am surprised to find the Indian words [of one of the
different Carib dialects?] Ezrabeta cassipuna aquerewana, translated
by Raleigh, the great princes or greatest commander. Since acarwana
certainly signifies a chief, or any person who commands (Raleigh pages
6 and 7), cassipuna perhaps means great, and lake Cassipa is
synonymous with great lake. In the same manner Cass-iquiare may be a
great river, for iquiare, like veni, is, an the north of the Amazon, a
termination common to all rivers. Goto, however, in Cassipa-goto, is a
Caribbee term denoting a tribe.) Raleigh gives this basin forty miles
in breadth; and, as all the lakes of Parima must have auriferous
sands, he does not fail to assert that in summer, when the waters
retire, pieces of gold of considerable weight are found there.

The sources of the tributary streams of the Carony, the Arui, and the
Caura (Caroli, Arvi, and Caora,* of the ancient geographers (*
D'Anville names the Rio Caura, Coari; and the Rio Arui, Aroay. I have
not been able hitherto to guess what is meant by the Aloica (Atoca,
Atoica of Raleigh), which issues from the lake Cassipa, between the
Caura and the Arui.)) being very near each other, this suggested the
idea of making all these rivers take their rise from the pretended
lake Cassipa.* (* Raleigh makes only the Carony and the Arui issue
from it (Hondius, Nieuwe Caerte van het wonderbare landt Guiana,
besocht door Sir Walter Raleigh, 1594 to 1596): but in later maps, for
instance that of Sanson, the Rio Caura issues also from Lake Cassipa.)
Sanson has so much enlarged this lake, that he gives it forty-two
leagues in length, and fifteen in breadth. The ancient geographers
placed opposite to each other, with very little hesitation, the
tributary streams of the two banks of a river; and they place the
mouth of the Carony, and lake Cassipa, which communicates by the
Carony with the Orinoco, sometimes* ABOVE the confluence of the Meta.
(* Sanson, Map for the Voyage of Acunha, 1680. Id. South America,
1659. Coronelli, Indes occidentales, 1689.) Thus it is carried back by
Hondius as far as the latitudes of 2 and 3 degrees, giving it the form
of a rectangle, the longest sides of which run from north to south.
This circumstance is worthy of remark, because, in assigning gradually
a more southern latitude to lake Cassipa, it has been detached from
the Carony and the Arui, and has taken the name of Parima. To follow
this metamorphosis in its progressive development, we must compare the
maps which have appeared since the voyage of Raleigh till now. La
Cruz, who has been copied by all the modern geographers, has preserved
the oblong form of the lake Cassipa for his lake Parima, although this
form is entirely different from that of the ancient lake Parima, or
Rupunuwini, of which the great axis was directed from east to west.
The ancient lake (that of Hondius, Sanson, and Coronelli) was also
surrounded by mountains, and gave birth to no river; while the lake
Parima of La Cruz and the modern geographers communicates with the
Upper Orinoco, as the Cassipa with the Lower Orinoco.

I have stated the origin of the fable of the lake Cassipa, and the
influence it has had on the opinion that the lake Parima is the source
of the Orinoco. Let us now examine what relates to this latter basin,
this pretended interior sea, called Rupunuwini by the geographers of
the sixteenth century. In the latitude of four degrees or four degrees
and a half (in which direction unfortunately, south of Santo Thome del
Angostura to the extent of eight degrees, no astronomical observation
has been made) is a long and narrow Cordillera, that of Pacaraimo,
Quimiropaca, and Ucucuamo; which, stretching from east to south-west,
unites the group of mountains of Parima to the mountains of Dutch and
French Guiana. It divides its waters between the Carony, the Rupunury
or Rupunuwini, and the Rio Branco, and consequently between the
valleys of the Lower Orinoco, the Essequibo, and the Rio Negro. On the
north-west of the Cordillera de Pacaraimo, which has been traversed
but by a small number of Europeans (by the German surgeon, Nicolas
Hortsmann, in 1739; by a Spanish officer, Don Antonio Santos, in 1775;
by the Portuguese colonel, Barata, in 1791; and by several English
settlers, in 1811), descend the Noeapra, the Paraguamusi, and the
Paragua, which fall into the Rio Carony; on the north-east, the
Rupunuwini, a tributary stream of the Rio Essequibo. Toward the south,
the Tacutu and the Urariquera form together the famous Rio Parima, or
Rio Branco.

This isthmus, between the branches of the Rio Essequibo and the Rio
Branco (that is, between the Rupunuwini on one side, and the Pirara,
the Mahu, and the Uraricuera or Rio Parima on the other), may be
considered as the classical soil of the Dorado of Parima. The rivers
at the foot of the mountains of Pacaraimo are subject to frequent
overflowings. Above Santa Rosa, the right bank of the Urariapara, a
tributary stream of the Uraricuera, is called el Valle de la
Inundacion. Great pools are also found between the Rio Parima and the
Xurumu. These are marked on the maps recently constructed in Brazil,
which furnish the most ample details of those countries. More to the
west, the Cano Pirara, a tributary stream of the Mahu, issues from a
lake covered with rushes. This is the lake Amucu described by Nicolas
Hortsmann, and respecting which some Portuguese of Barcelos, who had
visited the Rio Branco (Rio Parima or Rio Paravigiana), gave me
precise notions during my stay at San Carlos del Rio Negro. The lake
Amucu is several leagues broad, and contains two small islands, which
Santos heard called Islas Ipomucena. The Rupunuwini (Rupunury), on the
banks of which Hortsmann discovered rocks covered with hieroglyphical
figures, approaches very near this lake, but does not communicate with
it. The portage between the Rupunuwini and the Mahu is farther north,
where the mountain of Ucucuamo* rises, the natives still call the
mountain of gold. (* I follow the orthography of the manuscript
journal of Rodriguez; it is the Cerro Acuquamo of Caulin, or rather of
his commentator. Hist. corogr. page 176.) They advised Hortsmann to
seek round the Rio Mahu for a mine of silver (no doubt mica with large
plates), of diamonds, and emeralds. He found nothing but rocky
crystals. His account seems to prove that the whole length of the
mountains of the Upper Orinoco (Sierra Parima) toward the east, is
composed of granitic rocks, full of druses and open veins, the Peak of
Duida. Near these lands, which still enjoy a great celebrity for their
riches, on the western limits of Dutch Guiana, live the Macusis,
Aturajos, and Acuvajos. The traveller Santos found them stationed
between the Rupunuwini, the Mahu, and the chain of Pacaraimo. It is
the appearance of the micaceous rocks of the Ucucuamo, the name of the
Rio Parima, the inundations of the rivers Urariapara, Parima, and
Xurumu, and more especially the existence of the lake Amucu (near the
Rio Rupunuwini, and regarded as the principal source of the Rio
Parima), which have given rise to the fable of the White Sea and the
Dorado of Parima. All these circumstances (which have served on this
very account to corroborate the general opinion) are found united on a
space of ground which is eight or nine leagues broad from north to
south, and forty long from east to west. This direction, too, was
always assigned to the White Sea, by lengthening it in the direction
of the latitude, till the beginning of the sixteenth century. Now this
White Sea is nothing but the Rio Parima, which is called the White
River (Rio Branco, or Rio del Aguas blancas), and runs through and
inundates the whole of this land. The name of Rupunuwini is given to
the White Sea on the most ancient maps, which identifies the place of
the fable, since of all the tributary streams of the Rio Essequibo the
Rupunuwini is the nearest to the lake Amucu. Raleigh, in his first
voyage (1595), had formed no precise idea of the situation of El
Dorado and the lake Parima, which he believed to be salt, and which he
calls another Caspian Sea. It was not till the second voyage (1596),
performed equally at the expense of Raleigh, that Laurence Keymis
fixed so well the localities of El Dorado, that he appears to me to
have no doubt of the identity of the Parima de Manao with the lake
Amucu, and with the isthmus between the Rupunuwini (a tributary stream
of the Essequibo) and the Rio Parima or Rio Branco. "The Indians,"
says Keymis, "go up the Dessekebe [Essequibo] in twenty days, towards
the south. To mark the greatness of this river, they call it the
brother of the Orinoco. After twenty days' navigating they convey
their canoes by a portage of one day, from the river Dessekebe to a
lake, which the Jaos call Roponowini, and the Caribbees Parime. This
lake is as large as a sea; it is covered with an infinite number of
canoes; and I suppose" [the Indians then had told him nothing of this]
"that this lake is no other than that which contains the town of
Manoa."* (* Cayley's Life of Raleigh volume 1 pages 159, 236 and 283.
Masham in the third voyage of Raleigh (1596) repeats these accounts of
the Lake Rupunuwini.) Hondius has given a curious plate of this
portage; and, as the mouth of the Carony was then supposed to be in
latitude 4 degrees (instead of 8 degrees 8 minutes), the portage of
Parima was placed close to the equator. At the same period the Viapoco
(Oyapoc) and the Rio Cayenne (Maroni?) were made to issue from this
lake Parima. The same name being given by the Caribs to the western
branch of the Rio Branco has perhaps contributed as much to the
imaginary enlargement of the lake Amucu, as the inundations of the
various tributary streams of the Uraricuera, from the confluence of
the Tacutu to the Valle de la Inundacion.

We have shown above that the Spaniards took the Rio Paragua, or
Parava, which falls into the Carony, for a lake, because the word
parava signifies sea, lake, river. Parima seems also to denote vaguely
great water; for the root par is found in the Carib words that
designate rivers, pools, lakes, and the ocean.* (* In Persian the root
water (ab) is found also in lake (abdan). For other etymologies of the
words Parima and Manoa see Gili volume 1 pages 81 and 141; and Gumilla
volume 1 page 403.) In Arabic and in Persian, bahr and deria are also
applied at the same time to the sea, to lakes, and to rivers; and this
practice, common to many nations in both worlds, has, on our ancient
maps, converted lakes into rivers and rivers into lakes. In support of
what I here advance, I shall appeal to very respectable testimony,
that of Father Caulin. "When I inquired of the Indians," says this
missionary, who sojourned longer than I on the banks of the Lower
Orinoco, "what Parima was, they answered that it was nothing more than
a river that issued from a chain of mountains, the opposite side of
which furnished waters to the Essequibo." Caulin, knowing nothing of
lake Amucu, attributes the erroneous opinion of the existence of an
inland sea solely to the inundations of the plains (a las inundaciones
dilatadas por los bajos del pais). According to him, the mistakes of
geographers arise from the vexatious circumstance of all the rivers of
Guiana having different names at their mouths and near their sources.
"I have no doubt," he adds, "that one of the upper branches of the Rio
Branco is that very Rio Parima which the Spaniards have taken for a
lake (a quien suponian laguna)." Such are the opinions which the
historiographer of the Expedition of the Boundaries had formed on the
spot. He could not expect that La Cruz and Surville, mingling old
hypotheses with accurate ideas, would reproduce on their maps the Mar
Dorado or Mar Blanco. Thus, notwithstanding the numerous proofs which
I have furnished since my return from America, of the non-existence of
an inland sea the origin of the Orinoco, a map has been published in
my name,* on which the Laguna Parima figures anew. (* Carte de
l'Amerique, dressee sur les Observations de M. de Humboldt, par Fried.
Vienna 1818.)

From the whole of these statements it follows, first, that the Laguna
Rupunuwini, or Parima of the voyage of Raleigh and of the maps of
Hondius, is an imaginary lake, formed by the lake Amucu* (* This is
the lake Amaca of Surville and La Cruz. By a singular mistake, the
name of this lake is transformed to a village on Arrowsmith's map.)
and the tributary streams of the Uraricuera, which often overflow
their banks; secondly, that the Laguna Parime of Surville's map is the
lake Amucu, which gives rise to the Rio Pirara and (conjointly with
the Mahu, the Tacutu, the Uraricuera, or Rio Parima, properly so
called) to the Rio Branco; thirdly, that the Laguna Parime of La Cruz
is an imaginary swelling of the Rio Parime (confounded with the
Orinoco) below the junction of the Mahu with the Xurumu. The distance
from the mouth of the Mahu to that of the Tacutu is scarcely 0 degrees
40 minutes; La Cruz enlarges it to 7 degrees of latitude. He calls the
upper part of the Rio Branco (that which receives the Mahu) Orinoco or
Purumu. There can be no doubt of its being the Xurumu, one of the
tributary streams of the Tacutu, which is well known to the
inhabitants of the neighbouring fort of San Joaquim. All the names
that figure in the fable of El Dorado are found in the tributary
streams of the Rio Branco. Slight local circumstances, joined to the
remembrances of the salt lake of Mexico, more especially of the
celebrated lake Manoa in the Dorado des Omaguas, have served to
complete a picture created by the imagination of Raleigh and his two
lieutenants, Keymis and Masham. The inundations of the Rio Branco, I
conceive, may be compared at the utmost to those of the Red River of
Louisiana, between Nachitoches and Cados, but not to the Laguna de los
Xarayes, which is a temporary swelling of the Rio Paraguay.* (*
Southey volume 1 page 130. These periodical overflowings of the Rio
Paraguay have long acted the same part in the southern hemisphere, as
lake Parima has been made to perform in the northern. Hondius and
Sanson have made the Rio de la Plata, the Rio Topajos (a tributary
stream of the Amazon), the Rio Tocantines, and the Rio de San
Francisco, issue from the Laguna de los Xarayes.)

