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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Our Maps Of America Are
Overloaded With Names, For Which Rivers Have Been Created.
This desire
of compiling, of filling up vacancies, and of employing, without
investigation, heterogeneous materials, has given our maps
Of
countries the least visited an appearance of exactness, the falsity of
which is discovered when we arrive on the spot.) Almost all the maps
of South America which have appeared since the year 1775 are, in what
regards the interior of the country, comprised between the steppes of
Venezuela and the river of the Amazons, between the eastern back of
the Andes and the coast of Cayenne, a simple copy of the great Spanish
map of La Cruz Olmedilla. A line, indicating the extent of country
which Don Jose Solano boasted of having discovered and pacified by his
troops and emissaries, was taken for the road followed by that
officer, who never went beyond San Fernando de Atabapo, a village one
hundred and sixty leagues distant from the pretended lake Parima. The
study of the work of Father Caulin, who was the historiographer of the
expedition of Solano, and who states very clearly, from the testimony
of the Indians, how the name of the river Parima gave rise to the
fable of El Dorado, and of an inland sea, has been neglected. No use
either has been made of a map of the Orinoco, three years posterior to
that of La Cruz, and traced by Surville from the collection of true or
hypothetical materials preserved in the archives of the Despacho
universal de Indias.
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