BOUNDARIES OF BRAZIL. 
373 
of Madrid and Lisbon, commissioners of the boundaries 
were sent to the Orinoco, the Amazon, and the Eio Plata. 
The little that was known, up to the end of the last cen- 
tury, of the astronomical geography of the interior of the 
New Continent, was owing to these estimable and laborious 
men, the French and Spanish academicians, who measured a 
meridian line at Quito, and to officers who went from Val- 
paraiso to Buenos Ayres to join the expedition of Malaspina. 
Those persons who know the inaccuracy of the maps of 
South America, and have seen those uncultivated lands 
between the Jupura and the Eio Negro, the Madeira and 
the TTcayale, the Eio Branco and the coasts of Cayenne, 
which up to our own days have been gravely disputed in 
Europe, can must not a little surprised at the perse- 
verance with which the possession of a few square leagues is 
litigated. These disputed grounds are generally separated 
from the cultivated part of the colonies by deserts, the 
extent of which is unknown. In the celebrated con- 
ferences of Puente de Caya the question was agitated, 
whether, in fixing the line of demarcation three hundred and 
seventy’ Spanish leagues to the west of the Cape Verde 
Islands, the pope meant that the first meridian should be 
reckoned from the centre of the island of St. Nicholas, or 
(as the court of Portugal asserted) from the western extre- 
mity of the little island of St. Antonio. In the year 1754, 
the time of the expedition of Iturriaga and Solano, negotia- 
tions were entered into respecting the possession of the 
then desert banks of the Tuamini, and of a marshy tract 
which we crossed in one evening going from Javita to Cano 
Pimichin. The Spanish commissioners very recently would 
Have placed the divisional line at the point where the 
Apoporis falls into the Jupura, while the Portuguese astro- 
nomers carried it back as far as Salto Grande. 
The Eio Negro and the Jupuro are two tributary streams 
of the Amazon, and may be compared in length to the 
Danube. The upper parts belong to the Spaniards, while 
the lower are occupied by the Portuguese. The Christian 
settlements are very numerous from Mocoa to the mouth of 
the Caguan ; while on the Lower J upura the Portuguese 
have founded only a few villages. On the Eio Negro, 
on the contrary, the Spaniards have not been able to rival 
