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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It Is, However, By This River Only, Or By The Cuyuni And The
Essequibo, That The Missions Of Carony Can Export Their Productions.
The Latter Way Has Not Yet Been Tried, Though Several Christian
Settlements* Are Formed On One Of The Principal Tributary Streams Of
The Cuyuni, The Rio Juruario.
(* Guacipati, Tupuquen, Angel de la
Custodia, and Cura, where the military post of the frontiers was
stationed in 1800, which had been anciently placed at the confluence
of the Cuyuni and the Curumu.) This stream furnishes, at the period of
the great swellings, the remarkable phenomenon of a bifurcation.
It
communicates by the Juraricuima and the Aurapa with the Rio Carony; so
that the land comprised between the Orinoco, the sea, the Cuyuni, and
the Carony, becomes a real island. Formidable rapids impede the
navigation of the Upper Cuyuni; and hence of late an attempt has been
made to open a road to the colony of Essequibo much more to the
south-east, in order to fall in with the Cuyuni much below the mouth
of the Curumu.
The whole of this southern territory is traversed by hordes of
independent Caribs; the feeble remains of that warlike people who were
so formidable to the missionaries till 1733 and 1735, at which period
the respectable bishop Gervais de Labrid,* (* Consecrated a bishop for
the four parts of the world (obispo para las quatro partes del mundo)
by pope Benedict XIII.) canon of the metropolitan chapter of Lyon,
Father Lopez, and several other ecclesiastics, perished by the hands
of the Caribs.
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