Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of

Re: Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions

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Part 1 of 3

CHAPTER 3.26. THE LLANOS DEL PAO, OR EASTERN PART OF THE PLAINS OF VENEZUELA. MISSIONS OF THE CARIBS. LAST VISIT TO THE COAST OF NUEVA BARCELONA, CUMANA, AND ARAYA.

Night had set in when we crossed for the last time the bed of the Orinoco. We purposed to rest near the little fort San Rafael, and on the following morning at daybreak to set out on our journey through the plains of Venezuela. Nearly six weeks had elapsed since our arrival at Angostura; and we earnestly wished to reach the coast, with the view of finding, at Cumana, or at Nueva Barcelona, a vessel in which we might embark for the island of Cuba, thence to proceed to Mexico. After the sufferings to which we had been exposed during several months, whilst sailing in small boats on rivers infested by mosquitos, the idea of a sea voyage was not without its charms. We had no idea of ever again returning to South America. Sacrificing the Andes of Peru to the Archipelago of the Philippines (of which so little is known), we adhered to our old plan of remaining a year in New Spain, then proceeding in a galleon from Acapulco to Manila, and returning to Europe by way of Bassora and Aleppo. We imagined that, when we had once left the Spanish possessions in America, the fall of that ministry which had procured for us so many advantages, could not be prejudicial to the execution of our enterprise.

Our mules were in waiting for us on the left bank of the Orinoco. The collection of plants, and the different geological series which we had brought from the Esmeralda and Rio Negro, had greatly augmented our baggage; and, as it would have been dangerous to lose sight of our herbals, we expected to make a very slow journey across the Llanos. The heat was excessive, owing to the reverberation of the soil, which was almost everywhere destitute of vegetation; yet the centigrade thermometer during the day (in the shade) was only from thirty to thirty-four degrees, and during the night, from twenty-seven to twenty-eight degrees. Here, therefore, as almost everywhere within the tropics, it was less the absolute degree of heat than its duration that affected our sensations. We spent thirteen days in crossing the plains, resting a little in the Caribbee (Caraibes) missions and in the little town of Pao. The eastern part of the Llanos through which we passed, between Angostura and Nueva Barcelona, presents the same wild aspect as the western part, through which we had passed from the valleys of Aragua to San Fernando de Apure. In the season of drought, (which is here called summer,) though the sun is in the southern hemisphere, the breeze is felt with greater force in the Llanos of Cumana, than in those of Caracas; because those vast plains, like the cultivated fields of Lombardy, form an inland basin, open to the east, and closed on the north, south and west by high chains of primitive mountains. Unfortunately, we could not avail ourselves of this refreshing breeze, of which the Llaneros, or the inhabitants of the plains, speak with rapture. It was now the rainy season north of the equator; and though it did not rain in the plains, the change in the declination of the sun had for some time caused the action of the polar currents to cease. In the equatorial regions, where the traveller may direct his course by observing the direction of the clouds, and where the oscillations of the mercury in the barometer indicate the hour almost as well as a clock, everything is subject to a regular and uniform rule. The cessation of the breezes, the setting-in of the rainy season, and the frequency of electric explosions, are phenomena which are found to be connected together by immutable laws.

On entering the Llanos of Nueva Barcelona, we met with a Frenchman, at whose house we passed the first night, and who received us with the kindest hospitality. He was a native of Lyons, and he had left his country at a very early age. He appeared extremely indifferent to all that was passing beyond the Atlantic, or, as they say here, disdainfully enough, when speaking of Europe, on the other side of the great pool (al otro lado del charco). Our host was employed in joining large pieces of wood by means of a kind of glue called guayca. This substance, which is used by the carpenters of Angostura, resembles the best animal glue. It is found perfectly prepared between the bark and the alburnum of a creeper* of the family of the Combretaceae. (* Combretum guayca.) It probably resembles in its chemical properties birdlime, the vegetable principle obtained from the berries of the mistletoe, and the internal bark of the holly. An astonishing abundance of this glutinous matter issues from the twining branches of the vejuco de guayca when they are cut. Thus we find within the tropics a substance in a state of purity and deposited in peculiar organs, which in the temperate zone can be procured only by artificial means.

We did not arrive until the third day at the Caribbee missions of Cari. We observed that the ground was less cracked by the drought in this country than in the Llanos of Calabozo. Some showers had revived the vegetation. Small gramina and especially those herbaceous sensitive-plants so useful in fattening half-wild cattle, formed a thick turf. At great distances one from another, there arose a few fan-palms (Corypha tectorum), rhopalas* (chaparro (* The Proteaceae are not, like the Araucaria, an exclusively southern form. We found the Rhopala complicata and the R. obovata, in 2 degrees 30 minutes, and in 10 degrees of north latitude.)), and malpighias* with coriaceous and glossy leaves. (* A neighbouring genus, Byrsonima cocollobaefolia, B. laurifolia, near Matagorda, and B. ropalaefolia.) The humid spots are recognized at a distance by groups of mauritia, which are the sago-trees of those countries. Near the coast this palm-tree constitutes the whole wealth of the Guaraon Indians; and it is somewhat remarkable that we also found it one hundred and sixty leagues farther south, in the midst of the forests of the Upper Orinoco, in the savannahs that surround the granitic peak of Duida.* (* The moriche, like the Sagus Rumphii, is a palm-tree of the marshes, not a palm-tree of the coast, like the Chamaerops humilis, the common cocoa-tree, and the lodoicea.) It was loaded at this season with enormous clusters of red fruit, resembling fir-cones. Our monkeys were extremely fond of this fruit, which has the taste of an over-ripe apple. The monkeys were placed with our baggage on the backs of the mules, and they made great efforts to reach the clusters that hung over their heads. The plain was undulating from the effects of the mirage; and when, after travelling for an hour, we reached the trunks of the palm-trees, which appeared like masts in the horizon, we observed with astonishment how many things are connected with the existence of a single plant. The winds, losing their velocity when in contact with the foliage and the branches, accumulate sand around the trunk. The smell of the fruit and the brightness of the verdure attract from afar the birds of passage, which love to perch on the slender, arrow-like branches of the palm-tree. A soft murmuring is heard around; and overpowered by the heat, and accustomed to the melancholy silence of the plains, the traveller imagines he enjoys some degree of coolness on hearing the slightest sound of the foliage. If we examine the soil on the side opposite to the wind, we find it remains humid long after the rainy season. Insects and worms, everywhere else so rare in the Llanos, here assemble and multiply. This one solitary and often stunted tree, which would not claim the notice of the traveller amid the forests of the Orinoco, spreads life around it in the desert.

On the 13th of July we arrived at the village of Cari, the first of the Caribbee missions that are under the Observantin monks of the college of Piritu. We lodged as usual at the convent, that is, with the clergyman. Our host could scarcely comprehend how natives of the north of Europe could arrive at his dwelling from the frontiers of Brazil by the Rio Negro, and not by way of the coast of Cumana. He behaved to us in the most affable manner, at the same time manifesting that somewhat importunate curiosity which the appearance of a stranger, not a Spaniard, always excites in South America. He expressed his belief that the minerals we had collected must contain gold; and that the plants, dried with so much care, must be medicinal. Here, as in many parts of Europe, the sciences are thought worthy to occupy the mind only so far as they confer some immediate and practical benefit on society.

We found more than five hundred Caribs in the village of Cari; and saw many others in the surrounding missions. It is curious to observe this nomad people, recently attached to the soil, and differing from all the other Indians in their physical and intellectual powers. They are a very tall race of men, their height being from five feet six inches, to five feet ten inches. According to a practice common in America, the women are more sparingly clothed than the men. The former wear only the guajuco, or perizoma, in the form of a band. The men have the lower part of the body wrapped in a piece of blue cloth, so dark as to be almost black. This drapery is so ample that, on the lowering of the temperature towards evening, the Caribs throw it over their shoulders. Their bodies tinged with onoto,* (* Rocou, obtained from the Bixa orellana. This paint is called in the Carib tongue, bichet.) their tall figures, of a reddish copper-colour, and their picturesque drapery, when seen from a distance, relieved against the sky as a background, resemble antique statues of bronze. The men cut their hair in a very peculiar manner, very much in the style of the monks. A part of the forehead is shaved, which makes it appear extremely high, and a circular tuft of hair is left near the crown of the head. This resemblance between the Caribs and the monks is not the result of mission life. It is not caused, as had been erroneously supposed, by the desire of the natives to imitate their masters, the Franciscan monks. The tribes that have preserved their wild independence, between the sources of the Carony and the Rio Branco, are distinguished by the same cerquillo de frailes,* (* Circular tonsure of the friars.) which the early Spanish historians at the time of the discovery of America attributed to the nations of the Carib race. All the men of this race whom we saw either during our voyage on the Lower Orinoco, or in the missions of Piritu, differ from the other Indians not only in the tallness of their stature, but also in the regularity of their features. Their noses are smaller, and less flattened; the cheek-bones are not so high; and their physiognomy has less of the Mongol character. Their eyes, which are darker than those of the other hordes of Guiana, denote intelligence, and it may even be said, the habit of reflection. The Caribs have a gravity of manner, and a certain look of sadness which is observable among most of the primitive inhabitants of the New World. The expression of severity in their features is heightened by the practice of dyeing their eyebrows with the juice of caruto: they also lengthen their eyebrows, thereby giving them the appearance of being joined together; and they often mark their faces all over with black spots to give themselves a more fierce appearance. The Carib women are less robust and good-looking than the men, On them devolves almost the whole burden of domestic work, as well as much of the out-door labour. They asked us eagerly for pins, which they stuck under their lower lip, making the head of the pin penetrate deeply into the skin. The young girls are painted red, and are almost naked. Among the different nations of the old and the new worlds, the idea of nudity is altogether relative. A woman in some parts of Asia is not permitted to show the tips of her fingers; while an Indian of the Carib race is far from considering herself unclothed if she wear round her waist a guajuco two inches broad. Even this band is regarded as less essential than the pigment which covers the skin. To go out of the hut without being painted, would be to transgress all the rules of Carib decency.

The Indians of the missions of Piritu especially attracted our attention, because they belong to a nation which, by its daring, its warlike enterprises, and its mercantile spirit has exercised great influence over the vast country extending from the equator towards the northern coast. Everywhere on the Orinoco we beheld traces of the hostile incursions of the Caribs: incursions which heretofore extended from the sources of the Carony and the Erevato as far as the banks of the Ventuari, the Atacavi, and the Rio Negro. The Carib language is consequently the most general in this part of the world; it has even passed (like the language of the Lenni-Lenapes, or Algonkins, and the Natchez or Muskoghees, on the west of the Allegheny mountains) to tribes which have not a common origin.

When we survey that multitude of nations spread over North and South America, eastward of the Cordilleras of the Andes, we fix our attention particularly on those who, having long held dominion over their neighbours, have acted an important part on the stage of the world. It is the business of the historian to group facts, to distinguish masses, to ascend to the common sources of many migrations and popular movements. Great empires, the regular organization of a sacerdotal hierarchy, and the culture which that organization favours in the first ages of society, have existed only on the high mountains of the western world. In Mexico we see a vast monarchy enclosing small republics; at Cundinamarca and Peru we find pure theocracies. Fortified towns, highways and large edifices of stone, an extraordinary development of the feudal system, the separation of castes, convents of men and women, religious congregations regulated by discipline more or less severe, complicated divisions of time connected with the calendars, the zodiacs, and the astrology of the enlightened nations of Asia—all these phenomena in America belong to one region only, the long and narrow Alpine band extending from the thirtieth degree of north latitude to the twenty-fifth degree of south. The migration of nations in the ancient world was from east to west; the Basques or Iberians, the Celts, the Germans and the Pelasgi, appeared in succession. In the New World similar migrations flowed from north to south. Among the nations that inhabit the two hemispheres, the direction of this movement followed that of the mountains; but in the torrid zone the temperate table-lands of the Cordilleras had greater influence on the destiny of mankind, than the mountains of Asia and central Europe. As, properly speaking, only civilized nations have a history, the history of the Americans is necessarily no more than that of a small portion of the inhabitants of the mountains. Profound obscurity envelops the vast country which stretches from the eastern slope of the Cordilleras towards the Atlantic; and for this very reason, whatever in that country relates to the preponderance of one nation over others, to distant migrations, to the physiognomical features which denote a foreign race, excite our deepest interest.

Amidst the plains of North America, some powerful nation, which has disappeared, constructed circular, square, and octagonal fortifications; walls six thousand toises in length; tumuli from seven to eight hundred feet in diameter, and one hundred and forty feet in height, sometimes round, sometimes with several stories and containing thousands of skeletons. These skeletons are the remains of men less slender and more squat than the present inhabitants of those countries. Other bones wrapped in fabrics resembling those of the Sandwich and Feejee Islands are found in the natural grottoes of Kentucky. What is become of those nations of Louisiana anterior to the Lenni-Lenapes, the Shawanese, and perhaps even to the Sioux (Nadowesses, Nahcotas) of the Missouri, who are strongly mongolised; and who, it is believed, according to their own traditions, came from the coast of Asia? In the plains of South America we find only a very few hillocks of that kind called cerros hechos a mano;* (* Hills made by the hand, or artificial hills.) and nowhere any works of fortification analogous to those of the Ohio. However, on a vast space of ground, at the Lower Orinoco, as well as on the banks of the Cassiquiare and between the sources of the Essequibo and the Rio Branco, there are rocks of granite covered with symbolic figures. These sculptures denote that the extinct generations belonged to nations different from those which now inhabit the same regions. There seems to be no connection between the history of Mexico and that of Cundinamarca and of Peru; but in the plains of the east a warlike and long-dominant nation betrays in its features and its physical constitution traces of a foreign origin. The Caribs preserve traditions that seem to indicate ancient communications between North and South America. Such a phenomenon deserves particular attention. If it be true that savages are for the most part degenerate races, remnants escaped from a common wreck, as their languages, their cosmogonic fables, and numerous other indications seem to prove, it becomes doubly important to examine the course by which these remnants have been driven from one hemisphere to the other.

That fine race of people, the Caribs, now occupy only a small part of the country which they inhabited at the time of the discovery of America. The cruelties exercised by Europeans have entirely exterminated them from the West Indian Islands and the coasts of Darien; while under the government of the missions they have formed populous villages in the provinces of New Barcelona and Spanish Guiana. The Caribs who inhabit the Llanos of Piritu and the banks of the Carony and the Cuyuni may be estimated at more than thirty-five thousand. If we add to this number the independent Caribs who live westward of the mountains of Cayenne and Pacaraymo, between the sources of the Essequibo and the Rio Branco, we shall no doubt obtain a total of forty thousand individuals of pure race, unmixed with any other tribes of natives. Prior to my travels, the Caribs were mentioned in many geographical works as an extinct race. Writers unacquainted with the interior of the Spanish colonies of the continent supposed that the small islands of Dominica, Guadaloupe, and St. Vincent had been the principal abodes of that nation of which the only vestiges now remaining throughout the whole of the eastern West India Islands are skeletons petrified, or rather enveloped in a limestone containing madrepores.* (* These skeletons were discovered in 1805 by M. Cortez. They are encased in a formation of madrepore breccia, which the negroes call God's masonry, and which, like the travertin of Italy, envelops fragments of vases and other objects created by human skill. M. Dauxion Lavaysse and Dr. Koenig first made known in Europe this phenomenon which has greatly interested geologists.)

