If We Follow The Course Of The Rio Branco, Or That Strip Of Cultivated Land Which Is Dependent On The Capitania General Of Grand Para, We See Lakes, Partly Imaginary And Partly Enlarged By Geographers, Forming Two Distinct Groups.

The first of these groups includes the lakes which they place between the Esmeralda and the Rio Branco; and to the second belong those that are supposed to lie between the Rio Branco and the mountains of Dutch and French Guiana.

It results from this sketch that the question whether there exists a lake Parima on the east of the Rio Branco is altogether foreign to the problem of the sources of the Orinoco.

Beside the country which we have just noticed (the Dorado de la Parime, traversed by the Rio Branco), another part of America is found, two hundred and sixty leagues toward the west, near the eastern back of the Cordillera of the Andes, equally celebrated in the expeditions to El Dorado. This is the Mesopotamia between the Caqueta, the Rio Negro, the Uaupes, and the Yurubesh, of which I have already given a particular account; it is the Dorado of the Omaguas which contains Lake Manoa of Father Acunha, the Laguna de oro of the Guanes and the auriferous land whence Father Fritz received plates of beaten gold in his mission on the Amazon, toward the end of the seventeenth century.

The first and above all the most celebrated enterprises attempted in search of El Dorado were directed toward the eastern back of the Andes of New Grenada. Fired with the ideas which an Indian of Tacunga had given of the wealth of the king or zaque of Cundirumarca, Sebastian de Belalcazar, in 1535, sent his captains Anasco and Ampudia, to discover the valley of El Dorado,* twelve days' journey from Guallabamba, consequently in the mountains between Pasto and Popayan. (* El valle del Dorado. Pineda relates: que mas adelante de la provincia de la Canela se hallan tierras muy ricas, adonde andaban los hombres armados de piecas y joyas de oro, y que no havia sierra, ni montana. [Beyond the province of Canela there are found very rich countries (though without mountains) in which the natives are adorned with trinkets and plates of gold.] Herrera dec. 5 lib. 10 cap. 14 and dec. 6 lib. 8 cap. 6 Geogr. Blaviana volume 11 page 261. Southey tome 1 pages 78 and 373.) The information which Pedro de Anasco had obtained from the natives, joined to that which was received subsequently (1536) by Diaz de Pineda, who had discovered the provinces of Quixos and Canela, between the Rio Napo and the Rio Pastaca, gave birth to the idea that on the east of the Nevados of Tunguragua, Cayambe, and Popayan, were vast plains, abounding in precious metals, and where the inhabitants were covered with armour of massy gold. Gonzales Pizarro, in searching for these treasures, discovered accidentally, in 1539, the cinnamon-trees of America (Laurus cinnamomoides, Mut.); and Francisco de Orellana went down the Napo, to reach the river Amazon.

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