AMElllCA -WITH ASIA. 
217 
voyage, on approaching the coast of Cariay (Poyais, Or Mos- 
quito Coast), Veragua, and the Isthmus, he believed himself 
to be near the mouth of the Ganges.* These geographical 
illusions, this mysterious veil, which enveloped the first 
discoveries, contributed to magnify every object, and to fix 
the attention of Europe on regions, the very names of 
which are, to us, scarcely knoivn. New Cadiz, the principal 
seat of the pearl-fishery, was on an island which has again 
become uninhabited. The extremity of the rocky coast of 
Paria is also a desert Several towms were founded at the 
mouth of the Eio Atrato, by the names of Antigua del 
Darien, Uraba, or San Sebastian de Buenavista. In these 
spots, so celebrated at tlie beginning of the sixteenth cen- 
tiirv, the historians of the conquest tell us that the flower 
of 'the Castilian heroes were found assembled : thence 
Balboa set out to discover the South Sea ; Pizarro marched 
from thence to conquer and ravage Peru; and Pedro do 
Cie^a constantly followed the chain of the Andes, by An- 
tioquia, Popayan, and Cuzco, as far as La Plata, alter having 
gone 900 leagues by land. These towns of Darien are 
destroyed ; some rums scattered on the hills of Uraba, the 
fruit-trees of Europe mixed with native trees, are all that 
mark to the traveller the spiots on which those towns once 
stood. In almost all Spanish America the first lands peopled 
by the Conquistadores, have retrograted into barbarism.t 
* “ Tambien dicen que la mar baxa a Ciguare, y de alii a diez joniadas 
rs el Rio de Guangues : para qne estas tierras estan con Veragua como 
I'ortosa con Fuenterabia 6 Pisa con Venecia," [Also it is said that the 
^ea lowers at Ciguara, and from thence it is a ten days^ journey to the 
river Ganges ; for these lands are, with reicrcnce to Veragua, like Tor- 
tosa with respect to Fuenterabia, or Pisa, with respect to Venice.] 
liiese words are taken from the Jjettera Rarissima of Columbus, of which 
the original Spanish w’as lately found, and puitlished by the learned 
Navarrete, in his Coleccion de Viages, vol. i, p. 299. 
*t In carefully collating the testimonies of tlie historians of the Con- 
quest, some contradictions are observed in the periods assigned to the 
foundation of the towns of Darieq. Pedro do Cie^a, who had been on the 
*Pot, affirms, that under the government of Alonzo de Ojeda and Nicuessa, 
the town of Nuestra Sefiora Santa Maria el Antigua del Darien was 
founded on the western coast of the Gulf or Culata de Uraba, in 1509 ; 
»ud that later (despues desto passado) Ojeda passed to the eastern coast 
uf the Culata to construct the town of San Sebastian de Uraba. Ihe 
former, called by abbreviation Ciudad del Antigua, had soon a population 
