JUNCTION WITH THE RIO NEGRO. 
429 
Orinoco. Father Guudlla himself, whom Bouguer met at 
Carthagena, confessed that he had been deceived ; and he 
read to Father Gili, a short time before his death, a supple- 
ment to his history of the Orinoco, intended for a new 
edition, in which he recounts pleasantly the manner in 
which he had been undeceived. The expedition of the 
boundaries, under Iturriaga and Solano, completed in 
detail the knowledge of the geography of the Upper 
Orinoco, and the intertwinings of this river with the Bio 
Negro. Solano established himself in 1756 at the con- 
fluence of the Atabapo ; and from that time the Spanish 
and Portuguese commissioners often passed in their canoes, 
by the Cassiquiare, from the Lower Orinoco to the Iiio 
Negro, to visit each other at their head-quarters of Cabruta* 
ancl Mariva. Since the year 1707, two or three canoes 
come annually from the fort of San Carlos, by the bifur- 
cation of the Orinoco to Angostura, to fetch salt and the 
pay of the troops. These passages, from one basin of a 
river to another, by the natural canal of the Cassiquiare, 
excite no more attention in the colonists at present than 
the arrival of boats that descend the Lome by the canal of 
Orleans, awakens on the banks of the Seine. 
Although, since the journey of Father Roman, in 1744, 
precise notions have been acquired in the Spanish posses- 
sions in America, both of the direction of the Upper Orinoco 
from east to west, and of the manner of its communication 
with the Rio Negro, this knowledge did not reach Europe 
till a much later period. In 1750, La Condamine and 
D’Anvillet were still of opinion that the Orinoco was a 
* General Iturriaga, confined by illness, first at Muitaco, or Heal 
Corona, and afterward at Cabruta, received a visit in 1760 from the 
Portuguese colonel Don Gabriel de Souza y Figueira. who came from 
Grand Para, having made a voyage of nearly nine hundred leagues in his 
boat. The Swedish botanist, Deeding, who was chosen to accompany 
the expedition of the boundaries at the expense of the Spanish government, 
so greatly multiplied in his ardent imagination the branchings of the 
great rivers of South America, that he appeared well persuaded of being 
able to navigate, by the Rio Negro and the Amazon, to the Rio de la 
Plata. {Iter, p. 131.) 
t See the classical memoir of this great geographer in the Journal de« 
Savans, March 1750, p. 181. “ One fact,” says D’Anville, “which can- 
hot be considered as equivocal, after the proofs witli which we have beea 
