Up the Orinoco and down the Magdalena

by J. A. Zahm

It is, however, the imposing figure of Spain’s great admiral, Cristobal Colon, that looms highest in these parts. He it was that gave the chief promontories of island and mainland, and the channels that separate the one from the other, many of the names they still bear.

Far down to the south is La Boca de la Sierpe—the Serpent’s Mouth—the channel that separates the southwesternmost point of Trinidad from Venezuela. It was through this channel that Columbus passed when he entered the gulf in which we now are, and from which he got his first view of the mainland of the New World. But he did not realize at first the magnitude of his discovery. Thinking the land he saw on his port quarter was an island—for during his two preceding voyages he had seen nothing but islands, outside of Cuba, which he fancied to be the eastern part of Asia—he named it Isla Santa, or Holy Island. A short distance to the northwest of us is La Boca del Draco, the Dragon’s Mouth, through which the great navigator

“Push’d his prows into the setting sun,

And made West East.”

The names Serpent’s Mouth and Dragon’s Mouth were given to the two straits mentioned on account of the strong currents found there and on account of the danger Columbus experienced in taking his ships through them. His letter to Ferdinand and Isabella contains a graphic description of the dangers he encountered while passing through the Serpent’s Mouth. “In the dead of night,” he writes, “while I was on deck, I heard an awful roaring, that came from the south, toward the ship; on the top of this rolling sea came a mighty wave roaring with a frightful noise, and with all this terrific uproar were other conflicting currents, producing, as I have already said, a sound as of breakers upon rocks. To this day I have a vivid recollection of the dread I then felt lest the ship might flounder under the force of that tremendous sea; but it passed by, and reached the mouth of the before-mentioned passage, where the uproar lasted for a considerable time.”[10] He had similar difficulty in making his exit through the Dragon’s Mouth.

No wonder that the frightened sailors of Columbus imagined that they were the sport of the Evil One. “Being in the region of Paria,” writes Navarrete, “the Admiral asked the pilots what they made their position to be; some said that they were in the sea of Spain, others that they were in the sea of Scotland, and that all the seamen were in despair, and said the Devil had brought them there.”[11]

Columbus, as has been stated, at first considered the land on his port side to be insular in character, but before he left the Gulf of Paria he was evidently convinced by the raging surges of fresh water that had nearly swamped his ships, that he had discovered a land of continental dimensions. In his letter to the Spanish sovereigns he writes, “This land, which your highnesses have sent me to explore, is very extensive, and I think there are many other countries in the south of which the world has never had any knowledge.”

He had observed that a very large river debouched from the land of Gracia and he at once “rightly conjectured that the currents and the overwhelming mountains of water which rushed into these straits with such an awful roaring, arose from the contest between the fresh water and the sea. The fresh water struggled with the salt to oppose its entrance and the salt water contended against the fresh in its efforts to gain a passage outward. And I formed the conjecture, that at one time there was a continuous neck of land from the island of Trinidad and the land of Gracia, where the two straits now are.” All these conclusions have been confirmed by the observations of subsequent explorers.

What, however, will most interest the curious reader are the speculations into which Columbus was led by the various phenomena observed in the Gulf of Paria. The most fantastic, from our modern point of view, were his theories regarding the form of the earth and the location of the Terrestrial Paradise.

Before his arrival in the Gulf of Paria, he had been a firm believer in the sphericity of the earth, but in this part of the world he had observed so many new and unexpected features—“so much irregularity,” as he phrased it—that he came “to another conclusion respecting the shape of the earth, namely: that it is not round, as they describe, but of the form of a pear, which is very round except where the stalk grows, at which part it is most prominent.”