We have now examined a White Sea,* (* That of D'Anville and La Cruz,
and of the greater part of the modern maps.) which the principal of
the Rio Branco is made to traverse; and another,* (* The lake of
Surville, which takes the place of lake Amucu.) which is placed on the
east of this river, and communicates with it by the Cano Pirara. A
third lake* (* The lake which Surville calls Laguna tenida hasta ahora
or La una Parime.) is figured on the west of the Rio Branco,
respecting which I found recently some curious details in the
manuscript journal of the surgeon Hortsmann. "At the distance of two
days' journey below the confluence of the Mahu (Tacutu) with the Rio
Parima (Uraricuera) a lake is found on top of a mountain. This lake is
stocked with the same fish as the Rio Parima; but the waters of the
former are black, and those of the latter white." May not Surville,
from a vague notion of this basin, have imagined, in his map prefixed
to Father Caulin's work, an Alpine lake of ten leagues in length, near
which, towards the east, rise at the same time the Orinoco, and the
Rio Idapa, a tributary stream of the Rio Negro? However vague may be
the account of the surgeon of Hildesheim, it is impossible to admit
that the mountain, which has a lake at its summit, is to the north of
the parallel of 2 degrees 30 minutes: and this latitude coincides
nearly with that of the Cerro Unturan. Hence it follows that the
Alpine lake of Hortsmann, which has escaped the attention of
D'Anville, and which is perhaps situate amid a group of mountains,
lies north-east of the portage from the Idapa to the Mavaca, and
south-east of the Orinoco, where it goes up above Esmeralda.

Most of the historians who have treated of the first ages of the
conquest seem persuaded that the name provincias or pais del Dorado
denoted originally every region abounding in gold. Forgetting the
precise etymology of the word El Dorado (the gilded), they have not
perceived that this tradition is a local fable, as were almost all the
ancient fables of the Greeks, the Hindoos, and the Persians. The
history of the gilded man belongs originally to the Andes of New
Grenada, and particularly to the plains in the vicinity of their
eastern side: we see it progressively advance, as I observed above,
three hundred leagues toward the east-north-east, from the sources of
the Caqueta to those of the Rio Branco and the Essequibo. Gold was
sought in different parts of South America before 1536, without the
word El Dorado having been ever pronounced, and without the belief of
the existence of any other centre of civilization and wealth, than the
empire of the Inca of Cuzco. Countries which now do not furnish
commerce with the smallest quantities of the precious metals, the
coast of Paria, Terra Firma (Castillo del Oro), the mountains of Santa
Marta, and the isthmus of Darien, then enjoyed the same celebrity
which has been more recently acquired by the auriferous lands of
Sonora, Choco, and Brazil.

Diego de Ordaz (1531) and Alonzo de Herrera (1535) directed their
journeys of discovery along the banks of the Lower Orinoco. The former
is the famous Conquistador of Mexico, who boasted that he had taken
sulphur out of the crater of the Peak of Popocatepetl, and whom the
emperor Charles V permitted to wear a burning volcano on his armorial
bearings. Ordaz, named Adelantado of all the country which he could
conquer between Brazil and the coast of Venezuela, which was then
called the country of the German Company of Welsers (Belzares) of
Augsburg, began his expedition by the mouth of the Maranon. He there
saw, in the hands of the natives, "emeralds as big as a man's fist."
They were, no doubt, pieces of that saussurite jade, or compact
feldspar, which we brought home from the Orinoco, and which La
Condamine found in abundance at the mouth of the Rio Topayos. The
Indians related to Diego de Ordaz that on going up during a certain
number of suns toward the west, he would find a large rock (pena) of
green stone; but before they reached this pretended mountain of
emerald (rocks of euphotide?) a shipwreck put an end to all farther
discovery. The Spaniards saved themselves with difficulty in two small
vessels. They hastened to get out of the mouth of the Amazon; and the
currents, which in those parts run with violence to the north-west,
led Ordaz to the coast of Paria where, in the territory of the cacique
Yuripari (Uriapari, Viapari), Sedeno had constructed the Casa fuerte
de Paria. This post being very near the mouth of the Orinoco, the
Mexican Conquistador resolved to attempt an expedition on this great
river. He sojourned first at Carao (Caroa, Carora), a large Indian
village, which appears to me to have been a little to the east of the
confluence of the Carony; he then went up the Cabruta (Cabuta,
Cabritu), and to the mouth of the Meta (Metacuyu), where he found
great difficulty in passing his boats through the Raudal of Cariven.
The Aruacas, whom Ordaz employed as guides, advised him to go up the
Meta; where, on advancing towards the west, they asserted he would
find men clothed, and gold in abundance. Ordaz pursued in preference
the navigation of the Orinoco, but the cataracts of Tabaje (perhaps
even those of the Atures) compelled him to terminate his discoveries.

It is worthy of remark that in this voyage, far anterior to that of
Orellana, and consequently the greatest which the Spaniards had then
performed on a river of the New World, the name of the Orinoco was for
the first time heard. Ordaz, the leader of the expedition, affirms
that the river, from its mouth as far as the confluence of the Meta,
is called Uriaparia, but that above this confluence it bears the name
of Orinucu. This word (formed analogously with the words Tamanacu,
Otomacu, Sinarucu) is, in fact, of the Tamanac tongue; and, as the
Tamanacs dwell south-east of Encaramada, it is natural that the
conquistadores heard the actual name of the river only on drawing near
the Rio Meta.* (* Gili volume 3 page 381. The following are the most
ancient names of the Orinoco, known to the natives near its mouth, and
which historians give us altered by the double fault of pronunciation
and orthography; Yuyapari, Yjupari, Huriaparia, Urapari, Viapari, Rio
de Paria. The Tamanac word Orinucu was disfigured by the Dutch pilots
into Worinoque. The Otomacs say Joga-apurura (great river); the Cabres
and Guaypunabis, Paragua, Bazagua Parava, three words signifying great
water, river, sea. That part of the Orinoco between the Apure and the
Guaviare is often denoted by the name of Baraguan. A famous strait,
which we have described above, bears also this name, which is no doubt
a corruption of the word Paragua. Great rivers in every zone are
called by the dwellers on their banks the river, without any
particular denominations. If other names be added, they change in
every province. Thus the Rio Turiva, near the Encaramada, has five
names in the different parts of its course. The Upper Orinoco, or
Paragua, is called by the Maquiritares (near Esmeralda) Maraguaca, on
account of the lofty mountains of this name near Duida. Gili volume 1
pages 22 and 364. Caulin page 75. In most of the names of the rivers
of America we recognize the root water. Thus yacu in the Peruvian, and
veni in the Maypure tongues, signify water and river. In the Lule
dialect I find fo, water; foyavolto, a river; foysi, a lake; as in
Persian, ab is water; abi frat, the river Euphrates; abdan, a lake.
The root water is preserved in the derivatives.) On this last
tributary stream Diego de Ordaz received from the natives the first
idea of civilized nations who inhabited the table-lands of the Andes
of New Granada; of a very powerful prince with one eye (Indio tuerto),
and of animals less than stags, but fit for riding like Spanish
horses. Ordaz had no idea that these animals were llamas (ovejas del
Peru). Must we admit that llamas, which were used in the Andes to draw
the plough and as beasts of burden, but not for riding, were already
common on the north and east of Quito? I find that Orellana saw these
animals at the river Amazon, above the confluence of the Rio Negro,
consequently in a climate very different from that of the table-land
of the Andes. The table of an army of Omaguas mounted on llamas served
to embellish the account given by the fellow-travellers of Felipe de
Urre of their adventurous expedition to the Upper Caqueta. We cannot
be sufficiently attentive to these traditions, which seem to prove
that the domestic animals of Quito and Peru had already begun to
descend the Cordilleras, and spread themselves by degrees in the
eastern regions of South America.

Herrera, the treasurer of the expedition of Ordaz, was sent in 1553,
by the governor Geronimo de Ortal, to pursue the discovery of the
Orinoco and the Meta. He lost nearly thirteen months between Punta
Barina and the confluence of the Carony in constructing flat-bottomed
boats, and making the preparations indispensable for a long voyage. We
cannot read without astonishment the narrative of those daring
enterprises, in which three or four hundred horses were embarked to be
put ashore whenever cavalry could act on one of the banks. We find in
the expedition of Herrera the same stations which we already knew; the
fortress of Paria, the Indian village of Uriaparia (no doubt below
Imataca, on a point where the inundations of the delta prevented the
Spaniards from being able to procure firewood), Caroa, in the province
of Carora; the rivers Caranaca (Caura?) and Caxavana (Cuchivero?); the
village of Cabritu (Cabruta), and the Raudal near the mouth of the
Meta (probably the Raudal of Cariven and the Piedra de la Paciencia).
As the Rio Meta, on account of the proximity of its sources and of its
tributary streams to the auriferous Cordilleras of new Grenada
(Cundinamarca), enjoyed great celebrity, Herrera attempted to go up
this river. He there found nations more civilized than those of the
Orinoco, but that fed on the flesh of mute dogs. Herrera was killed in
battle by an arrow poisoned with the juice of curare (yierva); and
when dying named Alvaro de Ordaz his lieutenant, who led the remains
of the expedition (1535) to the fortress of Paria, after having lost
the few horses which had resisted a campaign of eighteen months.

Confused reports which were circulated of the wealth of the
inhabitants of the Meta, and the other tributary streams that descend
from the eastern side of the Cordilleras of New Grenada, engaged
successively Geronimo de Ortal, Nicolas Federmann, and Jorge de Espira
(George von Speier), in 1535 and 1536, to undertake expeditions by
land towards the south and south-west. From the promontory of Paria,
as far as Cabo de la Vela, little figures of molten gold had been
found in the hands of the natives, as early as the years 1498 and
1500. The principal markets for these amulets, which the women used as
ornaments, were the villages of Curiana (Coro) and Cauchieto (Near the
Rio la Hacha). The metal employed by the founders of Cauchieto came
from a mountainous country more to the south. It may be conceived that
the expeditions of Ordaz and Herrera served to increase the desire of
drawing nearer to those auriferous countries. George von Speier left
Coro (1535), and penetrated by the mountains of Merida to the banks of
the Apure and the Meta. He passed these two rivers near their sources,
where they have but little breadth. The Indians told him that, farther
on, white men wandered about the plains. Speier, who imagined that he
was not far from the banks of the Amazon, had no doubt that these
wandering Spaniards were men unfortunately shipwrecked in the
expedition of Ordaz. He crossed the savannahs of San Juan de los
Llanos, which were said to abound in gold; and made a long stay at an
Indian village called Pueblo de Nuestra Senora, and afterwards La
Fragua, south-east of the Paramo de la Suma Paz. I have been on the
western back of this group of mountains, at Fusagasuga, and there
heard that the plains by which they are skirted toward the east still
enjoy some celebrity for wealth among the natives. Speier found in the
populous village of La Fragua a Casa del Sol (temple of the sun), and
a convent of virgins similar to those of Peru and New Granada. Were
these the consequence of a migration of religious rites towards the
east? or must we admit that the plains of San Juan were their first
cradle? Tradition, indeed, records that Bochica, the legislator of New
Granada and high-priest of Iraca, had gone up from the plains of the
east to the table-land of Bogota. But Bochica being at once the
offspring and the symbol of the sun, his history may contain
allegories that are merely astrological. Speier, pursuing his way
toward the south, and crossing the two branches of the Guaviare, which
are the Ariare and the Guayavero (Guayare or Canicamare), arrived on
the banks of the great Rio Papamene or Caqueta. The resistance he met
with during a whole year in the province de los Choques, put an end,
in 1537, to this memorable expedition. Nicolas Federmann and Geronimo
de Ortal (1536), who went from Macarapana and the mouth of the Rio
Neveri, followed (1535) the traces of Jorge de Espira. The former
sought for gold in the Rio Grande de la Magdalena; the latter
endeavoured to discover a temple of the sun (Casa del Sol) on the
banks of the Meta. Ignorant of the idiom of the natives, they seemed
to see everywhere, at the foot of the Cordilleras, the reflexion of
the greatness of the temples of Iraca (Sogamozo), which was then the
centre of the civilization of Cundinamarca.