The name of Caribs, which I find for the first time in a letter of Peter Martyr d'Anghiera is derived from Calina and Caripuna, the l and p being transferred into r and b. It is very remarkable that this name, which Columbus heard pronounced by the people of Hayti, was known to exist at the same time among the Caribs of the islands and those of the continent. From the word Carina, or Calina, has been formed Galibi (Caribi). This is the distinctive denomination of a tribe in French Guiana,* who are of much more diminutive stature than the inhabitants of Cari, but speaking one of the numerous dialects of the Carib tongue. (* The Galibis (Calibitis), the Palicours, and the Acoquouas, also cut their hair in the style of the monks; and apply bandages to the legs of their children for the purpose of swelling the muscles. They have the same predilection for green stones (saussurite) which we observed among the Carib nations of the Orinoco. There exist, besides, in French Guiana, twenty Indian tribes which are distinguished from the Galibis though their language proves that they have a common origin.) The inhabitants of the islands are called Calinago in the language of the men; and in that of the women, Callipinan. The difference in the language of the two sexes is more striking among the people of the Carib race than among other American nations (the Omaguas, the Guaranis, and the Chiquitos) where it applies only to a limited number of ideas; for instance, the words mother and child. It may be conceived that women, from their separate way of life, frame particular terms which men do not adopt. Cicero observes* that old forms of language are best preserved by women because by their position in society they are less exposed to those vicissitudes of life, changes of place and occupation which tend to corrupt the primitive purity of language among men. (* Cicero, de Orat. lib. 3 cap. 12 paragraph 45 ed. Verburg. Facilius enim mulieres incorruptam antiquitatem conservant, quod multorum sermonis expertes ea tenent semper, quae prima didicerunt.) But in the Carib nations the contrast between the dialect of the two sexes is so great that to explain it satisfactorily we must refer to another cause; and this may perhaps be found in the barbarous custom, practised by those nations, of killing their male prisoners, and carrying the wives of the vanquished into captivity. When the Caribs made an irruption into the archipelago of the West India Islands, they arrived there as a band of warriors, not as colonists accompanied by their families. The language of the female sex was formed by degrees, as the conquerors contracted alliances with the foreign women; it was composed of new elements, words distinct from the Carib words,* which in the interior of the gynaeceums were transmitted from generation to generation, but on which the structure, the combinations, the grammatical forms of the language of the men exercised an influence. (* The following are examples of the difference between the language of the men (m), and the women (w); isle, oubao (m), acaera (w); man, ouekelli (m), eyeri (w); but, irhen (m), atica (w).) There was then manifested in a small community the peculiarity which we now find in the whole group of the nations of the New Continent. The American languages, from Hudson's Bay to the Straits of Magellan, are in general characterized by a total disparity of words combined with a great analogy in their structure. They are like different substances invested with analogous forms. If we recollect that this phenomenon extends over one-half of our planet, almost from pole to pole; if we consider the shades in the grammatical forms (the genders applied to the three persons of the verb, the reduplications, the frequentatives, the duals); it appears highly astonishing to find a uniform tendency in the development of intelligence and language among so considerable a portion of the human race.

We have just seen that the dialect of the Carib women in the West India Islands contains the vestiges of a language that was extinct. Some writers have imagined that this extinct language might be that of the Ygneris, or primitive inhabitants of the Caribbee Islands; others have traced in it some resemblance to the ancient idiom of Cuba, or to those of the Arowaks, and the Apalachites in Florida: but these hypotheses are all founded on a very imperfect knowledge of the idioms which it has been attempted to compare one with another.

The Spanish writers of the sixteenth century inform us that the Carib nations then extended over eighteen or nineteen degrees of latitude, from the Virgin Islands east of Porto Rico, to the mouths of the Amazon. Another prolongation toward the west, along the coast-chain of Santa Marta and Venezuela, appears less certain. Gomara, however, and the most ancient historians, give the name of Caribana, not, as it has since been applied, to the country between the sources of the Orinoco and the mountains of French Guiana,* (* This name is found in the map of Hondius, of 1599, which accompanies the Latin edition of the narrative of Raleigh's voyage. In the Dutch edition Nieuwe Caerte van het goudrycke landt Guiana, the Llanos of Caracas, between the mountains of Merida and the Rio Pao, bear the name of Caribana. We may remark here, what we observe so often in the history of geography, that the same denomination has spread by degrees from west to east.) but to the marshy plains between the mouths of the Rio Atrato and the Rio Sinu. I have visited those coasts in going from the Havannah to Porto Bello; and I there learned that the cape which bounds the gulf of Darien or Uraba on the east, still bears the name of Punta Caribana. An opinion heretofore prevailed pretty generally that the Caribs of the West India Islands derived their origin, and even their name, from these warlike people of Darien. "From the eastern shore springs Cape Uraba, which the natives call Caribana, whence the Caribs of the island are said to have received their present name."* (* Inde Vrabam ab orientali prehendit ora, quam appellant indigenae Caribana, unde Caribes insulares originem habere nomenque retinere dicuntur.) Thus Anghiera expresses himself in his Oceanica. He had been told by a nephew of Amerigo Vespucci that thence, as far as the snowy mountains of St. Marta, all the natives were e genere Caribium, vel Canibalium. I do not deny that Caribs may have had a settlement near the gulf of Darien, and that they may have been driven thither by the easterly currents; but it also may have happened that the Spanish navigators, little attentive to languages, gave the names Carib and Cannibal to every race of people of tall stature and ferocious character. Still it is by no means probable that the Caribs of the islands and of Parima took to themselves the name of the region which they had originally inhabited. On the east of the Andes and wherever civilization has not yet penetrated, it is the people who have given names to the places where they have settled.* (* These names of places can be perpetuated only where the nations succeed immediately to each other, and where the tradition is interrupted. Thus in the province of Quito many of the summits of the Andes bear names which belong neither to the Quichua (the language of Inca) nor to the ancient language of the Paruays, governed by the Conchocando of Lican.) The words Caribs and Cannibals appear significant; they are epithets referring to valour, strength and even superior intelligence.* (* Vespucci says: Charaibi magnae sapientiae viri.) It is worthy of remark that, at the arrival of the Portuguese, the Brazilians gave to their magicians the name of caraibes. We know that the Caribs of Parima were the most wandering people of America; possibly some wily individuals of that nation played the same part as the Chaldeans of the ancient continent. The names of nations readily become affixed to particular professions; and when, in the time of the Caesars, the superstitions of the East were introduced into Italy, the Chaldeans no more came from the banks of the Euphrates than our Gypsies (Egyptians or Bohemians) came from the banks of the Nile or the Elbe.

When a continent and its adjacent islands are peopled by one and the same race, we may choose between two hypotheses; supposing the emigration to have taken place either from the islands to the continent, or from the continent to the islands. The Iberians (Basques) who were settled at the same time in Spain and in the islands of the Mediterranean, afford an instance of this problem; as do also the Malays who appear to be indigenous in the peninsula of Malacca, and in the district of Menangkabao in the island of Sumatra.* (* Crawfurd, Indian Archipelago volume 2 page 371. I make use of the word indigenous (autocthoni) not to indicate a fact of creation, which does not belong to history, but simply to denote that we are ignorant of the autocthoni having been preceded by any other people.) The archipelago of the large and small West India Islands forms a narrow and broken neck of land, parallel with the isthmus of Panama, and supposed by some geographers to join the peninsula of Florida to the north-east extremity of South America. It is the eastern shore of an inland sea which may be considered as a basin with several outlets. This peculiar configuration of the land has served to support the different systems of migration, by which it has been attempted to explain the settlement of the nations of the Carib race in the islands and on the neighbouring continent. The Caribs of the continent admit that the small West India Islands were anciently inhabited by the Arowaks,* a warlike nation, the great mass of which still inhabit the insalubrious shores of Surinam and Berbice. (* Arouaques. The missionary Quandt (Nachricht von Surinam, 1807 page 47) calls them Arawackes.) They assert that the Arowaks, with the exception of the women, were all exterminated by Caribs, who came from the mouths of the Orinoco. In support of this tradition they refer to the traces of analogy existing between the language of the Arowaks and that of the Carib women; but it must be recollected that the Arowaks, though the enemies of the Caribs, belonged to the same branch of people; and that the same analogy exists between the Arowak and Carib languages as between the Greek and the Persian, the German and the Sanscrit. According to another tradition, the Caribs of the islands came from the south, not as conquerors, but because they were expelled from Guiana by the Arowaks, who originally ruled over all the neighbouring nations. Finally, a third tradition, much more general and more probable, represents the Caribs as having come from Florida, in North America. Mr. Bristock, a traveller who has collected every particular relating to these migrations from north to south, asserts that a tribe of Confachites (Confachiqui* (* The province of Confachiqui, which in 1541 became subject to a woman, is celebrated by the expedition of Hernando de Soto to Florida. Among the nations of the Huron tongue, and the Attakapas, the supreme authority was also often exercised by women.)) had long waged war against the Apalachites; that the latter, having yielded to that tribe the fertile district of Amana, called their new confederates Caribes (that is, valiant strangers); but that, owing to a dispute respecting their religious rites, the Confachite-Caribs were driven from Florida. They went first to the Yucayas or Lucayes Islands (to Cigateo and the neighbouring islands); thence to Ayay (Hayhay, now Santa Cruz), and to the lesser Caribbee Islands; and lastly to the continent of South America.* (* Rochefort, Hist. des Antilles volume 1 pages 326 to 353; Garcia page 322; Robertson book 3 note 69. The conjecture of Father Gili that the Caribs of the continent may have come from the islands at the time of the first conquest of the Spaniards (Saggio volume 3 page 204), is at variance with all the statements of the early historians.) It is supposed that this event took place toward the year 1100 of our era. In the course of this long migration the Caribs had not touched at the larger islands; the inhabitants of which however also believed that they came originally from Florida. The islanders of Cuba, Hayti, and Boriken (Porto Rico) were, according to the uniform testimony of the first conquistadores, entirely different from the Caribs; and at the period of the discovery of America, the latter had already abandoned the group of the lesser Lucayes Islands; an archipelago in which there prevailed that variety of languages always found in lands peopled by shipwrecked men and fugitives.* (* La gente de las islas Yucayas era (1492) mas blanca y de major policia que la de Cuba y Haiti. Havia mucha diversidad de lenguas. [The people of the Lucayes were (1492) of fairer complexion and of more civilized manners than those of Cuba and Hayti. They had a great diversity of languages.] Gomara, Hist. de Ind. fol. 22.)

The dominion so long exercised by the Caribs over a great part of the continent, joined to the remembrance of their ancient greatness, has inspired them with a sentiment of dignity and national superiority which is manifest in their manners and their discourse. "We alone are a nation," say they proverbially; "the rest of mankind (oquili) are made to serve us." This contempt of the Caribs for their enemies is so strong that I saw a child of ten years of age foam with rage on being called a Cabre or Cavere; though he had never in his life seen an individual of that unfortunate race of people who gave their name to the town of Cabruta (Cabritu); and who, after long resistance, were almost entirely exterminated by the Caribs. Thus we find among half savage hordes, as in the most civilized part of Europe, those inveterate animosities which have caused the names of hostile nations to pass into their respective languages as insulting appellations.

The missionary of the village of Cari led us into several Indian huts, where extreme neatness and order prevailed. We observed with pain the torments which the Carib mothers inflict on their infants for the purpose not only of enlarging the calf of the leg, but also of raising the flesh in alternate stripes from the ankle to the top of the thigh. Narrow ligatures, consisting of bands of leather, or of woven cotton, are fixed two or three inches apart from each other, and being tightened more and more, the muscles between the bands become swollen. The monks of the missions, though ignorant of the works or even of the name of Rousseau, attempt to oppose this ancient system of physical education: but in vain. Man when just issued from the woods and supposed to be so simple in his manners, is far from being tractable in his ideas of beauty and propriety. I observed, however, with surprise, that the manner in which these poor children are bound, and which seems to obstruct the circulation of the blood, does not operate injuriously on their muscular movements. There is no race of men more robust and swifter in running than the Caribs.

If the women labour to form the legs and thighs of their children so as to produce what painters call undulating outlines, they abstain (at least in the Llanos), from flattening the head by compressing it between cushions and planks from the most tender age. This practice, so common heretofore in the islands and among several tribes of the Caribs of Parima and French Guiana, is not observed in the missions which we visited. The men there have foreheads rounder than those of the Chaymas, the Otomacs, the Macos, the Maravitans and most of the inhabitants of the Orinoco. A systematizer would say that the form is such as their intellectual faculties require. We were so much the more struck by this fact as some of the skulls of Caribs engraved in Europe, for works on anatomy, are distinguished from all other human skulls by the extremely depressed forehead and acute facial angle. In some osteological collections skulls supposed to be those of Caribs of the island of St. Vincent are in fact skulls shaped by having been pressed between planks. They have belonged to Zambos (black Caribs) who are descended from Negroes and true Caribs.* (* These unfortunate remnants of a nation heretofore powerful were banished in 1795 to the Island of Rattam in the Bay of Honduras because they were accused by the English Government of having connexions with the French. In 1760 an able minister, M. Lescallier, proposed to the Court of Versailles to invite the Red and Black Caribs from St. Vincent to Guiana and to employ them as free men in the cultivation of the land. I doubt whether their number at that period amounted to six thousand, as the island of St. Vincent contained in 1787 not more than fourteen thousand inhabitants of all colours.) The barbarous habit of flattening the forehead is practised by several nations,* of people not of the same race; and it has been observed recently in North America; but nothing is more vague than the conclusion that some degree of conformity in customs and manners proves identity of origin. (* For instance the Tapoyranas of Guiana (Barrere page 239), the Solkeeks of Upper Louisiana (Walckenaer, Cosmos page 583). Los Indios de Cumana, says Gomara (Hist. de Ind.), aprietan a los ninos la cabeca muy blando, pero mucho, entre dos almohadillas de algodon para ensancharlos la cara, que lo tienen por hermosura. Las donzellas traen senogiles muy apretados par debaxo y encima de las rodillas, para que los muslos y pantorillas engorden mucho. [The Indians of Cumana press down the heads of young infants tightly between cushions stuffed with cotton for the purpose of giving width to their faces, which they regard as a beauty. The young girls wear very tight bandages round their knees in order to give thickness to the thighs and calves of the legs.]) On observing the spirit of order and submission which prevails in the Carib missions, the traveller can scarcely persuade himself that he is among cannibals. This American word, of somewhat doubtful signification, is probably derived from the language of Hayti, or that of Porto Rico; and it has passed into the languages of Europe, since the end of the fifteenth century, as synonymous with that of anthropophagi. "These newly discovered man-eaters, so greedy of human flesh, are called Caribes or Cannibals,"* says Anghiera, in the third decade of his Oceanica, dedicated to Pope Leo X. (* Edaces humanarum carnium novi helluones anthropophagi, Caribes alias Canibales appellati.) There can be little doubt that the Caribs of the islands, when a conquering people, exercised cruelties upon the Ygneris, or ancient inhabitants of the West Indies, who were weak and not very warlike; but we must also admit that these cruelties were exaggerated by the early travellers, who heard only the narratives of the old enemies of the Caribs. It is not always the vanquished solely, who are calumniated by their contemporaries; the insolence of the conquerors is punished by the catalogue of their crimes being augmented.
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Re: Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions

