Before I quit this coast, so seldom visited by travellers and described by no modern voyager, I may here offer some information which I acquired during my stay at Carthagena. The Rio Sinu in its upper course approaches the tributary streams of the Atrato which, to the auriferous and platiniferous province of Choco, is of the same importance as the Magdalena to Cundinamarca, or the Rio Cauca to the provinces of Antioquia and Popayan. The three great rivers here mentioned have heretofore been the only commercial routes, I might almost add, the only channels of communication for the inhabitants. The Rio Atrato receives, at twelve leagues distance from its mouth, the Rio Sucio on the east; the Indian village of San Antonio is situated on its banks. Proceeding upward beyond the Rio Pabarando, you arrive in the valley of Sinu. After several fruitless attempts on the part of the Archbishop Gongora to establish colonies in Darien del Norte and on the eastern coast of the gulf of Uraba, the Viceroy Espeleta recommended the Spanish Government to fix its whole attention on the Rio Sinu; to destroy the colony of Cayman; to fix the planters in the Spanish village of San Bernardo del Viento in the jurisdiction of Lorica; and from that post, which is the most westerly, to push forward the peaceful conquests of agriculture and civilization towards the banks of the Pabarando, the Rio Sucio and the Atrato.* (* I will here state some facts which I obtained from official documents during my stay at Carthagena, and which have not yet been published. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the name of Darien was given vaguely to the whole coast extending from the Rio Damaquiel to the Punta de San Blas, on 2 1/4 degrees of longitude. The cruelties exercised by Pedrarias Davila rendered almost inaccessible to the Spaniards a country which was one of the first they had colonized. The Indians (Dariens and Cunas-Cunas) remained masters of the coast, as they still are at Poyais, in the land of the Mosquitos. Some Scotchmen formed in 1698 the settlements of New Caledonia, New Edinburgh and Scotch Port, in the most eastern part of the isthmus, a little west of Punta Carreto. They were soon driven away by the Spaniards but, as the latter occupied no part of the coast, the Indians continued their attacks against Choco's boats, which from time to time descended the Rio Atrato, The sanguinary expedition of Don Manuel de Aldarete in 1729 served only to augment the resentment of the natives. A settlement for the cultivation of the cocoa-tree, attempted in the territory of Urabia in 1740 by some French planters under the protection of the Spanish Government, had no durable success; and the court, excited by the reports of the archbishop-viceroy, Gongora, ordered, by the cedule of the 15th August, 1783, either the conversion and conquest, or the destruction (reduccion o extincion) of the Indians of Darien. This order, worthy of another age, was executed by Don Antonio de Arebalo: he experienced little resistance and formed, in 1785, the four settlements and forts of Cayman on the eastern coast of the Gulf of Urabia, Concepcion, Carolina and Mandinga. The Lele, or high-priest of Mandinga, took an oath of fidelity to the King of Spain; but in 1786 the war with the Darien Indians recommenced and was terminated by a treaty concluded July 27th, 1787, between the archbishop-viceroy and the cacique Bernardo. The forts and new colonies, which figured only on the maps sent to Madrid, augmented the debt of the treasury of Santa Fe de Bogota, in 1789, to the sum of 1,200,000 piastres. The viceroy, Gil Lemos, wiser than his predecessor, obtained permission from the Court to abandon Carolina, Concepcion and Mandinga. The settlement of Cayman only was preserved, on account of the navigation of the Atrato, and it was declared free, under the government of the archbishop-viceroy: it was proposed to transfer this settlement to a more healthy spot, that of Uraba; but lieutenant-general Don Antonio Arebalo, having proved that the expense of this removal would amount to the sum of 40,000 piastres, the fort of Cayman was also destroyed, by order of the viceroy Espeleta in 1791, and the planters were compelled to join those of the village of San Bernardo.) The number of independent Indians who inhabit the lands between Uraba, Rio Atrato, Rio Sucio and Rio Sinu was, according to a census made in 1760, at least 1800. They were distributed in three small villages, Suraba, Toanequi and Jaraguia. This population was computed, at the period when I travelled there, to be 3000. The natives, comprehended in the general name of Caymans, live at peace with the inhabitants of San Bernardo del Viento (pueblo de Espanoles), situated on the western bank of the Rio Sinu, lower than San Nicolas de Zispata, and near the mouth of the river. These people have not the ferocity of the Darien and Cunas Indians, on the left bank of the Atrato; who often attack the boats trading with the town of Quidbo in the Choco; they also make incursions on the territory of Uraba, in the months of June and November, to collect the fruit of the cacao-trees. The cacao of Uraba is of excellent quality; and the Darien Indians sometimes come to sell it, with other productions, to the inhabitants of Rio Sinu, entering the valley of that river by one of its tributary streams, the Jaraguai.
