52 G. L. Burr but neither longer questioned that European settlement in Guiana began with Berrio's town of Santo Thome on the Orinoco. It is indeed the explicit assertion of the earliest of the new documents submitted by Great Britain — an exceedingly interesting letter of January i, 1593, from Don Antonio Berrio himself to the King of Spain, wherein he reports his "ten years spent in continual labors" to penetrate to El Dorado — that " from the mouth of the river Amazon to that of the Orinoco the map shows more than four hundred leagues," and that "in all this breadth and more than fif- teen hundred leagues in depth there is not a spot peopled by Span- iards." This letter of Berrio and two later ones printed with it make it impossible longer to credit Fray Pedro Simon's date of I 591 or I 592 for the founding of Santo Thome, and, when added to Raleigh's silence ' and to the letters of Felipe de Santiago and of Roque de Montes earlier produced by England, leave small ground for believing that the town can have come into existence (save per- haps as an Indian village harboring Spanish guests) earlier than the very end of 1595." As we know indubitably from Keymis that in April, 1596, it was a " rancheria of some twentie or thirty houses," it can hardly be placed later ; and Berrio's letters make it all the clearer that from 1592 on such an occupation of Guiana had been contemplated and in preparation. At last, too, we are given the text of that letter of Berrio's lieutenant, Domingo de Ybarguen y Vera, of October 27, 1597, which served as the basis of such wild statements in the British Blue-Books. The Dutchmen seized by him prove to be only " five Flemings, . . . found on land, belonging to a Flemish ship which had come to traffic at Margarita and Cumana, and in this island " (Trinidad) ; and of the Essequibo he says only " I then went to the river Essequibo, where I had much information as to the people grave, and I blush for it. Let me only plead in defense that the map, which fell into my hands just at the close of my work in Washington, was mentioned at all only to dis- miss it as having " no direct bearing on the question of boundary." The further British claim that " the map cannot be earlier than the seventeenth century because it shows two Spanish towns in Trinidad" I cannot for a moment accede to. It shows no towns in Trinidad. One of the marks thus interpreted is only the ". of Trinidad ° {i. c, Trini- dado — a spelling common among the early explorers, cf. Raleigh, Keymis, Wyatt), and the other but a fleck (such as abound on the map) which happens to be near the Spanish word palmar, a palm-grove. The handwriting and the orthography, as well as the substance of the notes, show it clearly of the middle of the sixteenth century. • To which should perhaps be added that of Robert Dudley, who sent a boat up the Orinoco in February, 1595, and whose own narrative is now supplemented by the more detailed one of his captain, Wyatt (first published last year by the Hakluyt Society). Vet it is unlikely that Dudley's boat went so far up as the site of Santo Thome. 2 This date receives a slight further support from another letter produced by Eng- land, written to the King of Spain in 1609 by one of Domingo de Vera's twenty-two hundred colonists.
