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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He Calls The
Upper Part Of The Rio Branco (That Which Receives The Mahu) Orinoco Or
Purumu.
There can be no doubt of its being the Xurumu, one of the
tributary streams of the Tacutu, which is well known to the
inhabitants of the neighbouring fort of San Joaquim.
All the names
that figure in the fable of El Dorado are found in the tributary
streams of the Rio Branco. Slight local circumstances, joined to the
remembrances of the salt lake of Mexico, more especially of the
celebrated lake Manoa in the Dorado des Omaguas, have served to
complete a picture created by the imagination of Raleigh and his two
lieutenants, Keymis and Masham. The inundations of the Rio Branco, I
conceive, may be compared at the utmost to those of the Red River of
Louisiana, between Nachitoches and Cados, but not to the Laguna de los
Xarayes, which is a temporary swelling of the Rio Paraguay.* (*
Southey volume 1 page 130. These periodical overflowings of the Rio
Paraguay have long acted the same part in the southern hemisphere, as
lake Parima has been made to perform in the northern. Hondius and
Sanson have made the Rio de la Plata, the Rio Topajos (a tributary
stream of the Amazon), the Rio Tocantines, and the Rio de San
Francisco, issue from the Laguna de los Xarayes.)
We have now examined a White Sea,* (* That of D'Anville and La Cruz,
and of the greater part of the modern maps.) which the principal of
the Rio Branco is made to traverse; and another,* (* The lake of
Surville, which takes the place of lake Amucu.) which is placed on the
east of this river, and communicates with it by the Cano Pirara.
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