r 570 



we may repeat with Tacitus ; est durans originis 

 vis. 



These tribes with a fair complexion, which we 

 had an opportunity of seeing at the mission of 

 Esmeralda, inhabit part of a mountainous 

 country, that extends between the sources of six 

 tributary streams of the Oroonoko, the Padamo, 

 the Jao, the Ventuari, the Erevato, the Amy, 

 and the Paraguay *. The Spanish and Portu- 

 guese missionaries have the custom of designat- 

 ing this country more particularly by the name 

 of Parima. Here, as in several other countries 

 of Spanish America, the savages have recon- 

 quered what had been wrested from them by 

 civilization, or rather by it's precursors, the mis- 

 sionaries. The expedition of the boundaries 

 under Solano, and the extravagant zeal displayed 

 by a governor of Guyana *f- for the discovery of 

 Dorado, revived in the latter half of the eigh- 

 teenth century, in some individuals, that spirit 



* They are six tributary streams on the right bank of the 

 Oroonoko j the first three run toward the south, or the Up- 

 per Oroonoko ; the three others toward the north, or the 

 .Lower Oroonoko. The word Parima, which signifies water, 

 great water, is applied sometimes, and more especially, to the 

 land bathed by the Rio Parima, or Rio Branco (Rio de 

 Aguas Blancas) , a stream running into the Rio Negro j some- 

 times to the mountains (Sierra Parima), which divide the 

 Upper and Lower Oroonoko. 



+ Don Manuel Centurion, Governador y Comendante 

 general of Guyana from 1766 to 1777. 



