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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This River Appears, For The
First Time, By The Name Of Rio Dolce, On The Celebrated Map
Constructed In 1529 By Diego Ribeyro, Cosmographer Of The Emperor
Charles V, Which Was Published, With A Learned Commentary, By M.
Sprengel, In 1795.
Neither Columbus (1498) nor Alonzo de Ojeda,
accompanied by Amerigo Vespucci (1499), had seen the real mouth of the
Orinoco; they confounded it with the northern opening of the Gulf of
Paria, to which they attributed (by an exaggeration so common to the
navigators of that time, an immense volume of fresh water. It was
Vicente Yanez Pincon, who, after having discovered the mouth of the
Rio Maranon,* first saw, in 1500, that of the Orinoco. (* The name of
Maranon was known fifty-nine years before the expedition of Lopez de
Aguirre; the denomination of the river is therefore erroneously
attributed to the nickname of maranos (hogs), which this adventurer
gave his companions in going down the river Amazon. Was not this
vulgar jest rather an allusion to the Indian name of the river?) He
called this river Rio Dolce - a name which, since Ribeyro, was long
preserved on our maps, and which has sometimes been given erroneously
to the Maroni and to the Essequibo.
The great Lake Parima did not appear on our maps* till after the first
voyage of Raleigh. (* I find no trace of it on a very rare map,
dedicated to Richard Hakluyt, and constructed on the meridian of
Toledo. Novus Orbis, Paris 1587. In this map, published before the
voyage of Quiros, a group of Islands is marked (Infortunatae Insulae)
where the Friendly Islands actually are.
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