nrsrcnoN WITH THE RIO NEGUO. 429 



Orinoco. Father Gun.illa himself, whom Bouguer met at 

 Carthagena, confessed that he had been deceived ; and he 

 read to Father Gili, a short time before his death, a supple- 

 ment to his history of the Orinoco, intended for a new 

 edition, in which he recounts pleasantly the manner in 

 which he had been undeceived. The expedition of the 

 boundaries, under Iturriaga and Solano, completed in 

 detail the knowledge of the geography of the Upper 

 Orinoco, and the intertwinings of this river with the Rio 

 Negro. Solano established himself in 1756 at the con- 

 fluence of the Atabapo; and from that time the Spanish 

 and Portuguese commissioners often passed in their canoes, 

 by the Cassiquiare, from the Lower Orinoco to the Rio 

 Negro, to visit each other at their head-quarters of Cabruta* 

 and Mariva. Since the year 1767, two or three canoes 

 come annually from the fort of San Carlos, by the bifur- 

 cation of the Orinoco to Angostura, to fetch salt and the 

 pay of the troops. These passages, from one basin of a 

 river to another, by the natural canal of the Cassiquiare, 

 excite no more attention in the colonists at present than 

 the arrival of boats that descend the Loire by the canal of 

 Orleans, awakens on the banks of the Seine. 



Although, since the journey of Father Roman, in 1744, 

 precise notions have been acquired in the Spanish posses- 

 sions in America, both of the direction of the Upper Orinoco 

 from east to west, and of the manner of its communication 

 with the Rio Negro, this knowledge did not reach Europe 

 till a much later period. In 1750, La Condamine and 

 D'Anvillef were still of opinion that the Orinoco was a 



* General Iturriaga, confined by illness, first at Muitaco, or Real 

 Corona, and afterward at Cabruta, received a visit in 1760 from the" 

 Portuguese colonel Don Gabriel de Souza y Figueira, who came from 

 Grand Pura, having made a voyage of nearly nine hundred leagues in his 

 boat. The Swedish botanist, Loeflinp, who was chosen to accompany 

 the expedition of the boundaries at the expense of the Spanish government, 

 so greatly multiplied in his ardent imagination the branchings of the 

 great rivers of South America, that he appeared well persuaded of being 

 able to navigate, by the Rio Negro and the Amazon, to the Rio de la 

 Plata. (//, p. 131.) 



f See the classical memoir of this great geographer in the Journal deg 

 Savans, March 1750, p. 184. " One fact," says D'Anville, "n-hich can- 

 aot be conside;eJ as equivocal, after the proofs with winch we have bei 



