Word: orinoco
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...that dank forest where the Orinoco is a turbulent but puny brook, numerous tributaries tumble through the Parima Mountains. By measuring the varying rates of flow of these mountain streams, Major Rísquez Iribarren's men determined what they are sure is the true path of the river. Their observations also located the source of the Orinoco at Lat. 2° 18 min. North, Long. 63° 15 min. West, a few miles to the west of where...
...search for the source of the Orinoco River has long been a favorite obsession among explorers of South America's jungles. The jaundiced waters of the third largest river in South America sprawl across the breadth of Venezuela like a gigantic fishhook. The shank fans out into a delta just below Trinidad. The barb is buried far to the southwest, deep in the tangled wilderness of the Parima Mountains. For the past four centuries adventurers and scientists have hunted its headwaters...
...upriver as Esmeralda. In 1800, Baron Friedrich Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt took an expedition farther than any scientist before him, and the world of botany was enriched with more than 6,000 species of new plants. Humboldt also discovered a link between the water systems of the Orinoco and the Amazon...
...many years later an itinerant Brazilian claimed to have traveled the length of the river. In 1931, an American, Dr. Herbert Spencer Dickey, also made the trip (TIME, Aug. 10, 1931), reported what he declared were the exact coordinates of the Orinoco's source: Lat. 2° 25 min. 30 sec. North, Long. 63° 45 min. 31 sec. West. Then, in 1943, a Brazilian boundary-setting expedition claimed that it had found the source 30 miles to the west. U.S. Army flyers from British Guiana helped to confirm the location of the river's origin...
Mermaids & Indians. Early this year, Colombian-born Hector Robert Acebes Medina organized a small expedition to find the source of the Orinoco all over again and study Indian tribes along the way. According to Acebes, he was within 100 miles of his goal when Venezuelan authorities chased him back to San Felipe in Colombia. He had studied the Indians, and had seen, so he said, some toninas -strange mermaidlike mammals with breasts like a woman's and the strength to defeat alligators in aquatic battle. But he was not permitted to re-enter Venezuela and continue his travels...