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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I May Take This Opportunity Of Expressing My
Opinion On A Tradition Which Has So Romantic An Appearance; And I Am
Farther Led To Do This As La Condamine Asserts That The Amazons Of The
Rio Cayame* Crossed The Maranon To Establish Themselves On The Rio
Negro.
(* Orellana, arriving at the Maranon by the Rio Coca and the
Napo, fought with the Amazons, as it appears, between the mouth of the
Rio Negro and that of the Xingu.
La Condamine asserts that in the
seventeenth century they passed the Maranon between Tefe and the mouth
of the Rio Puruz, near the Cano Cuchivara, which is a western branch
of the Puruz. These women therefore came from the banks of the Rio
Cayame, or Cayambe, consequently from the unknown country which
extends south of the Maranon, between the Ucayale and the Madeira.
Raleigh also places them on the south of the Maranon, but in the
province of Topayos, and on the river of the same name. He says they
were rich in golden vessels, which they had acquired in exchange for
the famous green stones, or piedras hijadas. (Raleigh means, no doubt,
piedros del higado, stones that cure diseases of the liver.) It is
remarkable enough that, one hundred and forty-eight years after, La
Condamine still found those green stones (divine stones), which differ
neither in colour nor in hardness from oriental jade, in greater
numbers among the Indians who live near the mouth of the Rio Topayos,
than elsewhere. The Indians said that they inherited these stones,
which cure the nephritic colic and epilepsy, from their fathers, who
received them from the women without husbands.) A taste for the
marvellous, and a wish to invest the descriptions of the New Continent
with some of the colouring of classic antiquity, no doubt contributed
to give great importance to the first narratives of Orellana. In
perusing the works of Vespucci, Fernando Columbus, Geraldini, Oviedo,
and Pietro Martyr, we recognize this tendency of the writers of the
sixteenth century to find among the newly discovered nations all that
the Greeks have related to us of the first age of the world, and of
the manners of the barbarous Scythians and Africans. But if Oviedo, in
addressing his letters to cardinal Bembo, thought fit to flatter the
taste of a man so familiar with the study of antiquity, Sir Walter
Raleigh had a less poetic aim. He sought to fix the attention of Queen
Elizabeth on the great empire of Guiana, the conquest of which he
proposed. He gave a description of the rising of that gilded king (el
dorado),* whose chamberlains, furnished with long tubes, blew powdered
gold every morning over his body, after having rubbed it over with
aromatic oils: but nothing could be better adapted to strike the
imagination of queen Elizabeth, than the warlike republic of women
without husbands, who resisted the Castilian heroes. (* The term el
dorado, which signifies the gilded, was not originally the name of the
country.
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