12 SOUTH AMERICA— THE ANDES REGIONS. 



conquer golden palaces, paved with diamonds, and adorned with colonnades of 

 glittering gems. TTad not Columbus already declared that the Orinoco issued 

 from the " Earthly Paradise " ? And so they set out in quest of that marvellous 

 land whence their first parents had been expelled by the archangel. No failure 

 could damp their sanguine hopes or turn them aside from this pursuit of the 

 unknown. Every Indian legend, every hallucination of wearied wayfarers, every 

 ileetino- mirage on the distant horizon, seemed in the eyes of the eager adventurers 

 a fresh vision of the enchanted city where reigned the Man of Gold, the potent 

 Dorado ! For over a century all the expeditions made east of the Andes in the 

 Orinoco and Amazons basins were directed or inspired by these fanciful visions. 



One of the first of these treasure- seekers was the same Diego de Ordaz, com- 

 panion of Cortez, who had already visited the crater of Popocatepetl in the hope 

 of there finding liquid stores of the precious metals. In 1531 he ascended the 

 Orinoco to the Meta confluence, that is, to the great plains extending from the 

 inner slopes of the Andes to the Amazons basin, Gonzalo Pizarro, brother of the 

 founder of Lima, also undertook a great journey in the quest of gold, but during 

 his descent of the Hio Napo he found nothing more precious than the "cinnamon- 

 tree," which was at first supposed to be as efficacious as the Ceylon plant, but 

 which has since been neglected as worthless. 



But the bark of a tree, however valuable, could scarcely suffice to sate the 

 greed of a Pizarro. He accordingly continued his route be3'ond the cinnamon 

 forest ; but the morasses, the impenetrable masses of vegetation, the snags in the 

 river, strewed his path w4th such difficulties that he was obliged to send forward 

 a scout to explore the lower Napo and the mainstream of the Amazons. Unfor- 

 tunately, he placed too much confidence in Orellana, who had been selected 

 for this pioneer work, and who was himself eager, even at the price of treason, to 

 acquire the glory, perhaps the profit also, of the discovery. He accordingly 

 launched on the broad stream, drifting with the current from island to island, 

 from bank to bank, all the way to the " Freshwater Sea" formed by the immense 

 body of Amazonian waters spread over the Atlantic floods. For the first time the 

 South American continent had been traversed from shore to shore, and, as it 

 happened, the course followed nearly coincided with the equatorial line, not far 

 from the zone where it acquires its greatest breadth. 



This journey made by Orellana down the Amazons, and by his contemporaries 

 regarded as prodigious, had several imitators amongst the pioneers and mis- 

 sionaries of those times. But the voyage up-stream was delayed for nearly 

 another century, till 1638-9, when Captain Pedro Texeira ascended from Grao 

 Para to the city of Quito with a flotilla of forty-seven canoes, containing 

 70 Portuguese soldiers, 1,200 Indian sailors and soldiers, and the like number of 

 women and children.* 



Gold-hunters descending from the upland valleys of the present Peru and 

 Bolivia, also explored the waterpartings between the Amazons and La Plata 



* M. J. de la Espada, J'iaje del Capitdn Pedro Texeira Aguas arriba del Rio de las Amazonas. 



