Note 226-4 — JOURNAL OF THE FIRST VOYAGE OF COLUMBUS (continued 3)

Columbus had read in Marco Polo of the islands of Masculia and Feminina in the Indian Seas and noted the passage in his copy. See ch. XXXIII. of pt. III. of Marco Polo. On the other hand there is evidence for an indigenous Amazon myth in the New World. The earliest sketch of American folk-lore ever made, that of the Friar Ramon Pane in 1497, preserved in Ferdinand Columbus’s Historie and in a condensed form in Peter Martyr’s De Rebus Oceanicis (Dec. I., lib. IX.), tells the story of the culture-hero Guagugiona, who set forth from the cave, up to that time the home of mankind, “with all the women in search of other lands and he came to Matinino, where at once he left the women and went away to another country,” etc., Historie (London ed., 1867), p. 188. Ramon’s name is erroneously given as Roman in the Historie. On the Amazons in Venezuela, see Oviedo, lib. XXV., cap. XIV. It may be accepted that the Amazon myth as given by Oviedo, from which the great river derived its name, River of the Amazons, is a composite of an Arawak folk-tale like that preserved by Ramon Pane overlaid with the details of the Marco Polo myth, which in turn derives from the classical myth.