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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Thence He Makes Him Dragged
By The Caribs From Town To Town, Till He Finds At Manoa A Relation Of
The Inca Atabalipa (Atahualpa), Whom He Had Known Before At Caxamarca,
And Who Had Fled Before The Spaniards.
It appears that Raleigh had
forgotten that the voyage of Ordaz (1531) was two years anterior to
the death of Atahualpa and the entire destruction of the empire of
Peru!
He must have confounded the expedition of Ordaz with that of
Silva (1570), in which Juan Martin de Albuzar partook. The latter, who
related his tales at Santa Fe, at Venezuela, and perhaps at Porto
Rico, must have combined what he had heard from the Caribs with what
he had learned from the Spaniards respecting the town of the Omaguas
seen by Huten; of the gilded man who sacrificed in a lake, and of the
flight of the family of Atahualpa into the forests of Vilcabamba, and
the eastern Cordillera of the Andes. Garcilasso volume 2 page 194.) It
is difficult to distinguish what this conquistador had himself
observed in going down the Orinoco from what he said he had collected
in a pretended journal of Martinez, deposited at Porto Rico. It
appears that in general at that period the same ideas prevailed
respecting America as those which we have long entertained in regard
to Africa; it was imagined that more civilization would be found
towards the centre of the continent than on the coasts. Already Juan
Gonzalez, whom Diego de Ordaz had sent in 1531 to explore the banks of
the Orinoco, announced that "the farther you went up this river the
more you saw the population increase." Berrio mentions the
often-inundated province of Amapaja, between the confluence of the
Meta and the Cuchivero, where he found many little idols of molten
gold, similar to those which were fabricated at Cauchieto, east of
Coro.
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