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Part 2 of 3

All the missionaries of the Carony, the Lower Orinoco and the Llanos del Cari whom we had an opportunity of consulting assured us that the Caribs are perhaps the least anthropophagous nations of the New Continent. They extend this remark even to the independent hordes who wander on the east of the Esmeralda, between the sources of the Rio Branco and the Essequibo. It may be conceived that the fury and despair with which the unhappy Caribs defended themselves against the Spaniards, when in 1504 a royal decree declared them slaves, may have contributed to acquire for them a reputation for ferocity. The first idea of attacking this nation and depriving it of liberty and of its natural rights originated with Christopher Columbus, who was not in all instances so humane as he is represented to have been. Subsequently the licenciado Rodrigo de Figueroa was appointed by the court, in 1520, to determine the tribes of South America, who were to be regarded as of Carib race, or as cannibals; and those who were Guatiaos,* that is, Indians of peace, and friends of the Castilians. (* I had some trouble in discovering the origin of this denomination which has become so important from the fatal decrees of Figueroa. The Spanish historians often employ the word guatiao to designate a branch of nations. To become a guatiao of any one seems to have signified, in the language of Hayti, to conclude a treaty of friendship. In the West India Islands, as well as in the archipelago of the South Sea, names were exchanged in token of alliance. Juan de Esquivel (1502) se hice guatiao del cacique Cotubanama; el qual desde adelante se llamo Juan de Esquivel, porque era liga de perpetua amistad entre los Indios trocarse los nombres: y trocados quedaban guatiaos, que era tanto coma confederados y hermanos en armas. Ponce de Leon se hace guatiao con el poderoso cacique Agueinaha." Herrera dec. 1 pages 129, 159 and 181. [Juan de Esquivel (1502) became the guatiao of the cacique Cotubanama; and thenceforth the latter called himself Juan de Esquivel, for among the Indians the exchange of names was a bond of perpetual friendship. Those who exchanged names became guaitaos, which meant the same as confederates or brethren-in-arms. Ponce de Leon became guatiao with the powerful cacique Agueinaha.] One of the Lucayes Islands, inhabited by a mild and pacific people, was heretofore called Guatao; but we will not insist on the etymology of this word, because the languages of the Lucayes Islands differed from those of Hayti.) The ethnographic document called El Auto de Figueroa is one of the most curious records of the barbarism of the first conquistadores. Without any attention to the analogy of languages, every nation that could be accused of having devoured a prisoner after a battle was arbitrarily declared of Carib race. The inhabitants of Uriapari (on the peninsula of Paria) were named Caribs; the Urinacos (settled on the banks of the Lower Orinoco, or Urinucu), Guatiaos. All the tribes designated by Figueroa as Caribs were condemned to slavery; and might at will be sold, or exterminated by war. In these sanguinary struggles, the Carib women, after the death of their husbands, defended themselves with such desperation that Anghiera says they were taken for tribes of Amazons. But amidst the cruelties exercised on the Caribs, it is consolatory to find, that there existed some courageous men who raised the voice of humanity and justice. Some of the monks embraced an opinion different from that which they had at first adopted. In an age when there could be no hope of founding public liberty on civil institutions, an attempt was at least made to defend individual liberty. "That is a most holy law (ley sanctissima)," says Gomara, in 1551, "by which our emperor has prohibited the reducing of the Indians to slavery. It is just that men, who are all born free, should not become the slaves of one another."

During our abode in the Carib missions, we observed with surprise the facility with which young Indians of eighteen years of age, when appointed to the post of alguazil, would harangue the municipality for whole hours in succession. Their tone of voice, their gravity of deportment, the gestures which accompanied their speech, all denoted an intelligent people capable of a high degree of civilization. A Franciscan monk, who knew enough of the Carib language to preach in it occasionally, pointed out to us that the long and harmonious periods which occur in the discourses of the Indians are never confused or obscure. Particular inflexions of the verb indicate beforehand the nature of the object, whether it be animate or inanimate, singular or plural. Little annexed forms (suffixes) mark the gradations of sentiment; and here, as in every language formed by a free development, clearness is the result of that regulating instinct which characterises human intelligence in the various stages of barbarism and cultivation. On holidays, after the celebration of mass, all the inhabitants of the village assemble in front of the church. The young girls place at the feet of the missionary faggots of wood, bunches of plantains, and other provision of which he stands in need for his household. At the same time the governador, the alguazil, and other municipal officers, all of whom are Indians, exhort the natives to labour, proclaim the occupations of the ensuing week, reprimand the idle, and flog the untractable. Strokes of the cane are received with the same insensibility as that with which they are given. It were better if the priest did not impose these corporal punishments at the instant of quitting the altar, and if he were not, in his sacerdotal habits, the spectator of this chastisement of men and women; but this abuse is inherent in the principle on which the strange government of the missions is founded. The most arbitrary civil power is combined with the authority exercised by the priest over the little community; and, although the Caribs are not cannibals, and we would wish to see them treated with mildness and indulgence, it may be conceived that energetic measures are sometimes necessary to maintain tranquillity in this rising society.

The difficulty of fixing the Caribs to the soil is the greater, as they have been for ages in the habit of trading on the rivers. We have already described this active people, at once commercial and warlike, occupied in the traffic of slaves, and carrying merchandize from the coasts of Dutch Guiana to the basin of the Amazon. The travelling Caribs were the Bokharians of equinoctial America. The necessity of counting the objects of their little trade, and transmitting intelligence, led them to extend and improve the use of the quipos, or, as they are called in the missions, the cordoncillos con necos (cords with knots). These quipos or knotted cords are found in Canada, in Mexico (where Boturini procured some from the Tlascaltecs), in Peru, in the plains of Guiana, in central Asia, in China, and in India. As rosaries, they have become objects of devotion in the hands of the Christians of the East; as suampans, they have been employed in the operations of manual arithmetic by the Chinese, the Tartars, and the Russians. The independent Caribs who inhabit the little-known country situated between the sources of the Orinoco and those of the rivers Essequibo, Carony, and Parima, are divided into tribes; and, like the nations of the Missouri, of Chili, and of ancient Germany, form a political confederation. This system is most in accordance with the spirit of liberty prevailing amongst those warlike hordes who see no advantage in the ties of society but for common defence. The pride of the Caribs leads them to withdraw themselves from every other tribe; even from those to whom, by their language, they have some affinity.

They claim the same separation in the missions, which seldom prosper when any attempt is made to associate them with other mixed communities, that is, with villages where every hut is inhabited by a family belonging to another nation and speaking another language. The authority of the chiefs of the independent Caribs is hereditary in the male line only, the children of sisters being excluded from the succession. This law of succession which is founded on a system of mistrust, denoting no great purity of manners, prevails in India; among the Ashantees (in Africa); and among several tribes of the savages of North America.* (* Among the Hurons (Wyandots) and the Natchez the succession to the magistracy is continued by the women: it is not the son who succeeds, but the son of the sister, or of the nearest relation in the female line. This mode of succession is said to be the most certain because the supreme power remains attached to the blood of the last chief; it is a practice that insures legitimacy. Ancient traces of this strange mode of succession, so common in Africa and in the East Indies, exist in the dynasty of the kings of the West India Islands.) The young chiefs and other youths who are desirous of marrying, are subject to the most extraordinary fasts and penances, and are required to take medicines prepared by the marirris or piaches, called in the transalleghenian countries, war-physic. The Carribbee marirris are at once priests, jugglers and physicians; they transmit to their successors their doctrine, their artifices, and the remedies they employ. The latter are accompanied by imposition of hands, and certain gestures and mysterious practices, apparently connected with the most anciently known processes of animal magnetism. Though I had opportunities of seeing many persons who had closely observed the confederated Caribs, I could not learn whether the marirris belong to a particular caste. It is observed in North America that, among the Shawanese,* (* People that came from Florida, or from the south (shawaneu) to the north.) divided into several tribes, the priests, who preside at the sacrifices, must be (as among the Hebrews) of one particular tribe, that of the Mequachakes. Any facts that may hereafter be discovered in America respecting the remains of a sacerdotal caste appears to me calculated to excite great interest, on account of those priest-kings of Peru, who styled themselves the children of the Sun; and of those sun-kings among the Natchez, who recall to mind the Heliades of the first eastern colony of Rhodes.

On quitting the mission of Cari, we had some difficulties to settle with our Indian muleteers. They had discovered that we had brought skeletons with us from the cavern of Ataruipe; and they were fully persuaded that the beasts of burden which carried the bodies of their old relations would perish on the journey.* (* See volume 2.24.) Every precaution we had taken was useless; nothing escapes a Carib's penetration and keen sense of smell, and it required all the authority of the missionary to forward our passage. We had to cross the Rio Cari in a boat, and the Rio de agua clara, by fording, or, it may almost be said, by swimming. The quicksands of the bed of this river render the passage very difficult at the season when the waters are high. The strength of the current seems surprising in so flat a country; but the rivers of the plains are precipitated, to quote a correct observation of Pliny the younger,* "less by the declivity of their course than by their abundance, and as it were by their own weight." (* Epist. lib. 8 ep. 8. Clitumnus non loci devexitate, sed ipsa sui copia et quasi pondere impellitur.) We had two bad stations, one at Matagorda and the other at Los Riecetos, before we reached the little town of Pao. We beheld everywhere the same objects; small huts constructed of reeds, and roofed with leather; men on horseback armed with lances, guarding the herds; herds of cattle half wild, remarkable for their uniform colour, and disputing the pasturage with horses and mules. No sheep or goats are found on these immense plains. Sheep do not thrive well in equinoctial America, except on table-lands above a thousand toises high, where their fleece is long and sometimes very fine. In the burning climate of the plains, where the wolves give place to jaguars, these small ruminating animals, destitute of means of defence, and slow in their movements, cannot be preserved in any considerable numbers.

We arrived on the 15th of July at the Fundacion, or Villa, del Pao, founded in 1744, and situated very favourably for a commercial station between Nueva Barcelona and Angostura. Its real name is El Concepcion del Pao. Alcedo, La Cruz, Olmedilla, and many other geographers, have mistaken the situation of this small town of the Llanos of Barcelona, confounding it either with San Juan Bauptisto del Pao of the Llanos of Caracas, or with El Valle del Pao de Zarate. Though the weather was cloudy I succeeded in obtaining some heights of alpha Centauri, serving to determine the latitude of the place; which is 8 degrees 37 minutes 57 seconds. Some altitudes of the sun gave me 67 degrees 8 minutes 12 seconds for the longitude, supposing Angostura to be 66 degrees 15 minutes 21 seconds. The astronomical determinations of Calabozo and Concepcion del Pao are very important to the geography of this country, where, in the midst of savannahs, fixed points are altogether wanting. Some fruit-trees grow in the vicinity of Pao: they are rarely seen in the Llanos. We even found some cocoa-trees, which appeared very vigorous, notwithstanding the great distance of the sea. I was the more struck with this fact because doubts have recently been started respecting the veracity of travellers, who assert that they have seen the cocoa-tree, which is a palm of the shore, at Timbuctoo, in the centre of Africa. We several times saw cocoa-trees amid the cultivated spots on the banks of the Rio Magdalena, more than a hundred leagues from the coast.

Five days, which to us appeared very tedious, brought us from Villa del Pao to the port of Nueva Barcelona. As we advanced the sky became more serene, the soil more dusty, and the atmosphere more hot. The heat from which we suffered is not entirely owing to the temperature of the air, but is produced by the fine sand mingled with it; this sand strikes against the face of the traveller, as it does against the ball of the thermometer. I never observed the mercury rise in America, amid a wind of sand, above 45.8 degrees centigrade. Captain Lyon, with whom I had the pleasure of conversing on his return from Mourzouk, appeared to me also inclined to think that the temperature of fifty-two degrees, so often felt in Fezzan, is produced in great part by the grains of quartz suspended in the atmosphere. Between Pao and the village of Santa Cruz de Cachipo, founded in 1749, and inhabited by five hundred Caribs, we passed the western elongation of the little table-land, known by the name of Mesa de Amana. This table-land forms a point of partition between the Orinoco, the Guarapiche, and the coast of New Andalusia. Its height is so inconsiderable that it would scarcely be an obstacle to the establishment of inland navigation in this part of the Llanos. The Rio Mano however, which flows into the Orinoco above the confluence of the Carony, and which D'Anville (I know not on what authority) has marked in the first edition of his great map as issuing from the lake of Valencia, and receiving the waters of the Guayra, could never have served as a natural canal between two basins of rivers. No bifurcation of this kind exists in the Llano. A great number of Carib Indians, who now inhabit the missions of Piritu, were formerly on the north and east of the table-land of Amana, between Maturin, the mouth of the Rio Arco, and the Guarapiche. The incursions of Don Joseph Careno, one of the most enterprising governors of the province of Cumana, occasioned a general migration of independent Caribs toward the banks of the Lower Orinoco in 1720.

The whole of this vast plain consists of secondary formations which to the southward rest immediately on the granitic mountains of the Orinoco. On the north-west they are separated by a narrow band of transition-rocks from the primitive mountains of the shore of Caracas. This abundance of secondary rocks, covering without interruption a space of more than seven thousand square leagues,* is a phenomenon the more remarkable in that region of the globe, because in the whole of the Sierra da la Parima, between the right bank of the Orinoco and the Rio Negro, there is, as in Scandinavia, a total absence of secondary formations. (* Reckoning only that part of the Llanos which is bounded by the Rio Apure on the south, and by the Sierra Nevada de Merida and the Parima de las Rosas on the west.) The red sandstone, containing some vestiges of fossil wood (of the family of monocotyledons) is seen everywhere in the plains of Calabozo: farther east it is overlaid by calcareous and gypseous rocks which conceal it from the research of the geologist. The marly gypsum, of which we collected specimens near the Carib mission of Cachipo, appeared to me to belong to the same formation as the gypsum of Ortiz. To class it according to the type of European formations I would range it among the gypsums, often muriatiferous, that cover the Alpine limestone or zechstein. Farther north, in the direction of the mission of San Josef de Curataquiche, M. Bonpland picked up in the plain some fine pieces of riband jasper, or Egyptian pebbles. We did not see them in their native place enchased in the rock, and cannot determine whether they belong to a very recent conglomerate or to that limestone which we saw at the Morro of Nueva Barcelona, and which is not transition limestone though it contains beds of schistose jasper (kieselschiefer).

