THE ORINOCO. 



91 



Desolacion, but since re- named the Salto de los Franceses ; he thus reached, if not 

 the source itself, at least the streamlet which lower down becomes the Orinoco. 



Humboldt's survey of the bifurcation of the Orinoco was one of the great 

 events of geographical history. But the admirers of the great naturalist carried 

 their zeal too far when they also credited him with the discovery of the navigable 

 channel connecting the Orinoco and Amazons basins. This channel, the Cassi- 

 quiare, was already known to the Spanish missionaries, and the boats of San 

 Carlos on the Amazons slopes had frequently penetrated into the Orinoco by 

 this waterway. On a map published in 1599 by Raleigh's- companion, Keymis, 

 a great salt lake is figured between the Amazons affluents and the Orinoco, which 

 he calls Raleana, " Raleigh's river." This lake reappears under all imaginable 

 forms in subsequent documents, and even in 1763 Captain Jose Solano, specially 



Fiff. 30. — Mythical Lake of Pabima. 



charged to survey the Hispano-Portuguese frontiers, represented the mythical 

 Lake Parima as communicating with the two great South American rivers. 



In 1638 Benito de Acosta had already stated, on the report of the natives, that 

 the Rio Negro communicated on the one hand with the Amazons, and on the 

 other with the northern sea, "facing the island of Trinidad, through a stream 

 which is supposed to be the famous Orinoco," a hypothesis reproduced in Sanson 

 d'Abbeville's map of 1656. Later Cristobal de Acufia endeavoured to show 

 that the bifurcation took place between the Rio Negro and the Essequibo, or else 

 the Oyapoc. At last all doubt was removed in 1725, when some Portuguese 

 explorers ascended the Rio Negro to its upper affluents, and passed thence 

 through the Cassiquiare into the Orinoco. The fact was afterwards established 

 that the Cassiquiare lies in a valley, which is prolonged southwards by that of 

 another river, where occurs a second bifurcation of streams, that of the Baria and 