I have now examined, in a geographical point of view, the expeditions
on the Orinoco, and in a western and southern direction on the eastern
back of the Andes, before the tradition of El Dorado was spread among
the conquistadores. This tradition, as we have noticed above, had its
origin in the kingdom of Quito, where Luis Daza (1535) met with an
Indian of New Grenada who had been sent by his prince (no doubt the
zippa of Bogota, or the zaque of Tunja), to demand assistance from
Atahualpa, inca of Peru. This ambassador boasted, as is usual, the
wealth of his country; but what particularly fixed the attention of
the Spaniards who were assembled with Daza in the town of Tacunga
(Llactacunga), was the history of a lord who, his body covered with
powdered gold, went into a lake amid the mountains. This lake may have
been the Laguna de Totta, a little to the east of Sogamozo (Iraca) and
of Tunja (Hunca, the town of Huncahua), where two chiefs,
ecclesiastical and secular, of the empire of Cundinamarca, or
Cundirumarca, resided; but no historical remembrance being attached to
this mountain lake, I rather suppose that it was the sacred lake of
Guatavita, on the east of the mines of rock-salt of Zipaquira, into
which the gilded lord was made to enter. I saw on its banks the
remains of a staircase hewn in the rock, and serving for the
ceremonies of ablution. The Indians said that powder of gold and
golden vessels were thrown into this lake, as a sacrifice to the
adoratorio de Guatavita. Vestiges are still found of a breach which
was made by the Spaniards for the purpose of draining the lake. The
temple of the sun at Sogamozo being pretty near the northern coasts of
Terra Firma, the notions of the gilded man were soon applied to a
high-priest of the sect of Bochica, or Indacanzas, who every morning,
before he performed his sacrifice, caused powder of gold to be stuck
upon his hands and face, after they had been smeared with grease.
Other accounts, preserved in a letter of Oviedo addressed to the
celebrated cardinal Bembo, say that Gonzalo Pizarro, when he
discovered the province of cinnamon-trees, "sought at the same time a
great prince, noised in those countries, who was always covered with
powdered gold, so that from head to foot he resembled an image of gold
fashioned by the hand of a skilful workman (a una figura d'oro
lavorato di mano d'un buonissimo orefice). The powdered gold is fixed
to the body by means of an odoriferous resin; but, as this kind of
garment would be uneasy to him while he slept, the prince washes
himself every evening, and is gilded anew in the morning, which proves
that the empire of El Dorado is infinitely rich in mines." It seems
probable that there was something in the ceremonies of the worship
introduced by Bochica which gave rise to a tradition so generally
spread. The strangest customs are found in the New World. In Mexico
the sacrificers painted their bodies and wore a kind of cape, with
hanging sleeves of tanned human skin.

On the banks of the Caura, and in other wild parts of Guiana, where
painting the body is used instead of tattooing, the nations anoint
themselves with turtle-fat, and stick spangles of mica with a metallic
lustre, white as silver and red as copper, on their skin, so that at a
distance they seem to wear laced clothes. The fable of the gilded man
is, perhaps, founded on a similar custom; and, as there were two
sovereign princes in New Granada, the lama of Iraca and the secular
chief or zaque of Tunja, we cannot be surprised that the same ceremony
was attributed sometimes to the prince and sometimes to the
high-priest. It is more extraordinary that, as early as the year 1535,
the country of El Dorado was sought for on the east of the Andes.
Robertson is mistaken in admitting that Orellana received the first
notions of it (1540) on the banks of the Amazon. The history of Fray
Piedro Simon, founded on the memoirs of Queseda, the conqueror of
Cundirumarca, proves directly the contrary; and Gonzalo Diaz de
Pineda, as early as 1536, sought for the gilded man beyond the plains
of the province of Quixos. The ambassador of Bogota, whom Daza met
with in the kingdom of Quito, had spoken of a country situate toward
the east. Was this because the table-land of New Granada is not on the
north, but on the north-east of Quito? We may venture to say that the
tradition of a naked man covered with powdered gold must have belonged
originally to a hot region, and not to the cold table-lands of
Cundirumarca, where I often saw the thermometer sink below four or
five degrees; however, on account of the extraordinary configuration
of the country, the climate differs greatly at Guatavita, Tunja,
Iraca, and on the banks of the Sogamozo. Sometimes, also, religious
ceremonies are preserved which took rise in another zone; and the
Muyscas, according to ancient traditions, made Bochica, their first
legislator and the founder of their worship, arrive from the plains
situate to the east of the Cordilleras. I shall not decide whether
these traditions expressed an historical fact, or merely indicated, as
we have already observed in another place, that the first Lama, who
was the offspring and symbol of the sun, must necessarily have come
from the countries of the East. Be it as it may, it is not less
certain that the celebrity which the expeditions of Ordaz, Herrera,
and Speier had already given to the Orinoco, the Meta, and the
province of Papamene, situate between the sources of the Guaviare and
Caqueta, contributed to fix the fable of El Dorado near to the eastern
back of the Cordilleras.

The junction of three bodies of troops on the table-land of New
Granada spread through all that part of America occupied by the
Spaniards the news of an immensely rich and populous country which
remained to be conquered. Sebastian de Belalcazar marched from Quito
by way of Popayan (1536) to Bogota; Nicholas Federmann, coming from
Venezuela, arrived from the east by the plains of Meta. These two
captains found, already settled on the table-land of Cundirumarca, the
famous Adelantado Gonzalo Ximenez de Queseda, one of whose descendants
I saw near Zipaquira, with bare feet, attending cattle. The fortuitous
meeting of the three conquistadores, one of the most extraordinary and
dramatic events of the history of the conquest, took place in 1538.
Belalcazar's narratives inflamed the imagination of warriors eager for
adventurous enterprises; and the notions communicated to Luis Daza by
the Indian of Tacunga were compared with the confused ideas which
Ordaz had collected on the Meta respecting the treasures of a great
king with one eye (Indio tuerto), and a people clothed, who rode upon
llamas. An old soldier, Pedro de Limpias, who had accompanied
Federmann to the table-land of Bogota, carried the first news of El
Dorado to Coro, where the remembrance of the expedition of Speier
(1535 to 1537) to the Rio Papamene was still fresh. It was from this
same town of Coro that Felipe von Huten (Urre, Utre) undertook his
celebrated voyage to the province of the Omaguas, while Pizarro,
Orellana, and Hernan Perez de Quesada, brother of the Adelantado,
sought for the gold country at the Rio Napo, along the river of the
Amazons, and on the eastern chain of the Andes of New Grenada. The
natives, in order to get rid of their troublesome guests, continually
described Dorado as easy to be reached, and situate at no considerable
distance. It was like a phantom that seemed to flee before the
Spaniards, and to call on them unceasingly. It is in the nature of
man, wandering on the earth, to figure to himself happiness beyond the
region which he knows. El Dorado, similar to Atlas and the islands of
the Hesperides, disappeared by degrees from the domain of geography,
and entered that of mythological fictions.

I shall not here relate the numerous enterprises which were undertaken
for the conquest of this imaginary country. Unquestionably we are
indebted to them in great part for our knowledge of the interior of
America; they have been useful to geography, as errors and daring
hypotheses are often to the search of truth: but in the discussion on
which we are employed, it is incumbent on me to rest only upon those
facts which have had the most direct influence on the construction of
ancient and modern maps. Hernan Perez de Quesada, after the departure
of his brother the Adelantado for Europe, sought anew (1539) but this
time in the mountainous land north-east of Bogota, the temple of the
sun (Casa del Sol), of which Geronimo de Ortal had heard spoken in
1536 on the banks of the Meta. The worship of the sun introduced by
Bochica, and the celebrity of the sanctuary of Iraca, or Sogamozo,
gave rise to those confused reports of temples and idols of massy
gold; but on the mountains as in the plains, the traveller believed
himself to be always at a distance from them, because the reality
never corresponded with the chimerical dreams of the imagination.
Francisco de Orellana, after having vainly sought El Dorado with
Pizarro in the Provincia de los Canelos, and on the auriferous banks
of the Napo, went down (1540) the great river of the Amazon. He found
there, between the mouths of the Javari and the Rio de la Trinidad
(Yupura?) a province rich in gold, called Machiparo (Muchifaro), in
the vicinity of that of the Aomaguas, or Omaguas. These notions
contributed to carry El Dorado toward the south-east, for the names
Omaguas (Om-aguas, Aguas), Dit-Aguas, and Papamene, designated the
same country--that which Jorge de Espira had discovered in his
expedition to the Caqueta. The Omaguas, the Manaos or Manoas, and the
Guaypes (Uaupes or Guayupes) live in the plains on the north of the
Amazon. They are three powerful nations, the latter of which,
stretching toward the west along the banks of the Guape or Uaupe, had
been already mentioned in the voyages of Quesada and Huten. These two
conquistadores, alike celebrated in the history of America, reached by
different roads the llanos of San Juan, then called Valle de Nuestra
Senora. Hernan Perez de Quesada (1541) passed the Cordilleras of
Cundirumarca, probably between the Paramos of Chingasa and Suma Paz;
while Felipe de Huten, accompanied by Pedro de Limpias (the same who
had carried to Venezuela the first news of Dorado from the land of
Bogota), directed his course from north to south, by the road which
Speier had taken to the eastern side of the mountains. Huten left
Coro, the principal seat of the German factory or company of Welser,
when Henry Remboldt was its director. After having traversed (1541)
the plains of Casanare, the Meta, and the Caguan, he arrived at the
banks of the Upper Guaviare (Guayuare), a river which was long
believed to be the source of the Orinoco, and the mouth of which I saw
in passing by San Fernando de Atabapo to the Rio Negro. Not far from
the right bank of the Guaviare, Huten entered Macatoa, the city of the
Guapes. The people there were clothed, the fields appeared well
cultivated; everything denoted a degree of civilization unknown in the
hot region of America which extends to the east of the Cordilleras.
Speier, in his expedition to the Rio Caqueta and the province of
Papamene, had probably crossed the Guaviare far above Macatoa, before
the junction of the two branches of this river, the Ariari and the
Guayavero. Huten was told that on advancing more to the south-east he
would enter the territory of the great nation of the Omaguas, the
priest-king of which was called Quareca, and which possessed numerous
herds of llamas. These traces of cultivation--these ancient
resemblances to the table-land of Quito--appear to me very remarkable.
It has already been said above that Orellana saw llamas at the
dwelling of an Indian chief on the banks of the Amazon, and that Ordaz
had heard mention made of them in the plains of Meta.

I pause where ends the domain of geography and shall not follow Huten
in the description either of that town of immense extent, which he saw
from afar; or of the battle of the Omaguas, where thirty-nine
Spaniards (the names of fourteen are recorded in the annals of the
time) fought against fifteen thousand Indians. These false reports
contributed greatly to embellish the fable of El Dorado. The name of
the town of the Omaguas is not found in the narrative of Huten; but
the Manoas, from whom Father Fritz received, in the seventeenth
century, plates of beaten gold, in his mission of Yurim-Aguas, are
neighbours of the Omaguas. The name of Manoa subsequently passed from
the country of the Amazons to an imaginary town, placed in El Dorado
de la Parima. The celebrity attached to those countries between the
Caqueta (Papamene) and the Guaupe (one of the tributary streams of the
Rio Negro) excited Pedro de Ursua, in 1560, to that fatal expedition,
which ended by the revolt of the tyrant Aguirre. Ursua, in going down
the Caqueta to enter the river of the Amazons, heard of the province
of Caricuri. This denomination clearly indicates the country of gold;
for I find that this metal is called caricuri in the Tamanac, and
carucuru in the Caribbee. Is it a foreign word that denotes gold among
the nations of the Orinoco, as the words sugar and cotton are in our
European languages? This would prove that these nations learned to
know the precious metals among the foreign products which came to them
from the Cordilleras,* or from the plains at the eastern back of the
Andes. (* In Peruvian or Quichua (lengua del Inca) gold is called
cori, whence are derived chichicori, gold in powder, and corikoya,
gold-ore.)