We rested on the night of the 16th of July in the Indian village of Santa Cruz de Cachipo. This mission, founded in 1749 by several Carib families who inhabited the inundated and unhealthy banks of the Lagunetas de Auache, is opposite the confluence of the Zir Puruay with the Orinoco. We lodged at the house of the missionary, Fray Jose de las Piedras; and, on examining the registers of the parish, we saw how rapidly the prosperity of the community has been advanced by his zeal and intelligence. Since we had reached the middle of the plains, the heat had increased to such a degree that we should have preferred travelling no more during the day; but we were without arms and the Llanos were then infested by large numbers of robbers who attacked and murdered the whites who fell into their hands. Nothing can be worse than the administration of justice in these colonies. We everywhere found the prisons filled with malefactors on whom sentence is not passed till after the lapse of seven or eight years. Nearly a third of the prisoners succeed in making their escape; and the unpeopled plains, filled with herds, furnish them with booty. They commit their depredations on horseback in the manner of the Bedouins. The insalubrity of the prisons would be attended with fatal results but that these receptacles are cleared from time to time by the flight of the prisoners. It also frequently happens that sentences of death, tardily pronounced by the Audiencia of Caracas, cannot be executed for want of a hangman. In these cases the barbarous custom is observed of pardoning one criminal on condition of his hanging the others. Our guides related to us that, a short time before our arrival on the coast of Cumana, a Zambo, known for the great ferocity of his manners, determined to screen himself from punishment by turning executioner. The preparations for the execution however, shook his resolution; he felt a horror of himself, and preferring death to the disgrace of thus saving his life, he called again for his irons which had been struck off. He did not long remain in prison, and he underwent his sentence through the baseness of one of his accomplices. This awakening of a sentiment of honour in the soul of a murderer is a psychologic phenomenon worthy of reflection. The man who had so often shed the blood of travellers in the plains recoiled at the idea of becoming the passive instrument of justice in inflicting upon others a punishment which he felt that he himself deserved.

If, even in the peaceful times when M. Bonpland and myself had the good fortune to travel through North and South America, the Llanos were the refuge of malefactors who had committed crimes in the missions of the Orinoco, or who had escaped from the prisons on the coast, how much worse must that state of things have been rendered by discord during the continuance of that sanguinary struggle which has terminated in conferring freedom and independence on those vast regions! Our European wastes and heaths are but a feeble image of the savannahs of the New Continent which for the space of eight or ten thousand square leagues are smooth as the surface of the sea. The immensity of their extent insures impunity to robbers, who conceal themselves more effectually in the savannahs than in our mountains and forests; and it is easy to conceive that even a European police would not be very effective in regions where there are travellers and no roads, herds and no herdsmen, and farms so solitary that notwithstanding the powerful action of the mirage, a journey of several days may be made without seeing one appear within the horizon.

Whilst traversing the Llanos of Caracas, New Barcelona, and Cumana, which succeed each other from west to east, from the snowy mountains of Merida to the Delta of the Orinoco, we feel anxious to know whether these vast tracts of land are destined by nature to serve eternally for pasture or whether they will at some future time be subject to the plough and the spade. This question is the more important as the Llanos, situated at the two extremities of South America, are obstacles to the political union of the provinces they separate. They prevent the agriculture of the coast of Venezuela from extending towards Guiana and they impede that of Potosi from advancing in the direction of the mouth of the Rio de la Plata. The intermediate Llanos preserve, together with pastoral life, somewhat of a rude and wild character which separates and keeps them remote from the civilization of countries anciently cultivated. Thus it has happened that in the war of independence they have been the scene of struggle between the hostile parties; and that the inhabitants of Calabozo have almost seen the fate of the confederate provinces of Venezuela and Cundinamarca decided before their walls. In assigning limits to the new states and to their subdivisions, it is to be hoped there may not be cause hereafter to repent having lost sight of the importance of the Llanos, and the influence they may have on the disunion of communities which important common interests should bring together. These plains would serve as natural boundaries like the seas or the virgin forests of the tropics, were it not that armies can cross them with greater facility, as their innumerable troops of horses and mules and herds of oxen furnish every means of conveyance and subsistence.

What we have seen of the power of man struggling against the force of nature in Gaul, in Germany and recently (but still beyond the tropics) in the United States, scarcely affords any just measure of what we may expect from the progress of civilization in the torrid zone. Forests disappear but very slowly by fire and the axe when the trunks of trees are from eight to ten feet in diameter; when in falling they rest one upon another, and the wood, moistened by almost continual rains, is excessively hard. The planters who inhabit the Llanos or Pampas do not generally admit the possibility of subjecting the soil to cultivation; it is a problem not yet solved. Most of the savannahs of Venezuela have not the same advantage as those of North America. The latter are traversed longitudinally by three great rivers, the Missouri, the Arkansas, and the Red River of Nachitoches; the savannahs of Araura, Calabozo, and Pao are crossed in a transverse direction only by the tributary streams of the Orinoco, the most westerly of which (the Cari, the Pao, the Acaru, and the Manapire) have very little water in the season of drought. These streams scarcely flow at all toward the north; so that in the centre of the Llanos there remain vast tracts of land called bancos and mesas* frightfully parched. (* The Spanish words banco and mesa signify literally bench and table. In the Llanos of South America little elevations rising slightly above the general elevation of the plain are called bancos and mesas from their supposed resemblance to benches and tables.) The eastern parts, fertilized by the Portuguesa, the Masparro, and the Orivante, and by the tributary streams of those three rivers, are most susceptible of cultivation. The soil is sand mixed with clay, covering a bed of quartz pebbles. The vegetable mould, the principal source of the nutrition of plants, is everywhere extremely thin. It is scarcely augmented by the fall of the leaves, which, in the forests of the torrid zone, is less periodically regular than in temperate climates. During thousands of years the Llanos have been destitute of trees and brushwood; a few scattered palms in the savannah add little to that hydruret of carbon, that extractive matter, which, according to the experiments of Saussure, Davy, and Braconnot, gives fertility to the soil. The social plants which almost exclusively predominate in the steppes, are monocotyledons; and it is known how much grasses impoverish the soil into which their fibrous roots penetrate. This action of the killingias, paspalums and cenchri, which form the turf, is everywhere the same; but where the rock is ready to pierce the earth this varies according as it rests on red sandstone, or on compact limestone and gypsum; it varies according as periodical inundations accumulate mud on the lower grounds or as the shock of the waters carries away from the small elevations the little soil that has covered them. Many solitary cultivated spots already exist in the midst of the pastures where running water and tufts of the mauritia palm have been found. These farms, sown with maize, and planted with cassava, will multiply considerably if trees and shrubs be augmented.

The aridity and excessive heat of the mesas do not depend solely on the nature of their surface and the local reverberation of the soil; their climate is modified by the adjacent regions; by the whole of the Llano of which they form a part. In the deserts of Africa or Arabia, in the Llanos of South America, in the vast heaths extending from the extremity of Jutland to the mouth of the Scheldt, the stability of the limits of the desert, the savannahs, and the downs, depends chiefly on their immense extent and the nakedness these plains have acquired from some revolution destructive of the ancient vegetation of our planet. By their extent, their continuity, and their mass they oppose the inroads of cultivation and preserve, like inland gulfs, the stability of their boundaries. I will not enter upon the great question, whether in the Sahara, that Mediterranean of moving sands, the germs of organic life are increased in our days. In proportion as our geographical knowledge has extended we have discovered in the eastern part of the desert islets of verdure; oases covered with date-trees crowd together in more numerous archipelagos, and open their ports to the caravans; but we are ignorant whether the form of the oases have not remained constantly the same since the time of Herodotus. Our annals are too incomplete to enable us to follow Nature in her slow and gradual progress. From these spaces entirely bare whence some violent catastrophe has swept away the vegetable covering and the mould; from those deserts of Syria and Africa which, by their petrified wood, attest the changes they have undergone; let us turn to the grass-covered Llanos and to the consideration of phenomena that come nearer the circle of our daily observations. Respecting the possibility of a more general cultivation of the steppes of America, the colonists settled there, concur in the opinions I have deduced from the climatic action of these steppes considered as surfaces, or continuous masses. They have observed that downs enclosed within cultivated and wooded land sooner yield to the labours of the husbandman than soils alike circumscribed, but forming part of a vast surface of the same nature. This observation is extremely just whether in reference to soil covered with heath, as in the north of Europe; with cistuses, mastic-trees, or palmettos, as in Spain; or with cactuses, argemones, or brathys, as in equinoctial America. The more space the association occupies the more resistance do the social plants oppose to the labourer. With this general cause others are combined in the Llanos of Venezuela; namely the action of the small grasses which impoverish the soil; the total absence of trees and brushwood; the sandy winds, the heat of which is increased by contact with a surface absorbing the rays of the sun during twelve hours, and unshaded except by the stalks of the aristides, chanchuses, and paspalums. The progress observable on the vegetation of large trees and the cultivation of dicotyledonous plants in the vicinity of towns, (for instance around Calabozo and Pao) prove what may be gained upon the Llano by attacking it in small portions, enclosing it by degrees, and dividing it by coppices and canals of irrigation. Possibly the influence of the winds which render the soil sterile might be diminished by sowing on a large scale, for example, over fifteen or twenty acres, the seeds of the psidium, the croton, the cassia, or the tamarind, which prefer dry, open spots. I am far from believing that the savannahs will ever disappear entirely; or that the Llanos, so useful for pasturage and the trade in cattle, will ever be cultivated like the valleys of Aragua or other parts near the coast of Caracas and Cumana: but I am persuaded that in the lapse of ages a considerable portion of these plains, under a government favourable to industry, will lose the wild aspect which has characterized them since the first conquest by Europeans.

After three days' journey we began to perceive the chain of the mountains of Cumana, which separates the Llanos, or, as they are often called here, the great sea of verdure,* from the coast of the Caribbean Sea. (* Los Llanos son como un mar de yerbas—The Llanos are like a vast sea of grass—is an observation often repeated in these regions.) If the Bergantin be more than eight hundred toises high, it may be seen supposing only an ordinary refraction of one fourteenth of the arch, at the distance of twenty-seven nautical leagues; but the state of the atmosphere long concealed from us the majestic view of this curtain of mountains. It appeared at first like a fog-bank which hid the stars near the pole at their rising and setting; gradually this body of vapour seemed to augment and condense, to assume a bluish tint, and become bounded by sinuous and fixed outlines. The same effects which the mariner observes on approaching a new land present themselves to the traveller on the borders of the Llano. The horizon began to enlarge in some part and the vault of heaven seemed no longer to rest at an equal distance on the grass-covered soil. A llanero, or inhabitant of the Llanos, is happy only when, as expressed in the simple phraseology of the country, he can see everywhere well around him. What appears to European eyes a covered country, slightly undulated by a few scattered hills, is to him a rugged region bristled with mountains. After having passed several months in the thick forests of the Orinoco, in places where one is accustomed, when at any distance from the river, to see the stars only in the zenith, as through the mouth of a well, a journey in the Llanos is peculiarly agreeable and attractive. The traveller experiences new sensations; and, like the Llanero, he enjoys the happiness of seeing well around him. But this enjoyment, as we ourselves experienced, is not of long duration. There is doubtless something solemn and imposing in the aspect of a boundless horizon, whether viewed from the summits of the Andes or the highest Alps, amid the expanse of the ocean or in the vast plains of Venezuela and Tucuman. Infinity of space, as poets in every language say, is reflected within ourselves; it is associated with ideas of a superior order; it elevates the mind which delights in the calm of solitary meditation. It is true, also, that every view of unbounded space bears a peculiar character. The prospect surveyed from a solitary peak varies according as the clouds reposing on the plain extend in layers, are conglomerated in groups, or present to the astonished eye, through broad openings, the habitations of man, the labour of agriculture, or the verdant tint of the aerial ocean. An immense sheet of water, animated by a thousand various beings even to its utmost depths, changing perpetually in colour and aspect, moveable at its surface like the element that agitates it, all charm the imagination during long voyages by sea; but the dusty and creviced Llano, throughout a great part of the year, has a depressing influence on the mind by its unchanging monotony. When, after eight or ten days' journey, the traveller becomes accustomed to the mirage and the brilliant verdure of a few tufts of mauritia* (* The fan-palm, or sago-tree of Guiana.) scattered from league to league, he feels the want of more varied impressions. He loves again to behold the great tropical trees, the wild rush of torrents or hills and valleys cultivated by the hand of the labourer. If the deserts of Africa and of the Llanos or savannahs of the New Continent filled a still greater space than they actually occupy, nature would be deprived of many of the beautiful products peculiar to the torrid zone.* (* In calculating from maps on a very large scale I found the Llanos of Cumana, Barcelona, and Caracas, from the delta of the Orinoco to the northern bank of the Apure, 7200 square leagues; the Llanos between the Apure and Putumayo, 21,000 leagues; the Pampas on the north-west of Buenos Ayres, 40,000 square leagues; the Pampas south of the parallel of Buenos Ayres, 37,000 square leagues. The total area of the Llanos of South America, covered with gramina, is consequently 105,200 square leagues, twenty leagues to an equatorial degree.) The heaths of the north, the steppes of the Volga and the Don, are scarcely poorer in species of plants and animals than are the twenty-eight thousand square leagues of savannahs extending in a semicircle from north-east to south-west, from the mouths of the Orinoco to the banks of the Caqueta and the Putumayo, beneath the finest sky in the world, and in the land of plantains and bread-fruit trees. The influence of the equinoctial climate, everywhere else so vivifying, is not felt in places where the great associations of gramina almost exclude every other plant. Judging from the aspect of the soil we might have believed ourselves to be in the temperate zone and even still farther northward but that a few scattered palms, and at nightfall the fine constellations of the southern sky (the Centaur, Canopus, and the innumerable nebulae with which the Ship is resplendent), reminded us that we were only eight degrees distant from the equator.

