Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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The Valiant Philip De Urre Sought For The
Great City Of Manoa By Traversing The Guaviare.
Even now the Indians
of San Jose de Maravitanos relate that, on sailing to the north-east
for fifteen days, on the Guape or Uaupe, you reach a famous laguna de
oro, surrounded by mountains, and so large that the opposite shore
cannot be discerned.
A ferocious nation, the Guanes, do not permit the
collecting of the gold of a sandy plain that surrounds the lake.
Father Acunha places the lake Manoa, or Yenefiti, between the Jupura
and the Rio Negro. Some Manoa Indians brought Father Fritz, in 1687,
several slips of beaten gold. This nation, the name of which is still
known on the banks of the Urarira, between Lamalongo and Moreira,
dwelt on the Yurubesh. La Condamine is right in saying that this
Mesopotamia, between the Caqueta, the Rio Negro, the Yurubesh, and the
Iquiare, was the first scene of El Dorado. But where shall we find the
names of Yurubesh and Iquiare, given by the Fathers Acunha and Fritz?
I think I recognise them in the rivers Urubaxi and Iguari,* on some
manuscript Portuguese maps which I possess. (* It may be written
Urubaji. The j and the x were the same as the German ch to Father
Fritz. The Urubaxi, or Hyurubaxi (Yurubesh), falls into the Rio Negro
near Santa Isabella; the Iguari (Iquiare?) runs into the Issana, which
is also a tributary of the Rio Negro.) I have long and assiduously
studied the geography of South America, north of the Amazon, from
ancient maps and unpublished materials. Desirous that my work should
preserve the character of a scientific performance, I ought not to
hesitate about treating of subjects on which I flatter myself that I
can throw some light; namely, on the questions respecting the sources
of the Rio Negro and the Orinoco, the communication between these
rivers and the Amazon, and the problem of the auriferous soil, which
has cost the inhabitants of the New World so much suffering and so
much blood.
In the distribution of the waters circulating on the surface of the
globe, as well as in the structure of organic bodies, nature has
pursued a much less complicated plan than has been believed by those
who have suffered themselves to be guided by vague conceptions and a
taste for the marvellous. We find, too, that all anomalies, all the
exceptions to the laws of hydrography, which the interior of America
displays, are merely apparent; that the course of running waters
furnishes phenomena equally extraordinary in the old world, but that
these phenomena, from their littleness, have less struck the
imagination of travellers. When immense rivers may be considered as
composed of several parallel furrows of unequal depth; when these
rivers are not enclosed in valleys; and when the interior of the great
continent is as flat as the shores of the sea with us; the
ramifications, the bifurcations, and the interlacings in the form of
net-work, must be infinitely multiplied. From what we know of the
equilibrium of the seas, I cannot think that the New World issued from
the waters later than the Old, and that organic life is there younger,
or more recent; but without admitting oppositions between the two
hemispheres of the same planet, we may conceive that in the hemisphere
most abundant in waters the different systems of rivers required more
time to separate themselves from one another, and establish their
complete independence. The deposits of mud, which are formed wherever
the running waters lose somewhat of their swiftness, contribute, no
doubt, to raise the beds of the great confluent streams, and augment
their inundations; but at length these deposits entirely obstruct the
branches of the rivers and the narrow channels that connect the
neighbouring streams. The substances washed down by rain-waters form
by their accumulation new bars, isthmuses of deposited earth, and
points of division that did not before exist. It hence results that
these natural channels of communication are by degrees divided into
two tributary streams, and from the effect of a transverse rising,
acquire two opposite slopes; a part of their waters is turned back
towards the principal recipient, and a buttress rises between the two
parallel basins, which occasions all traces of their ancient
communication to disappear. From this period the bifurcations no
longer connect different systems of rivers; and, where they continue
to take place at the time of great inundations, we see that the waters
diverge from the principal recipient only to enter it again after a
longer or shorter circuit. The limits, which at first appeared vague
and uncertain, begin to be fixed; and in the lapse of ages, from the
action of whatever is moveable on the surface of the globe, from that
of the waters, the deposits, and the sands, the basins of rivers
separate, as great lakes are subdivided, and as inland seas lose their
ancient communications.* (* The geological constitution of the soil
seems to indicate that, notwithstanding the actual difference of level
in their waters, the Black Sea, the Caspian, and lake Aral,
communicated with each other in an era anterior to historic times. The
overflowing of the Aral into the Caspian Sea seems even to be partly
of a more recent date, and independent of the bifurcation of the Gihon
(Oxus), on which one of the most learned geographers of our day, M.
Ritter, has thrown new light.)
The certainty acquired by geographers since the sixteenth century, of
the existence of several bifurcations, and the mutual dependence of
various systems of rivers in South America, have led them to admit an
intimate connection between the five great tributary streams of the
Orinoco and the Amazon; the Guaviare, the Inirida, the Rio Negro, the
Caqueta or Hyapura, and the Putumayo or Iza.
The Meta, the Guaviare, the Caqueta, and the Putumayo, are the only
great rivers that rise immediately from the eastern declivity of the
Andes of Santa Fe, Popayan, and Pasto.
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