We arrive now at the period when the fable of El Dorado was fixed in
the eastern part of Guiana, first at the pretended lake Cassipa (on
the banks of the Paragua, a tributary stream of the Carony), and
afterwards between the sources of the Rio Essequibo and the Rio
Branco. This circumstance has had the greatest influence on the state
of geography in those countries. Antonio de Berrio, son-in-law* (*
Properly casado con una sobrina. Fray Pedro Simon pages 597 and 608.
Harris Coll. volume 2 page 212. Laet page 652. Caulin page 175.
Raleigh calls Quesada Cemenes de Casada. He also confounds the periods
of the voyages of Ordaz (Ordace), Orellana (Oreliano), and Ursua. See
Empire of Guiana pages 13 to 20.) and sole heir of the great
Adelantado Gonzalo Ximenez de Quesada, passed the Cordilleras to the
east of Tunja,* (* No doubt between the Paramos of Chita and of
Zoraca, taking the road of Chire and Pore. Berrio told Raleigh that he
came from the Casanare to the Pato, from the Pato to the Meta, and
from the Meta to the Baraguan (Orinoco). We must not confound this Rio
Pato (a name connected no doubt with that of the ancient mission of
Patuto) with the Rio Paute.) embarked on the Rio Casanare, and went
down by this river, the Meta, and the Orinoco, to the island of
Trinidad. We scarcely know this voyage except by the narrative of
Raleigh; it appears to have preceded a few years the first foundation
of Vieja Guayana, which was in the year 1591. A few years later (1595)
Berrio caused his maese de campo, Domingo de Vera, to prepare in
Europe an expedition of two thousand men to go up the Orinoco, and
conquer El Dorado, which then began to be called the country of the
Manoa, and even the Laguna de la gran Manoa. Rich landholders sold
their farms, to take part in a crusade, to which twelve Observantin
monks, and ten secular ecclesiastics were annexed. The tales related
by one Martinez* (Juan Martin de Albujar?), who said he had been
abandoned in the expedition of Diego de Ordaz, and led from town to
town till he reached the capital of El Dorado, had inflamed the
imagination of Berrio. (* I believe I can demonstrate that the fable
of Juan Martinez, spread abroad by the narrative of Raleigh, was
founded on the adventures of Juan Martin de Albujar, well known to the
Spanish historians of the Conquest; and who, in the expedition of
Pedro de Silva (1570), fell into the hands of the Caribs of the Lower
Orinoco. This Albujar married an Indian woman and became a savage
himself, as happens sometimes in our own days on the western limits of
Canada and of the United States. After having long wandered with the
Caribs, the desire of rejoining the Whites led him by the Rio
Essequibo to the island of Trinidad. He made several excursions to
Santa Fe de Bogota, and at length settled at Carora. (Simon page 591).
I know not whether he died at Porto Rico; but it cannot be doubted
that it was he who learned from the Carib traders the name of the
Manoas [of Jurubesh]. As he lived on the banks of the Upper Carony and
reappeared by the Rio Essequibo, he may have contributed also to place
the lake Manoa at the isthmus of Rupunuwini. Raleigh makes his Juan
Martinez embark below Morequito, a village at the east of that
confluence of the Carony with the Orinoco. Thence he makes him dragged
by the Caribs from town to town, till he finds at Manoa a relation of
the inca Atabalipa (Atahualpa), whom he had known before at Caxamarca,
and who had fled before the Spaniards. It appears that Raleigh had
forgotten that the voyage of Ordaz (1531) was two years anterior to
the death of Atahualpa and the entire destruction of the empire of
Peru! He must have confounded the expedition of Ordaz with that of
Silva (1570), in which Juan Martin de Albuzar partook. The latter, who
related his tales at Santa Fe, at Venezuela, and perhaps at Porto
Rico, must have combined what he had heard from the Caribs with what
he had learned from the Spaniards respecting the town of the Omaguas
seen by Huten; of the gilded man who sacrificed in a lake, and of the
flight of the family of Atahualpa into the forests of Vilcabamba, and
the eastern Cordillera of the Andes. Garcilasso volume 2 page 194.) It
is difficult to distinguish what this conquistador had himself
observed in going down the Orinoco from what he said he had collected
in a pretended journal of Martinez, deposited at Porto Rico. It
appears that in general at that period the same ideas prevailed
respecting America as those which we have long entertained in regard
to Africa; it was imagined that more civilization would be found
towards the centre of the continent than on the coasts. Already Juan
Gonzalez, whom Diego de Ordaz had sent in 1531 to explore the banks of
the Orinoco, announced that "the farther you went up this river the
more you saw the population increase." Berrio mentions the
often-inundated province of Amapaja, between the confluence of the
Meta and the Cuchivero, where he found many little idols of molten
gold, similar to those which were fabricated at Cauchieto, east of
Coro. He believed this gold to be a product of the granitic soil that
covers the mountainous country between the Carichana, Uruana, and
Cuchivero. In fact the natives have recently found a mass of native
gold in the Quebrada del Tigre near the mission of Encaramada. Berrio
mentions on the east of the province of Amapaja the Rio Carony
(Caroly), which was said to issue from a great lake, because one of
the tributary streams of the Carony, the Rio Paragua (river of the
great water), had been taken for an inland sea, from ignorance of the
Indian languages. Several of the Spanish historians believed that this
lake, the source of the Carony, was the Grand Manoa of Berrio; but the
notions he communicated to Raleigh show that the Laguna de Manoa (del
Dorado, or de Parime) was supposed to be to the south of the Rio
Paragua, transformed into Laguna Cassipa. "Both these basins had
auriferous sands; but on the banks of the Cassipa was situate
Macureguarai (Margureguaira), the capital of the cacique of Aromaja,
and the first city of the imaginary empire of Guyana."

As these often-inundated lands have been at all times inhabited by
nations of Carib race, who carried on a very active inland trade with
the most distant regions, we must not be surprised that more gold was
found here in the hands of the Indians than elsewhere. The natives of
the coast did not employ this metal in the form of ornaments or
amulets only; but also as a medium of exchange. It is not
extraordinary, therefore, that gold has disappeared on the coast of
Paria, and among the nations of the Orinoco, their inland
communications have been impeded by the Europeans. The natives who
have remained independent are in our days, no doubt, more wretched,
more indolent, and in a ruder state, than they were before the
conquest. The king of Morequito, whose son Raleigh took to England,
had visited Cumana in 1594, to exchange a great quantity of images of
massy gold for iron tools, and European merchandise. The unexpected
appearance of an Indian chief augmented the celebrity of the riches of
the Orinoco. It was supposed that El Dorado must be near the country
from which the king of Morequito came; and as this country was often
inundated, and rivers vaguely called great seas, or great basins of
water, El Dorado must be on the banks of a lake. It was forgotten that
the gold brought by the Caribs and other trading people was as little
the produce of the soil as the diamonds of Brazil and India are the
produce of the regions of Europe, where they are most abundant. The
expedition of Berrio which had increased in number during the stay of
the vessels at Cumana, La Margareta, and the island of Trinidad,
proceeded by Morequito (near Vieja Guayana) towards the Rio Paragua, a
tributary stream of the Carony; but sickness, the ferocity of the
natives, and the want of subsistence, opposed invincible obstacles to
the progress of the Spaniards. They all perished; except about thirty,
who returned in a deplorable state to the post of Santo Thome.

These disasters did not calm the ardour displayed during the first
half of the 17th century in the search of El Dorado. The Governor of
the island of Trinidad, Antonio de Berrio, became the prisoner of Sir
Walter Raleigh in the celebrated incursion of that navigator, in 1595,
on the coast of Venezuela and at the mouths of the Orinoco. Raleigh
collected from Berrio, and from other prisoners made by Captain
Preston* at the taking of Caracas, all the information which had been
obtained at that period on the countries situate to the south of Vieya
Guayana. (* These prisoners belonged to the expedition of Berrio and
of Hernandez de Serpa. The English landed at Macuto (then Guayca
Macuto), whence a white man, Villalpando, led them by a mountain-path
between Cumbre and the Silla (perhaps passing over the ridge of
Galipano) to the town of Caracas. Simon page 594; Raleigh page 19.
Those only who are acquainted with the situation can be sensible how
difficult and daring this enterprise was.) He lent faith to the fables
invented by Juan Martin de Albujar, and entertained no doubt either of
the existence of the two lakes Cassipa and Rupunuwini, or of that of
the great empire of the Inca, which, after the death of Atahualpa, the
fugitive princes were supposed to have founded near the sources of the
Essequibo. We are not in possession of a map that was constructed by
Raleigh, and which he recommended to lord Charles Howard to keep
secret. The geographer Hondius has filled up this void; and has even
added to his map a table of longitudes and latitudes, among which
figure the laguna del Dorado, and the Ville Imperiale de Manoas.
Raleigh, when at anchor near the Punta del Gallo* in the island of
Trinidad (* The northern part of La Punta de Icacos, which is the
south-east cape of the island of Trinidad. Christopher Columbus cast
anchor there on August 3, 1498. A great confusion exists in the
denomination of the different capes of the island of Trinidad; and as
recently, since the expedition of Fidalgo and Churruca, the Spaniards
reckon the longitudes in South America west of La Punta de la Galera
(latitude 10 degrees 50 minutes, longitude 63 degrees 20 minutes), it
is important to fix the attention of geographers on this point.
Columbus called the south-east cape of the island Punta Galera, on
account of the form of a rock. From Punta de la Galera he sailed to
the west and landed at a low cape, which he calls Punta del Arenal;
this is our Punta de Icacos. In this passage, near a place (Punta de
la Playa) where he stopped to take in water (perhaps at the mouth of
the Rio Erin), he saw to the south, for the first time, the continent
of America, which he called Isla Santa. It was, therefore, the eastern
coast of the province of Cumana, to the east of the Cano Macareo, near
Punta Redonda, and not the mountainous coast of Paria (Isla de Gracia,
of Columbus), which was first discovered.), made his lieutenants
explore the mouths of the Orinoco, principally those of Capuri, Grand
Amana (Manamo Grande), and Macureo (Macareo). As his ships drew a
great deal of water, he found it difficult to enter the bocas chicas,
and was obliged to construct flat-bottomed barks. He remarked the
fires of the Tivitivas (Tibitibies), of the race of the Guaraon
Indians, on the tops of the mauritia palm-trees; and appears to have
first brought the fruit to Europe (fructum squamosum, similem palmae
pini). I am surprised, that he scarcely mentions the settlement, which
had been made by Berrio under the name of Santo Thome (la Vieja
Guayana.) This settlement however dates from 1591; and though,
according to Fray Pedro Simon, "religion and policy prohibited all
mercantile connection between Christians [Spaniards] and Heretics [the
Dutch and English]," there was then carried on at the end of the
sixteenth century, as in our days, an active contraband trade by the
mouths of the Orinoco. Raleigh passed the river Europa (Guarapo), and
"the plains of Saymas (Chaymas), which extend, keeping the same level,
as far as Cumana and Caracas;" he stopped at Morequito (perhaps a
little to the north of the site of the villa de Upata, in the missions
of the Carony), where an old cacique confirmed to him all the reveries
of Berrio on the irruption of foreign nations (Orejones and Epuremei)
into Guiana. The Raudales or cataracts of the Caroli (Carony), a river
which was at that period considered as the shortest way for reaching
the towns of Macureguarai and Manoa, situate on the banks of lake
Cassipa and of lake Rupunuwini or Dorado, put an end to this
expedition.

Raleigh went scarcely the distance of sixty leagues along the Orinoco;
but he names the upper tributary streams, according to the vague
notions he had collected; the Cari, the Pao, the Apure (Capuri?) the
Guarico (Voari?) the Meta,* and even, "in the province of Baraguan,
the great cataract of Athule (Atures), which prevents all further
navigation." (* Raleigh distinguishes the Meta from the Beta, which
flows into the Baraguan (the Orinoco) conjointly with the Daune, near
Athule; as he distinguishes the Casanare, a tributary stream of the
Meta, and the Casnero, which comes from the south, and appears to be
the Rio Cuchivero. All above the confluence of the Apure was then very
confusedly known; and streams that flow into the tributary streams of
the Orinoco were considered as flowing into this river itself. The
Apure (Capuri) and Meta appeared long to be the same river on account
of their proximity, and the numerous branches by which the Arauca and
the Apure join each other. Is the name of Beta perchance connected
with that of the nation of Betoyes, of the plains of the Casanare and
the Meta? Hondius and the geographers who have followed him, with the
exception of De L'Isle (1700), and of Sanson (1656), place the
province of Amapaja erroneously to the east of the Orinoco. We see
clearly by the narrative of Raleigh (pages 26 and 72), that Amapaja is
the inundated country between the Meta and the Guarico. Where are the
rivers Dauney and Ubarro? The Guaviare appears to me to be the Goavar
of Raleigh.) Notwithstanding Raleigh's exaggeration, so little worthy
of a statesman, his narrative contains important materials for the
history of geography. The Orinoco above the confluence of the Apure
was at that period as little known to Europeans, as in our time the
course of the Niger below Sego. The names of several very remote
tributary streams were known, but not their situation; and when the
same name, differently pronounced, or not properly apprehended by the
ear, furnished different sounds, their number was multiplied. Other
errors had perhaps their source in the little interest which Antonio
de Berrio, the Spanish governor, felt in communicating true and
precise notions to Raleigh, who indeed complains of his prisoner, "as
being utterly unlearned, and not knowing the east from the west." I
shall not here discuss the point how far the belief of Raleigh, in all
he relates of inland seas similar to the Caspian sea; on "the imperial
and golden city of Manoa," and on the magnificent palaces built by the
emperor Inga of Guyana, in imitation of those of his ancestors at
Peru, was real or pretended. The learned historian of Brazil, Mr.
Southey, and the biographer of Raleigh, Sir G. Cayley, have recently
thrown much light on this subject. It seems to me difficult to doubt
of the extreme credulity of the chief of the expedition, and of his
lieutenants. We see Raleigh adapted everything to the hypotheses he
had previously formed. He was certainly deceived himself; but when he
sought to influence the imagination of queen Elizabeth, and execute
the projects of his own ambitious policy, he neglected none of the
artifices of flattery. He described to the Queen "the transports of
those barbarous nations at the sight of her picture;" he would have
"the name of the august virgin, who knows how to conquer empires,
reach as far as the country of the warlike women of the Orinoco and
the Amazon;" he asserts that "at the period when the Spaniards
overthrew the throne of Cuzco, an ancient prophecy was found, which
predicted that the dynasty of the Incas would one day owe its
restoration to Great Britain;" he advises that "on pretext of
defending the territory against external enemies, garrisons of three
or four thousand English should be placed in the towns of the Inca,
obliging this prince to pay a contribution annually to Queen Elizabeth
of three hundred thousand pounds sterling;" finally he adds, like a
man who foresees the future, that "all the vast countries of South
America will one day belong to the English nation."* (* "I showed them
her Majesty's picture, which the Casigui so admired and honoured, as
it had been easy to have brought them idolatrous thereof. And I
further remember that Berreo confessed to me and others (which I
protest before the majesty of God to be true), that there was found
among prophecies at Peru (at such a time as the empire was reduced to
the Spanish obedience) in their chiefest temple, among divers others
which foreshowed the losse of the said empyre, that from Inglatierra
those Ingas should be again in time to come restored. The Inga would
yield to her Majesty by composition many hundred thousand pounds
yearely as to defend him against all enemies abroad and defray the
expenses of a garrison of 3000 or 4000 soldiers. It seemeth to me that
this Empyre of Guiana is reserved for the English nation." (Raleigh
pages 7, 17, 51 and 100.)

