323 



Oroonoko ; he imagined, that there was a com- 

 munication with Rio San Felipe, which flows 

 out west of Cape North, and by which, accord- 

 ing to him, the tyrant Lopez de Aguirre ter- 

 minated his long navigation. This last hypo- 

 thesis appears to me very conjectural, although, 

 as we have seen above, the tyrant, in his strange 

 letter to Phillip II, confesses himself, that, " he 

 knows not how he and his men got through so 

 great a mass of water.*" 



Until Acunna had acquired in his voyage 

 some vague notions of the communications with 

 another great river north of the Amazon, the 

 best informed missionaries considered the Oroo- 

 noko as a continuation of the Caqueta (Kaque- 

 ta, Caketa). " This river," says Fray Pedro 

 Simonf- in 1625, f rises on the eastern declivity 



* See vol. iv, p. 259, and vol. ii, p. 220. In reading 

 again carefully the narrative of the voyage of Lopez de 

 Aguirre, of which Fray Pedro Simon has preserved a mi- 

 nute account (Notic. 6, c. 23—25, p. 471-482), I see no- 

 thing to indicate, that the expedition ever went out of the 

 bed of the Amazon. We see the river enlarging itself by 

 degrees, and that Aguirre went out (in the beginning of 

 the month of July 1561) through an opening full of very 

 low and small islands, which was eighty leagues broad. 

 The facility, with which his sloops performed in seventeen 

 days the passage of the u golfo que ay desde la boca del Rio 

 hasta la isla de la Margarita" might appear surprising, if we 

 did not recollect the force of the currents, which in these 

 latitudes run to the north-west. 



f We must here recollect, that Fray Pedro Simon, Pro- 



y2 



