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 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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