A New Voyage Round the World by a Course Never Sailed Before

by Daniel Defoe

Well, said I, and is it not a great pity that all this part of the country, and in such a climate as this is, should lie uncultivated, or uninhabited rather? for I understand there are not any great numbers of people to be found among them.

It is true, added he, there are some notions prevailing of people being spread about in this country, but, as the terror of our people, the Spaniards, drove them at first from the seacoast towards these mountains, so the greatest part of them continue on this side still, for towards the coast it is very rare that they find any people.

I would have inquired of him about rivers and navigable streams which might be in this country, but he told me frankly that he could give me no account of those; only thus, that if any of the rivers went away towards the north, they certainly run all into the great Rio de la Plata; but that if they went east, or southerly, they must go directly to the coast, which was ordinarily called, as he said, La Costa Deserta, or, as by some, the coast of Patagonia. That, as to the magnitude of those rivers he could say little, but it was reasonable to suppose there must be some very considerable rivers, and whose streams must needs be capable of navigation, seeing abundance of water must continually flow from the mountains where we then were, and its being at least four hundred miles from the sea-side, those small streams must necessarily join together, and form large rivers in the plain country.

I had enough in this discourse fully to satisfy all my curiosity, and sufficiently to heighten my desire of making the farther discoveries which I had in my thoughts.

We pitched our little camp here, and sat down to our repast; for I found that though we were to go back to lodge, yet my patron had taken care we should be furnished sufficiently for dinner, and have a good house to eat it in, that is to say, a tent as before.

The place where we stood, though we had come down hill for a great way, yet seemed very high from the ordinary surface of the country, and gave us therefore an exceeding fine prospect of it, the country declining gradually for near ten miles; and we thought, as well as the distance of the place would allow us, we saw a great river, but, as I learned afterwards, it was rather a great lake than a river, which was supplied by the smaller rivers, or rivulets, from the mountains, which met there as in a great receptacle of waters, and out of this lake they all issued again in one river, of which I shall have occasion to give a farther account hereafter.

While we were at dinner, I ordered my midshipmen to take their observations of every distant object, and to look at everything with their glasses, which they did, and told me of this lake; but my patron could give no account of it, having never been, as he said before, one step farther that way than where we were.

However, my men showed me plainly that it was a great lake, and that there went a large river from it towards the east-south-east, and this was enough for me, for that way lay all the schemes I had laid.

I took this opportunity to ask my midshipmen, first, if they had taken such observations in their passage of the mountains as that they were sure they could find their way through to this place again without guides? And they assured me they could.

Then I put it to them whether they thought it might not be practicable to travel over that vast level country to the North Seas? and to make a sufficient discovery of the country, so as that hereafter Englishmen coming to the coast on the side of those seas, might penetrate to these golden mountains, and reap the benefit of the treasure without going a prodigious length above Cape Horn and the Terra del Fuego, which was always attended with innumerable dangers, and without breaking through the kingdom of Chili and the Spaniards' settlements, which, perhaps, we might soon be at peace with, and so be shut out that way by our own consents?