[9] How much of Raleigh's work is true and how much is fabricated remains unclear:[10] His account indicates that he only succeeded in navigating up the Orinoco as far as Angostura (what is now Ciudad Bolívar), and did not come close to the supposed location of Lake Parime.

[14] Kemys wrote that the Indians called this river "brother of the Orenoque [Orinoco]" and that this river of Essequibo, or Devoritia, lyeth Southerly into the land, and from the mouth of it unto the head, they pass in twenty days: then taking their provision they carry it on their shoulders one days journey: afterwards they return for their canoas, and bear them likewise to the side of a lake, which the Iaos call Roponowini, the Charibes, Parime: which is of such bigness, that they know no difference between it and the main sea.

One of the first was the elder Jodocus Hondius' Nieuwe Caerte van het Wonderbaer ende Goudrycke Landt Guiana, which was published in 1598.

[24] In early 1611 Sir Thomas Roe, on a mission to the West Indies for Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, sailed his 200-ton ship, the Lion's Claw, some 320 kilometres (200 mi) up the Amazon,[25] then took a party of canoes up the Oyapock River in search of Lake Parime, negotiating thirty-two rapids and traveling about 160 km (100 mi) before they ran out of food and had to turn back.

The expedition failed to uncover any new evidence of the lake and ended with the death of Raleigh's son Walter and the suicide of Captain Kemys.

[30] Between 1689 and 1691 the Jesuit priest Samuel Fritz traveled along the Amazon and its tributaries, preparing a detailed map at the request of the Royal Audiencia of Quito.

[36]Horstman also gave La Condamine a remarkably accurate hand-drawn map of his route from the coast through the interior of Northern Brazil.

[38] According to Humboldt: Arimuicaipi, an Indian of the nation of the Ipurucotos, went down the Rio Carony, and by his false narrations inflamed the imagination of the Spanish colonists.

He showed them in the southern sky the Clouds of Magellan, the whitish light of which he said was the reflection of the argentiferous rocks situate in the middle of the Laguna Parima.

[1] Between June and September 1743 the scientist and geographer Charles de La Condamine traveled from Quito to the Atlantic coast via the Amazon River, charting its course and making scientific observations.

The Manaus pulled gold from the Yquiari[39] & seized small flakes: these are real facts, which were used in exaggeration, giving rise to the fable of the city of Manoa & Golden Lake.

If we find that there is still a long way from the small flakes of gold of the Manaus, to the [golden] roofs of the town of Manoa, & that there is nonetheless far from the glitter of this metal, ripped from the waters of the Yquiari, to the fable of Parime gold; one cannot deny that on the one hand greed & concern of Europeans who wanted by any force to find what they were looking for, and on the other, clever liars & exaggerating Indians [who], interested in sending away the uncomfortable visitors, might alter & deface [the facts] to the point of making them unrecognizable.

On the map of his own travels included in his book, La Condamine placed a small lake as a source of the Takutu River, designating it only "Lac".

[40] In his Relation historique du voyage aux régions équinoxiales du nouveau continent (1825), Humboldt found that Lake Amucu was in the same vicinity as the Lake Parime (or Roponowini) described to Raleigh, and was also a "large inland sea" when flooded; he noted that: All fables have some real foundation; that of El Dorado resembles those myths of antiquity ... No man in Europe believes any longer in the wealth of Guiana and the ... town of Manoa and its palaces covered with plates of massy gold have long since disappeared; but the geographical apparatus serving to adorn the fable of El Dorado, the lake Parima, which ... reflected the image of so many sumptuous edifices, has been religiously preserved by geographers.

[46]In 1844 the American author Jacob Adrien van Heuvel, a graduate of Yale and a law student, published an account of his travels in Guiana in which he investigated evidence for the existence of El Dorado and Lake Parima.

[47] In his 1848 edition of Raleigh's The Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana, Schomburgk dismissed Van Heuvel's propositions: Mr. Van Heuvel visited the coast regions of Guiana without penetrating into the interior, and his conclusions respecting this lake rest only upon what he learned from some Indians, whose language he did not understand, and upon the maps of Sanson, D'Anville and others of the last century; and although fully acquainted with Humboldt's writings, "who," he says, "effaced without sufficient grounds that wondrous lake," Mr. Van Heuvel has fully restored it, and gives to it a length of from two hundred to two hundred and fifty miles, and a breadth of about fifty miles.

In 1977 artist and explorer Roland Stevenson found ruins north of the Rio Negro in the Uaupés River basin that are believed to be the remnants of the Nhamini-wi.

[54] In June 1690, a massive earthquake opened a bedrock fault, forming a rift or a graben that permitted the water to flow into the Rio Branco.

"[59] Starting around 66,000 years ago, sea level rise and more humid conditions created flooded zones north of the confluence of the Rio Negro and the Solimões River, in what is now Roraima.

The drainage system of the Rupununi Savannahs is unable to carry a high volume of surface runoff and as a result, most rivers flood in the wet season.

[63] Designs 10 metres (33 ft) above the ground on the sheer exterior face of the rock were probably painted by people standing in canoes on the surface of the now-vanished lake.