AMERICA WITH ASIA. 217 



voyage, on approaching the coast of Cariay (Poyais, or Mos- 

 quito Coast), Veragua, and the Isthmus, he believed himself 

 to be near the mouth of the Granges.* These geographical 

 illusions, this mysterious veil, which enveloped the first 

 discoveries, contributed to magnify every object, and to fix 

 the attention of Europe on regions, the very names of 

 which are, to us, scarcely known. New Cadiz, the principal 

 seat of the pearl-fishery, was on an island which has again 

 become uninhabited. The extremity of the rocky coast of 

 Paria is also a desert Several towns were founded at the 

 mouth of the Eio Atrato, by the nnmes of Antigua del 

 Darien, Uraba, or San Sebastian de Buenavista. In thene 

 spots, so celebrated at the beginning of the sixteenth cen- 

 tury, the historians of the conquest tell us that the flower 

 of the Castilian heroes were found assembled : thence 

 Balboa set out to discover the South Sea ; Pizarro marched 

 from thence to conquer and ravage Peru ; and Pedro de 

 Ciea constantly followed the chain of the Andes, by An- 

 timjuia, Popayan, andCuzco, as far as La Plata, after having 

 gone 900 leagues by land. These towns of Darien are 

 destroyed ; some ruins scattered on the hills of Uraba, the 

 fruit-trees of Europe mixed with native trees, are all that 

 mark to the traveller the spots on which those towns once 

 stood. In almost all Spanish America the first lands peopled 

 by the Conquistadores, have retrograted into barbarism. f 



* "Tambien dicen que la mar baxa a Ciguare, y de alii a diez jornadas 

 es el Rio de Guanyues : para que estas tierras ebtun con Veragua como 

 Tortosa con Fuenterabia d Pisa con Venecia." [Also it is said that the 

 sea lowers at Ciguara, and from thence it is a ten days' journey to the 

 river Ganges ; for these lands are, with reference to Veragua, like Tor- 

 tosa with respect to Fuenterabia, or Pisa, with respect to Venice.] 

 These words are taken from the Lettera Rarissima of Columbus, of which 

 the original Spanish was lately found, and published by the learned 

 M. Navarrete, in his Coleccion de Viages, vol. i, p. 299. 



t In carefully collating the testimonies of the historians of the Con- 

 quest, some contradictions are observed in the periods assigned to the 

 foundation of the towns of Darien. Pedro de Cie^a, who had been on the 

 pot, affirms, that under the government of Alonzo de Ojeda and Nicuessa. 

 the town of Nuestra Seftora Santa Maria el Antigua del Darien was 

 founded on the western coast of the Gulf or Culata de Uraba, in 1509; 

 and that later (despues desto passado) Ojeda passed to the eastern coast 

 of the Culata to construct the town of San Sebastian de Uraba. The 

 former, called by abbreviation Ciudad del Antigua, had soon a population 



