These Pareas Are, No Doubt, The Inhabitants Of Paria, A Name Which Christopher Columbus Had Already Heard In 1498, And Which Was Long Applied To A Great Part Of America.

Bishop Geraldini says clearly, in a letter addressed to Pope Leo X in 1516:

Insula illa, quae Europa et Asia est major, quam indocti Continentem Asiae appellant, et alii Americam vel Pariam nuncupant [that island, larger than Europe and Asia joined together, which the unlearned call the continent of Asia, and others America or Paria].* (* Alexandri Geraldini Itinerarium page 250.) I find in the map of the world of 1508 no trace whatever of the Orinoco. This river appears, for the first time, by the name of Rio Dolce, on the celebrated map constructed in 1529 by Diego Ribeyro, cosmographer of the emperor Charles V, which was published, with a learned commentary, by M. Sprengel, in 1795. Neither Columbus (1498) nor Alonzo de Ojeda, accompanied by Amerigo Vespucci (1499), had seen the real mouth of the Orinoco; they confounded it with the northern opening of the Gulf of Paria, to which they attributed (by an exaggeration so common to the navigators of that time, an immense volume of fresh water. It was Vicente Yanez Pincon, who, after having discovered the mouth of the Rio Maranon,* first saw, in 1500, that of the Orinoco. (* The name of Maranon was known fifty-nine years before the expedition of Lopez de Aguirre; the denomination of the river is therefore erroneously attributed to the nickname of maranos (hogs), which this adventurer gave his companions in going down the river Amazon. Was not this vulgar jest rather an allusion to the Indian name of the river?) He called this river Rio Dolce - a name which, since Ribeyro, was long preserved on our maps, and which has sometimes been given erroneously to the Maroni and to the Essequibo.

The great Lake Parima did not appear on our maps* till after the first voyage of Raleigh. (* I find no trace of it on a very rare map, dedicated to Richard Hakluyt, and constructed on the meridian of Toledo. Novus Orbis, Paris 1587. In this map, published before the voyage of Quiros, a group of Islands is marked (Infortunatae Insulae) where the Friendly Islands actually are. Ortelius (1570) already knew them. Were they islands seen by Magellan?) It was Jodocus Hondius who, as early as the year 1599, fixed the ideas of geographers and figured the interior of Spanish Guiana as a country well known. He transformed the isthmus between the Rio Branco and the Rio Rupunuwini (one of the tributary streams of the Essequibo) into the lake Rupunuwini, Parima, or Dorado, two hundred leagues long, and forty broad, and bounded by the latitudes of 1 degree 45 minutes south, and 2 degrees north. This inland sea, larger than the Caspian, is sometimes traced in the midst of a mountainous country, without communication with any river;* (* See, for instance, Hondius, Nieuwe Caerte van het goudrycke landt Guiana, 1599; and Sanson's Map of America, in 1656 and 1669.) and sometimes the Rio Oyapok (Waiapago, Japoc, Viapoco) and the Rio de Cayana are made to issue from it.* (* Brasilia et Caribaua, auct. Hondio et Huelsen 1599.) The first of these rivers, confounded in the eighth article of the treaty of Utrecht with the Rio de Vicente Pincon (Rio Calsoene of D'Anville), has been, even down to the late congress of Vienna, the subject of interminable discussions between the French and Portuguese diplomatists.* (* I have treated this question in a Memoire sur la fixation des limites de La Guyane Francaise, written at the desire of the Portuguese government during the negotiations of Paris in 1817.

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