Note 1 — Chapter IV · IN MID-ORINOQUIA
Reading edition
Sr. Pérez Triana, the son of a former president of Colombia, was in 1893 obliged to flee from his country, and as the seaports were watched he and his companions were forced to escape by way of the Meta and the Orinoco. He tells us in his charming book, De Bogotá al Atlantico, p. 3, of the dread inspired by the thought of “lo incierto del viaje, que emprendiamos hacia regiones desconocidas, acaso nunca holladas par la planta del hombre civilizado,” “the uncertainty of the journey we were undertaking to unknown regions, probably never trod by the foot of civilized man.”—Segunda Edición, Madrid, 1905.
Mr. Cunninghame Graham, in his introduction to this book, remarks that “The voyage in itself was memorable because, since the first conquerors went down the river with the faith that in their case, if rightly used, might have smoothed out all the mountain ranges in the world, no one, except a stray adventurer, or india-rubber trader, has followed in their footsteps,” p. 13, English edition, London, 1902.
Another Colombian, Sr. Modesto Garces, had made the same journey eight years before, a record of which he has given us in his little work, Un viaje á Venezuela, Bogotá, 1890. But neither he nor Sir Pérez Triana saw the lower Meta, for they left this river a short distance above Orocué, and voyaged to the Orinoco by way of the Vichada.
Three years subsequently to Pérez Triana’s trip the same journey, with slight modifications, was made by a German naturalist, Dr. Otto Bürger. He has given us a record of it in his Reisen eines Naturforschers im Tropischen America, Leipzig, 1900.
So far as I am aware, no writer has made the journey up the river from Ciudad Bolivar to Bogotá. In a certain limited sense it was, therefore, probably true that we were the first to undertake the journey described in the following pages. ↑