402 PROBABLE OK1G1H OJf T1IE LEGEND. 



voyage of Orellana, Christopher Columbus imagined he had 

 found the Amazons in the Caribbee Islands. This great 

 man was told, that the small island of Madanino (Mont- 

 serrat) was inhabited by warlike women, who lived the 

 greater part of the year separate from men. At other times 

 also, the conquistadores imagined that the women, who 

 defended their huts in the absence of their husbands, were 

 republics of Amazons ; and, by an error less excusable, 

 formed a like supposition respecting the religious congrega- 

 tions, the convents of Mexican virgins, who, far from admit- 

 ing men at any season of the year into their society, lived 

 according to the austere rule of Quetzalcohuatl. Such was 

 the disposition of men's minds, that in the long succession 

 of travellers, who crowded on each other in their discoveries 

 and in narrations of the marvels of the New World, every 

 one readily declared he had seen what his predecessors had 

 announced. 



We passed three nights at San Carlos del Bio Negro. 1 

 count the nights, because I watched during the greater part 

 of them, in the hope of seizing the moment of the passage of 

 some star over the meridian. That I might have nothing to 

 reproach myself with, I kept the instruments always ready 

 for an observation. I could not even obtain double altitudes, 

 to calculate the latitude by the method of Douwes. What 

 a contrast between two parts of the same zone; between the 

 sky of Cumana, where the air is constantly pure as in 

 Persia and Arabia, and the sky of the Bio Negro, veiled like 

 that of the Feroe islands, without sun, or moon, or stars! 



On the 10th of May, our canoe being ready before sun- 

 rise, we embarked to go up the Bio Negro as far as the 

 mouth of the Cassiquiare, and to devote ourselves to re- 

 searches on the real course of that river, which unites the 

 Orinoco to the Amazon. The morning was fine; but, in 

 proportion as the heat augmented, the sky became obscured. 

 The air is so saturated by water in these forests, that the 

 vesicular vapours become visible on the least increase of 

 evaporation at the surface of the earth. The breeze being 

 never felt, the humid strata are not displaced and renewed 

 by dryer air. We were every day more grieved at the 

 aspect of the cloudy sky. M. Bonpland was losing by this 

 excessive humidity the plants he had collected; and I, for 



