Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 3 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
- Page 90 of 635 - First - Home
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. (See Schoell, Archives polit. or Pieces inedites volume
1 pages 48 to 58.) Ribeyro, in his celebrated map of the world of
1529, places the Rio de Vicente Pincon south of the Amazon, near the
Gulf of Maranhao.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 90 of 635
Words from 24801 to 25074
of 174507
