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Updated: June 2, 2025
On the east of Javita, all along the Cassiquiare, and particularly in the mountains of Duida, the number of veins in the granite increases. These veins are full of holes and druses; and their frequency seems to indicate that the granite of these countries is not of very ancient formation.
At San Fernando, as well as in the neighbouring villages of San Balthasar and Javita, the abodes of the priests are neatly-built houses, covered by lianas, and surrounded by gardens. The tall trunks of the pirijao palms were the most beautiful ornaments of these plantations. In our walks, the president of the mission gave us an animated account of his incursions on the Rio Guaviare.
The road from San Carlos to San Fernando de Atabapo is far more disagreeable, and is half as long again by the Cassiquiare as by Javita and the Cano Pimichin. In this region I determined, by means of a chronometer by Berthoud, and by the meridional heights of stars, the situation of San Balthasar de Atabapo, Javita, San Carlos del Rio Negro, the rock Culimacavi, and Esmeralda.
The embarcadero of the Pimichin appeared to me to be eleven thousand toises west of its mouth, and 0 degrees 2 minutes west of the mission of Javita. This Cano is navigable during the whole year, and has but one raudal, which is somewhat difficult to go up; its banks are low, but rocky. After having followed the windings of the Pimichin for four hours and a half we at length entered the Rio Negro.
Besides the spadix and the fruit of the seje palm, the Indians of Javita lixiviate also the ashes of the famous liana called cupana, which is a new species of the genus paullinia, consequently a very different plant from the cupania of Linnaeus. I may here mention, that a missionary seldom travels without being provided with some prepared seeds of the cupana. This preparation requires great care.
Perhaps the most eventful and memorable journey during this period was the exploration of the Uaupés River, of which Wallace wrote nearly sixty years later: "So far as I have heard, no English traveller has to this day ascended the Uaupés River so far as I did, and no collector has stayed at any time at Javita, or has even passed through it."
The little settlements of the Europeans having now caused the independent Indians to retire from the banks of the Upper Orinoco, the solitude of these regions is such, that from Carichana to Javita, and from Esmeralda to San Fernando de Atabapo, during a course of one hundred and eighty leagues, we did not meet a single boat.
These discoveries will be multiplied, when, as the political state of the world seems now to indicate, European civilization shall flow in a great measure toward the equinoctial regions of the New Continent. The marshy tract between Javita and the embarcadero of Pimichin is infested with great numbers of vipers.
The low regions, which are bounded by the southern and northern declivities of the Parime and Brazil mountains, and which the geologist ought to mark by one name, contain, according to the no less precise language of hydrography, two basins of rivers, those of the Upper Orinoco and the Amazon, separated by a ridge that runs from Javita towards Esmeralda.
This difference, observed in the same family, appears to me very remarkable, though it is in no way contradictory to the results obtained by De Candolle in his ingenious researches on the chemical properties of plants. The collecting of these gummy and resinous substances is a trade in the village of Javita.
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