Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, During the Years 1799-1804, Vol.3 — 07 - Chapter 3.25, Part 7

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. )