It cannot be doubted that the Gulf of Darien was considered, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, as a nook in the country of the Caribs. The word Caribana is still preserved in the name of the eastern cape of that gulf. We know nothing of the languages of the Darien, Cunas and Cayman Indians: and we know not whether Carib or Arowak words are found in their idioms; but it is certain, notwithstanding the testimony of Anghiera on the identity of the race of the Caribs of the Lesser Antilles and the Indians of Uraba, that Pedro de Cieca, who lived so long among the latter, never calls them Caribs nor cannibals. He describes the race of that tribe as being naked with long hair, and going to the neighbouring countries to trade; and says the women are cleanly, well dressed and extremely engaging (amorosas y galanas). "I have not seen," adds the Conquistador, "any women more beautiful* in all the Indian lands I have visited: they have one fault, however, that of having too frequent intercourse with the devil." (* Cronica del Peru pages 21 and 22. The Indians of Darien, Uraba, Zenu (Sinu), Tatabe, the valleys of Nore and of Guaca, the mountains of Abibe and Antioquia, are accused, by the same author, of the most ferocious cannibalism; and perhaps that circumstance alone gives rise to the idea that they were of the same race as the Caribs of the West Indies. In the celebrated Provision Real of the 30th of October, 1503, by which the Spaniards are permitted to make slaves of the anthropophagic Indians of the archipelago of San Bernardo, opposite the mouth of the Rio Sinu, the Isla Fuerte, Isla Bura (Baru) and Carthagena, there is more of a question of morals than of race, and the denomination of Caribs is altogether avoided. Cieca asserts that the natives of the valley of Nore seized the women of neighbouring tribes, in order first to devour the children who were born of the union with foreign wives, and then the women themselves. Foreseeing that this horrible depravity would not be believed, although it had been observed by Columbus in the West Indies, he cites the testimony of Juan de Vadillo, who had observed the same facts and who was still living in 1554 when the Cronica del Peru appeared in Dutch. With respect to the etymology of the word cannibal, it seems to me entirely cleared up by the discovery of the journal kept by Columbus during his first voyage of discovery, and of which Bartholomew de las Casas has left us an abridged copy. Dice mas el Almirante que en las islas passadas estaban con gran temor de carib: y en algunas los llamaban caniba; pero en la Espanola carib y son gente arriscada, pues andan por todas estas islas y comen la gente que pueden haber. [And the Admiral moreover says that in the islands they passed, great apprehension was entertained on account of the caribs. Some call them canibas; but in Spanish they are called caribs. They are a very bold people, and they travel about these islands, and devour all the persons whom they capture.] Navarete tome 1 page 135. In this primitive form of words it is easy to perceive that the permutation of the letters r and n, resulting from the imperfection of the organs in some nations, might change carib into canib, or caniba. Geraldini who, according to the tendency of that age, sought, like Cardinal Bembo, to latinize all barbarous denominations, recognizes in the Cannibals the manners of dogs (canes) just as St. Louis desired to send the Tartars ad suas tartareas sedes unde exierint.)
The Rio Sinu, owing to its position and its fertility, is of the highest importance for provisioning Carthagena. In time of war the enemy usually stationed their ships between the Morro de Tigua and the Boca de Matunilla, to intercept barques laden with provisions. In that station they were, however, sometimes exposed to the attack of the gun-boats of Carthagena: these gun-boats can pass through the channel of Pasacaballos which, near Saint Anne, separates the isle of Baru from the continent. Lorica has, since the sixteenth century, been the principal town of Rio Sinu; but its population which, in 1778, under the government of Don Juan Diaz Pimienta, amounted to 4000 souls, has considerably diminished, because nothing has been done to secure the town from inundations and the deleterious miasmata they produce.
