54 G- L. Burr themselves the place of their dwelHng." These deputies sailed, accordingly, on July i, 1623, in the ship Pigeon ol 100 tons, "to make the voyage to the Amazon." Reaching that river on Oc- tober 20, they pushed northwestward along the coast, prospecting as they went, as far as the Wiapoco, where they arrived in Decem- ber. There they selected a place for their colony, and there they were left by their ship, which returned to Holland on the first day of 1624. In the following summer (so, at least, one must infer from the scanty extracts, which, alas, are all that is printed of this precious document), a flotilla having meanwhile arrived from Hol- land, they pressed on westward with their prospecting and on August 15, 1624, reached the Demerara. Thence, on the i6th, they write, " our sloop went to Ezikebe [Essequibo] to carry our master on board the Admiral to learn his wishes ; " and, on the 2 2d, " our sloop having returned, our ship went to Ezikebe to fetch the remainder of the merchandise which the Admiral had left there." There they tarried till the 28th, when they returned to the Demer- ara, and, having first transferred the Admiral into a ship which was to return home, they sailed on September 9 for the Carribbean Islands. In this description of the Essequibo, which shows that they ascended the river as far as the confluence of Cuyuni and Mazaruni, they remark that " the Spaniards of San Thome " (so the British editors acutely translate the " Saint Omer " of the French text) "formerly traded there, but now they dare not go there," and their journal later quotes " a Frenchman who lived there three years," and who had been " above the second fall of the river, where there was a crystal mine ; " but there is no mention of any previous Dutch occupation, nor is there anything to imply that the expedition here described had other aim or result than exploration and trade. Yet it is at least not improbable that a Dutch outlier may have remained in the river from this time forward ; and the dif- ference between this date of August, 1624, and that of 1625, reached by the Americans and accepted by the Venezuelans, is insignificant. It is a thousand pities that this journal, which so happily helps replace a lost record-book of the West India Com- pany, could not be published in full. On the vicissitudes of the trading-post in the Essequibo prior to the end of the long war with Spain no further light has been thrown. As to the hostile activity of Dutch fleets and privateers in the Orinoco and its creeks Great Britain was able, however, to produce from Spanish archives testimony of moment : (i) a report of the Spanish governor, the Marquis of Sofraga, who, writing from Bogota in July, 163 1, avers that, after the sacking of Santo
