The Real Expedición de Límites al Orinoco (1754-1761)
A boundary commission sent to fix the line with Portugal surveyed the Orinoco instead. Its cosmographer's observations of 1756 are the latitudes a Franciscan of the expedition printed in 1779; its boats passed rapids a famous Jesuit had called impassable, and it left forts, portages and towns on the Río Negro. The same book records that the people gathered into those towns fled to the forest in a single night.
Why this wins its question: English accounts of the Casiquiare begin with Humboldt in 1800, and the Spanish boundary expedition that preceded him by forty years is usually one clause about a treaty. This object works from the 1779 printing of a Franciscan who was on the river with it: the cosmographer's 1756 latitudes adopted as the most exact "por la providencia de los mas finos instrumentos"; nine champanes taken up a rapid a printed authority had called impassable, with the author's own reasoning about why that authority was wrong; the fort on the Río Negro described in the language of a barrier against the Portuguese; the ten-day express that replaced a fifty-day one. And it puts, from the same pages and the same voice, the night the towns emptied and the fields were left standing - which no celebratory account of the expedition quotes and no account hostile to it can supply, because it is written by one of its own.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The printed witness used here is Antonio Caulín's "Historia coro-graphica natural y evangelica de la nueva Andalucia, provincias de Cumaná, Guayana y vertientes del rio Orinoco" (Madrid, Juan de San Martín, 1779), a Franciscan Observant of the Píritu missions who was himself on the river during the expedition's years: at folio 371 he counts himself among the four people left in the Casa Fuerte on the day the surrounding towns emptied, "quando solo habia en ella dos Soldados y yo".
The commission is named in the book as the Real Expedición de Límites, with Don Joseph de Yturriaga (Iturriaga) as its principal commissioner - the alphabetical index entering him as "Principal Comisario de la Real Expedicion de Limites" - and Don Joseph Solano as "Cosmographo de su Magestad, y uno de los Señores Comisarios". Iturriaga reached the fort of Muitaco, or Puerto-Sano, on the middle Orinoco in 1756.
The latitudes printed through the geographical book of the Historia are not the author's own but the expedition's: "En esta, y las demás graduaciones, que dexo dichas, me arreglo à las observaciones tomadas por Don Joseph Solano... este año pasado de mil, setecientos, cinquenta, y seis, à que se debe estar, como las mas exactas, asi por la capacidad, y pericia de su Author, como por la providencia de los mas finos instrumentos, que dudo se habran visto hasta ahora en estos Países" (f. 71). The values so credited include the fort of Muitaco at 7 degrees 59 minutes north and the town at the Atures rapid at 5 degrees 35 minutes north.
The expedition also corrected a printed authority by experiment. Gumilla's Orinoco ilustrado had stated that at the Atures rapids there was no expedient but to carry the boats overland "con increible trabajo"; Caulín answers that Solano took nine champanes and some falúas of good burden up through the rapid "venciendo, con la correspondiente maniobra, y su ingeniosa habilidad, los rapidos hileros del Raudal", and that the two earlier rapids of Carichana and Tabaje, described by the same author as passed with great danger by hauling on ropes from the bank, are now passed under sail in the dry season (ff. 71-72).
Caulín offers two explanations for the disagreement and prefers neither exclusively: that the river's sands and falling rocks had changed the channels in the intervening years, and that the craft Gumilla saw on those rapids were light indigenous piraguas whose crews found it easier to drag them, so that "tomó de estos la noticia, y sentó por insuperable lo que hoy nos hace vér la experiencia vencible" (f. 72). The passage is an eighteenth-century missionary correcting another missionary's book from measurement.
By the time the book was printed the river link between the Orinoco and the Amazon basin was treated as settled knowledge and as a working route: the narrative turns back "Sabida ya la verdadera comunicacion del Orinóco con el Rio Negro, que lo conduce al Marañón... retrocediendo por el Casiquiare hasta caer à Orinóco" (f. 80). This is forty years before the account of Humboldt's 1800 passage made the connection famous in English, though Caulín does not say who first traced it and no priority is asserted here.
The purpose was a frontier, and the book says so without embarrassment: three leagues below the mouth of the Casiquiare stand San Carlos and San Felipe, "que fundaron los Comisarios de la Expedicion de Limites, à una, y otra margen del Rio Negro, con Indios Maripisánas, y otros de nueva reduccion, con un Fortin guarnecido de alguna Tropa, y Artilleria menor, que sirve de barrera à nuestros Dominios por aquella parte, y de frontera à los Portugueses, que se hallan establecidos, y fortificados veinte, y cinco leguas mas abajo en San Joseph de los Maribitánas" (f. 80, note).
The survey produced a shortcut that is measured in days. Two towns founded later by governor Manuel Centurión on the Tuamini and Pimichín caños opened a land communication between the Atabapo and the Río Negro, "de forma, que en diez dias puede ir ahora un expreso de la frontera del Rio Negro à la Ciudad de Guayana, en lugar de cinquenta, ò sesenta, que necesitaba antes, quando no habia otro camino que el de Casiquiare" (f. 76, note).
The towns were made by reduction, and the text uses that vocabulary of its own commissioners: the pueblo above the Maypures rapid was founded by Solano "con los Indios Guipunábis, que reduxo à la efectiva dominacion del Rey" (f. 72, note); San Fernando de Atabapo was begun with the Guaipunábi captain Crusero, "atraido de la benevolencia, y afabilidad de Don Joseph Yturriaga, y su muy fiel, y leal amigo Don Joseph Solano" (f. 76); and on Crusero's death and Solano's departure that town was destroyed, being afterwards rebuilt by Centurión with "Indios Gentiles, que reduxo, y sacó del Guaviárre, y Vichada" (f. 76, note).
What the gathering cost is recorded by the same author in the first person. On the eighth of May, with only two soldiers, the captain's family, two Indian servants and himself in the Casa Fuerte, he was told that all the Indians of the south bank and many of the already settled towns of the north had fled to the mountains of the Parágua, having provisioned themselves for the march; the fugitives left their fields "enteramente abandonadas", and Iturriaga wrote to him from Caracas in February of the following year, 1758, that most had by then returned and were clearing them again (f. 371).
The witness is an interested one and its explanations should be read as such. Caulín attributes the flight to two Dutchmen on the Caura who supplied the fugitives with arms and munitions and persuaded them to go, and to souls who "trocaban la felicidad del Christianismo por su antigua Gentilidad, en que tan engañados los tiene la astucia del demonio" (f. 371); the possibility that people left because they did not wish to live in the towns is nowhere entertained. He is a missionary of the province whose conversions the book celebrates.
The expedition also redrew the missionary map. A footnote records that after Solano had better explored the upper Orinoco and Río Negro, and the difficulty of the Jesuits reducing so numerous a population being recognised, the King resolved that from the Maypures rapid upward the Andalusian Capuchins should take charge of the reduction - an establishment that had still not been effected when the book went to press, so that the Observants were covering it at the governor's request (f. 11, note).