The four voyages of Raleigh to the Lower Orinoco succeeded each other
from 1595 to 1617. After all these useless attempts the ardour of
research after El Dorado has greatly diminished. No expeditions have
since been formed by a numerous band of colonists; but some solitary
enterprises have been encouraged by the governors of the provinces.
The notions spread by the journeys of Father Acunha in 1688, and
Father Fritz in 1637, to the auriferous land of the Manoas of
Jurubesh, and to the Laguna de Ore, contributed to renew the ideas of
El Dorado in the Portuguese and Spanish colonies north and south of
the equator. At Cuenza, in the kingdom of Quito, I met with some men,
who were employed by the bishop Marfil to seek at the east of the
Cordilleras, in the plains of Macas, the ruins of the town of Logrono,
which was believed to be situate in a country rich in gold. We learn
by the journal of Hortsmann, which I have often quoted, that it was
supposed, in 1740, El Dorado might be reached from Dutch Guiana by
going up the Rio Essequibo. Don Manuel Centurion, the governor of
Santo Thome del Angostura, displayed an extreme ardour for reaching
the imaginary lake of Manoa. Arimuicaipi, an Indian of the nation of
the Ipurucotos, went down the Rio Carony, and by his false narrations
inflamed the imagination of the Spanish colonists. He showed them in
the southern sky the Clouds of Magellan, the whitish light of which he
said was the reflection of the argentiferous rocks situate in the
middle of the Laguna Parima. This was describing in a very poetical
manner the splendour of the micaceous and talcy slates of his country!
Another Indian chief, known among the Caribs of Essequibo by the name
El Capitan Jurado, vainly attempted to undeceive the governor
Centurion. Fruitless attempts were made by the Caura and the Rio
Paragua; and several hundred persons perished miserably in these rash
enterprises, from which, however, geography has derived some
advantages. Nicolas Rodriguez and Antonio Santos (1775 to 1780) were
employed by the Spanish governor. Santos, proceeding by the Carony,
the Paragua, the Paraguamusi, the Anocapra, and the mountains of
Pacaraymo and Quimiropaca, reached the Uraricuera and the Rio Branco.
I found some valuable information in the journals of these perilous
expeditions.

The maritime charts which the Florentine traveller, Amerigo Vespucci,*
constructed in the early years of the sixteenth century, as Piloto
mayor de la Casa de Contratacion of Seville, and in which he placed,
perhaps artfully, the words Tierra de Amerigo, have not reached our
times. (* He died in 1512, as Mr. Munoz has proved by the documents of
the archives of Simancas. Hist. del Nuevo Mundo volume 1 page 17.
Tiraboschi, Storia della Litteratura.) The most ancient monument we
possess of the geography of the New Continent,* is the map of the
world by John Ruysch, annexed to a Roman edition of Ptolemy in 1508.
(* See the learned researches of M. Walckenaer, in the Bibliographie
Universelle volume 6 page 209 article Buckinck. On the maps added to
Ptolemy in 1506 we find no trace of the discoveries of Columbus.) We
there find Yucatan and Honduras (the most southern part of Mexico)*
figured as an island, by the name of Culicar. (* No doubt the lands
between Uucatan, Cape Gracias a Dios, and Veragua, discovered by
Columbus (1502 and 1503), by Solis, and by Pincon (1506).) There is no
isthmus of Panama, but a passage, which permits of a direct navigation
from Europe to India. The great southern island (South America) bears
the name of Terra de Pareas, bounded by two rivers, the Rio Lareno and
the Rio Formoso. These Pareas are, no doubt, the inhabitants of Paria,
a name which Christopher Columbus had already heard in 1498, and which
was long applied to a great part of America. Bishop Geraldini says
clearly, in a letter addressed to Pope Leo X in 1516: Insula illa,
quae Europa et Asia est major, quam indocti Continentem Asiae
appellant, et alii Americam vel Pariam nuncupant [that island, larger
than Europe and Asia joined together, which the unlearned call the
continent of Asia, and others America or Paria].* (* Alexandri
Geraldini Itinerarium page 250.) I find in the map of the world of
1508 no trace whatever of the Orinoco. This river appears, for the
first time, by the name of Rio Dolce, on the celebrated map
constructed in 1529 by Diego Ribeyro, cosmographer of the emperor
Charles V, which was published, with a learned commentary, by M.
Sprengel, in 1795. Neither Columbus (1498) nor Alonzo de Ojeda,
accompanied by Amerigo Vespucci (1499), had seen the real mouth of the
Orinoco; they confounded it with the northern opening of the Gulf of
Paria, to which they attributed (by an exaggeration so common to the
navigators of that time, an immense volume of fresh water. It was
Vicente Yanez Pincon, who, after having discovered the mouth of the
Rio Maranon,* first saw, in 1500, that of the Orinoco. (* The name of
Maranon was known fifty-nine years before the expedition of Lopez de
Aguirre; the denomination of the river is therefore erroneously
attributed to the nickname of maranos (hogs), which this adventurer
gave his companions in going down the river Amazon. Was not this
vulgar jest rather an allusion to the Indian name of the river?) He
called this river Rio Dolce--a name which, since Ribeyro, was long
preserved on our maps, and which has sometimes been given erroneously
to the Maroni and to the Essequibo.

The great Lake Parima did not appear on our maps* till after the first
voyage of Raleigh. (* I find no trace of it on a very rare map,
dedicated to Richard Hakluyt, and constructed on the meridian of
Toledo. Novus Orbis, Paris 1587. In this map, published before the
voyage of Quiros, a group of Islands is marked (Infortunatae Insulae)
where the Friendly Islands actually are. Ortelius (1570) already knew
them. Were they islands seen by Magellan?) It was Jodocus Hondius who,
as early as the year 1599, fixed the ideas of geographers and figured
the interior of Spanish Guiana as a country well known. He transformed
the isthmus between the Rio Branco and the Rio Rupunuwini (one of the
tributary streams of the Essequibo) into the lake Rupunuwini, Parima,
or Dorado, two hundred leagues long, and forty broad, and bounded by
the latitudes of 1 degree 45 minutes south, and 2 degrees north. This
inland sea, larger than the Caspian, is sometimes traced in the midst
of a mountainous country, without communication with any river;* (*
See, for instance, Hondius, Nieuwe Caerte van het goudrycke landt
Guiana, 1599; and Sanson's Map of America, in 1656 and 1669.) and
sometimes the Rio Oyapok (Waiapago, Japoc, Viapoco) and the Rio de
Cayana are made to issue from it.* (* Brasilia et Caribaua, auct.
Hondio et Huelsen 1599.) The first of these rivers, confounded in the
eighth article of the treaty of Utrecht with the Rio de Vicente Pincon
(Rio Calsoene of D'Anville), has been, even down to the late congress
of Vienna, the subject of interminable discussions between the French
and Portuguese diplomatists.* (* I have treated this question in a
Memoire sur la fixation des limites de La Guyane Francaise, written at
the desire of the Portuguese government during the negotiations of
Paris in 1817. (See Schoell, Archives polit. or Pieces inedites volume
1 pages 48 to 58.) Ribeyro, in his celebrated map of the world of
1529, places the Rio de Vicente Pincon south of the Amazon, near the
Gulf of Maranhao. This navigator landed at this spot, after having
been at Cape Saint Augustin, and before he reached the mouth of the
Amazon. Herrera dec. I page 107. The narrative of Gomara, Hist. Nat.
1553 page 48, is very confused in a geographical point of view.) The
second is an imaginary prolongation either of the Tonnegrande or of
the Oyac (Wia?). The inland sea (Laguna Parime) was at first placed in
such a manner that its western extremity coincided with the meridian
of the confluence of the Apure and the Orinoco. By degrees it was
advanced toward the east,* the western extremity being found to the
south of the mouth of the Orinoco. (* Compare the maps of 1599 with
those of Sanson (1656) and of Blaeuw (1633).) This change produced
others in the respective situations of the lakes Parima and Cassipa,
as well as in the direction of the course of the Orinoco. This great
river is represented as running from its delta as far as beyond the
Meta, from south to north, like the river Magdalena. The tributary
streams, therefore, which were made to issue from the lake Cassipa,
the Carony, the Arui, and the Caura, then took the direction of the
latitude, while in nature they follow that of a meridian. Beside the
lakes Parima and Cassipa, a third was traced upon the maps, from which
the Aprouague (Apurwaca) was made to issue. It was then a general
practice among geographers to attach all rivers to great lakes. By
this means Ortelius joined the Nile to the Zaire or Rio Congo, and the
Vistula to the Wolga and the Dnieper. North of Mexico, in the
pretended kingdoms of Quivira and Cibola, rendered celebrated by the
falsehoods of the monk Marcos de Niza, a great inland sea was
imagined, from which the Rio Colorado of California was made to
issue.* (* This is the Mexican Dorado, where it was pretended that
vessels had been found on the coasts [of New Albion?] loaded with the
merchandise of Catayo and China (Gomara, Hist. Gen. page 117), and
where Fray Marcos (like Huten in the country of the Omaguas) had seen
from afar the gilded roofs of a great town, one of the Siete Ciudades.
The inhabitants have great dogs, en los quales quando se mudan cargan
su menage. (Herrera dec. 6 pages 157 and 206.) Later discoveries,
however, leave no doubt that there existed a centre of civilization in
those countries.) A branch of the Rio Magdalena flowed to the Laguna
de Maracaybo; and the lake of Xarayes, near which a southern Dorado
was placed, communicated with the Amazon, the Miari* (Meary) (* As
this river flows into the gulf of Maranhao (so named because some
French colonists, Rifault, De Vaux, and Ravadiere, believed they were
opposite the mouth of the Maranon or Amazon), the ancient maps call
the Meary Maranon, or Maranham. See the maps of Hondius, and Paulo de
Forlani. Perhaps the idea that Pincon, to whom the discovery of the
real Maranon is due, had landed in these parts, since become
celebrated by the shipwreck of Ayres da Cunha, has also contributed to
this confusion. The Meary appears to me identical with the Rio de
Vicente Pincon of Diego Ribeyro, which is more than one hundred and
forty leagues from that of the modern geographers. At present the name
of Maranon has remained at the same time to the river of the Amazons,
and to a province much farther eastward, the capital of which is
Maranhao, or St. Louis de Maranon.) and the Rio de San Francisco.
These hydrographic reveries have for the most part disappeared; but
the lakes Cassipa and Dorado have been long simultaneously preserved
on our maps.

In following the history of geography we see the Cassipa, figured as a
rectangular parallelogram, enlarge by degrees at the expense of El
Dorado. While the latter is sometimes suppressed, no one ventures to
touch the former,* which is the Rio Paragua (a tributary stream of the
Caroni) enlarged by temporary inundations. (* Sanson, Course of the
Amazon, 1680; De L'Isle, Amerique Merid. 1700. D'Anville, first
edition of his America, 1748.) When D'Anville learned from the
expedition of Solano that the sources of the Orinoco, far from lying
to the west, on the back of the Andes of Pasto, came from the east,
from the mountains of Parima, he restored in the second edition of his
fine map of America (1760) the Laguna Parime, and very arbitrarily
made it to communicate with three rivers, the Orinoco, the Rio Branco,
and the Essequibo, by the Mazuruni and the Cujuni; assigning to it the
latitude from 3 to 4 degrees north, which had till then been given to
lake Cassipa.

I have now stated, as I announced above, the variable forms which
geographical errors have assumed at different periods. I have
explained what in the configuration of the soil, the course of the
rivers, the names of the tributary streams, and the multiplicity of
the portages, may have given rise to the hypothesis of an inland sea
in the centre of Guiana. However dry discussions of this nature may
appear, they ought not to be regarded as sterile and fruitless. They
show travellers what remains to be discovered; and make known the
degree of certainty which long-repeated assertions may claim. It is
with maps, as with those tables of astronomical positions which are
contained in our ephemerides, designed for the use of navigators: the
most heterogeneous materials have been employed in their construction
during a long space of time; and, without the aid of the history of
geography, we could scarcely hope to discover at some future day on
what authority every partial statement rests.

