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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How Could We Hope
To Pass A Point Where The Commander Of The Rio Negro, Don Francisco
Bovadilla, Was Stopped
When, accompanied by his soldiers, he tried to
penetrate beyond the Gehette?* (* See above.) The carnage then made
among the
Natives has rendered them more distrustful, and more averse
to the inhabitants of the missions. It must be remembered that the
Orinoco had hitherto offered to geographers two distinct problems,
alike important, the situation of its sources, and the mode of its
communication with the Amazon. The latter problem formed the object of
the journey which I have described; with respect to the discovery of
its sources, that remains to be done by the Spanish and Portuguese
governments.
Our canoe was not ready to receive us till near three o'clock in the
afternoon. It had been filled with innumerable swarms of ants during
the navigation of the Cassiquiare; and the toldo, or roof of
palm-leaves, beneath which we were again doomed to remain stretched
out during twenty-two days, was with difficulty cleared of these
insects. We employed part of the morning in repeating to the
inhabitants of Esmeralda the questions we had already put to them,
respecting the existence of a lake towards the east. We showed copies
of the maps of Surville and La Cruz to old soldiers, who had been
posted in the mission ever since its first establishment. They laughed
at the supposed communication of the Orinoco with the Rio Idapa, and
at the White Sea, which the former river was represented to cross.
What we politely call geographical fictions they termed lies of the
old world (mentiras de por alla). These good people could not
comprehend how men, in making the map of a country which they had
never visited, could pretend to know things in minute detail, of which
persons who lived on the spot were ignorant.
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