50 LEGENDS OF GOLD COUNTRIES. 



immense extent, which he saw from afar ; or of the battle 

 of the Omaguas, where thirty-nine Spaniards (the names of 

 fourteen are recorded in the annals of the time) fought 

 against fifteen thousand Indians. These ialse reports con- 

 tributed greatly to embellish the fable of El Dorado. The 

 name of the town of the Omaguas is not found in the narra- 

 tive ot Huten ; but the Manoas, from whom Father Fritz 

 received, in the seventeenth century, plates of beaten gold, 

 in his mission of Yurim-Aguas, are neighbours of the Om- 

 aguas. The name of Manoa subsequently passed from the 

 country of the Amazons to an imaginary town, placed in El 

 Dorado de la Parima. The celebrity attached to those coun- 

 tries between the Caqueta (Papamene) and the Gruaupe 

 (one ol the tributary streams of the Bio Negro) excited 

 Pedro de Ursua, in 1560, to that fatal expedition, which 

 ended by the revolt of the tyrant Aguirre. Ursua, in going 

 down the Caqueta to enter the river of the Amazons, heard 

 of the province of Caricuri. This denomination clearly 

 indicates ' the country of gold ;' for I find that this metal 

 is called caricuri in the Tamanac, and carucuru in the 

 Caribbee. Is it a foreign word, that denotes gold among 

 the nations of the Orinoco, as the words sugar and cotton 

 are in our European languages? This would prove that 

 these nations learned to know the precious metals among 

 the foreign products which came to them from the Cor- 

 dilleras,* or from the plains at the eastern back of the 

 Andes. 



"We arrive now at the period when the fable of El Dorado 

 was fixed in the eastern part of Guiana, first at the pre- 

 tended lake Cassipa (on the banks of the Paragua, a tribu- 

 tary stream of the Carony), and afterwards between the 

 sources of the Bio Essequibo and the Eio Branco. This 

 circumstance has had the greatest influence on the state of 

 geography in those countries. Antonio de Berrio, son-in- 

 2iw f and sole heir of the great Adelantado Gonzalo Ximenez 



* In Peruvian or Quichua (lengua del Inca) gold is called cori, whence 

 are derived chichicori, gold in powder, and corikoya, gold-ore. 



+ Properly " casado con una sobrina." (Fray Pedro Simon, p. 597 

 and 608. Harris, Coll., vol. ii, p. 212. Laet, p. 652. Caulin, p. 175.) 

 Raleigh calls Quesada Cemenes de Casada. He also confounds the pe- 

 riods of the voyages of Ordaz (Ordace), Orellana (Oreliano), and Ursua. 

 See Empire of Guiana, p. 1320. 



