478 



breaks off." He discusses what the Rio Grande 

 may be ; and he concludes, that it certainly is 

 not the Oroonoko, but perhaps the Rio Dulce 

 or the Rio de Felipe, that by which Aguirre 

 reached the sea # . Acunha inclines to the last 



* I doubt if Acunha had himself a precise idea of what he 

 calls Rio Dulce and Rio Felipe, when distinguishing the 

 latter from the principal mouth of the Amazon. Vicente 

 Pinzon, coming in the year 1500 from the mouth of the 

 Maragnon to the coast of Paria, had given the name of Rio 

 Dulce to the mouth of a river, " near which, at twenty 

 leagues from the coast, he took in water." Herera (vol. i. 

 sec. i, p. 108) believes it to be a branch of the Yuyapari, or 

 Oroonoko : I rather think it is the Oroonoko itself. But 

 what river is that, which the Dutch call Rio Dulce, or Felipe 

 Hadias? (Soutkey, vol. i, p. 602). Of this I am ignorant. 

 The very rare map of Paulo di Forlani of Verona {la Des- 

 crittione di tutto il Peru) preserved in the King's Library at 

 Paris, number 457, gives the Maragnon, the Oregliana, the 

 Rio Dulce, and the Rio Viaparo, from south to north, as so 

 many independant rivers. The first is, from it's situation, 

 the Rio Meary of the province of Maranham, to which is 

 given the length of the course of the Amazon, such as it 

 was laid down by Orellana in 1540. The second is indi- 

 cated as a very small river, although, judging from the lati- 

 tude, it is the real river of the Amazons, of which Pinzon 

 discovered the mouths in 1500 5 and which, as Mr. Southey 

 has fully proved, then took the name of the Maranon, long 

 before the expedition of Aguirre. The third river appears to 

 be the Marony (Marowine, Maraveni, Marwyne), or the 

 great river of Essequibo ; finally, the fourth, the Viaparo, it 

 cannot be doubted, is the Oroonoko. The geographer 

 De ITsle indicates a river near Cape Orange, " which must 



