The Wapisianas were first seen by Dutch traders who made their way up the Essiquibo River to the savannah country south of the Pakaraima Mountains early in the eighteenth century. In 1738 Nicholas Horstman, a German surgeon in the employ of the Dutch West India Company, was sent up the Essiquibo to discover the city of El Dorado and to find a passage to the Amazon. He made these discoveries and crossed the divide to the Rio Negro, where he turned traitor and remained with the Portuguese. He met La Condamine to whom he gave a map he had made of the country traversed. This map was published ten years later by d'Anville, in the first great map of South America. At that time the Wapisianas occupied all the Brazilian savannahs south of the Takutu and the Uraracuera rivers.

When Robert Schomburgk first explored Southern British Guiana in 1835 he found the Wapisianas occupying the territory stretching from the forests of the Essiquibo on the east to the Parima (Rio Branco) on the west and between the parallels of 2° and 3° north latitude. They had for neighbors the Macusis on the north, the Atarois on the south and the Paranauas on the west. The region east of the Essiquibo was unoccupied, as it remains even today. The Wapisianas were regarded as intruders by the Macusis, whom they had forced northward.