Before I Quit This Coast, So Seldom Visited By Travellers And Described By No Modern Voyager, I May Here Offer Some Information Which I Acquired During My Stay At Carthagena.

The Rio Sinu in its upper course approaches the tributary streams of the Atrato which, to the auriferous and platiniferous province of Choco, is of the same importance as the Magdalena to Cundinamarca, or the Rio Cauca to the provinces of Antioquia and Popayan.

The three great rivers here mentioned have heretofore been the only commercial routes, I might almost add, the only channels of communication for the inhabitants. The Rio Atrato receives, at twelve leagues distance from its mouth, the Rio Sucio on the east; the Indian village of San Antonio is situated on its banks. Proceeding upward beyond the Rio Pabarando, you arrive in the valley of Sinu. After several fruitless attempts on the part of the Archbishop Gongora to establish colonies in Darien del Norte and on the eastern coast of the gulf of Uraba, the Viceroy Espeleta recommended the Spanish Government to fix its whole attention on the Rio Sinu; to destroy the colony of Cayman; to fix the planters in the Spanish village of San Bernardo del Viento in the jurisdiction of Lorica; and from that post, which is the most westerly, to push forward the peaceful conquests of agriculture and civilization towards the banks of the Pabarando, the Rio Sucio and the Atrato.* (* I will here state some facts which I obtained from official documents during my stay at Carthagena, and which have not yet been published. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the name of Darien was given vaguely to the whole coast extending from the Rio Damaquiel to the Punta de San Blas, on 2 1/4 degrees of longitude. The cruelties exercised by Pedrarias Davila rendered almost inaccessible to the Spaniards a country which was one of the first they had colonized. The Indians (Dariens and Cunas-Cunas) remained masters of the coast, as they still are at Poyais, in the land of the Mosquitos. Some Scotchmen formed in 1698 the settlements of New Caledonia, New Edinburgh and Scotch Port, in the most eastern part of the isthmus, a little west of Punta Carreto. They were soon driven away by the Spaniards but, as the latter occupied no part of the coast, the Indians continued their attacks against Choco's boats, which from time to time descended the Rio Atrato, The sanguinary expedition of Don Manuel de Aldarete in 1729 served only to augment the resentment of the natives. A settlement for the cultivation of the cocoa-tree, attempted in the territory of Urabia in 1740 by some French planters under the protection of the Spanish Government, had no durable success; and the court, excited by the reports of the archbishop-viceroy, Gongora, ordered, by the cedule of the 15th August, 1783, either the conversion and conquest, or the destruction (reduccion o extincion) of the Indians of Darien. This order, worthy of another age, was executed by Don Antonio de Arebalo:

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