Castro, also, worked hard to build up a spirit of nationalism with which to withstand the impositions of foreign governments, whose citizens in many instances had sought by fraudulent claims to enrich themselves. He, too, won a good fight and in some respects advanced Venezuela to a higher place in the family of nations. His patriotism has been made grotesque in our public press, but those who know him well have no doubt that it was sincere. He is well born and able and has shown many of the elements of statesmanship. Venezuela unquestionably has suffered injustice at the hands of European governments, and of our own, in the demands they have sought to enforce on behalf of adventurers who have attempted to exploit the country to their own advantage and without regard to her interests—notably in the cases of her dispute with Great Britain over the boundary with British Guiana, and the French cable company. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ XII THE GUIANAS On the northeastern shoulder of the continent lies a huge block of territory as large as France and Spain combined. It is in reality an island, since it is bounded on the north and east by the Caribbean Sea and Atlantic Ocean, on the south by the Amazon River, and on the northwest and west by the continuous waterway formed by the Orinoco, the Casiquiare and the Negro rivers, the last named an affluent of the Amazon. Like the north Andean republics, the Guiana country is made up of mountains, highlands, and low-lying plains, and lies wholly in the tropics; its productiveness thus embraces nearly every cereal and vegetable found in the three great zones of the earth. Guiana was discovered, named, and first occupied by the Spanish in the very beginning of things in South America. It acquired fame in the latter part of the sixteenth century as one of the regions in which the home of El Dorado was supposed to be located—the fateful will-o’-the-wisp that was chased by the early fortune hunters all over the region from the mountain fastnesses about Bogotá, in Colombia, to the Paraná, in southern Brazil, the lure which brought disaster even to such men of intelligence and practical common sense as Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake. The long-sought Lake Guatavita (now known to be located near Bogotá), in whose sacred waters El Dorado bathed his gilded body, was once supposed to lie near the source of the Orinoco in the Parima Mountains, and, indeed, geologists now contend that such a lake did exist ages ago in these mountainous heights, and it is unquestionably true that on the line northward from this point runs a vein of gold richer than any in the known world, and that this vein had been worked by the Indians from time immemorial.