E2 EXPEDITION OF BEBRIO. 



(Juan Martin de Albujar?), who said he had been aban- 

 doned in the expedition of Diego de Ordaz, and led Irom 

 town to town till he reached the capital of El Dorado, had 

 inflamed the imagination of Berno. It is difficult to dis- 

 tinguish what this conquistador had himself observed in 

 going down the Orinoco from what he said he had collected 

 in a pretended journal of Martinez, deposited at Porto Bico* 

 It appears, that in general at that period the same ideas 

 prevailed respecting America as those which we have long 

 entertained in regard to Africa ; it was imagined that more 

 civilization would be found towards the centre of the con- 

 tinent than on the coasts. Already Juan Gonzalez, whom 

 Diego de Ordaz had sent in 1531 to explore the banks of 

 the Orinoco, announced that " the farther you went up this 

 river the more you saw the population increase." Berrio 

 mentions the often-inundated province of Amapaja, between 

 the confluence of the Meta and the Cuchivero, where he 

 found many little idols of molten gold, similar to those 

 which were fabricated at Cauchieto, east of Coro. He 

 believed this gold to be a product of the granitic soil that 

 covers the mountainous country between the Carichana, 

 Uruana, and Cuchivero. In fact, the natives have recently 

 found a mass of native gold in the Quebrada del Tigre, near 

 the mission of Encaramada. Berrio mentions on the east of 

 the province of Amapaja the Bio Carony (Caroly), which 

 was said to issue from a great lake, because one of the 

 tributary streams of the Carony, the Bio Paragua (river of 

 the great water), had been taken for an inland sea, from 

 ignorance of the Indian languages. Several of the Spanish 

 historians believed that this lake, the source of the Carony, 

 was the Grand Manoa of Berrio ; but the notions he com- 

 municated to Baleigh show that the Laguna de Manoa (del 

 Dorado, or de Parime,) was supposed to be to the south of 

 the Bio Paragua, transformed into Laguna Cassipa. " Both 

 these basins had auriferous sands ; but on the banks of the 

 Cassipa was situate Macureguarai (Margureguaira), the 



perhaps at Porto Rico, must have combined what he had heard from the 

 Caribs with what he had learned from the Spaniards respecting the town 

 of the Omaguas seen by Huten ; of 'the gilded man' who sacrificed in a 

 lake, and of the flight of the family of Atahualpa into the forests of Vilca- 

 h tun ha, and the eastern Cordillera of the Andes. (Garcilasso, vol. ii, 

 p. 194). 



