The name Orinoco, which the first discoverers gave to this river, and which probably owes its origin to some confusion of language, is unknown in the interior of the country. For in their condition of animal rudeness, savage tribes only designate by peculiar geographical names, those objects which might be confounded with others. Thus the Orinoco, the Amazon, and the Magdalena, are each simply termed _The River_, the _Great River_, and _The Great Water_; whilst, those who dwell on the banks of even the smallest streams distinguish them by special names. The current produced by the Orinoco between the South American Continent and the asphaltic island of Trinidad is so powerful, that ships, with all their canvass spread, and a westerly breeze in their favour, can scarcely make way against it. This desolate and fearful spot is called the Bay of Sadness (_Golfo Triste_), and its entrance the _Dragon’s Mouth_ (_Boca del Drago_). Here isolated cliffs rise tower-like in the midst of the rushing stream. They seem to mark the old rocky barrier[55] which, before it was broken through by the current, connected the island of Trinidad with the coast of Paria. The appearance of this region first convinced the bold navigator Columbus of the existence of an American continent. “Such an enormous body of fresh water,” concluded this acute observer of nature, “could only be collected from a river having a long course; the land, therefore, which supplied it must be a continent, and not an island.” As, according to Arrian, the companions of Alexander, when they penetrated across the snow-crowned summits of Paropanisus[56], believed that they recognized in the crocodile-teeming Indus a part of the Nile,[HZ] so Columbus, in his ignorance of the similarity of physiognomy which characterises all the products of the climate of palms, imagined that the New Continent was the eastern coast of the far projecting Asia. The grateful coolness of the evening air, the ethereal purity of the starry firmament, the balmy fragrance of flowers, wafted to him by the land breeze—all led him to suppose. (as we are told by Herrera, in the Decades[57],) that he was approaching the garden of Eden, the sacred abode of our first parents. The Orinoco seemed to him one of the four rivers, which, according to the venerable tradition of the ancient world, flowed from Paradise, to water and divide the surface of the earth, newly adorned with plants. This poetical passage in the Journal of Columbus, or rather in a letter to Ferdinand and Isabella, written from Haiti in October, 1498, presents a peculiar psychological interest. It teaches us anew, that the creative fancy of the poet manifests itself in the discoverer of a world, no less than in every other form of human greatness.