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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The Name Of Manoa Subsequently Passed From
The Country Of The Amazons To An Imaginary Town, Placed In El Dorado
De La Parima.
The celebrity attached to those countries between the
Caqueta (Papamene) and the Guaupe (one of the tributary streams of the
Rio Negro) excited Pedro de Ursua, in 1560, to that fatal expedition,
which ended by the revolt of the tyrant Aguirre.
Ursua, in going down
the Caqueta to enter the river of the Amazons, heard of the province
of Caricuri. This denomination clearly indicates the country of gold;
for I find that this metal is called caricuri in the Tamanac, and
carucuru in the Caribbee. Is it a foreign word that denotes gold among
the nations of the Orinoco, as the words sugar and cotton are in our
European languages? This would prove that these nations learned to
know the precious metals among the foreign products which came to them
from the Cordilleras,* or from the plains at the eastern back of the
Andes. (* In Peruvian or Quichua (lengua del Inca) gold is called
cori, whence are derived chichicori, gold in powder, and corikoya,
gold-ore.)
We arrive now at the period when the fable of El Dorado was fixed in
the eastern part of Guiana, first at the pretended lake Cassipa (on
the banks of the Paragua, a tributary stream of the Carony), and
afterwards between the sources of the Rio Essequibo and the Rio
Branco. This circumstance has had the greatest influence on the state
of geography in those countries.
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