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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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.
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