400 
THE “GOLDEUT KIHG.” 
the Marafion to establish themselves on the Rio Negro. A 
taste for the marvellous, and a wish to invest the descrip- 
tions of the New Continent with some of the colouring of 
classic antiquity, no doubt contributed to give great import- 
ance to the lirst narratives of Orellana. In perusing the 
works of Vespucci, Fernando Columbus, Geraldini, Oviedo, 
and Pietro Martyr, we recognize this tendency of the writers 
of the sixteenth century to find among the newly discovered 
nations all that the Greeks have related to us of the first 
age of the world, and of the manners of the barbarous Scy- 
thians and Africans. But if Oviedo, in addressing his letters 
to cardinal Bembo, thought fit to flatter the taste of a man 
so familiar with the study of' antiquity, Sir Walter Raleigh 
had a less poetic aim. Ho sought to fix the attention <>f 
Queen Elizabeth on the great empire of Guiana, the con- 
quest of which he proposed. He gave a description of the 
rising of that gilded king ( el dorado),* whose chamberlains, 
furnished with long tubes, blew powdered gold every morn- 
ing over his body, after having rubbed it over with aromatic 
oils : but nothing could be better adapted to strike the ima- 
gination of queen Elizabeth, than the warlike republic of 
women without husbands, who resisted the Castilian heroes. 
Such were the motives which prompted exaggeration on the 
part of those writers who have given most reputation to the 
Amazons of America; but these motives do not, I think, 
suffice for entirely rejecting a tradition, which is spread 
among various nations having no communications one with 
another. 
Thirty years after La Condamine visited Quito, a Portu- 
guese astronomer, Ribeiro, who has traversed the Amazon, 
and the tributary streams which run into that river on tin 1 
northern side, has confirmed on the spot all that the learned 
Frenchman had advanced. He found the same tradition* 
among the Indians; and he collected them with the greater 
impartiality as he did not himself believe that the Amazons 
the nephritic colic and epilepsy, from their fathers, who received them 
from the women without husbands.” 
* The term el dorado, which signifies the gilded, was not original'? 
the name of the country. The territory subsequently distinguished by 
that appellation was at first known as the country of “el Rey DoradP 
{the Gilded King). 
