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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Della Scoperta Delle Communicazione Dell' Orinoco Col
Maragnone.) "The Communication Between The Orinoco And The Amazon,"
Said He, "Recently Averred,
May pass so much the more for a discovery
in geography, as, although the junction of these two rivers is
Marked
on the old maps (according to the information given by Acunha), it had
been suppressed by all the modern geographers in their new maps, as if
in concert. This is not the first time that what is positive fact has
been thought fabulous, that the spirit of criticism has been pushed
too far, and that this communication has been treated as chimerical by
those who ought to have been better informed." Since the voyage of
Father Roman in 1774, no person in Spanish Guiana, or on the coasts of
Cumana and Caracas, has admitted a doubt of the existence of the
Cassiquiare and the bifurcation of the Orinoco. Father Gumilla
himself; whom Bouguer met at Carthagena, confessed that he had been
deceived; and he read to Father Gili, a short time before his death, a
supplement to his history of the Orinoco, intended for a new edition,
in which he recounts pleasantly the manner in which he had been
undeceived. The expedition of the boundaries, under Iturriaga and
Solano, completed in detail the knowledge of the geography of the
Upper Orinoco, and the intertwinings of this river with the Rio Negro.
Solano established himself in 1756 at the confluence of the Atabapo;
and from that time the Spanish and Portuguese commissioners often
passed in their canoes, by the Cassiquiare, from the Lower Orinoco to
the Rio Negro, to visit each other at their head-quarters of Cabruta*
and Mariva. (* General Iturriaga, confined by illness, first at
Muitaco, or Real Corona, and afterward at Cabruta, received a visit in
1760 from the Portuguese colonel Don Gabriel de Souza y Figueira, who
came from Grand Para, having made a voyage of nearly nine hundred
leagues in his boat. The Swedish botanist, Loefling, who was chosen to
accompany the expedition of the boundaries at the expense of the
Spanish government, so greatly multiplied in his ardent imagination
the branchings of the great rivers of South America, that he appeared
well persuaded of being able to navigate, by the Rio Negro and the
Amazon, to the Rio de la Plata. (Iter page 131.)) Since the year 1767,
two or three canoes come annually from the fort of San Carlos, by the
bifurcation of the Orinoco to Angostura, to fetch salt and the pay of
the troops. These passages, from one basin of a river to another, by
the natural canal of the Cassiquiare, excite no more attention in the
colonists at present than the arrival of boats that descend the Loire
by the canal of Orleans, awakens on the banks of the Seine.
Although, since the journey of Father Roman, in 1744, precise notions
have been acquired in the Spanish possessions in America, both of the
direction of the Upper Orinoco from east to west, and of the manner of
its communication with the Rio Negro, this knowledge did not reach
Europe till a much later period. In 1750, La Condamine and D'Anville*
were still of opinion that the Orinoco was a branch of the Caqueta
coming from the south-east, and that the Rio Negro issued immediately
from it. (* See the classical memoir of this great geographer in the
Journal des Savans, March 1750 page 184. "One fact," says D'Anville,
"which cannot be considered as equivocal, after the proofs with which
we have been recently furnished, is the communication of the Rio Negro
with the Orinoco; but we must not hesitate to admit, that we are not
yet sufficiently informed of the manner in which this communication
takes place." I was surprised to see in a very rare map, which I found
at Rome (Provincia Quitensis Soc. Jesu in America, auctore Carolo
Brentano et Nicolao de la Torre; Romae 1745) that seven years after
the discovery of Father Roman, the Jesuits of Quito were ignorant of
the existence of the Cassiquiare. The Rio Negro is figured in this map
as a branch of the Orinoco.) It was only in the second edition of his
South America, that D'Anville (without renouncing that
intercommunication of the Caqueta, by means of the Iniricha (Inirida),
with the Orinoco and the Rio Negro) describes the Orinoco as taking
its rise at the east, near the sources of the Rio Branco, and marks
the Rio Cassiquiare as bearing the waters of the Upper Orinoco to the
Rio Negro. It is probable that this indefatigable and learned writer
had obtained information on the manner of the bifurcation from his
frequent communications with the missionaries,* who were then the only
geographers of the most inland parts of the continents. (* According
to the Annals of Berredo, it would appear, that as early as the year
1739, the military incursions from the Rio Negro to the Cassiquiare
had confirmed the Portuguese Jesuits in the opinion that there was a
communication between the Amazon and the Orinoco. Southey's Brazils
volume 1 page 658.)
Had the nations of the lower region of equinoctial America
participated in the civilization spread over the cold and alpine
region, that immense Mesopotamia between the Orinoco and the Amazon
would have favoured the development of their industry, animated their
commerce, and accelerated the progress of social order. We see
everywhere in the old world the influence of locality on the dawning
civilization of nations. The island of Meroe between the Astaboras and
the Nile, the Punjab of the Indus, the Douab of the Ganges, and the
Mesopotamia of the Euphrates, furnish examples that are justly
celebrated in the annals of the human race. But the feeble tribes that
wander in the savannahs and the woods of eastern America, have
profited little by the advantages of their soil, and the
interbranchings of their rivers. The distant incursions of the Caribs,
who went up the Orinoco, the Cassiquiare, and the Rio Negro, to carry
off slaves and exercise pillage, compelled some rude tribes to rouse
themselves from their indolence, and form associations for their
common defence; the little good, however, which these wars with the
Caribs (the Bedouins of the rivers of Guiana) produced, was but slight
compensation for the evils that followed in their train, by rendering
the tribes more ferocious, and diminishing their population.
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