ABSTRACT
In the Introduction, Guiana has been presented as an island. Why speak of Guiana Island? Early on, chroniclers distinguished Guiana from the rest of the Amazon (Figure 16). In the middle of the seventeenth century, François de Pagan (1655) recognized a coherent ensemble between the Orinoco and the Amazon. At the end of the eighteenth century, Miguel Marmión wrote:
Lope de Aguirre was the first European to explore the Casiquiare Canal in 1561. Nevertheless, westerners did not travel regularly through this geographic anomaly until much later, and its existence was previously more understood through myth than direct observation (Alès and Pouyllau 1992). Bordered on all sides by the Atlantic Ocean, the Amazon, the Orinoco, and the Rio Negro, it was not difficult to envisage the egg of Guiana, located between the latter two basins, separated from its Amazonian womb, creating an island of this region that spans 1.8 million square kilometers. What phenomenon or magic allowed a canal, unique in the world, to link two watersheds? This distributary channel of the Upper Orinoco flows over 355 kilometers before it empties into the Rio Negro (Georgescu et al. 2008), called Rio Guainía in Venezuela, to the level of the village of San Carlos. There, the Orinoco loses 12 percent of its waters during low-water periods and 20 percent during floods. Charles de La Condamine was the first scholar to travel along the Casiquiare Canal in 1800 and confirm its existence. A few years later, Alexander von Humboldt descended the canal and created a map.
