100 THE "GOLDEIT KIIfQ." 



the Maranon to establish themselves on the Rio Negro. A 

 taste for the marvellous, and a wish to invest the (Descrip- 

 tions of the New Continent with some of the colouring of 

 classic antiquity, no doubt contributed to give great import- 

 ance to the first narratives of Orellana. In perusing the 

 works of Vespucci, Fernando Columbus, Greraldini, Oviedo, 

 and Pietro Martyr, we recognize this tendency of the writers 

 of the sixteenth century to find among the newly discovered 

 nations all that the Greeks have related to us of the first 

 age of the world, and of the manners of the barbarous Scy- 

 thians and Africans. But if Oviedo, in addressing his letters 

 to cardinal Bembo, thought fit to flatter the taste of a man 

 so familiar with the study of antiquity, Sir "Walter Raleigh 

 had a less poetic aim. He sought to fix the attention of 

 Queen Elizabeth on the great empire of Guiana, the con- 

 quest of which he proposed. He gave a description of the 

 rising of that gilded king (el dorado}* whose chamberlains, 

 furnished with long tubes, blew powdered gold every morn- 

 ing over his body, after having rubbed it over with aromatic 

 oils : but nothing could be better adapted to strike the ima- 

 gination of queen Elizabeth, than the warlike republic of 

 women without husbands, who resisted the Castilian heroes. 

 Such were the motives which prompted exaggeration on the 

 part of those writers who have given most reputation to the 

 Amazons of America ; but these motives do not, I think, 

 suffice for .entirely rejecting a tradition, which is spread 

 among various nations having no communications one with 

 another. 



Thirty years after La Condaniine visited Quito, a Portu- 

 guese astronomer, Ribeiro, who has traversed the Amazon, 

 and the tributary streams which run into that river on the 

 northern side, has confirmed on the spot all that the learned 

 Frenchman had advanced. He found the same traditions 

 among the Indians; and he collected them with the greater 

 impartiality as he did not himself believe that the Amazons 



the nephritic colic and epilepsy, from their fathers, who received them 

 from the women without husbands." 



* The term el dorado, which signifies the gilded, was not originally 

 the name of the country. The territory subsequently distinguished by 

 that appellation WHS at tirst known as the country of "el Rey Dorada*' 

 (the. Glided King). 



