The Learned Historian Of Brazil, Mr. Southey, And The Biographer Of Raleigh, Sir G. Cayley, Have Recently Thrown Much Light On This Subject.

It seems to me difficult to doubt of the extreme credulity of the chief of the expedition, and of his lieutenants.

We see Raleigh adapted everything to the hypotheses he had previously formed. He was certainly deceived himself; but when he sought to influence the imagination of queen Elizabeth, and execute the projects of his own ambitious policy, he neglected none of the artifices of flattery. He described to the Queen "the transports of those barbarous nations at the sight of her picture;" he would have "the name of the august virgin, who knows how to conquer empires, reach as far as the country of the warlike women of the Orinoco and the Amazon;" he asserts that "at the period when the Spaniards overthrew the throne of Cuzco, an ancient prophecy was found, which predicted that the dynasty of the Incas would one day owe its restoration to Great Britain;" he advises that "on pretext of defending the territory against external enemies, garrisons of three or four thousand English should be placed in the towns of the Inca, obliging this prince to pay a contribution annually to Queen Elizabeth of three hundred thousand pounds sterling;" finally he adds, like a man who foresees the future, that "all the vast countries of South America will one day belong to the English nation."* (* "I showed them her Majesty's picture, which the Casigui so admired and honoured, as it had been easy to have brought them idolatrous thereof. And I further remember that Berreo confessed to me and others (which I protest before the majesty of God to be true), that there was found among prophecies at Peru (at such a time as the empire was reduced to the Spanish obedience) in their chiefest temple, among divers others which foreshowed the losse of the said empyre, that from Inglatierra those Ingas should be again in time to come restored. The Inga would yield to her Majesty by composition many hundred thousand pounds yearely as to defend him against all enemies abroad and defray the expenses of a garrison of 3000 or 4000 soldiers. It seemeth to me that this Empyre of Guiana is reserved for the English nation." (Raleigh pages 7, 17, 51 and 100.)

The four voyages of Raleigh to the Lower Orinoco succeeded each other from 1595 to 1617. After all these useless attempts the ardour of research after El Dorado has greatly diminished. No expeditions have since been formed by a numerous band of colonists; but some solitary enterprises have been encouraged by the governors of the provinces. The notions spread by the journeys of Father Acunha in 1688, and Father Fritz in 1637, to the auriferous land of the Manoas of Jurubesh, and to the Laguna de Ore, contributed to renew the ideas of El Dorado in the Portuguese and Spanish colonies north and south of the equator.

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