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Updated: June 1, 2025


This immense journey had important results not only was the course of the Amazon made out in scientific fashion, but it seemed almost certain that it communicated with the Orinoco. Fifty-five years later Humboldt and Bonpland completed the valuable work of La Condamine, and drew up the map of the Mananon as far as Napo.

They started with 300 soldiers and 4000 Indian porters; but, arrived on the banks of one of the tributaries of the Napo, their followers were so greatly decreased in number by disease and hunger, and the remainder so much weakened, that Pizarro was obliged to despatch Orellana with fifty men, in a vessel they had built, to the Napo, in search of provisions.

On the Napo itself, still higher up than Archidona where the stream, fed by the snows of the grand volcano of Cotopaxi, issues from the spurs of the Andes there were they most likely to accomplish the object of their expedition, and thither determined they to go.

They had reacted a district which lies between two great branches of the Napo river, and which bears the name of Canelos, or the "cinnamon country." The name was given to it by the Spanish discoverers of Peru from the fact of their finding trees in this region, the bark of which bears a considerable resemblance to the celebrated spice of the East Indies.

It would seem as though this sea of verdure stretched forth an arm from the basin of Buenos Ayres, by the Llanos of Tucuman, Manso, Chuco, the Chiquitos, and the Moxos, to the Pampas del Sacramento and the savannahs of Napo, Guaviare, Meta and Apure.

At length they reached the point they sought, where the Napo plunged into a much larger stream, that mighty river since known as the Amazon, which rolls for thousands of miles eastward through the vast Brazilian forest. Here they looked in vain for the brigantine and the rich and populous country promised them. They were still in a dense forest region, as unpromising as that they had left.

Francisco de Orellana, after having vainly sought El Dorado with Pizarro in the Provincia de los Canelos, and on the auriferous banks of the Napo, went down the great river of the Amazon. They are three powerful nations, the latter of which, stretching toward the west along the banks of the Guape or Uaupe, had been already mentioned in the voyages of Quesada and Huten.

All these monkish settlements not only on the Napo, but on the other tributaries of the Amazon were at one time in a state of considerable prosperity.

At length the way-worn company came on a broad expanse of water formed by the Napo, one of the great tributaries of the Amazon, and which, though only a third or fourth rate river in America, would pass for one of the first magnitude in the Old World. The sight gladdened their hearts, as, by winding along its banks, they hoped to find a safer and more practicable route.

On arriving at the mouth of the Napo, therefore, they engaged a periagua, with its Indian crew, and continued their journey up this stream towards the still-distant Cordilleras of Quito.

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