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What would lead me to doubt this last supposition is, that we saw toninas above the great cataracts of the Orinoco, in the Rio Atabapo. Did they penetrate into the centre of equinoctial America from the mouth of the Amazon, by the communication of that river with the Rio Negro, the Cassiquiare, and the Orinoco?
The Cassiquiare, as broad as the Rhine, and the course of which is one hundred and eighty miles in length, will no longer form uselessly a navigable canal between two basins of rivers which have a surface of one hundred and ninety thousand square leagues.
That great geographer was entirely ignorant of the existence of the Cassiquiare and the Atabapo; and he makes the Orinoco or Rio Paragua, the Japura, and the Putumayo, take their rise from three branchings of the Caqueta. The expedition of the boundaries, commanded by Iturriaga and Solano, corrected these errors.
The most depressing of all physical sufferings are those which are uniform in their duration, and can be combated only by long patience. It is probable, that in the exhalations of the forests of the Cassiquiare M. Bonpland imbibed the seeds of a severe malady, under which he nearly sunk on our arrival at Angostura.
The soil of the Cassiquiare appears more fertile than that of the valley of the Rio Negro, where maize does not prosper. It is called cumapana, and is cooked by being baked on the ashes.
This is the most usual method, according to the account of the missionary Gili, and it accords with what I myself learned from Father Zea. I do not believe that there exists one tumulus in Guiana, not even in the plains of the Cassiquiare and the Essequibo. It is believed they belong to a race of men analogous to that of the Sandwich Islands.
They heard with astonishment that the river on which this meeting took place was the Orinoco; and they brought Father Roman by the Cassiquiare to the Brazilian settlements on the Rio Negro. The superior of the Spanish missions was forced to remain near the flying camp of the troop of ransomers till the arrival of the Portuguese Jesuit Avogadri, who had gone upon business to Grand Para.
The variety of idioms spoken on the banks of the Meta, the Orinoco, the Cassiquiare, and the Rio Negro, is so prodigious, that a traveller, however great may be his talent for languages, can never hope to learn enough to make himself understood along the navigable rivers, from Angostura to the small fort of San Carlos del Rio Negro.
Thence it results that, while on the west of the Cassiquiare, between that river, the Atabapo, and the Rio Negro, we find only vast plains, in which rise some little hills and insulated rocks; real spurs stretch eastward of the Cassiquiare, from north-west to south-east, and form a continued mountainous territory as far as 2 degrees north latitude.
The passage from the mouth of the Rio Negro to Grand Para occupying only twenty or twenty-five days, it would not have taken us much more time to have gone down the Amazon as far as the coast of Brazil, than to return by the Cassiquiare and the Orinoco to the northern coast of Caracas.
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