26 THE LEGEND OF EL DOHA1JO. 



Jose Avalo, the intendant of Caracas, undertook a very coa 

 siderable work in the centre of the missions of the Bio 

 Carony, near the town of Upata, in the Cerros del Potrero 

 and de Chirica. They declared that the whole rock was 

 auriferous; stamping-mills, brocards, and smelting-furnaces 

 were constructed. After having expended very large sums, 

 it was discovered that the pyrites contained no trace what- 

 ever of gold. These essays, though fruitless, served to 

 renew the ancient idea, " that every shining rock in Guiana 

 is teeming with gold (una, madre del oro)." Not contented 

 with taking the mica-slate to the iurnace, strata of amphi- 

 bolic slates were shown to me near Angostura, without any 

 mixture of heterogeneous substances, which had been worked 

 under the whimsical name of black ore of gold (oro negro). 

 This is the place to make known, in order to complete the 

 description of the Orinoco, the principal results of my 

 researches on El Dorado, the White Sea, or Laguna Parime, 

 and the sources of the Orinoco, as they are marked in the 

 most recent maps. The idea of an auriferous earth, emi- 

 nently rich, has been connected, ever since the end ot the 

 sixteenth century, with that of a great inland lake, which 

 furnishes at the same time waters to the Orinoco, the Rio 

 Branco, and the Rio Essequibo. I believe, from a more 

 accurate knowledge of the country, a long and laborious 

 study of the Spanish authors who treat of El Dorado, and, 

 above all, from comparing a great number of ancient maps, 

 arranged in chronological order, I have succeeded in discover- 

 ing the source of these errors. All fables have some real 

 foundation; that of El Dorado resembles those myths of 

 antiquity, which, travelling from country to country, have 

 been successively adapted to different localities. In the 

 sciences, in order to distinguish truth from error, it often 

 suffices to retrace the history of opinions, and to follow their 

 successive developments The discussion to which I shall 

 devote the end of this chapter is important, not only because 

 it throws light on the events of the Conquest, and that long 

 series of disastrous expeditions made in search of El Dorado, 

 the last of which was in the year 1775 ; it also furnishes, in 

 addition to this simply historical interest, another, more 

 substantial and more generally felt, that of rectifying the 

 geography of South America, and of disembarrassing the 







