The aspect of this region first convinced the great discoverer of the New World of the existence of an American continent. Familiar with nature, he inferred that so immense a body of fresh water could only be collected in a long course, and “that the land which supplied it must be a continent, not an island.” As, according to Arrian, the companions of Alexander, after crossing the snow-covered Paropanisus,[56] on reaching the Indus imagined, from the presence of crocodiles, that they recognised in that river a branch of the Nile; so Columbus, unaware of the similarity of physiognomy which characterises the various productions of the climate of Palms, readily supposed this new continent to be the eastern coast of the far-projecting continent of Asia. The mild coolness of the evening air, the ethereal purity of the starry firmament, the balsamic fragrance of the flowers wafted to him by the land breeze,--all led him (as Herrara tells us in the Decades)[57], to deem that he had approached the garden of Eden, the sacred dwelling-place of the first parents of the human race. The Orinoco appeared to him to be one of the four rivers descending from Paradise, to divide and water the earth newly decked with vegetation. This poetic passage from the journal of Columbus’s voyage, or rather from a letter written from Hayti, in October 1498, to Ferdinand and Isabella, has a peculiar psychological interest. It teaches us anew that the creative imagination of the poet exists in the Discoverer as in every form of human greatness. In considering the quantity of water which the Orinoco bears to the Atlantic, the question arises--Which of the great South American Rivers,--the Orinoco, the Amazons, or the River Plate,--is the largest? The question, however, thus put is not a determinate one, the idea of size in this case not being altogether definite. The River Plate has the widest embouchure, being 92 geographical miles across; but, like the British rivers, its length is comparatively small. Even at Buenos Ayres its depth is already so inconsiderable as to impede navigation. The Amazons is the longest of all rivers: its course from its origin in the Lake of Lauricocha to its mouth is 2880 geographical miles. But its breadth in the province of Jaen de Bracamoros, near the cataract of Rentama, as measured by me at the foot of the picturesque mountain of Patachuma, hardly equals that of the Rhine at Mayence.