402 
SEOBAB EE OSIGIN Or THE LEGEND. 
voyage of Orellana, Christopher Columbus imagined he had 
found the Amazons in the Caribbee Islands. This great 
man was told, that the small island of Madanino (Mont- 
serrat) was inhabited by warlike women, who lived the 
greater part of the year separate from men. At other times 
also, the conquistadores imagined that the women, who 
defended their huts in the absence of their husbands, were 
republics of Amazons; and, by an error less excusable, 
formed a like supposition respecting the religious congrega- 
tions, the convents of Mexican virgins, who, far from admit- 
ing men at any season of the year into their society, lived 
according to the austere rule of Quetzalcohuatl. Such was 
the disposition of men’s minds, that in the long succession 
of travellers, who crowded on each other in their discoveries 
and in narrations of the marvels of the New World, every 
one readily declared lie had seen what his predecessors had 
announced. 
We passed three nights at San Carlos del Kio Negro. 3 
count the nights, because I watched during the greater part 
of them, in the hope of seizing the moment of the passage of 
some star over the meridian. That I might have nothing to 
reproach myself with, I kept the instruments always ready 
for an observation. I could not even obtain double altitudes, 
to calculate the latitude by the method of Douwes. What 
a contrast between two parts of the same zone; between the 
sky of Cumana, where the air is constantly pure as in 
Persia and Arabia, and the sky of the II io Negro, veiled like 
that of the Fcroe islands, without sun, or moon, or stars! 
On the 10th of May, our canoe being ready before sun- 
rise, we embarked to go up the Eio Negro as far as the 
mouth of the Cassiquiare, and to devote ourselves to re- 
searches on the real course of that river, which unites the 
Orinoco to the Amazon. The morning was line; but, in 
proportion as the heat augmented, the sky became obscured. 
The air is so saturated by water in these forests, that the 
vesicular vapours become visible on the least increase of 
evaporation at the surface of the earth. The breeze being 
never felt, the humid strata are not displaced and renewed 
by dryer air. We were every day more grieved at the 
aspect of the cloudy sky. M. Bonpland was losing by this 
excessive humidity the plants he had collected; and I, f° r 