The gold-washings of the Rio Sinu, heretofore so important above all, between its source and the village of San Geronimo, have almost entirely ceased, as well as those of Cienega de Tolu, Uraba and all the rivers descending from the mountains of Abibe. "The Darien and the Zenu," says the bachelor Enciso in his geographical work published at the beginning of the sixteenth century, "is a country so rich in gold pepites that, in the running waters, that metal can be fished with nets." Excited by these narratives, the governor Pedrarias sent his lieutenant, Francisco Becerra, in 1515, to the Rio Sinu. This expedition was most unfortunate for Becerra and his troop were massacred by the natives, of whom the Spaniards, according to the custom of the time, had carried away great numbers to be sold as slaves in the West Indies. The province of Antioquia now furnishes, in its auriferous veins, a vast field for mining speculations; but it might be well worth while to relinquish gold-washings for the cultivation of colonial productions in the fertile lands of Sinu, the Rio Damaquiel, the Uraba and the Darien del Norte; above all, that of cacao, which is of a superior quality. The proximity of the port of Carthagena would also render the neglected cultivation of cinchona an object of great importance to European trade. That precious tree vegetates at the source of the Rio Sinu, as in the mountains of Abibe and Maria. The real febrifuge cinchona, with a hairy corolla, is nowhere else found so near the coast, if we except the Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta.
The Rio Sinu and the Gulf of Darien were not visited by Columbus. The most eastern point at which that great man touched land, on the 26th November, 1503, is the Puerto do Retreto, now called Punta de Escribanos, near the Punta of San Blas, in the isthmus of Panama. Two years previously, Rodrigo de Bastidas and Alanso do Ojeda, accompanied by Amerigo Vespucci, had discovered the whole coast of the main land, from the Gulf of Maracaybo as far as the Puerto de Retreto. Having often had occasion in the preceding volumes to speak of New Andalusia, I may here mention that I found that denomination, for the first time, in the convention made by Alonso de Ojeda with the Conquistador Diego de Sicuessa, a powerful man, say the historians of his time, because he was a flattering courtier and a wit. In 1508 all the country from the Cabo de la Vela to the Gulf of Uraba, where the Castillo del Oro begins, was called New Andalusia, a name since restricted to the province of Cumana.
A fortunate chance led me to see, during the course of my travels, the two extremities of the main land, the mountainous and verdant coast of Paria, which Columbus supposes to have been the cradle of the human race, and the low and humid coast extending from the mouth of the Sinu towards the Gulf of Darien. The comparison of these scenes, which have again relapsed into a savage state, confirms what I have elsewhere advanced relative to the strange and sometimes retrograde nature of civilization in America. On one side, the coast of Paria, the islands of Cubagua and Marguerita; on the other, the Gulf of Uraba and Darien, received the first Spanish colonists. Gold and pearls, which were there found in abundance, because from time immemorial they had been accumulated in the hands of the natives, gave those countries a popular celebrity from the beginning of the sixteenth century. At Seville, Toledo, Pisa, Genoa and Antwerp those countries were viewed like the realms of Ormuz and of Ind. The pontiffs of Rome mentioned them in their bulls; and Bembo has celebrated them in those historical pages which add lustre to the glory of Venice.
