In 1508 All The Country From The Cabo De La Vela To The Gulf Of Uraba, Where The Castillo Del Oro Begins, Was Called New Andalusia, A Name Since Restricted To The Province Of Cumana.

A fortunate chance led me to see, during the course of my travels, the two extremities of the main

Land, the mountainous and verdant coast of Paria, which Columbus supposes to have been the cradle of the human race, and the low and humid coast extending from the mouth of the Sinu towards the Gulf of Darien. The comparison of these scenes, which have again relapsed into a savage state, confirms what I have elsewhere advanced relative to the strange and sometimes retrograde nature of civilization in America. On one side, the coast of Paria, the islands of Cubagua and Marguerita; on the other, the Gulf of Uraba and Darien, received the first Spanish colonists. Gold and pearls, which were there found in abundance, because from time immemorial they had been accumulated in the hands of the natives, gave those countries a popular celebrity from the beginning of the sixteenth century. At Seville, Toledo, Pisa, Genoa and Antwerp those countries were viewed like the realms of Ormuz and of Ind. The pontiffs of Rome mentioned them in their bulls; and Bembo has celebrated them in those historical pages which add lustre to the glory of Venice.

At the close of the fifteenth, and the beginning of the sixteenth century, Europe saw, in those parts of the New World discovered by Columbus, Ojeda, Vespucci and Rodrigo de Bastidas, only the advanced capes of the vast territories of India and eastern Asia. The immense wealth of those territories in gold, diamonds, pearls and spices had been vaunted in the narratives of Benjamin de Tudela, Rubruquis, Marco Polo and Mandeville. Columbus, whose imagination was excited by these narrations, caused a deposition to be made before a notary, on the 12th of June, 1494, in which sixty of his companions, pilots, sailors and passengers certified upon oath that the southern coast of Cuba was a part of the continent of India. The description of the treasures of Cathay and Cipango, of the celestial town of Quinsay and the province of Mango, which had fired the admiral's ambition in early life, pursued him like phantoms in his declining days. In his fourth and last voyage, on approaching the coast of Cariay (Poyais or Mosquito Coast), Veragua and the Isthmus, he believed himself to be near the mouth of the Ganges.* (* Tambien dicen que la mar baxa a Ciguare, y de alli a diez jornadas es el Rio de Guangues: para que estas tierras estan con Veragua como Tortosa con Fuenterabia o Pisa con Venecia." [Also it is said that the sea lowers at Ciguara, and from thence it is a ten days' journey to the river Ganges; for these lands are, with reference to Veragua, like Tortosa with respect to Fuenterabia, or Pisa, with respect to Venice.] These words are taken from the Lettera Rarissima of Columbus, of which the original Spanish was lately found, and published by the learned M. Navarrete, in his Coleccion de Viages volume 1 page 299.) These geographical illusions, this mysterious veil, which enveloped the first discoveries, contributed to magnify every object, and to fix the attention of Europe on regions, the very names of which are, to us, scarcely known.

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