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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Before The
Voyage Of Orellana, Christopher Columbus Imagined He Had Found The
Amazons In The Caribbee Islands.
This great man was told, that the
small island of Madanino (Montserrat) was inhabited by warlike women,
who lived the greater part of the year separate from men.
At other
times also, the conquistadores imagined that the women, who defended
their huts in the absence of their husbands, were republics of
Amazons; and, by an error less excusable, formed a like supposition
respecting the religious congregations, the convents of Mexican
virgins, who, far from admitting men at any season of the year into
their society, lived according to the austere rule of Quetzalcohuatl.
Such was the disposition of men's minds, that in the long succession
of travellers, who crowded on each other in their discoveries and in
narrations of the marvels of the New World, every one readily declared
he had seen what his predecessors had announced.
We passed three nights at San Carlos del Rio Negro. I count the
nights, because I watched during the greater part of them, in the hope
of seizing the moment of the passage of some star over the meridian.
That I might have nothing to reproach myself with, I kept the
instruments always ready for an observation. I could not even obtain
double altitudes, to calculate the latitude by the method of Douwes.
What a contrast between two parts of the same zone; between the sky of
Cumana, where the air is constantly pure as in Persia and Arabia, and
the sky of the Rio Negro, veiled like that of the Feroe islands,
without sun, or moon or stars!
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