At the close of the fifteenth, and the beginning of the sixteenth century, Europe saw, in those parts of the New World discovered by Columbus, Ojeda, Vespucci and Rodrigo de Bastidas, only the advanced capes of the vast territories of India and eastern Asia. The immense wealth of those territories in gold, diamonds, pearls and spices had been vaunted in the narratives of Benjamin de Tudela, Rubruquis, Marco Polo and Mandeville. Columbus, whose imagination was excited by these narrations, caused a deposition to be made before a notary, on the 12th of June, 1494, in which sixty of his companions, pilots, sailors and passengers certified upon oath that the southern coast of Cuba was a part of the continent of India. The description of the treasures of Cathay and Cipango, of the celestial town of Quinsay and the province of Mango, which had fired the admiral's ambition in early life, pursued him like phantoms in his declining days. In his fourth and last voyage, on approaching the coast of Cariay (Poyais or Mosquito Coast), Veragua and the Isthmus, he believed himself to be near the mouth of the Ganges.* (* Tambien dicen que la mar baxa a Ciguare, y de alli a diez jornadas es el Rio de Guangues: para que estas tierras estan con Veragua como Tortosa con Fuenterabia o Pisa con Venecia." [Also it is said that the sea lowers at Ciguara, and from thence it is a ten days' journey to the river Ganges; for these lands are, with reference to Veragua, like Tortosa with respect to Fuenterabia, or Pisa, with respect to Venice.] These words are taken from the Lettera Rarissima of Columbus, of which the original Spanish was lately found, and published by the learned M. Navarrete, in his Coleccion de Viages volume 1 page 299.) These geographical illusions, this mysterious veil, which enveloped the first discoveries, contributed to magnify every object, and to fix the attention of Europe on regions, the very names of which are, to us, scarcely known. New Cadiz, the principal seat of the pearl-fishery, was on an island which has again become uninhabited. The extremity of the rocky coast of Paria is also a desert. Several towns were founded at the mouth of the Rio Atrato, by the names of Antigua del Darien, Uraba or San Sebastian de Buenavista. In these spots, so celebrated at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the historians of the conquest tell us that the flower of the Castilian heroes were found assembled: thence Balboa set out to discover the South Sea; Pizarro marched from thence to conquer and ravage Peru; and Pedro de Cieca constantly followed the chain of the Andes, by Autioquia, Popayan and Cuzco, as far as La Plata, after having gone 900 leagues by land. These towns of Darien are destroyed; some ruins scattered on the hills of Uraba, the fruit-trees of Europe mixed with native trees, are all that mark to the traveller the spots on which those towns once stood. In almost all Spanish America the first lands peopled by the Conquistadores, have retrograted into barbarism.* (* In carefully collating the testimonies of the historians of the Conquest, some contradictions are observed in the periods assigned to the foundation of the towns of Darien. Pedro de Cieca, who had been on the spot, affirms that, under the government of Alonzo de Ojeda and Nicuessa, the town of Nuestra Senora Santa Maria el Antigua del Darien was founded on the western coast of the Gulf or Culata de Uraba, in 1509; and that later (despues desto passado) Ojeda passed to the eastern coast of the Culata to construct the town of San Sebastian de Uraba. The former, called by abbreviation Ciudad del Antigua, had soon a population of 2000 Spaniards; while the latter, the Ciudad del Uraba, remained uninhabited, because Francisco Pizarro, since known as the conqueror of Peru, was forced to abandon it, having vainly demanded succour from St. Domingo. The historian Herrera, after having said that the foundation of Antigua had preceded by one year that of Uraba or San Sebastian, affirms the contrary in the following chapter and in the Chronicle itself. It was, according to the Chronicle, in 1501 that Ojeda, accompanied by Vespucci, and penetrating for the first time the Gulf of Uraba or Darien, resolved to construct, with wood and unbaked bricks, a fort at the entrance of Culata. It appears, however, that this enterprise was not executed; for, in 1508, in the convention made by Ojeda and Nicuessa, they each promised to build two fortresses on the limits of New Andalusia and of Castillo del Oro. Herrera, in the 7th and 8th books of the first Decade, fixes the foundation of San Sebastian de Uraba at the beginning of 1510, and mentions it as the most ancient town of the continent of America, after that of Ceragua, founded by Columbus in 1503, on the Rio Belen. He relates how Francisco Pizarro abandoned that town, and how the foundation of the Ciudad del Antigua by Entiso, towards the end of the year 1510, was the consequence of that event. Leo X made Antigua a bishopric in 1514; and this was the first episcopal church of the continent. In 1519 Pedrarius Davila persuaded the court of Madrid, by false reports, that the site of the new town of Panama was more healthful than that of Antigua, the inhabitants were compelled to abandon the latter town, and the bishopric was transferred to Panama. The Gulf of Uraba was deserted during thirteen years, till the founder of the town of Carthagena, Pedro de Heredia, after having dug up the graves, or huacas, of the Rio Sinu, to collect gold, sent his brother Alonzo, in 1532, to repeople Uraba, and reconstruct on that spot a town under the name of San Sebastian de Buenavista.) Other countries, discovered later, attract the attention of the colonists: such is the natural progress of things in peopling a vast continent. It may be hoped that on several points the people will return to the places that were first chosen. It is difficult to conceive why the mouth of a great river, descending from a country rich in gold and platina, should have remained uninhabited. The Atrato, heretofore called Rio del Darien, de San Juan or Dabayba, has had the same fate as the Orinoco. The Indians who wander around the delta of those rivers continue in a savage state.