A phenomenon which fixed the attention of De Luc and which in these latter years has furnished a subject of speculation to geologists, occupied us much during our journey across the Llanos. I allude not to those blocks of primitive rock which occur, as in the Jura, on the slope of limestone mountains, but to those enormous blocks of granite and syenite which, in limits very distinctly marked by nature, are found scattered on the north of Holland, Germany and the countries of the Baltic. It seems to be now proved that, distributed as in radii, they came at the time of the ancient revolutions of our globe from the Scandinavian peninsula southward; and that they did not primitively belong to the granitic chains of the Harz and Erzgeberg, which they approach without, however, reaching their foot.* (* Leopold von Buch, Voyage en Norwege volume 1 page 30.) I was surprised at not seeing one of these blocks in the Llanos of Venezuela, though these immense plains are bounded on the south by the Sierra Parima, a group of mountains entirely granitic and exhibiting in its denticulated and often columnar peaks traces of the most violent destruction. Northward the granitic chain of the Silla de Caracas and Porto Cabello are separated from the Llanos by a screen of mountains that are schistose between Villa de Cura and Parapara, and calcareous between the Bergantin and Caripe. I was no less struck by this absence of blocks on the banks of the Amazon. La Condamine affirms that from the Pongo de Manseriche to the Strait of Pauxis not the smallest stone is to be found. Now the basin of the Rio Negro and of the Amazon is also a Llano, a plain like those of Venezuela and Buenos Ayres. The difference consists only in the state of vegetation. The two Llanos situated at the northern and southern extremities of South America are covered with gramina; they are treeless savannahs; but the intermediate Llano, that of the Amazon, exposed to almost continual equatorial rains, is a thick forest. I do not remember having heard that the Pampas of Buenos Ayres or the savannahs of the Missouri* and New Mexico contain granitic blocks. (* Are there any isolated blocks in North America northward of the great lakes?) The absence of this phenomenon appears general in the New World as it probably also is in Sahara, in Africa; for we must not confound the rocky masses that pierce the soil in the midst of the desert, and of which travellers often make mention, with mere scattered fragments. These facts seem to prove that the blocks of Scandinavian granite which cover the sandy countries on the south of the Baltic, and those of Westphalia and Holland, must be traced to some local revolution. The ancient conglomerate (red sandstone) which covers a great part of the Llanos of Venezuela and of the basin of the Amazon contains no doubt fragments of the same primitive rocks which constitute the neighbouring mountains; but the convulsions of which these mountains exhibit evident marks, do not appear to have been attended with circumstances favourable to the removal of great blocks. This geognostic phenomenon was to me the more unexpected since there exists nowhere in the world so smooth a plain entirely granitic. Before my departure from Europe I had observed with surprise that there were no primitive blocks in Lombardy and in the great plain of Bavaria which appears to be the bottom of an ancient lake, and which is situated two hundred and fifty toises above the level of the ocean. It is bounded on the north by the granites of the Upper Palatinate; and on the south by Alpine limestone, transition-thonschiefer, and the mica-slates of the Tyrol.

We arrived, on the 23rd of July, at the town of Nueva Barcelona, less fatigued by the heat of the Llanos, to which we had been long accustomed, than annoyed by the winds of sand which occasion painful chaps in the skin. Seven months previously, in going from Cumana to Caracas, we had rested a few hours at the Morro de Barcelona, a fortified rock, which, near the village of Pozuelos, is joined to the continent only by a neck of land. We were received with the kindest hospitality in the house of Don Pedro Lavie, a wealthy merchant of French extraction. This gentleman, who was accused of having given refuge to the unfortunate Espana when a fugitive on these coasts in 1796, was arrested by order of the Audiencia, and conveyed as a prisoner to Caracas. The friendship of the governor of Cumana and the remembrance of the services he had rendered to the rising commerce of those countries contributed to procure his liberty. We had endeavoured to alleviate his captivity by visiting him in prison; and we had now the satisfaction of finding him in the midst of his family. Illness under which he was suffering had been aggravated by confinement; and he sank into the grave without seeing the dawn of those days of independence, which his friend Don Joseph Espana had predicted on the scaffold prior to his execution. "I die," said that man, who was formed for the accomplishment of grand projects, "I die an ignominious death; but my fellow citizens will soon piously collect my ashes, and my name will reappear with glory." These remarkable words were uttered in the public square of Caracas, on the 8th of May, 1799.

In 1790 Nueva Barcelona contained scarcely ten thousand inhabitants, and in 1800, its population was more than sixteen thousand. The town was founded in 1637 by a Catalonian conquistador, named Juan Urpin. A fruitless attempt was then made, to give the whole province the name of New Catalonia. As our maps often mark two towns, Barcelona and Cumanagoto, instead of one, and as the two names are considered as synonymous, it may be well to explain the cause of this error. Anciently, at the mouth of the Rio Neveri, there was an Indian town, built in 1588 by Lucas Faxardo, and named San Cristoval de los Cumanagotos. This town was peopled solely by natives who came from the saltworks of Apaicuare. In 1637 Urpin founded, two leagues farther inland, the Spanish town of Nueva Barcelona, which he peopled with some of the inhabitants of Cumanagoto, together with some Catalonians. For thirty-four years, disputes were incessantly arising between the two neighbouring communities till in 1671, the governor Angulo succeeded in persuading them to establish themselves on a third spot, where the town of Barcelona now stands. According to my observations it is situated in latitude 10 degrees 6 minutes 52 seconds.* (* These observations were made on the Plaza Major. They are merely the result of six circum-meridian heights of Canopus, taken all in one night. In Las Memorias de Espinosa the latitude is stated to be 10 degrees 9 minutes 6 seconds. The result of M. Ferrer's observations made it 10 degrees 8 minutes 24 seconds.) The ancient town of Cumanagoto is celebrated in the country for a miraculous image of the Virgin,* which the Indians say was found in the hollow trunk of an old tutumo, or calabash-tree (Crescentia cujete). (* La milagrosa imagen de Maria Santissima del Socorro, also called La Virgen del Tutumo.) This image was carried in procession to Nueva Barcelona; but whenever the clergy were dissatisfied with the inhabitants of the new city, the Virgin fled at night, and returned to the trunk of the tree at the mouth of the river. This miracle did not cease till a fine convent (the college of the Propaganda) was built, to receive the Franciscans. In a similar case, the Bishop of Caracas caused the image of Our Lady de los Valencianos to be placed in the archives of the bishopric, where she remained thirty years under seal.
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Re: Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions

Postby admin » Mon Jun 04, 2018 7:31 am

Part 3 of 3

The climate of Barcelona is not so hot as that of Cumana but it is extremely damp and somewhat unhealthy in the rainy season. M. Bonpland had borne very well the irksome journey across the Llanos; and had recovered his strength and activity. With respect to myself, I suffered more at Barcelona than I did at Angostura, immediately after our passage on the rivers. One of those extraordinary tropical rains during which, at sunset, drops of enormous size fall at great distances from one another, caused me to experience sensations which seemed to threaten an attack of typhus, a disease then prevalent on that coast. We remained nearly a month at Barcelona where we found our friend Fray Juan Gonzales, of whom I have often spoken, and who had traversed the Upper Orinoco before us. He expressed regret that we had not been able to prolong our visit to that unknown country; and he examined our plants and animals with that interest which must be felt by even the most uninformed man for the productions of a region he has long since visited. Fray Juan had resolved to go to Europe and to accompany us as far as the island of Cuba. We were together for the space of seven months, and his society was most agreeable: he was cheerful, intelligent and obliging. How little did we anticipate the sad fate that awaited him. He took charge of a part of our collections; and a friend of his own confided to his care a child who was to be conveyed to Spain for its education. Alas! the collection, the child and the young ecclesiastic were all buried in the waves.

South-east of Nueva Barcelona, at the distance of two Leagues, there rises a lofty chain of mountains, abutting on the Cerro del Bergantin, which is visible at Cumana. This spot is known by the name of the hot waters, (aguas calientes). When I felt my health sufficiently restored, we made an excursion thither on a cool and misty morning. The waters, which are loaded with sulphuretted hydrogen, issue from a quartzose sandstone, lying on compact limestone, the same as that we had examined at the Morro. We again found in this limestone intercalated beds of black hornstein, passing into kieselschiefer. It is not, however, a transition rock; by its position, its division into small strata, its whiteness and its dull and conchoidal fractures (with very flattened cavities), it rather approximates to the limestone of Jura. The real kieselschiefer and Lydian-stone have not been observed hitherto except in the transition-slates and limestones. Is the sandstone whence the springs of the Bergantin issue of the same formation as the sandstone of the Imposible and the Tumiriquiri? The temperature of the thermal waters is only 43.2 degrees centigrade (the atmosphere being 27). They flow first to the distance of forty toises over the rocky surface of the ground; then they rush down into a natural cavern; and finally they pierce through the limestone to issue out at the foot of the mountain on the left bank of the little river Narigual. The springs, while in contact with the oxygen of the atmosphere, deposit a good deal of sulphur. I did not collect, as I had done at Mariara, the bubbles of air that rise in jets from these thermal waters. They no doubt contain a large quantity of nitrogen because the sulphuretted hydrogen decomposes the mixture of oxygen and nitrogen dissolved in the spring. The sulphurous waters of San Juan which issue from calcareous rock, like those of the Bergantin, have also a low temperature (31.3 degrees); while in the same region the temperature of the sulphurous waters of Mariara and Las Trincheras (near Porto Cabello), which gush immediately from gneiss-granite, is 58.9 degrees the former, and 90.4 degrees the latter. It would seem as if the heat which these springs acquire in the interior of the globe diminishes in proportion as they pass from primitive to secondary superposed rocks.

Our excursion to the Aguas Calientes of Bergantin ended with a vexatious accident. Our host had lent us one of his finest saddle-horses. We were warned at the same time not to ford the little river of Narigual. We passed over a sort of bridge, or rather some trunks of trees laid closely together, and we made our horses swim, holding their bridles. The horse I had ridden suddenly disappeared after struggling for some time under water: all our endeavours to discover the cause of this accident were fruitless. Our guides conjectured that the animal's legs had been seized by the caymans which are very numerous in those parts. My perplexity was extreme: delicacy and the affluent circumstances of my host forbade me to think of repairing his loss; and M. Lavie, more considerate of our situation than sensible of his own misfortune, endeavoured to tranquillize us by exaggerating the facility with which fine horses were procurable from the neighbouring savannahs.

The crocodiles of the Rio Neveri are large and numerous, especially near the mouth of the river; but in general they are less fierce than the crocodiles of the Orinoco. These animals manifest in America the same contrasts of ferocity as in Egypt and Nubia: this fact is obvious when we compare with attention the narratives of Burckhardt and Belzoni. The state of cultivation in different countries and the amount of population in the proximity of rivers modify the habits of these large saurians: they are timid when on dry ground and they flee from man, even in the water, when they are not in want of food and when they perceive any danger in attacking. The Indians of Nueva Barcelona convey wood to market in a singular manner. Large logs of zygophyllum and caesalpinia* are thrown into the river and carried down by the stream, while the owners of the wood swim here and there to float the pieces that are stopped by the windings of the banks. (* The Lecythis ollaria, in the vicinity of Nueva Barcelona, furnishes excellent timber. We saw trunks of this tree seventy feet high. Around the town, beyond that arid zone of cactus which separates Nueva Barcelona from the steppe, grow the Clerodendrum tenuifolium, the Ionidium itubu, which resembles the Viola, and the Allionia violacea.) This could not be done in the greater part of those American rivers in which crocodiles are found. The town of Barcelona has not, like Cumana, an Indian suburb; and the only natives who are seen there are inhabitants of the neighbouring missions or of huts scattered in the plain. Neither the one nor the other are of Carib race, but a mixture of the Cumanagotos, Palenkas and Piritus; short, stunted, indolent and addicted to drinking. Fermented cassava is here the favourite beverage; the wine of the palm-tree, which is used on the Orinoco, being almost unknown on the coast. It is curious to observe that men in different zones, to satisfy the passion of inebriety, employ not only all the families of monocotyledonous and dicotyledonous plants, but even the poisonous Agaric (Amanita muscaria) of which, with disgusting economy, the Coriacs have learnt to drink the same juice several times during five successive days.* (* Mr. Langsdor (Wetterauisches Journal part 1 page 254) first made known this very extraordinary physiological phenomenon, which I prefer describing in Latin: Coriaecorum gens, in ora Asiae septentrioni opposita, potum sibi excogitavit ex succo inebriante agarici muscarii. Qui succus (aeque ut asparagorum), vel per humanum corpus transfusus, temulentiam nihilominus facit. Quare gens misera et inops, quo rarius mentis sit suae, propriam urinam bibit identidem: continuoque mingens rursusque hauriens eundem succum (dicas, ne ulla in parte mundi desit ebrietas), pauculis agaricis producere in diem quintum temulentiam potest.)

The packet boats (correos) from Corunna bound for the Havannah and Mexico had been due three months; and it was believed they had been taken by the English cruisers stationed on this coast. Anxious to reach Cumana, in order to avail ourselves of the first opportunity that might offer for our passage to Vera Cruz, we hired an open boat called a lancha, a sort of craft employed habitually in the latitudes east of Cape Codera where the sea is scarcely ever rough. Our lancha, which was laden with cacao, carried on a contraband trade with the island of Trinidad. For this reason the owner imagined we had nothing to fear from the enemy's vessels, which then blockaded all the Spanish ports. We embarked our collection of plants, our instruments and our monkeys; and, the weather being delightful, we hoped to make a very short passage from the mouth of the Rio Neveri to Cumana: but we had scarcely reached the narrow channel between the continent and the rocky isles of Borracha and the Chimanas, when to our great surprise we came in sight of an armed boat, which, whilst hailing us from a great distance, fired some musket-shot at us. The boat belonged to a privateer of Halifax; and I recognized among the sailors a Prussian, a native of Memel. I had found no opportunity, since my arrival in America, of expressing myself in my native language, and I could have wished to have spoken it on a less unpleasant occasion. Our protestations were without effect: we were carried on board the privateer, and the captain, affecting not to recognize the passports delivered by the governor of Trinidad for the illicit trade, declared us to be a lawful prize. Being a little in the habit of speaking English, I entered into conversation with the captain, begging not to be taken to Nova Scotia, but to be put on shore on the neighbouring coast. While I endeavoured, in the cabin, to defend my own rights and those of the owner of the lancha, I heard a noise on deck. Something was whispered to the captain, who left us in consternation. Happily for us, an English sloop of war, the Hawk, was cruising in those parts, and had signalled the captain to bring to; but the signal not being promptly answered, a gun was fired from the sloop and a midshipman sent on board our vessel. He was a polite young man, and gave me hopes that the lancha, which was laden with cacao, would be given up, and that on the following day we might pursue our voyage. In the meantime he invited me to accompany him on board the sloop, assuring me that his commander, Captain Garnier, would furnish me with better accommodation for the night than I should find in the vessel from Halifax.

