[1579] Schomburgk, in his Raleigh’s Discovery of Guiana (p. lvi), enumerates the various references to the Amazon story among the early writers on South America. Cf. Van Heuvel, Eldorado, chaps. vii. and viii. Acuña’s account in 1641 is translated in Markham’s Expeditions into the Valley of the Amazons, sect. 71; and also p. 123, Note.
[1580] Vol. III. p. 117, etc. One of the latest accounts is contained in P. G. L. Borde’s Histoire de l’ile de la Trinidad sous le gouvernement espagnol, 1498, etc, (Paris, 1876-1883, vol. i.). Abraham Kendall, who had been on the coast with Robert Dudley, and is the maker of one of the portolanos in Dudley’s Arcano del mare, was with Raleigh and of use to him. Kohl (Collection, no. 374) gives us from the British Museum a map which he supposes to be Raleigh’s.
[1581] Personal Narrative, chap. 17.
[1582] Raleigh’s Discovery of Guiana, published by Hakluyt Society (1848), p. li.
[1583] Schomburgk says that Levinus Hulsius availed himself of this map in constructing his Americæ pars Australis, which accompanies the Vera Historia of Schmiedel, published at Nuremberg in 1599. Cf. Uricoechea, Mapoteca Colombiana, p. 90, no. 5.
[1584] He was in the boundary expedition of Solano. Humboldt calls this map the combination of two traced by Caulin in 1756.
[1585] This enumeration has by no means mentioned all the instances of similar acceptance of the delusion.
[1586] Cf. his Cosmos, Eng. tr., p. 159; Views of Nature, p. 188. He asks: “Can the little reed-covered lake of Amuca have given rise to this myth?... It was besides an ancient custom of dogmatizing geographers to make all considerable rivers originate in lakes.” Cf. also Humboldt’s Personal Narrative and Southey’s History of Brazil.
[1587] Markham’s Valley of the Amazons, p. xlv.
[1588] This book is rare. It was priced by Rich in 1832 (no. 234) at £8 8s. The unsatisfactory French translation by De Gomberville was printed at Paris in 1682. Dufossé recently priced this edition at 150 francs. The original Spanish is said to have been suppressed by Philip IV. but such stories are attached too easily to books become rare. There was a copy in the Cooke sale (1884, no. 10). The Carter-Brown Catalogue (vol. ii. no. 484) shows a copy.