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in savage independence, at thirty-five thousand, we find nearly twenty-four thousand settled in the missions, and thus withdrawn as it were from the direct influence of the secular arm.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.