Before I resume the thread of my narrative, it remains for me to add a
few general reflections on the auriferous lands situate between the
Amazon and the Orinoco. We have just shown that the fable of El
Dorado, like the most celebrated fables of the nations of the ancient
world, has been applied progressively to different spots. We have seen
it advance from the south-west to the north-east, from the oriental
declivity of the Andes towards the plains of Rio Branco and the
Essequibo, an identical direction with that in which the Caribs for
ages conducted their warlike and mercantile expeditions. It may be
conceived that the gold of the Cordilleras might be conveyed from hand
to hand, through an infinite number of tribes, as far as the shore of
Guiana; since, long before the fur-trade had attracted English,
Russian, and American vessels to the north-west coast of America, iron
tools had been carried from New Mexico and Canada beyond the Rocky
Mountains. From an error in longitude, the traces of which we find in
all the maps of the 16th century, the auriferous mountains of Peru and
New Granada were supposed to be much nearer the mouths of the Orinoco
and the Amazon than they are in fact. Geographers have the habit of
augmenting and extending beyond measure countries that are recently
discovered. In the map of Peru, published at Verona by Paulo di
Forlani, the town of Quito is placed at the distance of 400 leagues
from the coast of the South Sea, on the meridian of Cumana; and the
Cordillera of the Andes there fills almost the whole surface of
Spanish, French, and Dutch Guiana. This erroneous opinion of the
breadth of the Andes has no doubt contributed to give so much
importance to the granitic plains that extend on their eastern side.
Unceasingly confounding the tributary streams of the Amazon with those
of the Orinoco, or (as the lieutenants of Raleigh called it, to
flatter their chief) the Rio Raleana, to the latter were attributed
all the traditions which had been collected respecting the Dorado of
Quixos, the Omaguas, and the Manoas.* (* The flight of Manco-Inca,
brother of Atahualpa, to the east of the Cordilleras, no doubt gave
rise to the tradition of the new empire of the Incas in Dorado. It was
forgotten that Caxamarca and Cuzco, two towns where the princes of
that unfortunate family were at the time of their emigration, are
situate to the south of the Amazon, in the latitudes seven degrees
eight minutes, and thirteen degrees twenty-one minutes south, and
consequently four hundred leagues south-west of the pretended town of
Manoa on the lake Parima (three degrees and a half north latitude). It
is probable that, from the extreme difficulty of penetration into the
plains east of the Andes, covered with forests, the fugitive princes
never went beyond the banks of the Beni. The following is what I
learnt with certainty respecting the emigration of the family of the
Inca, some sad vestiges of which I saw on passing by Caxamarca.
Manco-Inca, acknowledged as the legitimate successor of Atahualpa,
made war without success against the Spaniards. He retired at length
into the mountains and thick forests of Vilcabamba, which are
accessible either by Huamanga and Antahuaylla, or by the valley of
Yucay, north of Cuzco. Of the two Sons of Manco-Inca, the eldest,
Sayri-Tupac, surrendered himself to the Spaniards, upon the invitation
of the viceroy of Peru, Hurtado de Mendoza. He was received with great
pomp at Lima, was baptized there, and died peaceably in the fine
valley of Yucay. The youngest son of Manco-Inca, Tupac-Amaru, was
carried off by stratagem from the forests of Vilcabamba, and beheaded
on pretext of a conspiracy formed against the Spanish usurpers. At the
same period, thirty-five distant relations of the Inca Atahualpa were
seized, and conveyed to Lima, in order to remain under the inspection
of the Audiencia. (Garcilasso volume 2 pages 194, 480 and 501.) It is
interesting to inquire whether any other princes of the family of
Manco-Capac have remained in the forests of Vilcabamba, and if there
still exist any descendants of the Incas of Peru between the Apurimac
and the Beni. This supposition gave rise in 1741 to the famous
rebellion of the Chuncoes, and to that of the Amages and Campoes led
on by their chief, Juan Santos, called the false Atahualpa. The late
political events of Spain have liberated from prison the remains of
the family of Jose Gabriel Condorcanqui, an artful and intrepid man,
who, under the name of the Inca Tupac-Amaru, attempted in 1781 that
restoration of the ancient dynasty which Raleigh had projected in the
time of Queen Elizabeth.) The geographer Hondius supposed that the
Andes of Loxa, celebrated for their forests of cinchona, were only
twenty leagues distant from the lake Parima, or the banks of the Rio
Branco. This proximity procured credit to the tidings of the flight of
the Inca into the forests of Guiana, and the removal of the treasures
of Cuzco to the easternmost parts of that country. No doubt in going
up towards the east, either by the Meta or by the Amazon, the
civilization of the natives, between the Puruz, the Jupura, and the
Iquiari, was observed to increase. They possessed amulets, little
idols of molten gold, and chairs, elegantly carved; but these traces
of dawning civilization are far distant from those cities and houses
of stone described by Raleigh and those who followed him. We have made
drawings of some ruins of great edifices east of the Cordilleras, when
going down from Loxa towards the Amazon, in the province of Jaen de
Bracamoros; and thus far the Incas had carried their arms, their
religion, and their arts. The inhabitants of the Orinoco were also,
before the conquest, when abandoned to themselves, somewhat more
civilized than the independent hordes of our days. They had populous
villages along the river, and a regular trade with more southern
nations; but nothing indicates that they ever constructed an edifice
of stone. We saw no vestige of any during the course of our journey.

Though the celebrity of the riches of Spanish Guiana is chiefly
assignable to the geographical situation of the country and the errors
of the old maps, we are not justified in denying the existence of any
auriferous land in the tract of country of eighty-two thousand square
leagues, which stretches between the Orinoco and the Amazon, on the
east of the Andes of Quito and New Granada. What I saw of this country
between the second and eighth degrees of latitude, and the sixty-sixth
and seventy-first degrees of longitude, is entirely composed of
granite, and of a gneiss passing into micaceous and talcous slate.
These rocks appear naked in the lofty mountains of Parima, as well as
in the plains of the Atabapo and the Cassiquiare. Granite predominates
there over the other rocks; and though, in both continents, the
granite of ancient formation is pretty generally destitute of
gold-ore, we cannot thence conclude that the granite of Parima
contains no vein, no stratum of auriferous quartz. On the east of the
Cassiquiare towards the sources of the Orinoco, we observed that the
number of these strata and these veins increased. The granite of these
countries, by its structure, its mixture of hornblende, and other
geological features alike important, appears to me to belong to a more
recent formation, perhaps posterior to the gneiss, and analogous to
the stanniferous granites, the hyalomictes, and the pegmatites. Now
the least ancient granites are also the least destitute of metals; and
several auriferous rivers and torrents in the Andes, in the Salzburg,
Fichtelgebirge, and the table-land of the two Castiles, lead us to
believe that these granites sometimes contain native gold, and
portions of auriferous pyrites and galena disseminated throughout the
whole rock, as is the case with tin and magnetic and micaceous iron.
The group of the mountains of Parima, several summits of which attain
the height of one thousand three hundred toises, was almost entirely
unknown before our visit to the Orinoco. This group, however, is a
hundred leagues long and eighty broad; and though wherever M. Bonpland
and I traversed this vast group of mountains, its structure seemed to
us extremely uniform, it would be wrong to affirm that it may not
contain very metalliferous transition rocks and mica-slates
superimposed on the granite.

I have already observed that the silvery lustre and frequency of mica
have contributed to give Guiana great celebrity for metallic wealth.
The peak of Calitamini, glowing every evening at sunset with a reddish
fire, still attracts the attention of the inhabitants of Maypures.
According to the fabulous stories of the natives, the islets of
mica-slate, situate in lake Amucu, augment by their reflection the
lustre of the nebulae of the southern sky. "Every mountain," says
Raleigh, "every stone in the forests of the Orinoco, shines like the
precious metals; if it be not gold, it is madre del oro (mother of
gold)." Raleigh asserts that he brought back gangues of auriferous
white quartz ("harde white sparr"); and to prove the richness of this
ore he gives an account of the assays that were made by the officers
of the mint at London.* (* Messrs. Westewood, Dimocke, and Bulmar.) I
have no reason to believe that the chemists of that time sought to
lead Queen Elizabeth into error, and I will not insult the memory of
Raleigh by supposing, like his contemporaries,* that the auriferous
quartz which he brought home had not been collected in America. (* See
the defence of Raleigh in the preface to the Discovery of Guiana, 1596
pages 2 to 4.) We cannot judge of things from which we are separated
by so long an interval of time. The gneiss of the littoral chain*
contains traces of the precious metals (* In the southern branch of
this chain which passes by Yusma, Villa de Cura and Ocumare,
particularly near Buria, Los Teques and Los Marietas.); and some
grains of gold have been found in the mountains of Parima, near the
mission of Encaramada. How can we infer the absolute sterility of the
primitive rocks of Guiana from testimony merely negative, from the
circumstance that during a journey of three months we saw no
auriferous vein appearing above the soil?

In order to bring together whatever may enlighten the government of
this country on a subject so long disputed, I will enter upon a few
more geological considerations. The mountains of Brazil,
notwithstanding the numerous traces of embedded ore which they display
between Saint Paul and Villa Rica, have furnished only stream-works of
gold. More than six-sevenths of the seventy-eight thousand marks
(52,000 pounds) of this metal, with which at the beginning of the 19th
century America annually supplied the commerce of Europe, have come,
not from the lofty Cordilleras of the Andes, but from the alluvial
lands on the east and west of the Cordilleras. These lands are raised
but little above the level of the sea, like those of Sonora in Mexico,
and of Choco and Barbacoas in New Granada; or they stretch along in
table-lands, as in the interior of Brazil.* (* The height of Villa
Rica is six hundred and thirty toises; but the great table-land of the
Capitania de Minas Geraes is only three hundred toises in height. See
the profile which Colonel d'Eschwege has published at Weimar, with an
indication of the rocks, in imitation of my profile of the Mexican
table-land.) Is it not probable that some other depositions of
auriferous earth extend toward the northern hemisphere, as far as the
banks of the Upper Orinoco and the Rio Negro, two rivers which form
but one basin with that of the Amazon? I observed, when speaking of El
Dorado de Canelas, the Omaguas and the Iquiare, that almost all the
rivers which flow from the west wash down gold in abundance, and very
far from the Cordilleras. From Loxa to Popayan these Cordilleras are
composed alternately of trachytes and primitive rocks. The plains of
Ramora, of Logrono, and of Macas (Sevilla del Oro), the great Rio Napo
with its tributary streams* (the Ansupi and the Coca, in the province
of Quixos (* The little rivers Cosanga, Quixos, and Papallacta or
Maspa, which form the Coca, rise on the eastern slope of the Nevado de
Antisana. The Rio Ansupi brings down the largest grains of gold: it
flows into the Napo, south of the Archidona, above the mouth of the
Misagualli. Between the Misagualli and the Rio Coca, in the province
of Avila, five other northern tributary streams of the Napo (the
Siguna, Munino, Suno, Guataracu, and Pucono) are known as being
singularly auriferous. These local details are taken from several
manuscript reports of the Governor of Quixos, from which I traced the
map of the countries east of the Antisana.)), the Caqueta de Mocoa as
far as the mouth of the Fragua, in fine, all the country comprised
between Jaen de Bracamoros and the Guaviare,* (* From Rio Santiago, a
tributary stream of the Upper Maranon, to the Llanos of Caguan and of
San Juan.) preserve their ancient celebrity for metallic wealth. More
to the east, between the sources of the Guainia (Rio Negro), the
Uaupes, the Iquiare, and the Yurubesh, we find a soil incontestably
auriferous. There Acunha and Father Fritz placed their Laguna del Oro;
and various accounts which I obtained at San Carlos from Portuguese
Americans explain perfectly what La Condamine has related of the
plates of beaten gold found in the hands of the natives. If we pass
from the Iquiare to the left bank of the Rio Negro, we enter a country
entirely unknown, between the Rio Branco, the sources of the
Essequibo, and the mountains of Portuguese Guiana. Acunha speaks of
the gold washed down by the northern tributary streams of the Lower
Maranon, such as the Rio Trombetas (Oriximina), the Curupatuba, and
the Ginipape (Rio de Paru). It appears to me a circumstance worthy of
attention that all these rivers descend from the same table-land, the
northern slope of which contains the lake Amucu, the Dorado of Raleigh
and the Dutch, and the isthmus between the Rupunuri (Rupunuwini) and
the Rio Mahu. There is no reason for denying the existence of
auriferous alluvial lands far from the Cordilleras of the Andes on the
north of the Amazon; as there are on the south in the mountains of
Brazil. The Caribs of the Carony, the Cuyuni and the Essequibo, have
practised on a small scale the washing of alluvial earth from the
remotest times.* (* "On the north of the confluence of the Curupatuba
and the Amazon," says Acunha, "is the mountain of Paraguaxo, which,
when illumined by the sun, glows with the most beautiful colours; and
thence from time to time issues a horrible noise (revienta con grandes
struenos)." Is there a volcanic phenomenon in this eastern part of the
New Continent? or is it the love of the marvellous, which has given
rise to the tradition of the bellowings (bramidos) of Paraguaxo? The
lustre emitted from the sides of the mountain recalls to mind what we
have mentioned above of the miraculous rocks of Calitamini, and the
island Ipomucena, in the imaginary Lake Dorado. In one of the Spanish
letters intercepted at sea by Captain George Popham, in 1594, it is
said, "Having inquired of the natives whence they obtained the
spangles and powder of gold, which we found in their huts, and which
they stick on their skin by means of some greasy substances, they told
us that in a certain plain they tore up the grass, and gathered the
earth in baskets, to subject it to the process of washing." Raleigh
page 109. Can this passage be explained by supposing that the Indians
sought thus laboriously, not for gold, but for spangles of mica, which
the natives of Rio Caura still employ as ornaments, when they paint
their bodies?) When we examine the structure of mountains and embrace
in one point of view an extensive surface of the globe, distances
disappear; and places the most remote insensibly draw near each other.
The basin of the Upper Orinoco, the Rio Negro, and the Amazon is
bounded by the mountains of Parime on the north, and by those of Minas
Geraes, and Matogrosso on the south. The opposite slopes of the same
valley often display an analogy in their geological relations.