I accepted these obliging offers and was received with the utmost kindness by Captain Garnier, who had made the voyage to the north-west coast of America with Vancouver, and who appeared to be highly interested in all I related to him respecting the great cataracts of Atures and Maypures, the bifurcation of the Orinoco and its communication with the Amazon. He introduced to me several of his officers who had been with Lord Macartney in China. I had not, during the space of a year, enjoyed the society of so many well-informed persons. They had learned from the English newspapers the object of my enterprise. I was treated with great confidence and the commander gave me up his own state-room. They gave me at parting the astronomical Ephemerides for those years which I had not been able to procure in France or Spain. I am indebted to Captain Garnier for the observations I was enabled to make on the satellites beyond the equator and I feel it a duty to record here the gratitude I feel for his kindness. Coming from the forests of Cassiquiare, and having been confined during whole months to the narrow circle of missionary life, we felt a high gratification at meeting for the first time with men who had sailed round the world, and whose ideas were enlarged by so extensive and varied a course. I quitted the English vessel with impressions which are not yet effaced from my remembrance, and which rendered me more than ever satisfied with the career on which I had entered.

We continued our passage on the following day; and were surprised at the depth of the channels between the Caracas Islands, where the sloop worked her way through them almost touching the rocks. How much do these calcareous islets, of which the form and direction call to mind the great catastrophe that separated from them the mainland, differ in aspect from the volcanic archipelago on the north of Lanzerote where the hills of basalt seem to have been heaved up from the bottom of the sea! Numbers of pelicans and of flamingos, which fished in the nooks or harassed the pelicans in order to seize their prey, indicated our approach to the coast of Cumana. It is curious to observe at sunrise how the sea-birds suddenly appear and animate the scene, reminding us, in the most solitary regions, of the activity of our cities at the dawn of day. At nine in the morning we reached the gulf of Cariaco which serves as a roadstead to the town of Cumana. The hill, crowned by the castle of San Antonio, stood out, prominent from its whiteness, on the dark curtain of the inland mountains. We gazed with interest on the shore, where we first gathered plants in America, and where, some months later, M. Bonpland had been in such danger. Among the cactuses, that rise in columns twenty feet high, appear the Indian huts of the Guaykeries. Every part of the landscape was familiar to us; the forest of cactus, the scattered huts and that enormous ceiba, beneath which we loved to bathe at the approach of night. Our friends at Cumana came out to meet us: men of all castes, whom our frequent herborizations had brought into contact with us, expressed the greater joy at sight of us, as a report that we had perished on the banks of the Orinoco had been current for several months. These reports had their origin either in the severe illness of M. Bonpland, or in the fact of our boat having been nearly lost in a gale above the mission of Uruana.

We hastened to visit the governor, Don Vicente Emparan, whose recommendations and constant solicitude had been so useful to us during the long journey we had just terminated. He procured for us, in the centre of the town, a house which, though perhaps too lofty in a country exposed to violent earthquakes, was extremely useful for our instruments. We enjoyed from its terraces a majestic view of the sea, of the isthmus of Araya, and the archipelago of the islands of Caracas, Picuita and Borracha. The port of Cumana was every day more and more closely blockaded, and the vain expectation of the arrival of Spanish packets detained us two months and a half longer. We were often nearly tempted to go to the Danish islands which enjoyed a happy neutrality; but we feared that, if we left the Spanish colonies, we might find some obstacles to our return. With the ample freedom which in a moment of favour had been granted to us, we did not consider it prudent to hazard anything that might give umbrage to the local authorities. We employed our time in completing the Flora of Cumana, geologically examining the eastern part of the peninsula of Araya, and observing many eclipses of satellites, which confirmed the longitude of the place already obtained by other means. We also made experiments on the extraordinary refractions, on evaporation and on atmospheric electricity.

The living animals which we had brought from the Orinoco were objects of great curiosity to the inhabitants of Cumana. The capuchin of the Esmeralda (Simia chiropotes), which so much resembles man in the expression of its physiognomy; and the sleeping monkey (Simia trivirgata), which is the type of a new group; had never yet been seen on that coast. We destined them for the menagerie of the Jardin des Plantes at Paris. The arrival of a French squadron which had failed in an attack upon Curacao furnished us, unexpectedly, with an excellent opportunity for sending them to Guadaloupe; and General Jeannet, together with the commissary Bresseau, agent of the executive power at the Antilles, promised to convey them. The monkeys and birds died at Guadaloupe but fortunately the skin of the Simia chiropotes, the only one in Europe, was sent a few years ago to the Jardin des Plantes, where the couxio (Simia satanas) and the stentor or alouate of the steppes of Caracas (Simia ursina) had been already received. The arrival of so great a number of French military officers and the manifestation of political and religious opinions not altogether conformable with the interests of the governments of Europe excited singular agitation in the population of Cumana. The governor treated the French authorities with the forms of civility consistent with the friendly relations subsisting at that period between France and Spain. In the streets the coloured people crowded round the agent of the French Directory, whose dress was rich and theatrical. White men, too, with indiscreet curiosity, whenever they could make themselves understood, made enquiries concerning the degree of influence granted by the republic to the colonists in the government of Guadaloupe. The king's officers doubled their zeal in furnishing provision for the little squadron. Strangers, who boasted that they were free, appeared to these people troublesome guests; and in a country of which the growing prosperity depended on clandestine communication with the islands, and on a freedom of trade forced from the ministry, the European Spaniards extolled the wisdom of the old code of laws (leyes de Indias) which permitted the entrance of foreign vessels into their ports only in extreme cases of want or distress. These contrasts between the restless desires of the colonists and the distrustful apathy of the government, throw some light on the great political events which, after long preparation, have separated Spain from her colonies.

We again passed a few agreeable days, from the third to the fifth of November, at the peninsula of Araya, situated beyond the gulf of Cariaco, opposite to Cumana.* (* I have already described the pearls of Araya; its sulphurous deposits and submarine springs of liquid and colourless petroleum. See volume 1.5.) We were informed that the Indians carried to the town from time to time considerable quantities of native alum, found in the neighbouring mountains. The specimens shown to us sufficiently indicated that it was neither alunite, similar to the rock of Tolfa and Piombino, nor those capillary and silky salts of alkaline sulphate of alumina and magnesia that line the clefts and cavities of rocks, but real masses of native alum, with a conchoidal or imperfectly lamellar fracture. We were led to hope that we should find the mine of alum (mina de alun) in the slaty cordillera of Maniquarez, and so new a geological phenomenon was calculated to rivet our attention. The priest Juan Gonzales, and the treasurer, Don Manuel Navarete, who had been useful to us from our first arrival on this coast, accompanied us in our little excursion. We disembarked near Cape Caney and again visited the ancient salt-pit (which is converted into a lake by the irruption of the sea), the fine ruins of the castle of Araya and the calcareous mountain of the Barigon, which, from its steepness on the western side is somewhat difficult of access. Muriatiferous clay mixed with bitumen and lenticular gypsum and sometimes passing to a darkish brown clay, devoid of salt, is a formation widely spread through this peninsula, in the island of Margareta and on the opposite continent, near the castle of San Antonio de Cumana. Probably the existence of this formation has contributed to produce those ruptures and rents in the ground which strike the eye of the geologist when he stands on one of the eminences of the peninsula of Araya. The cordillera of this peninsula, composed of mica-slate and clay-slate, is separated on the north from the chain of mountains of the island of Margareta (which are of a similar composition) by the channel of Cubagua; and on the south it is separated from the lofty calcareous chain of the continent, by the gulf of Cariaco. The whole intermediate space appears to have been heretofore filled with muriatiferous clay; and no doubt the continual erosions of the ocean have removed this formation and converted the plain, first into lakes, then into gulfs, and finally into navigable channels. The account of what has passed in the most modern times at the foot of the castle of Araya, the irruption of the sea into the ancient salt-pit, the formation of the laguna de Chacopata and a lake, four leagues in length, which cuts the island of Margareta nearly into two parts, afford evident proofs of these successive erosions. In the singular configuration of the coasts in the Morro of Chacopata; in the little islands of the Caribbees, the Lobos and Tunal; in the great island of Coche, and the capes of Carnero and Mangliers there still seem to be apparent the remains of an isthmus which, stretching from north to south, formerly joined the peninsula of Araya to the island of Margareta. In that island a neck of very low land, three thousand toises long, and less than two hundred toises broad, conceals on the northern sides the two hilly groups, known by the names of La Vega de San Juan and the Macanao. The Laguna Grande of Margareta has a very narrow opening to the south and small boats pass by portage over the neck of land or northern dyke. Though the waters on these shores seem at present to recede from the continent it is nevertheless very probable that in the lapse of ages, either by an earthquake or by a sudden rising of the ocean, the long island of Margareta will be divided into two rocky islands of a trapezoidal form.

The limestone of the Barigon, which is a part of the great formation of sandstone or calcareous breccia of Cumana, is filled with fossil shells in as perfect preservation as those of other tertiary limestones in France and Italy. We detached some blocks containing oysters eight inches in diameter, pectens, venuses, and lithophyte polypi. I recommend to naturalists better versed in the knowledge of fossils than I then was, to examine with care this mountainous coast (which is easy of access to European vessels) in their way to Cumana, Guayra or Curacao. It would be curious to discover whether any of these shells and these species of petrified zoophytes still inhabit the seas of the West Indies, as M. Bonpland conjectured, and as is the case in the island of Timor and perhaps in Guadaloupe.

We sailed on the 4th of November, at one o'clock in the morning, in search of the mine of native alum. I took with me the chronometer and my large Dollond telescope, intending to observe at the Laguna Chica (Small Lake), east of the village of Maniquarez, the immersion of the first satellite of Jupiter; this design, however, was not accomplished, contrary winds having prevented our arrival before daylight. The spectacle of the phosphorescence of the ocean and the sports of the porpoises which surrounded our canoe somewhat atoned for this disappointment. We again passed those spots where springs of petroleum gush from mica-slate at the bottom of the sea and the smell of which is perceptible from a considerable distance. When it is recollected that farther eastward, near Cariaco, the hot and submarine waters are sufficiently abundant to change the temperature of the gulf at its surface, we cannot doubt that the petroleum is the effect of distillation at an immense depth, issuing from those primitive rocks beneath which lies the focus of all volcanic commotion.

The Laguna Chica is a cove surrounded by perpendicular mountains, and connected with the gulf of Cariaco only by a narrow channel twenty-five fathoms deep. It seems, like the fine port of Acapulco, to owe its existence to the effect of an earthquake. A beach shows that the sea is here receding from the land, as on the opposite coast of Cumana. The peninsula of Araya, which narrows between Cape Mero and Cape las Minas to one thousand four hundred toises, is little more than four thousand toises in breadth near the Laguna Chica, reckoning from one sea to the other. We had to cross this distance in order to find the native alum and to reach the cape called the Punta de Chuparuparu. The road is difficult only because no path is traced; and between precipices of some depth we were obliged to step over ridges of bare rock, the strata of which are much inclined. The principal point is nearly two hundred and twenty toises high; but the mountains, as it often happens in a rocky isthmus, display very singular forms. The Paps (tetas) of Chacopata and Cariaco, midway between the Laguna Chica and the town of Cariaco, are peaks which appear isolated when viewed from the platform of the castle of Cumana. The vegetable earth in this country is only thirty toises above sea level. Sometimes there is no rain for the space of fifteen months; if, however, a few drops fall immediately after the flowering of the melons and gourds, they yield fruit weighing from sixty to seventy pounds, notwithstanding the apparent dryness of the air. I say apparent dryness, for my hygrometric observations prove that the atmosphere of Cumana and Araya contains nearly nine-tenths of the quantity of watery vapour necessary to its perfect saturation. It is this air, at once hot and humid, that nourishes those vegetable reservoirs, the cucurbitaceous plants, the agaves and melocactuses half-buried in the sand. When we visited the peninsula the preceding year there was a great scarcity of water; the goats for want of grass died by hundreds. During our stay at the Orinoco the order of the seasons seemed to be entirely changed. At Araya, Cochen, and even in the island of Margareta it had rained abundantly; and those showers were remembered by the inhabitants in the same way as a fall of aerolites would be noted in the recollection of the naturalists of Europe.

The Indian who was our guide scarcely knew in what direction we should find the alum; he was ignorant of its real position. This ignorance of localities characterises almost all the guides here, who are chosen from among the most indolent class of the people. We wandered for eight or nine hours among rocks totally bare of vegetation. The mica-slate passes sometimes to clay-slate of a darkish grey. I was again struck by the extreme regularity in the direction and inclination of the strata. They run north 50 degrees east, inclining from 60 to 70 degrees north-west. This is the general direction which I had observed in the gneiss-granite of Caracas and the Orinoco, in the hornblende-slates of Angostura, and even in the greater part of the secondary rocks we had just examined. The beds, over a vast extent of land, make the same angle with the meridian of the place; they present a parallelism, which may be considered as one of the great geologic laws capable of being verified by precise measures. Advancing toward Cape Chuparuparu, the veins of quartz that cross the mica-slate increase in size. We found some from one to two toises broad, full of small fasciculated crystals of rutile titanite. We sought in vain for cyanite, which we had discovered in some blocks near Maniquarez. Farther on the mica-state presents not veins, but little beds of graphite or carburetted iron. They are from two to three inches thick and have precisely the same direction and inclination as the rock. Graphite, in primitive soils, marks the first appearance of carbon on the globe—that of carbon uncombined with hydrogen. It is anterior to the period when the surface of the earth became covered with monocotyledonous plants. From the summit of those wild mountains there is a majestic view of the island of Margareta. Two groups of mountains already mentioned, those of Macanao and La Vega de San Juan, rise from the bosom of the waters. The capital of the island, La Asuncion, the port of Pampatar, and the villages of Pueblo de la Mar, Pueblo del Norte and San Juan belong to the second and most easterly of these groups. The western group, the Macanao, is almost entirely uninhabited. The isthmus that divides these large masses of mica-slate was scarcely visible; its form appeared changed by the effect of the mirage and we recognized the intermediate part, through which runs the Laguna Grande, only by two small hills of a sugarloaf form, in the meridian of the Punta de Piedras. Nearer we look down on the small desert archipelago of the four Morros del Tunal, the Caribbee and the Lobos Islands.

After much vain search we at length found, before we descended to the northern coast of the peninsula of Araya, in a ravine of very difficult access (Aroyo del Robalo), the mineral which had been shown to us at Cumana. The mica-slate changed suddenly into carburetted and shining clay-slate. It was an ampelite; and the waters (for there are small springs in those parts, and some have recently been discovered near the village of Maniquarez) were impregnated with yellow oxide of iron and had a styptic taste. We found the sides of the neighbouring rocks lined with capillary sulphate of alumina in effervescence; and real beds, two inches thick, full of native alum, extending as far as the eye could reach in the clay slate. The alum is greyish white, somewhat dull on the surface and of an almost glassy lustre internally. Its fracture is not fibrous but imperfectly conchoidal. It is slightly translucent when its fragments are thin; and has a sweetish and astringent taste without any bitter mixture. When on the spot, I proposed to myself the question whether this alum, so pure, and filling beds in the clay-slate without leaving the smallest void, be of a formation contemporary with the rock, or whether it be of a recent, and in some sort secondary, origin, like the muriate of soda, found sometimes in small veins, where strongly concentrated springs traverse beds of gypsum or clay. In these parts nothing seems to indicate a process of formation likely to be renewed in our days. The slaty rock exhibits no open cleft; and none is found parallel with the direction of the slates. It may also be inquired whether this aluminous slate be a transition-formation lying on the primitive mica-slate of Araya, or whether it owe its origin merely to a change of composition and texture in the beds of mica-slate. I lean to the latter proposition; for the transition is progressive, and the clay-slate (thonschiefer) and mica-slate appear to me to constitute here but one formation. The presence of cyanite, rutile-titanite, and garnets, and the absence of Lydian stone, and all fragmentary or arenaceous rocks, seem to characterise the formation we describe as primitive. It is asserted that even in Europe ampelite and green stone are found, though rarely, in slates anterior to transition-slate.

