492 



of the Oroonoko. Father Gumilla himself 

 whom Bouguer met at Carthagena, confessed 

 that he had been deceived ; and he read' to 

 father Gili, a short time before his death, a sup- 

 plement to his history of the Oroonoko, intend- 

 ed for a new edition, in which he recounts 

 gaily* the manner in which he had been unde- 

 ceived. The expedition of the boundaries, under 

 Iturriaga and Solano, completed in great detail 

 the knowledge of the geography of the Upper 

 Oroonoko, and the intertwinings of this river 

 with the Rio Negro. Solano established him- 

 self in 1756 at. the confluence of the Atabapo ; 

 and from that time the Spanish and Portugueze 

 commissioners often passed in their canoes, by 

 the Cassiquiare, from the Lower Oroonoko to 

 the Rio Negro, to visit each other at their head- 

 quarters of Cabruta~j~ and Mariva^:. Since 



* Lepidamente, alsuo solito, says the missionary Gili. 

 t General Ituriaga, confined by illness, first at Muitaco, 

 or Real Corona, and afterward at Cabruta, received a visit 

 in 1760 from the Portugueze colonel don Gabriel de Sousa 

 y Figueira, who came from Grand Para, having made a voy- 

 aged) f nearly nine hundred leagues in his boat. The Swedish 

 botanist, Loefling, who was chosen to accompany the expe- 

 dition of the boundaries at the expense of the Spanish govern- 

 ment, multiplied in his ardent imagination to such a point the 

 branchings of the great rivers of South America, that he 

 appeared well persuaded of being able to navigate by the 

 Rio Negro aud the Amazon to the Rio de la Plata. (Iter, 

 p. 131.) 



X This place, called Marioba and Mariova by d'Anvilk 