I have described in this and the preceding volume the vast provinces
of Venezuela and Spanish Guiana. While examining their natural limits,
their climate, and their productions, I have discussed the influence
produced by the configuration of the soil on agriculture, commerce,
and the more or less rapid progress of society. I have successively
passed over the three regions that succeed each other from north to
south; from the Mediterranean of the West Indies to the forests of the
Upper Orinoco and of the Amazon. The fertile land of the shore, the
centre of agricultural riches, is succeeded by the Llanos, inhabited
by pastoral tribes. These Llanos are in their turn bordered by the
region of forests, the inhabitants of which enjoy, I will not say
liberty, which is always the result of civilization, but a sort of
savage independence. On the limit of these two latter zones the
struggle now exists which will decide the emancipation and future
prosperity of America. The changes which are preparing cannot efface
the individual character of each region; but the manners and condition
of the inhabitants will assume a more uniform colour. This
consideration perhaps adds interest to a tour made in the beginning of
the nineteenth century. We like to see, traced in the same picture,
the civilized nations of the sea-shore, and the feeble remains of the
natives of the Orinoco, who know no other worship than that of the
powers of nature; and who, like the ancient Germans, deify the
mysterious object which excites their simple admiration.* (* Deorum
nominibus appellant secretum illud, quod sola reverentia vident.
Tacitus Germania 9.)


CHAPTER 3.26.

THE LLANOS DEL PAO, OR EASTERN PART OF THE PLAINS OF VENEZUELA.
MISSIONS OF THE CARIBS.
LAST VISIT TO THE COAST OF NUEVA BARCELONA, CUMANA, AND ARAYA.

Night had set in when we crossed for the last time the bed of the
Orinoco. We purposed to rest near the little fort San Rafael, and on
the following morning at daybreak to set out on our journey through
the plains of Venezuela. Nearly six weeks had elapsed since our
arrival at Angostura; and we earnestly wished to reach the coast, with
the view of finding, at Cumana, or at Nueva Barcelona, a vessel in
which we might embark for the island of Cuba, thence to proceed to
Mexico. After the sufferings to which we had been exposed during
several months, whilst sailing in small boats on rivers infested by
mosquitos, the idea of a sea voyage was not without its charms. We had
no idea of ever again returning to South America. Sacrificing the
Andes of Peru to the Archipelago of the Philippines (of which so
little is known), we adhered to our old plan of remaining a year in
New Spain, then proceeding in a galleon from Acapulco to Manila, and
returning to Europe by way of Bassora and Aleppo. We imagined that,
when we had once left the Spanish possessions in America, the fall of
that ministry which had procured for us so many advantages, could not
be prejudicial to the execution of our enterprise.

Our mules were in waiting for us on the left bank of the Orinoco. The
collection of plants, and the different geological series which we had
brought from the Esmeralda and Rio Negro, had greatly augmented our
baggage; and, as it would have been dangerous to lose sight of our
herbals, we expected to make a very slow journey across the Llanos.
The heat was excessive, owing to the reverberation of the soil, which
was almost everywhere destitute of vegetation; yet the centigrade
thermometer during the day (in the shade) was only from thirty to
thirty-four degrees, and during the night, from twenty-seven to
twenty-eight degrees. Here, therefore, as almost everywhere within the
tropics, it was less the absolute degree of heat than its duration
that affected our sensations. We spent thirteen days in crossing the
plains, resting a little in the Caribbee (Caraibes) missions and in
the little town of Pao. The eastern part of the Llanos through which
we passed, between Angostura and Nueva Barcelona, presents the same
wild aspect as the western part, through which we had passed from the
valleys of Aragua to San Fernando de Apure. In the season of drought,
(which is here called summer,) though the sun is in the southern
hemisphere, the breeze is felt with greater force in the Llanos of
Cumana, than in those of Caracas; because those vast plains, like the
cultivated fields of Lombardy, form an inland basin, open to the east,
and closed on the north, south and west by high chains of primitive
mountains. Unfortunately, we could not avail ourselves of this
refreshing breeze, of which the Llaneros, or the inhabitants of the
plains, speak with rapture. It was now the rainy season north of the
equator; and though it did not rain in the plains, the change in the
declination of the sun had for some time caused the action of the
polar currents to cease. In the equatorial regions, where the
traveller may direct his course by observing the direction of the
clouds, and where the oscillations of the mercury in the barometer
indicate the hour almost as well as a clock, everything is subject to
a regular and uniform rule. The cessation of the breezes, the
setting-in of the rainy season, and the frequency of electric
explosions, are phenomena which are found to be connected together by
immutable laws.

On entering the Llanos of Nueva Barcelona, we met with a Frenchman, at
whose house we passed the first night, and who received us with the
kindest hospitality. He was a native of Lyons, and he had left his
country at a very early age. He appeared extremely indifferent to all
that was passing beyond the Atlantic, or, as they say here,
disdainfully enough, when speaking of Europe, on the other side of the
great pool (al otro lado del charco). Our host was employed in joining
large pieces of wood by means of a kind of glue called guayca. This
substance, which is used by the carpenters of Angostura, resembles the
best animal glue. It is found perfectly prepared between the bark and
the alburnum of a creeper* of the family of the Combretaceae. (*
Combretum guayca.) It probably resembles in its chemical properties
birdlime, the vegetable principle obtained from the berries of the
mistletoe, and the internal bark of the holly. An astonishing
abundance of this glutinous matter issues from the twining branches of
the vejuco de guayca when they are cut. Thus we find within the
tropics a substance in a state of purity and deposited in peculiar
organs, which in the temperate zone can be procured only by artificial
means.

We did not arrive until the third day at the Caribbee missions of
Cari. We observed that the ground was less cracked by the drought in
this country than in the Llanos of Calabozo. Some showers had revived
the vegetation. Small gramina and especially those herbaceous
sensitive-plants so useful in fattening half-wild cattle, formed a
thick turf. At great distances one from another, there arose a few
fan-palms (Corypha tectorum), rhopalas* (chaparro (* The Proteaceae
are not, like the Araucaria, an exclusively southern form. We found
the Rhopala complicata and the R. obovata, in 2 degrees 30 minutes,
and in 10 degrees of north latitude.)), and malpighias* with
coriaceous and glossy leaves. (* A neighbouring genus, Byrsonima
cocollobaefolia, B. laurifolia, near Matagorda, and B. ropalaefolia.)
The humid spots are recognized at a distance by groups of mauritia,
which are the sago-trees of those countries. Near the coast this
palm-tree constitutes the whole wealth of the Guaraon Indians; and it
is somewhat remarkable that we also found it one hundred and sixty
leagues farther south, in the midst of the forests of the Upper
Orinoco, in the savannahs that surround the granitic peak of Duida.*
(* The moriche, like the Sagus Rumphii, is a palm-tree of the marshes,
not a palm-tree of the coast, like the Chamaerops humilis, the common
cocoa-tree, and the lodoicea.) It was loaded at this season with
enormous clusters of red fruit, resembling fir-cones. Our monkeys were
extremely fond of this fruit, which has the taste of an over-ripe
apple. The monkeys were placed with our baggage on the backs of the
mules, and they made great efforts to reach the clusters that hung
over their heads. The plain was undulating from the effects of the
mirage; and when, after travelling for an hour, we reached the trunks
of the palm-trees, which appeared like masts in the horizon, we
observed with astonishment how many things are connected with the
existence of a single plant. The winds, losing their velocity when in
contact with the foliage and the branches, accumulate sand around the
trunk. The smell of the fruit and the brightness of the verdure
attract from afar the birds of passage, which love to perch on the
slender, arrow-like branches of the palm-tree. A soft murmuring is
heard around; and overpowered by the heat, and accustomed to the
melancholy silence of the plains, the traveller imagines he enjoys
some degree of coolness on hearing the slightest sound of the foliage.
If we examine the soil on the side opposite to the wind, we find it
remains humid long after the rainy season. Insects and worms,
everywhere else so rare in the Llanos, here assemble and multiply.
This one solitary and often stunted tree, which would not claim the
notice of the traveller amid the forests of the Orinoco, spreads life
around it in the desert.

On the 13th of July we arrived at the village of Cari, the first of
the Caribbee missions that are under the Observantin monks of the
college of Piritu. We lodged as usual at the convent, that is, with
the clergyman. Our host could scarcely comprehend how natives of the
north of Europe could arrive at his dwelling from the frontiers of
Brazil by the Rio Negro, and not by way of the coast of Cumana. He
behaved to us in the most affable manner, at the same time manifesting
that somewhat importunate curiosity which the appearance of a
stranger, not a Spaniard, always excites in South America. He
expressed his belief that the minerals we had collected must contain
gold; and that the plants, dried with so much care, must be medicinal.
Here, as in many parts of Europe, the sciences are thought worthy to
occupy the mind only so far as they confer some immediate and
practical benefit on society.

We found more than five hundred Caribs in the village of Cari; and saw
many others in the surrounding missions. It is curious to observe this
nomad people, recently attached to the soil, and differing from all
the other Indians in their physical and intellectual powers. They are
a very tall race of men, their height being from five feet six inches,
to five feet ten inches. According to a practice common in America,
the women are more sparingly clothed than the men. The former wear
only the guajuco, or perizoma, in the form of a band. The men have the
lower part of the body wrapped in a piece of blue cloth, so dark as to
be almost black. This drapery is so ample that, on the lowering of the
temperature towards evening, the Caribs throw it over their shoulders.
Their bodies tinged with onoto,* (* Rocou, obtained from the Bixa
orellana. This paint is called in the Carib tongue, bichet.) their
tall figures, of a reddish copper-colour, and their picturesque
drapery, when seen from a distance, relieved against the sky as a
background, resemble antique statues of bronze. The men cut their hair
in a very peculiar manner, very much in the style of the monks. A part
of the forehead is shaved, which makes it appear extremely high, and a
circular tuft of hair is left near the crown of the head. This
resemblance between the Caribs and the monks is not the result of
mission life. It is not caused, as had been erroneously supposed, by
the desire of the natives to imitate their masters, the Franciscan
monks. The tribes that have preserved their wild independence, between
the sources of the Carony and the Rio Branco, are distinguished by the
same cerquillo de frailes,* (* Circular tonsure of the friars.) which
the early Spanish historians at the time of the discovery of America
attributed to the nations of the Carib race. All the men of this race
whom we saw either during our voyage on the Lower Orinoco, or in the
missions of Piritu, differ from the other Indians not only in the
tallness of their stature, but also in the regularity of their
features. Their noses are smaller, and less flattened; the cheek-bones
are not so high; and their physiognomy has less of the Mongol
character. Their eyes, which are darker than those of the other hordes
of Guiana, denote intelligence, and it may even be said, the habit of
reflection. The Caribs have a gravity of manner, and a certain look of
sadness which is observable among most of the primitive inhabitants of
the New World. The expression of severity in their features is
heightened by the practice of dyeing their eyebrows with the juice of
caruto: they also lengthen their eyebrows, thereby giving them the
appearance of being joined together; and they often mark their faces
all over with black spots to give themselves a more fierce appearance.
The Carib women are less robust and good-looking than the men, On them
devolves almost the whole burden of domestic work, as well as much of
the out-door labour. They asked us eagerly for pins, which they stuck
under their lower lip, making the head of the pin penetrate deeply
into the skin. The young girls are painted red, and are almost naked.
Among the different nations of the old and the new worlds, the idea of
nudity is altogether relative. A woman in some parts of Asia is not
permitted to show the tips of her fingers; while an Indian of the
Carib race is far from considering herself unclothed if she wear round
her waist a guajuco two inches broad. Even this band is regarded as
less essential than the pigment which covers the skin. To go out of
the hut without being painted, would be to transgress all the rules of
Carib decency.

The Indians of the missions of Piritu especially attracted our
attention, because they belong to a nation which, by its daring, its
warlike enterprises, and its mercantile spirit has exercised great
influence over the vast country extending from the equator towards the
northern coast. Everywhere on the Orinoco we beheld traces of the
hostile incursions of the Caribs: incursions which heretofore extended
from the sources of the Carony and the Erevato as far as the banks of
the Ventuari, the Atacavi, and the Rio Negro. The Carib language is
consequently the most general in this part of the world; it has even
passed (like the language of the Lenni-Lenapes, or Algonkins, and the
Natchez or Muskoghees, on the west of the Allegheny mountains) to
tribes which have not a common origin.

