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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They Declared That The Whole Rock Was Auriferous;
Stamping-Mills, Brocards, And Smelting-Furnaces Were Constructed.
After Having Expended Very Large Sums, It Was Discovered That The
Pyrites Contained No Trace Whatever Of Gold.
These essays, though
fruitless, served to renew the ancient idea that every shining rock in
Guiana is teeming with gold (una madre del oro).
Not contented with
taking the mica-slate to the furnace, strata of amphibolic slates were
shown to me near Angostura, without any mixture of heterogeneous
substances, which had been worked under the whimsical name of black
ore of gold (oro negro).
This is the place to make known, in order to complete the description
of the Orinoco, the principal results of my researches on El Dorado,
the White Sea, or Laguna Parime, and the sources of the Orinoco, as
they are marked in the most recent maps. The idea of an auriferous
earth, eminently rich, has been connected, ever since the end of the
sixteenth century, with that of a great inland lake, which furnishes
at the same time waters to the Orinoco, the Rio Branco and the Rio
Essequibo. I believe, from a more accurate knowledge of the country, a
long and laborious study of the Spanish authors who treat of El
Dorado, and, above all, from comparing a great number of ancient maps,
arranged in chronological order, I have succeeded in discovering the
source of these errors. All fables have some real foundation; that of
El Dorado resembles those myths of antiquity, which, travelling from
country to country, have been successively adapted to different
localities. In the sciences, in order to distinguish truth from error,
it often suffices to retrace the history of opinions, and to follow
their successive developments. The discussion to which I shall devote
the end of this chapter is important, not only because it throws light
on the events of the Conquest, and that long series of disastrous
expeditions made in search of El Dorado, the last of which was in the
year 1775; it also furnishes, in addition to this simply historical
interest, another, more substantial and more generally felt, that of
rectifying the geography of South America, and of disembarrassing the
maps published in our days of those great lakes, and that strange
labyrinth of rivers, placed as if by chance between sixty and
sixty-six degrees of longitude. No man in Europe believes any longer
in the wealth of Guiana and the empire of the Grand Patiti. The town
of Manoa and its palaces covered with plates of massy gold have long
since disappeared; but the geographical apparatus serving to adorn the
fable of El Dorado, the lake Parima, which, similar to the lake of
Mexico, reflected the image of so many sumptuous edifices, has been
religiously preserved by geographers. In the space of three centuries,
the same traditions have been differently modified; from ignorance of
the American languages, rivers have been taken for lakes, and portages
for branches of rivers; one lake, the Cassipa, has been made to
advance five degrees of latitude toward the south, while another, the
Parima or Dorado, has been transported the distance of a hundred
leagues from the western to the eastern bank of the Rio Branco.
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