We weighed anchor in the road of Zapote, on the 27th March, at sunrise. The sea was less stormy, and the weather rather warmer, although the fury of the wind was undiminished. We saw on the north a succession of small cones of extraordinary form, as far as the Morro de Tigua; they are known by the name of the Paps (tetas) of Santero, Tolu, Rincon and Chichimar. The two latter are nearest the coast. The Tetas de Tolu rise in the middle of the savannahs. There, from the trunks of the Toluifera balsamum, is collected the precious balsam of Tolu, heretofore so celebrated in the pharmacopoeias of Europe, and in which is a profitable article of trade at Corozal, Caimito and the town of Tocasuan. In the savannahs (altas del Tolu) oxen and mules wander half wild. Several of those hills between Cienega de Pesquero and the Punta del Comissario are linked two-and-two together, like basaltic columns; it is, however, very probable that they are calcareous, like the Tetas de Managua, south of the Havannah. In the archipelago of San Bernardo we passed between the island of Salamanquilla and Cape Boqueron. We had scarcely quitted the gulf of Morosquillo when the sea became so rough that the waves frequently washed over the deck of our little vessel. It was a fine moonlight night. Our captain sought in vain a sheltering-place on the coast to the north of the village of Rincon. We cast anchor at four fathoms but, having discovered that we were lying over a reef of coral, we preferred the open sea.
The coast has a singular configuration beyond the Morro de Tigua, the terminatory point of the group of little mountains which rise like islands from the plain. We found at first a marshy soil extending over a square of eight leagues between the Bocas de Matuna and Matunilla. These marshes are connected by the Cienega de la Cruz, with the Dique of Mahates and the Rio Magdalena. The island of Baru which, with the island of Tierra Bomba, forms the vast port of Carthagena, is, properly speaking, but a peninsula fourteen miles long, separated from the continent by the narrow channel of Pasacaballos. The archipelago of San Bernardo is situated opposite Cape Boqueron. Another archipelago, called Rosario, lies off the southern point of the peninsula of Baru. These rents in the coast are repeated at the 10 3/4 and 11 degrees of latitude. The peninsulas near the Ensenada of Galera de Zamba and near the port of Savanilla have the same aspect as the peninsula Baru. Similar causes have produced similar effects; and the geologist must not neglect those analogies, in the configuration of a coast which, from Punta Caribana in the mouth of the Atrato, beyond the cape of La Vela, along an extent of 120 leagues, has a general direction from south-west to north-east.
The wind having dropped during the night we could only advance to the island of Arenas where we anchored. I found it was 78 degrees 2 minutes 10 seconds of longitude. The weather became stormy during the night. We again set sail on the morning of the 29th of March, hoping to be able to reach Boca Chica that day. The gale blew with extreme violence, and we were unable to proceed with our frail bark against the wind and the current, when, by a false manoeuvre in setting the sails (we had but four sailors), we were during some minutes in imminent danger. The captain, who was not a very bold mariner, declined to proceed further up the coast and we took refuge, sheltered from the wind, in a nook of the island of Baru south of Punta Gigantes. It was Palm Sunday and the Zambo, who had accompanied us to the Orinoco and did not leave us till we returned to France, reminded us that on the same Sunday in the preceding year, we had nearly been lost on the north of the mission of Uruana.