BOTTWDA-BIEC OF BRAZIL. 373 



of Madrid and Lisbon, commissioners of the boundaries 

 were sent to the Orinoco, the Amazon, and the Rio Plata. 



The little that was known, up to the end of the last cen- 

 tury, of the astronomical geography of the interior of the 

 New Continent, was owing to these estimable and laborious 

 men, the French and Spanish academicians, who measured a 

 meridian line at Quito, and to officers who went from Val- 

 paraiso to Buenos Ayres to join the expedition of Malaspina. 

 Those persons who know the inaccuracy of the maps of 

 South America, and have seen those uncultivated lands 

 between the Jupura and the Rio Negro, the Madeira and 

 the TJcayale, the Rio Branco and the coasts of Cayenne, 

 which up to our own days have been gravely disputed in 

 Europe, can must not a little surprised at the perse- 

 verance with which the possession of a few square leagues is 

 litigated. These disputed grounds are generally separated 

 from the cultivated part of the colonies by deserts, the 

 extent of which is unknown. In the celebrated con- 

 ferences of Puente de Caya the question was agitated, 

 whether, in fixing the line of demarcation three hundred and 

 seventy Spanish leagues to the west of the Cape Verde 

 Islands, the pope meant that the first meridian snould be 

 reckoned from the centre of the island of St. Nicholas, or 

 (as the court of Portugal asserted) from the western extre- 

 mity of the little island of St. Antonio. In the year 1754, 

 the time of the expedition of Iturriaga and Solano, negotia- 

 tions were entered into respecting the possession of the 

 then desert banks of the Tuamini, and of a marshy tract 

 which we crossed in one evening going from Javita to Cano 

 Pimichin. The Spanish commissioners very recently would 

 have placed the divisional line at the point where the 

 Apoporis falls into the Jupura, while the Portuguese astro- 

 nomers carried it back as far as Salto Grande. 



The Rio Negro and the Jupuro are two tributary streams 

 of the Amazon, and may be compared in length to the 

 Danube. The upper parts belong to the Spaniards, while 

 the lower are occupied by the Portuguese. The Christian 

 settlements are very numerous from Mocoa to the mouth of 

 the Caguan; while on the Lower Jupura the Portuguese 

 have founded only a few villages. On the Rio Negro, 

 on the contrary, the Spaniards have not been able to rival 



