Up the Orinoco and down the Magdalena

by J. A. Zahm

FOREWORD

The following pages contain the record of a journey made to islands and lands that border the Caribbean and to the less frequented parts of Venezuela and Colombia. Thanks to our trade relations with the Antilles, and the number of meritorious books that have been written about them during the last few decades, our knowledge of the West Indies is fairly complete and satisfactory. The same, however, cannot be said of the two extensive republics just south of us. Outside of their capitals and a few of their coast towns, they are rarely visited, and as a consequence, the most erroneous ideas prevail regarding them. Vast regions in both republics are now less known than they were three centuries ago, while there are certain sections about which our knowledge is as limited as it is regarding the least explored portions of darkest Africa.

This is not the place to account for the prevailing ignorance regarding the parts of the New Hemisphere that first claimed the attention of discoverers and explorers. Suffice it to state that, paradoxical as it may seem, it is, nevertheless, a fact.

When we recollect that the lands in question were not only the first discovered but that they were also witnesses of the marvelous achievements of some of the most renowned of the conquistadores, our surprise becomes doubly great that our information respecting them is so meager and confined almost exclusively to those who make a special study of things South American.

Never, perhaps, in the history of our race was the spirit of adventure so generally diffused as it was at the dawn of the sixteenth century—just after the epoch-making discoveries of Columbus and his hardy followers. It was like the spirit that animated the Crusaders when they started on their long march to recover the Holy Sepulchre from the possession of the Moslem. It was, indeed, in many of its aspects, a revival of the age of chivalry. The Sea of Darkness had at last been successfully crossed. That ocean of legend and mystery with its enchanted islands inhabited by witches and gnomes and griffins had been explored. And that strange island of Satanaxio, “the island of the hand of Satan,” where the Evil One was “supposed once a day to thrust forth a gigantic hand from the ocean to grasp a number of the inhabitants” was consigned to the limbo of mediæval superstitions. A new world was revealed to the astonished Spaniards. Every animal, tree, plant seemed new to them and often entirely different from anything the Old World could show. There was, too, a new race of men, with strange manners and customs—men who told them of a Fountain of Youth, of regions of pearls and precious stones, of cities and palaces of gold in the lofty plateau and in the heart of the wilderness.

Those who first came to the New World acted as if they were in a land of enchantment and were prepared to believe any tale, however preposterous, that appealed to their lust of gold or love of adventure. No enterprise was too difficult for them, no hardship too great. Neither trackless forests, nor miasmatic climates, nor ruthless savages could deter them from their quest of treasure, or quench their thirst for glory and emolument. Hence those extraordinary expeditions in search of El Dorado,—that El Dorado which Quesada hoped to find in Cundinamarca, his brother in Casanare, Orsua among the Omaguas on the Amazon, Philipp von Hutten in the regions of the Meta and the Guaviare, and Cesar and Belalcazar in the territories drained by the Cauca and the Magdalena,—in which were combined the extravagant performances of a Don Quixote with the feats of prowess of a Rodrigo Diaz. The spirit of knight-errantry seemed to revive and to bring with it an age of romance that for hardihood of enterprise and variety of incident surpassed any period that had preceded it. The feats of individual prowess were as brilliant as the success of Spanish arms was pronounced and far-reaching. It was an age of epics, of poetry in action.

Lord Macaulay, in his essay on Lord Clive, writes, “We have always thought it strange that, while the history of the Spanish empire in America is familiarly known to all the nations of Europe, the great actions of our countrymen in the East should, even among ourselves, excite little interest.”

One reason for the difference noted was the absence, in the English conquest of India, of those romantic and picturesque elements that so distinguished the achievements of the conquistadores in the New World, and which so fascinated Leo X, that he sat up all night to read the Decades of Peter Martyr. “The picturesque descriptions,” declares Theodore Irving, in his Conquest of Florida, “of steel-clad cavaliers with lance and helmet and prancing steed, glittering through the wildernesses of Florida, Georgia, Alabama and the prairies of the Far West, would seem to us fictions of romance, did they not come to us recorded in matter-of-fact narratives of contemporaries, and corroborated by minute and daily memoranda of eye-witnesses.”

The same can be said with even more truth of the conquistadores of the Spanish Main and of the daring adventurers who first penetrated the trackless forests and scaled the lofty mountains of Venezuela and New Granada. “Their minds,” as Fiske well observes, “were in a state like that of the heroes of the Arabian Nights who, if they only wander far enough through the dark forest or across the burning desert, are sure at length to come upon some enchanted palace whereof they may fairly hope, with the aid of some gracious Jinni, to become masters.” Thus it was that Cortes, unaided, however, by a gracious Jinni, became the master of the capital of the Aztecs, as Quesada and Pizarro became the masters of the lands and the treasures of the Muiscas and the Incas.