When we survey that multitude of nations spread over North and South
America, eastward of the Cordilleras of the Andes, we fix our
attention particularly on those who, having long held dominion over
their neighbours, have acted an important part on the stage of the
world. It is the business of the historian to group facts, to
distinguish masses, to ascend to the common sources of many migrations
and popular movements. Great empires, the regular organization of a
sacerdotal hierarchy, and the culture which that organization favours
in the first ages of society, have existed only on the high mountains
of the western world. In Mexico we see a vast monarchy enclosing small
republics; at Cundinamarca and Peru we find pure theocracies.
Fortified towns, highways and large edifices of stone, an
extraordinary development of the feudal system, the separation of
castes, convents of men and women, religious congregations regulated
by discipline more or less severe, complicated divisions of time
connected with the calendars, the zodiacs, and the astrology of the
enlightened nations of Asia--all these phenomena in America belong to
one region only, the long and narrow Alpine band extending from the
thirtieth degree of north latitude to the twenty-fifth degree of
south. The migration of nations in the ancient world was from east to
west; the Basques or Iberians, the Celts, the Germans and the Pelasgi,
appeared in succession. In the New World similar migrations flowed
from north to south. Among the nations that inhabit the two
hemispheres, the direction of this movement followed that of the
mountains; but in the torrid zone the temperate table-lands of the
Cordilleras had greater influence on the destiny of mankind, than the
mountains of Asia and central Europe. As, properly speaking, only
civilized nations have a history, the history of the Americans is
necessarily no more than that of a small portion of the inhabitants of
the mountains. Profound obscurity envelops the vast country which
stretches from the eastern slope of the Cordilleras towards the
Atlantic; and for this very reason, whatever in that country relates
to the preponderance of one nation over others, to distant migrations,
to the physiognomical features which denote a foreign race, excite our
deepest interest.

Amidst the plains of North America, some powerful nation, which has
disappeared, constructed circular, square, and octagonal
fortifications; walls six thousand toises in length; tumuli from seven
to eight hundred feet in diameter, and one hundred and forty feet in
height, sometimes round, sometimes with several stories and containing
thousands of skeletons. These skeletons are the remains of men less
slender and more squat than the present inhabitants of those
countries. Other bones wrapped in fabrics resembling those of the
Sandwich and Feejee Islands are found in the natural grottoes of
Kentucky. What is become of those nations of Louisiana anterior to the
Lenni-Lenapes, the Shawanese, and perhaps even to the Sioux
(Nadowesses, Nahcotas) of the Missouri, who are strongly mongolised;
and who, it is believed, according to their own traditions, came from
the coast of Asia? In the plains of South America we find only a very
few hillocks of that kind called cerros hechos a mano;* (* Hills made
by the hand, or artificial hills.) and nowhere any works of
fortification analogous to those of the Ohio. However, on a vast space
of ground, at the Lower Orinoco, as well as on the banks of the
Cassiquiare and between the sources of the Essequibo and the Rio
Branco, there are rocks of granite covered with symbolic figures.
These sculptures denote that the extinct generations belonged to
nations different from those which now inhabit the same regions. There
seems to be no connection between the history of Mexico and that of
Cundinamarca and of Peru; but in the plains of the east a warlike and
long-dominant nation betrays in its features and its physical
constitution traces of a foreign origin. The Caribs preserve
traditions that seem to indicate ancient communications between North
and South America. Such a phenomenon deserves particular attention. If
it be true that savages are for the most part degenerate races,
remnants escaped from a common wreck, as their languages, their
cosmogonic fables, and numerous other indications seem to prove, it
becomes doubly important to examine the course by which these remnants
have been driven from one hemisphere to the other.

That fine race of people, the Caribs, now occupy only a small part of
the country which they inhabited at the time of the discovery of
America. The cruelties exercised by Europeans have entirely
exterminated them from the West Indian Islands and the coasts of
Darien; while under the government of the missions they have formed
populous villages in the provinces of New Barcelona and Spanish
Guiana. The Caribs who inhabit the Llanos of Piritu and the banks of
the Carony and the Cuyuni may be estimated at more than thirty-five
thousand. If we add to this number the independent Caribs who live
westward of the mountains of Cayenne and Pacaraymo, between the
sources of the Essequibo and the Rio Branco, we shall no doubt obtain
a total of forty thousand individuals of pure race, unmixed with any
other tribes of natives. Prior to my travels, the Caribs were
mentioned in many geographical works as an extinct race. Writers
unacquainted with the interior of the Spanish colonies of the
continent supposed that the small islands of Dominica, Guadaloupe, and
St. Vincent had been the principal abodes of that nation of which the
only vestiges now remaining throughout the whole of the eastern West
India Islands are skeletons petrified, or rather enveloped in a
limestone containing madrepores.* (* These skeletons were discovered
in 1805 by M. Cortez. They are encased in a formation of madrepore
breccia, which the negroes call God's masonry, and which, like the
travertin of Italy, envelops fragments of vases and other objects
created by human skill. M. Dauxion Lavaysse and Dr. Koenig first made
known in Europe this phenomenon which has greatly interested
geologists.)

The name of Caribs, which I find for the first time in a letter of
Peter Martyr d'Anghiera is derived from Calina and Caripuna, the l and
p being transferred into r and b. It is very remarkable that this
name, which Columbus heard pronounced by the people of Hayti, was
known to exist at the same time among the Caribs of the islands and
those of the continent. From the word Carina, or Calina, has been
formed Galibi (Caribi). This is the distinctive denomination of a
tribe in French Guiana,* who are of much more diminutive stature than
the inhabitants of Cari, but speaking one of the numerous dialects of
the Carib tongue. (* The Galibis (Calibitis), the Palicours, and the
Acoquouas, also cut their hair in the style of the monks; and apply
bandages to the legs of their children for the purpose of swelling the
muscles. They have the same predilection for green stones (saussurite)
which we observed among the Carib nations of the Orinoco. There exist,
besides, in French Guiana, twenty Indian tribes which are
distinguished from the Galibis though their language proves that they
have a common origin.) The inhabitants of the islands are called
Calinago in the language of the men; and in that of the women,
Callipinan. The difference in the language of the two sexes is more
striking among the people of the Carib race than among other American
nations (the Omaguas, the Guaranis, and the Chiquitos) where it
applies only to a limited number of ideas; for instance, the words
mother and child. It may be conceived that women, from their separate
way of life, frame particular terms which men do not adopt. Cicero
observes* that old forms of language are best preserved by women
because by their position in society they are less exposed to those
vicissitudes of life, changes of place and occupation which tend to
corrupt the primitive purity of language among men. (* Cicero, de
Orat. lib. 3 cap. 12 paragraph 45 ed. Verburg. Facilius enim mulieres
incorruptam antiquitatem conservant, quod multorum sermonis expertes
ea tenent semper, quae prima didicerunt.) But in the Carib nations the
contrast between the dialect of the two sexes is so great that to
explain it satisfactorily we must refer to another cause; and this may
perhaps be found in the barbarous custom, practised by those nations,
of killing their male prisoners, and carrying the wives of the
vanquished into captivity. When the Caribs made an irruption into the
archipelago of the West India Islands, they arrived there as a band of
warriors, not as colonists accompanied by their families. The language
of the female sex was formed by degrees, as the conquerors contracted
alliances with the foreign women; it was composed of new elements,
words distinct from the Carib words,* which in the interior of the
gynaeceums were transmitted from generation to generation, but on
which the structure, the combinations, the grammatical forms of the
language of the men exercised an influence. (* The following are
examples of the difference between the language of the men (m), and
the women (w); isle, oubao (m), acaera (w); man, ouekelli (m), eyeri
(w); but, irhen (m), atica (w).) There was then manifested in a small
community the peculiarity which we now find in the whole group of the
nations of the New Continent. The American languages, from Hudson's
Bay to the Straits of Magellan, are in general characterized by a
total disparity of words combined with a great analogy in their
structure. They are like different substances invested with analogous
forms. If we recollect that this phenomenon extends over one-half of
our planet, almost from pole to pole; if we consider the shades in the
grammatical forms (the genders applied to the three persons of the
verb, the reduplications, the frequentatives, the duals); it appears
highly astonishing to find a uniform tendency in the development of
intelligence and language among so considerable a portion of the human
race.

We have just seen that the dialect of the Carib women in the West
India Islands contains the vestiges of a language that was extinct.
Some writers have imagined that this extinct language might be that of
the Ygneris, or primitive inhabitants of the Caribbee Islands; others
have traced in it some resemblance to the ancient idiom of Cuba, or to
those of the Arowaks, and the Apalachites in Florida: but these
hypotheses are all founded on a very imperfect knowledge of the idioms
which it has been attempted to compare one with another.

The Spanish writers of the sixteenth century inform us that the Carib
nations then extended over eighteen or nineteen degrees of latitude,
from the Virgin Islands east of Porto Rico, to the mouths of the
Amazon. Another prolongation toward the west, along the coast-chain of
Santa Marta and Venezuela, appears less certain. Gomara, however, and
the most ancient historians, give the name of Caribana, not, as it has
since been applied, to the country between the sources of the Orinoco
and the mountains of French Guiana,* (* This name is found in the map
of Hondius, of 1599, which accompanies the Latin edition of the
narrative of Raleigh's voyage. In the Dutch edition Nieuwe Caerte van
het goudrycke landt Guiana, the Llanos of Caracas, between the
mountains of Merida and the Rio Pao, bear the name of Caribana. We may
remark here, what we observe so often in the history of geography,
that the same denomination has spread by degrees from west to east.)
but to the marshy plains between the mouths of the Rio Atrato and the
Rio Sinu. I have visited those coasts in going from the Havannah to
Porto Bello; and I there learned that the cape which bounds the gulf
of Darien or Uraba on the east, still bears the name of Punta
Caribana. An opinion heretofore prevailed pretty generally that the
Caribs of the West India Islands derived their origin, and even their
name, from these warlike people of Darien. "From the eastern shore
springs Cape Uraba, which the natives call Caribana, whence the Caribs
of the island are said to have received their present name."* (* Inde
Vrabam ab orientali prehendit ora, quam appellant indigenae Caribana,
unde Caribes insulares originem habere nomenque retinere dicuntur.)
Thus Anghiera expresses himself in his Oceanica. He had been told by a
nephew of Amerigo Vespucci that thence, as far as the snowy mountains
of St. Marta, all the natives were e genere Caribium, vel Canibalium.
I do not deny that Caribs may have had a settlement near the gulf of
Darien, and that they may have been driven thither by the easterly
currents; but it also may have happened that the Spanish navigators,
little attentive to languages, gave the names Carib and Cannibal to
every race of people of tall stature and ferocious character. Still it
is by no means probable that the Caribs of the islands and of Parima
took to themselves the name of the region which they had originally
inhabited. On the east of the Andes and wherever civilization has not
yet penetrated, it is the people who have given names to the places
where they have settled.* (* These names of places can be perpetuated
only where the nations succeed immediately to each other, and where
the tradition is interrupted. Thus in the province of Quito many of
the summits of the Andes bear names which belong neither to the
Quichua (the language of Inca) nor to the ancient language of the
Paruays, governed by the Conchocando of Lican.) The words Caribs and
Cannibals appear significant; they are epithets referring to valour,
strength and even superior intelligence.* (* Vespucci says: Charaibi
magnae sapientiae viri.) It is worthy of remark that, at the arrival
of the Portuguese, the Brazilians gave to their magicians the name of
caraibes. We know that the Caribs of Parima were the most wandering
people of America; possibly some wily individuals of that nation
played the same part as the Chaldeans of the ancient continent. The
names of nations readily become affixed to particular professions; and
when, in the time of the Caesars, the superstitions of the East were
introduced into Italy, the Chaldeans no more came from the banks of
the Euphrates than our Gypsies (Egyptians or Bohemians) came from the
banks of the Nile or the Elbe.

When a continent and its adjacent islands are peopled by one and the
same race, we may choose between two hypotheses; supposing the
emigration to have taken place either from the islands to the
continent, or from the continent to the islands. The Iberians
(Basques) who were settled at the same time in Spain and in the
islands of the Mediterranean, afford an instance of this problem; as
do also the Malays who appear to be indigenous in the peninsula of
Malacca, and in the district of Menangkabao in the island of Sumatra.*
(* Crawfurd, Indian Archipelago volume 2 page 371. I make use of the
word indigenous (autocthoni) not to indicate a fact of creation, which
does not belong to history, but simply to denote that we are ignorant
of the autocthoni having been preceded by any other people.) The
archipelago of the large and small West India Islands forms a narrow
and broken neck of land, parallel with the isthmus of Panama, and
supposed by some geographers to join the peninsula of Florida to the
north-east extremity of South America. It is the eastern shore of an
inland sea which may be considered as a basin with several outlets.
This peculiar configuration of the land has served to support the
different systems of migration, by which it has been attempted to
explain the settlement of the nations of the Carib race in the islands
and on the neighbouring continent. The Caribs of the continent admit
that the small West India Islands were anciently inhabited by the
Arowaks,* a warlike nation, the great mass of which still inhabit the
insalubrious shores of Surinam and Berbice. (* Arouaques. The
missionary Quandt (Nachricht von Surinam, 1807 page 47) calls them
Arawackes.) They assert that the Arowaks, with the exception of the
women, were all exterminated by Caribs, who came from the mouths of
the Orinoco. In support of this tradition they refer to the traces of
analogy existing between the language of the Arowaks and that of the
Carib women; but it must be recollected that the Arowaks, though the
enemies of the Caribs, belonged to the same branch of people; and that
the same analogy exists between the Arowak and Carib languages as
between the Greek and the Persian, the German and the Sanscrit.
According to another tradition, the Caribs of the islands came from
the south, not as conquerors, but because they were expelled from
Guiana by the Arowaks, who originally ruled over all the neighbouring
nations. Finally, a third tradition, much more 

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