Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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The Expedition Of The Boundaries, Under Iturriaga And
Solano, Completed In Detail The Knowledge Of The Geography Of The
Upper
Orinoco, and the intertwinings of this river with the Rio Negro.
Solano established himself in 1756 at the confluence of
The Atabapo;
and from that time the Spanish and Portuguese commissioners often
passed in their canoes, by the Cassiquiare, from the Lower Orinoco to
the Rio Negro, to visit each other at their head-quarters of Cabruta*
and Mariva. (* General Iturriaga, confined by illness, first at
Muitaco, or Real Corona, and afterward at Cabruta, received a visit in
1760 from the Portuguese colonel Don Gabriel de Souza y Figueira, who
came from Grand Para, having made a voyage of nearly nine hundred
leagues in his boat. The Swedish botanist, Loefling, who was chosen to
accompany the expedition of the boundaries at the expense of the
Spanish government, so greatly multiplied in his ardent imagination
the branchings of the great rivers of South America, that he appeared
well persuaded of being able to navigate, by the Rio Negro and the
Amazon, to the Rio de la Plata. (Iter page 131.)) Since the year 1767,
two or three canoes come annually from the fort of San Carlos, by the
bifurcation of the Orinoco to Angostura, to fetch salt and the pay of
the troops. These passages, from one basin of a river to another, by
the natural canal of the Cassiquiare, excite no more attention in the
colonists at present than the arrival of boats that descend the Loire
by the canal of Orleans, awakens on the banks of the Seine.
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