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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Perhaps the idea that Pincon, to whom the discovery of the
real Maranon is due, had landed in these parts, since become
celebrated by the shipwreck of Ayres da Cunha, has also contributed to
this confusion.
The Meary appears to me identical with the Rio de
Vicente Pincon of Diego Ribeyro, which is more than one hundred and
forty leagues from that of the modern geographers. At present the name
of Maranon has remained at the same time to the river of the Amazons,
and to a province much farther eastward, the capital of which is
Maranhao, or St. Louis de Maranon.) and the Rio de San Francisco.
These hydrographic reveries have for the most part disappeared; but
the lakes Cassipa and Dorado have been long simultaneously preserved
on our maps.
In following the history of geography we see the Cassipa, figured as a
rectangular parallelogram, enlarge by degrees at the expense of El
Dorado. While the latter is sometimes suppressed, no one ventures to
touch the former,* which is the Rio Paragua (a tributary stream of the
Caroni) enlarged by temporary inundations. (* Sanson, Course of the
Amazon, 1680; De L'Isle, Amerique Merid. 1700. D'Anville, first
edition of his America, 1748.) When D'Anville learned from the
expedition of Solano that the sources of the Orinoco, far from lying
to the west, on the back of the Andes of Pasto, came from the east,
from the mountains of Parima, he restored in the second edition of his
fine map of America (1760) the Laguna Parime, and very arbitrarily
made it to communicate with three rivers, the Orinoco, the Rio Branco,
and the Essequibo, by the Mazuruni and the Cujuni; assigning to it the
latitude from 3 to 4 degrees north, which had till then been given to
lake Cassipa.
I have now stated, as I announced above, the variable forms which
geographical errors have assumed at different periods. I have
explained what in the configuration of the soil, the course of the
rivers, the names of the tributary streams, and the multiplicity of
the portages, may have given rise to the hypothesis of an inland sea
in the centre of Guiana. However dry discussions of this nature may
appear, they ought not to be regarded as sterile and fruitless. They
show travellers what remains to be discovered; and make known the
degree of certainty which long-repeated assertions may claim. It is
with maps, as with those tables of astronomical positions which are
contained in our ephemerides, designed for the use of navigators: the
most heterogeneous materials have been employed in their construction
during a long space of time; and, without the aid of the history of
geography, we could scarcely hope to discover at some future day on
what authority every partial statement rests.
Before I resume the thread of my narrative, it remains for me to add a
few general reflections on the auriferous lands situate between the
Amazon and the Orinoco.
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