26 
THE LEGEHJ) OF El DOKADO. 
Jose Avalo, the iiitendant of Caracas, undertook a very con 
^derable work in the centre of the missions of the Eio 
Carony, near the town of Upata, in the Cerros del Potrero 
and de Chirica. They declared that the whole rock was 
auriferous; ctamping-mills, hrocards^ and smelting-furnaces 
were constructed. After having expended very large sums, 
't was discovered that the pyrites contained no trace what- 
ever of gold. These essays, though fruitless, served to 
renew the ancient idea, “ that every shining rock in Guiana 
18 teemmg with goU {una madre del oro).” Not contented 
with taking the mica-slate to the lurnace, strata of amphi- 
bolic slates were shown to me near Angostura, without any 
mixture of heterogeneous substances, which had been worked 
under the whimsical name of black ore of gdd (oro negro). 
This is the place to make known, in order to complete the 
description of the Orinoco, the principal results of my 
researches on El Dorado, the White Sea, or Laguna Parime 
and the sources of the Orinoco, as they are marked in the 
most recent maps. The idea of an auriferous earth, emi- 
nently rich, has been connected, ever since the end of the 
sixteenth century, with that of a great iidand lake, which 
mrnishes at the same time waters to the Orinoco, the Eio 
Branco, and the Bio Bssequibo. I believe, from a more 
accurate knowledge of the country, a long and laborious 
study of the Spanish authors who treat of El Dorado, and, 
above all, from comparing a great number of ancient maps’ 
arranged in chronological order, I have succeeded in discover- 
ing the_ source of these errors. All fables have some real 
foundation ; that of El Dorado resembles those myths of 
antiquity, which, travelhng from country to coimtry, have 
been successively adapted to different localities. In the 
sciences, in order to distinguish truth from error, it often 
suffices to retrace the history of opinions, and to follow their 
successive developments The discussion to which I shall 
devote the end of this chapter is important, not only because 
it throws Ught on the events of the Conquest, and that long 
series of disastrous expeditions made in search of El Dorado 
the last of which was in the year 1775 ; it also furnishes, m 
addition to this simply historical interest, another more 
substantial and more generally felt, that of rectifying the 
geography of South. A merica, and of disembarrassing the 
