Page:The gilded man (El Dorado) and other pictures of the Spanish occupancy of America.djvu/117

Rh maraña (complication), and survived after Aguirre's campaign as a by-name for the Amazon. This is, however, not correct. Peter Martyr had already, in his "De Orbe Novo," applied the name to the Amazon, of which Pinzon had seen the mouths; Oviedo, who died in 1557, describes the Amazon River as the Marañon; and Gomara, whose "Historia general de las Indias" was printed in 1552, applied the name in an indefinite way to the great South American river that empties into the Atlantic Ocean.

The Amazon is, however, also known as the Rio de Orellano; and in view of the extremely vague geographical ideas that prevailed in the sixteenth century, no conclusion can be drawn from the application of the term "Marañones" to Aguirre's men concerning the further course or route of the expedition. It is significant that Acosta says, on the authority of a witness who was in the expedition of Ursua and Aguirre, and afterward went into the Order of Jesus, that the Amazon, Marañon, or Rio de Orellana, emptied into the sea opposite the islands of Margarita and Trinidad. In connection with this the statement of Cristoval de Acuña (1639), that Aguirre reached the sea through a side-mouth of the Amazon opposite Trinidad, is of considerable importance. Mr. Markham, therefore, does not seem to be wholly unjustified in supposing that the Marañones, having sailed up the Rio Negro, passed into the Orinoco through the Cassiquiare and thence through one of the mouths of the Orinoco, and not through the Amazon, into the Atlantic Ocean. In further confirmation of this view is the