When, in 1785, after an earthquake, a great rocky mass was broken off in the Aroyo del Robalo, the Guaykeries of Los Serritos collected fragments of alum five or six inches in diameter, extremely pure and transparent. It was sold in my time at Cumana to the dyers and tanners, at the price of two reals* per pound, while alum from Spain cost twelve reals. (* The real is about 6 1/2 English pence.) This difference of price was more the result of prejudice and of the impediments to trade, than of the inferior quality of the alum of the country, which is fit for use without undergoing any purification. It is also found in the chain of mica-slate and clay-slate, on the north-west coast of the island of Trinidad, at Margareta and near Cape Chuparuparu, north of the Cerro del Distiladero.* (* Another place was mentioned to us, west of Bordones, the Puerto Escondido. But that coast appeared to me to be wholly calcareous; and I cannot conceive where could be the situation of ampelite and native alum on this point. Was it in the beds of slaty clay that alternate with the alpine limestone of Cumanacoa? Fibrous alum is found in Europe only in formations posterior to those of transition, in lignites and other tertiary formations belonging to the lignites.) The Indians, who are naturally addicted to concealment, are not inclined to make known the spots whence they obtain native alum; but it must be abundant, for I have seen very considerable quantities of it in their possession at a time.

South America at present receives its alum from Europe, as Europe in its turn received it from the natives of Asia previous to the fifteenth century. Mineralogists, before my travels, knew no substances which, without addition, calcined or not calcined, could directly yield alum (sulphate of alumina and potash), except rocks of trachytic formation, and small veins traversing beds of lignite and bituminous wood. Both these substances, so different in their origin, contain all that constitutes alum, that is to say, alumina, sulphuric acid and potash. The ores of Tolfa, Milo and Nipoligo; those of Montione, in which silica does not accompany the alumina; the siliceous breccia of Mont Dore, which contains sulphur in its cavities; the alumiferous rocks of Parad and Beregh in Hungary, which belong also to trachytic and pumice conglomerates, may no doubt be traced to the penetration of sulphurous acid vapours. They are the products of a feeble and prolonged volcanic action, as may be easily ascertained in the solfataras of Puzzuoli and the Peak of Teneriffe. The alumite of Tolfa, which, since my return to Europe, I have examined on the spot, conjointly with Gay-Lussac, has, by its oryctognostic characters and its chemical composition, a considerable affinity to compact feldspar, which constitutes the basis of so many trachytes and transition-porphyries. It is a siliciferous subsulphate of alumina and potash, a compact feldspar, with the addition of sulphuric acid completely formed in it. The waters circulating in these alumiferous rocks of volcanic origin do not, however, deposit masses of native alum, to yield which the rocks must be roasted. I know not of any deposits analogous to those I brought from Cumana; for the capillary and fibrous masses found in veins traversing beds of lignites (as on the banks of the Egra, between Saatz and Commothau in Bohemia), or efflorescing in cavities (as at Freienwalde in Brandenburg, and at Segario in Sardinia), are impure salts, often destitute of potash, and mixed with the sulphates of ammonia and magnesia. A slow decomposition of the pyrites, which probably act as so many little galvanic piles, renders the waters alumiferous, that circulate across the bituminous lignites and carburetted clays. These waters, in contact with carbonate of lime, even give rise to the deposits of subsulphate of alumina (destitute of potash), found near Halle, and formerly believed erroneously to be pure alumina belonging, like the porcelain earth (kaolin) of Morl, to porphyry of red sandstone. Analogous chemical actions may take place in primitive and transition slates as well as in tertiary formations. All slates, and this fact is very important, contain nearly five per cent of potash, sulphuret of iron, peroxide of iron, carbon, etc. The contact of so many moistened heterogeneous substances must necessarily lead them to a change of state and composition. The efflorescent salts that abundantly cover the aluminous slates of Robalo, show how much these chemical effects are favoured by the high temperature of the climate; but, I repeat, in a rock where there are no crevices, no vacuities parallel to the direction and inclination of the strata, native alum, semitransparent and of conchoidal fracture, completely filling its place (its beds), must be regarded as of the same age with the rock in which it is contained. The term contemporary formation is here taken in the sense attached to it by geologists, in speaking of beds of quartz in clay-slate, granular limestone in mica-slate or feldspar in gneiss.

After having for a long time wandered over barren scenes amidst rocks entirely devoid of vegetation, our eyes dwelt with pleasure on tufts of malpighia and croton, which we found in descending toward the coast. These arborescent crotons were of two new species,* very remarkable for their form, and peculiar to the peninsula of Araya. (* Croton argyrophyllus and C. marginatus.) We arrived too late at the Laguna Chica to visit another rock situated farther east and celebrated by the name of the Laguna Grande, or the Laguna del Obispo.* (* Great Lake, or the Bishop's Lake.) We contented ourselves with admiring it from the height of the mountains that command the view; and, excepting the ports of Ferrol and Acapulco, there is perhaps none presenting a more extraordinary configuration. It is an inland gulf two miles and a half long from east to west, and one mile broad. The rocks of mica-slate that form the entrance of the port leave a free passage only two hundred and fifty toises broad. The water is everywhere from fifteen to twenty-five fathoms deep. Probably the government of Cumana will one day take advantage of the possession of this inland gulf and of that of Mochima,* eight leagues east of the bad road of Nueva Barcelona. (* This is a long narrow gulf, three miles from north to south, similar to the fiords of Norway.) The family of M. Navarete were waiting for us with impatience on the beach; and, though our boat carried a large sail, we did not arrive at Maniquarez before night.

We prolonged our stay at Cumana only a fortnight. Having lost all hope of the arrival of a packet from Corunna, we availed ourselves of an American vessel, laden at Nueva Barcelona with salt provision for the island of Cuba. We had now passed sixteen months on this coast and in the interior of Venezuela, and on the 16th of November we parted from our friends at Cumana to make the passage for the third time across the gulf of Cariaco to Nueva Barcelona. The night was cool and delicious. It was not without emotion that we beheld for the last time the disc of the moon illuminating the summit of the cocoa-trees that surround the banks of the Manzanares. The breeze was strong and in less than six hours we anchored near the Morro of Nueva Barcelona, where the vessel which was to take us to the Havannah was ready to sail.
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Re: Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions

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Part 1 of 2

CHAPTER 3.27. POLITICAL STATE OF THE PROVINCES OF VENEZUELA. EXTENT OF TERRITORY. POPULATION. NATURAL PRODUCTIONS. EXTERNAL TRADE. COMMUNICATIONS BETWEEN THE DIFFERENT PROVINCES COMPRISING THE REPUBLIC OF COLUMBIA.

Before I quit the coasts of Terra Firma and draw the attention of the reader to the political importance of Cuba, the largest of the West India Islands, I will collect into one point of view all those facts which may lead to a just appreciation of the future relations of commercial Europe with the united Provinces of Venezuela. When, soon after my return to Germany, I published the Essai Politique sur la Nouvelle-Espagne, I at the same time made known some of the facts I had collected in relation to the territorial riches of South America. This comparative view of the population, agriculture and commerce of all the Spanish colonies was formed at a period when the progress of civilization was restrained by the imperfection of social institutions, the prohibitory system and other fatal errors in the science of government. Since the time when I developed the immense resources which the people of both North and South America might derive from their own position and their relations with commercial Europe and Asia, one of those great revolutions which from time to time agitate the human race has changed the state of society in the vast regions through which I travelled. The continental part of the New World is at present in some sort divided between three nations of European origin; one (and that the most powerful) is of Germanic race: the two others belong by their language, their literature, and their manners to Latin Europe. Those parts of the old world which advance farthest westward, the Spanish Peninsula and the British Islands, are those of which the colonies are most extensive; but four thousand leagues of coast, inhabited solely by the descendants of Spaniards and Portuguese, attest the superiority which in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the peninsular nations had acquired, by their maritime expeditions, over the navigators of other countries. It may be fairly asserted that their languages, which prevail from California to the Rio de la Plata and along the back of the Cordilleras, as well as in the forests of the Amazon, are monuments of national glory that will survive every political revolution.

The inhabitants of Spanish and Portuguese America form together a population twice as numerous as the inhabitants of English race. The French, Dutch, and Danish possessions of the new continent are of small extent; but, to complete the general view of the nations which may influence the destiny of the other hemisphere, we ought not to forget the colonists of Scandinavian origin who are endeavouring to form settlements from the peninsula of Alashka as far as California; and the free Africans of Hayti who have verified the prediction made by the Milanese traveller Benzoni in 1545. The situation of these Africans in an island more than three times the size of Sicily, in the middle of the West Indian Mediterranean, augments their political importance. Every friend of humanity prays for the development of the civilization which is advancing in so calm and unexpected a manner. As yet Russian America is less like an agricultural colony than the factories established by Europeans on the coast of Africa, to the great misfortune of the natives; they contain only military posts, stations of fishermen, and Siberian hunters. It is a curious phenomenon to find the rites of the Greek Church established in one part of America and to see two nations which inhabit the eastern and western extremities of Europe (the Russians and the Spaniards) thus bordering on each other on a continent on which they arrived by opposite routes; but the almost savage state of the unpeopled coasts of Ochotsk and Kamtschatka, the want of resources furnished by the ports of Asia, and the barbarous system hitherto adopted in the Scandinavian colonies of the New World, are circumstances which will hold them long in infancy. Hence it follows that if in the researches of political economy we are accustomed to survey masses only, we cannot but admit that the American continent is divided, properly speaking, between three great nations of English, Spanish, and Portuguese race. The first of these three nations, the Anglo-Americans, is, next to the English of Europe, that whose flag waves over the greatest extent of sea. Without any distant colonies, its commerce has acquired a growth attained in the old world by that nation alone which communicated to North America its language, its literature, its love of labour, its predilection for liberty, and a portion of its civil institutions.

The English and Portuguese colonists have peopled only the coasts which lie opposite to Europe; the Castilians, on the contrary, in the earliest period of the conquest, crossed the chain of the Andes and made settlements in the most western regions. There only, at Mexico, Cundinamarca, Quito and Peru, they found traces of ancient civilization, agricultural nations and flourishing empires. This circumstance, together with the increase of the native mountain population, the almost exclusive possession of great metallic wealth, and the commercial relations established from the beginning of the sixteenth century with the Indian archipelago, have given a peculiar character to the Spanish possessions in equinoctial America. In the East Indies, the people who fell into the hands of the English and Portuguese settlers were wandering tribes or hunters. Far from forming a portion of the agricultural and laborious population, as on the tableland of Anahuac, at Guatimala and in Upper Peru, they generally withdrew at the approach of the whites. The necessity of labour, the preference given to the cultivation of the sugar-cane, indigo, and cotton, the cupidity which often accompanies and degrades industry, gave birth to that infamous slave-trade, the consequences of which have been alike fatal to the old and the new world. Happily, in the continental part of Spanish America, the number of African slaves is so inconsiderable that, compared with the slave population of Brazil, or with that of the southern part of the United States, it is found to be in the proportion of one to fourteen. The whole of the Spanish colonies, without excluding the islands of Cuba and Porto Rico, have not, over a surface which exceeds at least by one-fifth that of Europe, as many negroes as the single state of Virginia. The Spanish Americans, in the union of New Spain and Guatimala, present an example, unique in the torrid zone, namely, a nation of eight millions of inhabitants governed conformably with European institutions and laws, cultivating sugar, cacao, wheat and grapes, and having scarcely a slave brought from Africa.

The population of the New Continent as yet surpasses but little that of France or Germany. It doubles in the United States in twenty-three or twenty-five years; and at Mexico, even under the government of the mother country, it doubles in forty or forty-five years. Without indulging too flattering hopes of the future, it may be admitted that in less than a century and a half the population of America will equal that of Europe. This noble rivalry in civilization and the arts of industry and commerce, far from impoverishing the old continent, as has often been supposed it might at the expense of the new one, will augment the wants of the consumer, the mass of productive labour, and the activity of exchange. Doubtless, in consequence of the great revolutions which human society undergoes, the public fortune, the common patrimony of civilization, is found differently divided among the nations of the old and the new world: but by degrees the equilibrium is restored; and it is a fatal, I had almost said an impious prejudice, to consider the growing prosperity of any other part of our planet as a calamity to Europe. The independence of the colonies will not contribute to isolate them from the old civilized nations, but will rather bring all more closely together. Commerce tends to unite countries which a jealous policy has long separated. It is the nature of civilization to go forward without any tendency to decline in the spot that gave it birth. Its progress from east to west, from Asia to Europe, proves nothing against this axiom. A clear light loses none of its brilliancy by being diffused over a wider space. Intellectual cultivation, that fertile source of national wealth, advances by degrees and extends without being displaced. Its movement is not a migration: and though it may seem to be such in the east, it is because barbarous hordes possessed themselves of Egypt, Asia Minor, and of once free Greece, the forsaken cradle of the civilization of our ancestors.

The barbarism of nations is the consequence of oppression exercised by internal despotism or foreign conquest; and it is always accompanied by progressive impoverishment, by a diminution of the public fortune. Free and powerful institutions, adapted to the interests of all, remove these dangers; and the growing civilization of the world, the competition of labour and of trade, are not the ruin of states whose welfare flows from a natural source. Productive and commercial Europe will profit by the new order of things in Spanish America, as it would profit from events that might put an end to barbarism in Greece, on the northern coast of Africa and in other countries subject to Ottoman tyranny. What most menaces the prosperity of the ancient continent is the prolongation of those intestine struggles which check production and diminish at the same time the number and wants of consumers. This struggle, begun in Spanish America six years after my departure, is drawing gradually to an end. We shall soon see both shores of the Atlantic peopled by independent nations, ruled by different forms of Government, but united by the remembrance of a common origin, uniformity of language, and the wants which civilization creates. It may be said that the immense progress of the art of navigation has contracted the boundaries of the seas. The Atlantic already assumes the form of a narrow channel which no more removes the New World from the commercial states of Europe, than the Mediterranean, in the infancy of navigation, removed the Greeks of Peloponnesus from those of Ionia, Sicily, and the Cyrenaic region.

