: Seven Legs Across the Seas: A Printer's Impressions of Many Lands by Murray Samuel - Voyages and travels

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FOLLOWING THE CONQUISTADORES UP THE ORINOCO AND DOWN THE MAGDALENA

BY H. J. MOZANS, A.M., Ph.D.

ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK AND LONDON D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 1910

TO MY GENIAL COMPAGNON DE VOYAGE BRAVE LOYAL C.

Res ardua vetustis novitatem dare; novis auctoritatem; absoletis, nitorem; obscuris, lucem; fastiditis, gratiam; dubiis, fidem; omnibus vero naturam, et naturae sua omnia. Itaque etiam non assecutis, voluisse abunde pulchrum atque magnificum est. That is to say: It is a dyfficulte thynge to gyue newenes to owlde thynges, autoritie to newe thynges, bewtie to thynges owt of vse, fame to the obscure, fauoure to the hatefull, credite to the doubtefull, nature to all and all to nature. To such neuerthelesse as can not atayne to all these, it is greately commendable and magnificall to haue attempted the fame.

From the preface, addressed to the Emperor Vespasian, of Pliny's Natural History.

FOREWORD

The following pages contain the record of a journey made to islands and lands that border the Caribbean and to the less frequented parts of Venezuela and Colombia. Thanks to our trade relations with the Antilles, and the number of meritorious books that have been written about them during the last few decades, our knowledge of the West Indies is fairly complete and satisfactory. The same, however, cannot be said of the two extensive republics just south of us. Outside of their capitals and a few of their coast towns, they are rarely visited, and as a consequence, the most erroneous ideas prevail regarding them. Vast regions in both republics are now less known than they were three centuries ago, while there are certain sections about which our knowledge is as limited as it is regarding the least explored portions of darkest Africa.

This is not the place to account for the prevailing ignorance regarding the parts of the New Hemisphere that first claimed the attention of discoverers and explorers. Suffice it to state that, paradoxical as it may seem, it is, nevertheless, a fact.

When we recollect that the lands in question were not only the first discovered but that they were also witnesses of the marvelous achievements of some of the most renowned of the conquistadores, our surprise becomes doubly great that our information respecting them is so meager and confined almost exclusively to those who make a special study of things South American.

Never, perhaps, in the history of our race was the spirit of adventure so generally diffused as it was at the dawn of the sixteenth century--just after the epoch-making discoveries of Columbus and his hardy followers. It was like the spirit that animated the Crusaders when they started on their long march to recover the Holy Sepulchre from the possession of the Moslem. It was, indeed, in many of its aspects, a revival of the age of chivalry. The Sea of Darkness had at last been successfully crossed. That ocean of legend and mystery with its enchanted islands inhabited by witches and gnomes and griffins had been explored. And that strange island of Satanaxio, "the island of the hand of Satan," where the Evil One was "supposed once a day to thrust forth a gigantic hand from the ocean to grasp a number of the inhabitants" was consigned to the limbo of mediaeval superstitions. A new world was revealed to the astonished Spaniards. Every animal, tree, plant seemed new to them and often entirely different from anything the Old World could show. There was, too, a new race of men, with strange manners and customs--men who told them of a Fountain of Youth, of regions of pearls and precious stones, of cities and palaces of gold in the lofty plateau and in the heart of the wilderness.

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