Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 3 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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New Cadiz, The Principal
Seat Of The Pearl-Fishery, Was On An Island Which Has Again Become
Uninhabited.
The extremity of the rocky coast of Paria is also a
desert.
Several towns were founded at the mouth of the Rio Atrato, by
the names of Antigua del Darien, Uraba or San Sebastian de Buenavista.
In these spots, so celebrated at the beginning of the sixteenth
century, the historians of the conquest tell us that the flower of the
Castilian heroes were found assembled: thence Balboa set out to
discover the South Sea; Pizarro marched from thence to conquer and
ravage Peru; and Pedro de Cieca constantly followed the chain of the
Andes, by Autioquia, Popayan and Cuzco, as far as La Plata, after
having gone 900 leagues by land. These towns of Darien are destroyed;
some ruins scattered on the hills of Uraba, the fruit-trees of Europe
mixed with native trees, are all that mark to the traveller the spots
on which those towns once stood. In almost all Spanish America the
first lands peopled by the Conquistadores, have retrograted into
barbarism.* (* In carefully collating the testimonies of the
historians of the Conquest, some contradictions are observed in the
periods assigned to the foundation of the towns of Darien. Pedro de
Cieca, who had been on the spot, affirms that, under the government of
Alonzo de Ojeda and Nicuessa, the town of Nuestra Senora Santa Maria
el Antigua del Darien was founded on the western coast of the Gulf or
Culata de Uraba, in 1509; and that later (despues desto passado) Ojeda
passed to the eastern coast of the Culata to construct the town of San
Sebastian de Uraba. The former, called by abbreviation Ciudad del
Antigua, had soon a population of 2000 Spaniards; while the latter,
the Ciudad del Uraba, remained uninhabited, because Francisco Pizarro,
since known as the conqueror of Peru, was forced to abandon it, having
vainly demanded succour from St. Domingo. The historian Herrera, after
having said that the foundation of Antigua had preceded by one year
that of Uraba or San Sebastian, affirms the contrary in the following
chapter and in the Chronicle itself. It was, according to the
Chronicle, in 1501 that Ojeda, accompanied by Vespucci, and
penetrating for the first time the Gulf of Uraba or Darien, resolved
to construct, with wood and unbaked bricks, a fort at the entrance of
Culata. It appears, however, that this enterprise was not executed;
for, in 1508, in the convention made by Ojeda and Nicuessa, they each
promised to build two fortresses on the limits of New Andalusia and of
Castillo del Oro. Herrera, in the 7th and 8th books of the first
Decade, fixes the foundation of San Sebastian de Uraba at the
beginning of 1510, and mentions it as the most ancient town of the
continent of America, after that of Ceragua, founded by Columbus in
1503, on the Rio Belen. He relates how Francisco Pizarro abandoned
that town, and how the foundation of the Ciudad del Antigua by Entiso,
towards the end of the year 1510, was the consequence of that event.
Leo X made Antigua a bishopric in 1514; and this was the first
episcopal church of the continent.
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