I have thought it right to enter into these general considerations on the future connection of the two continents, before tracing the political sketch of the provinces of Venezuela. These provinces, governed till 1810 by a captain-general residing at Caracas, are now united to the old viceroyalty of New Grenada, or Santa Fe, under the name of the Republic of Columbia. I will not anticipate the description which I shall have hereafter to give of New Grenada; but, in order to render my observations on the statistics of Venezuela more useful to those who would judge of the political importance of the country and the advantages it may offer to the trade of Europe, even in its present unadvanced state of cultivation, I will describe the United Provinces of Venezuela in their relations with Cundinamarca, or New Grenada, and as forming part of the new state of Columbia. M. Bonpland and I passed nearly three years in the country which now forms the territory of the republic of Columbia; sixteen months in Venezuela and eighteen in New Grenada. We crossed the territory in its whole extent; on one hand from the mountains of Paria as far as Esmeralda on the Upper Orinoco, and San Carlo del Rio Negro, situated near the frontiers of Brazil; and on the other, from Rio Sinu and Carthagena as far as the snowy summits of Quito, the port of Guayaquil on the coast of the Pacific, and the banks of the Amazon in the province of Jaen de Bracamoros. So long a stay and an expedition of one thousand three hundred leagues in the interior of the country, of which more than six hundred and fifty were by water, have furnished me with a pretty accurate knowledge of local circumstances.

I am aware that travellers, who have recently visited America, regard its progress as far more rapid than my statistical researches seem to indicate. For the year 1913 they promise one hundred and twelve millions of inhabitants in Mexico, of which they believe that the population is doubled every twenty-two years; and during the same interval one hundred and forty millions in the United States. These numbers, I confess, do not appear to me to be alarming from the motives that may excite fear among the disciples of Malthus. It is possible that some time or other, two or three hundred millions of men may find subsistence in the vast extent of the new continent between the lake of Nicaragua and lake Ontario. I admit that the United States will contain above eighty millions of inhabitants a hundred years hence, allowing a progressive change in the period of doubling from twenty-five to thirty-five and forty years; but, notwithstanding the elements of prosperity to be found in equinoctial America, I doubt whether the increase of the population in Venezuela, Spanish Guiana, New Grenada and Mexico can be in general so rapid as in the United States. The latter, which are situated entirely in the temperate zone, destitute of high chains of mountains, embrace an immense extent of country easy of cultivation. The hordes of Indian hunters flee both from the colonists, whom they abhor, and the methodist missionaries, who oppose their taste for indolence and a vagabond life. The more fertile land of Spanish America produces indeed on the same surface a greater amount of nutritive substances. On the table lands of the equinoctial regions wheat doubtless yields annually from twenty to twenty-four for one; but Cordilleras furrowed by almost inaccessible crevices, bare and arid steppes, forests that resist both the axe and fire, and an atmosphere filled with venomous insects, will long present powerful obstacles to agriculture and industry. The most active and enterprising colonists cannot, in the mountainous districts of Merida, Antioquia, and Los Pastos, in the llanos of Venezuela and Guaviare, in the forests of the Rio Magdalena, the Orinoco, and the province of Las Esmeraldas, west of Quito, extend their agricultural conquests as they have done in the woody plains westward of the Alleghenies, from the sources of the Ohio, the Tennessee and the Alabama, as far as the banks of the Missouri and the Arkansas. Calling to mind the account of my voyage on the Orinoco, it may be easy to appreciate the obstacles which nature opposes to the efforts of man in hot and humid climates. In Mexico, large extents of soil are destitute of springs; rain seldom falls, and the want of navigable rivers impedes communication. As the ancient native population is agricultural, and had been so long before the arrival of the Spaniards, the lands most easy of access and cultivation have already their proprietors. Fertile tracts of country, at the disposal of the first occupier, or ready to be sold in lots for the profit of the state, are much less common than Europeans imagine. Hence it follows that the progress of colonization cannot be everywhere as free and rapid in Spanish America as it has hitherto been in the western provinces of the United States. The population of that union is composed wholly of whites, and of negros, who, having been torn from their country, or born in the New World, have become the instruments of the industry of the whites. In Mexico, Guatimala, Quito, and Peru, on the contrary, there exist in our day more than five millions and a half of natives of copper-coloured race, whose isolated position, partly forced and partly voluntary, together with their attachment to ancient habits, and their mistrustful inflexibility of character, will long prevent their participation in the progress of the public prosperity, notwithstanding the efforts employed to disindianize them.

I dwell on the differences between the free states of temperate and equinoctial America, to show that the latter have to contend against obstacles connected with their physical and moral position; and to remind the reader that the countries embellished with the most varied and precious productions of nature, are not always susceptible of an easy, rapid, and uniformly extended cultivation. If we consider the limits which the population may attain as depending solely on the quantity of subsistence which the land is capable of producing, the most simple calculations would prove the preponderance of the communities established in the fine regions of the torrid zone; but political economy, or the positive science of government, is distrustful of ciphers and vain abstractions. We know that by the multiplication of one family only, a continent previously desert may reckon in the space of eight centuries more than eight millions of inhabitants; and yet these estimates, founded on the hypothesis of a continuous doubling in twenty-five or thirty years, are contradicted by the history of every country already advanced in civilization. The destinies which await the free states of Spanish America are too glorious to require to be embellished by illusions and chimerical calculations.

Among the thirty-four million inhabitants spread over the vast surface of continental America, in which estimate are comprised the savage natives, we distinguish, according to the three preponderant races, sixteen millions and a half in the possessions of the Spanish Americans, ten millions in those of the Anglo-Americans, and nearly four millions in those of the Portuguese Americans. The population of these three great divisions is, at the present time, in the proportion of 4, 2 1/2, 1; while the extent of surface over which the population is spread is, as the numbers 1.5, 0.7, 1. The area of the United States* is nearly one-fourth greater than that of Russia west of the Ural mountains; and Spanish America is in the same proportion more extensive than the whole of Europe. (* Notwithstanding the political changes which have taken place in the South American colonies, I shall throughout this work designate the country inhabited by the Spanish Americans by the denomination of Spanish America. I call the country of the Anglo-Americans the United States, without adding of North America, although other United States exist in South America. It is embarrassing to speak of nations who play a great part on the scene of the world without having collective names. The term American can no longer be applied solely to the citizens of the United States of North America; and it were to be wished that the nomenclature of the independent nations of the New Continent should be fixed in a manner at once convenient, harmonious, and precise.) The United States contain five-eighths of the proportion of the Spanish possessions, and yet their area is not one-half so large. Brazil comprehends tracts of country so desert toward the west that over an extent only a third less than that of Spanish America its population is in the proportion of one to four. The following table contains the results of an attempt which I made, conjointly with M. Mathieu, member of the Academy of Sciences, and of the Bureau des Longitudes, to estimate with precision the extent of the surface of the various states of America. We made use of maps on which the limits had been corrected according to the statements published in my Recueil d'Observations Astronomiques. Our scales were, generally speaking, so large that spaces from four to five leagues square were not omitted. We observed this degree of precision that we might not add the uncertainty of the measure of triangles, trapeziums, and the sinuosities of the coasts, to the uncertainty of geographical statements.

TABLE OF GREAT POLITICAL DIVISIONS.

COLUMN 1 : NAME.
COLUMN 2 : SURFACE IN SQUARE LEAGUES OF 20 TO AN EQUINOCTIAL DEGREE.
COLUMN 3 : POPULATION (1823).
Surface Pop.

1. Possessions of the Spanish Americans : 371,380 : 16,785,000.

Mexico or New Spain : 75,830 : 6,800,000.
Guatemala : 16,740 : 1,600,000.
Cuba and Porto Rico : 4,430 : 800,000.
Columbia—Venezuela : 33,700 : 785,000.
Columbia—New Grenada and Quito : 58,250 : 2,000,000.
Peru : 41,420 : 1,400,000.
Chili : 14,240 : 1,100,000.
Buenos Ayres : 126,770 : 2,300,000.
2. Possessions of the Portuguese
Americans (Brazil) : 256,990 : 4,000,000.
3. Possessions of the
Anglo-Americans (United States) : 174,300 : 10,220,000.

From the statistical researches which have been made in several countries of Europe, important results have been obtained by a comparison of the relative population of maritime and inland provinces. In Spain these relations are to one another as nine to five; in the United Provinces of Venezuela, and, above all, in the ancient Capitania-General of Caracas, they are as thirty-five to one. How powerful soever may be the influence of commerce on the prosperity of states, and the intellectual development of nations, it would be wrong to attribute in America, as we do in Europe, to that cause alone the differences just mentioned. In Spain and Italy, if we except the fertile plains of Lombardy, the inland districts are arid and abounding in mountains or high table-lands: the meteorological circumstances on which the fertility of the soil depends are not the same in the lands bordering on the sea, as they are in the central provinces. Colonization in America has generally begun on the coast, and advanced slowly towards the interior; such is its progress in Brazil and in Venezuela. It is only where the coast is unhealthy, as in Mexico and New Grenada, or sandy and exempt from rain as in Peru, that the population is concentrated on the mountains, and the table-lands of the interior. These local circumstances are too often overlooked in considerations on the future fate of the Spanish colonies; they communicate a peculiar character to some of those countries, the physical and moral analogies of which are less striking than is commonly supposed. Considered with reference to the distribution of the population, the two provinces of New Grenada and Venezuela, which have been united in one political body, exhibit the most complete contrast. Their capitals (and the position of capitals always denotes where population is most concentrated) are at such unequal distances from the trading coasts of the Caribbean Sea, that the town of Caracas, to be placed on the same parallel with Santa-Fe de Bogota, must be transplanted southward to the junction of the Orinoco with the Guaviare, where the mission of San Fernando de Atabapo is situated.

The republic of Columbia is, with Mexico and Guatemala, the only state of Spanish America which occupies at once the coasts opposite to Europe and to Asia. From Cape Paria to the western extremity of Veragua is a distance of 400 sea leagues: and from Cape Burica to the mouth of Rio Tumbez the distance is 260. The shore possessed by the republic of Columbia consequently equals in length the line of coasts extending from Cadiz to Dantzic, or from Ceuta to Jaffa. This immense resource for national industry is combined with a degree of cultivation of which the importance has not hitherto been sufficiently acknowledged. The isthmus of Panama forms part of the territory of Columbia, and that neck of land, if traversed by good roads and stocked with camels, may one day serve as a portage for the commerce of the world, even though the plains of Cupica, the bay of Mandinga or the Rio Chagre should not afford the possibility of a canal for the passage of vessels proceeding from Europe to China,* or from the United States to the north-west coast of America. (* The old vice-royalty of Buenos Ayres extended also along a small portion of the South Sea coast.)

When considering the influence which the configuration of countries (that is, the elevation and the form of coasts) exercises in every district on the progress of civilization and the destiny of nations, I have pointed out the disadvantages of those vast masses of triangular continents, which, like Africa and the greater part of South America, are destitute of gulfs and inland seas. It cannot be doubted that the existence of the Mediterranean has been closely connected with the first dawn of human cultivation among the nations of the west, and that the articulated form of the land, the frequency of its contractions and the concatenation of peninsulas favoured the civilization of Greece, Italy, and perhaps of all Europe westward of the meridian of the Propontis. In the New World the uninterruptedness of the coasts and the monotony of their straight lines are most remarkable in Chili and Peru. The shore of Columbia is more varied, and its spacious gulfs, such as that of Paria, Cariaco, Maracaybo, and Darien, were, at the time of the first discovery better peopled than the rest and facilitated the interchange of productions. That shore possesses an incalculable advantage in being washed by the Caribbean Sea, a kind of inland sea with several outlets, and the only one pertaining to the New Continent. This basin, whose various shores form portions of the United States, of the republic of Columbia, of Mexico and several maritime powers of Europe, gives birth to a peculiar and exclusively American system of trade. The south-east of Asia with its neighbouring archipelago and, above all, the state of the Mediterranean in the time of the Phoenician and Greek colonies, prove that the nearness of opposite coasts, not having the same productions and not inhabited by nations of different races, exercises a happy influence on commercial industry and intellectual cultivation. The importance of the inland Caribbean Sea, bounded by Venezuela on the south, will be further augmented by the progressive increase of population on the banks of the Mississippi; for that river, the Rio del Norte and the Magdalena are the only great navigable streams which the Caribbean Sea receives. The depth of the American rivers, their immense branches, and the use of steam-boats, everywhere facilitated by the proximity of forests, will, to a certain extent, compensate for the obstacles which the uniform line of the coasts and the general configuration of the continent oppose to the progress of industry and civilization.

On comparing the extent of the territory with the absolute population, we obtain the result of the connection of those two elements of public prosperity, a connection that constitutes the relative population of every state in the New World. We shall find to every square sea league, in Mexico, 90; in the United States, 58; in the republic of Columbia, 30; and in Brazil, 15 inhabitants; while Asiatic Russia furnishes 11; the whole Russian Empire, 87; Sweden with Norway, 90; European Russia, 320; Spain, 763; and France, 1778. But these estimates of relative population, when applied to countries of immense extent, and of which a great part is entirely uninhabited, merely furnish mathematical abstractions of but little value. In countries uniformly cultivated—in France, for example—the number of inhabitants to the square league, calculated by separate departments, is in general only a third, more or less, than the relative population of the sum of all the departments. Even in Spain the deviations from the average number rise, with few exceptions, only from half to double. In America, on the contrary, it is only in the Atlantic states, from South Carolina to New Hampshire, that the population begins to spread with any uniformity. In that most civilized portion of the New World, from 130 to 900 inhabitants are reckoned to the square league, while the relative population on all the Atlantic states, considered together, is 240. The extremes (North Carolina and Massachusetts) are only in the relation of 1 to 7, nearly as in France, where the extremes, in the departments of the Hautes Alpes and the Cote-du-Nord are also in the relation of 1 to 6.7. The variations from the average number, which we generally find restricted to narrow limits in the civilized countries of Europe, exceed all measure in Brazil, in the Spanish colonies and even in the confederation of the United States, in its whole extent. We find in Mexico in some of the intendencias, for example, La Sonora and Durango, from 9 to 15 inhabitants to the square league, while in others, on the central table-land, there are more than 500. The relative population of the country situated between the eastern bank of the Mississippi and the Atlantic states is scarcely 47; while that of Connecticut, Rhode island, and Massachusetts is more than 800. Westward of the Mississippi as well as in the interior of Spanish Guiana there are not two inhabitants to the square league over much larger extents of territory than Switzerland or Belgium. The state of these countries is like that of the Russian Empire, where the relative population of some of the Asiatic governments (Irkutsk and Tobolsk) is to that of the best cultivated European districts as 1 to 300.
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Re: Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions

Postby admin » Mon Jun 04, 2018 7:34 am

Part 2 of 2

The enormous difference existing, in countries newly cultivated, between the extent of territory and the number of inhabitants, renders these partial estimates necessary. When we learn that New Spain and the United States, taking their entire extent at 75,000 and 174,000 square sea-leagues, give respectively 90 and 58 souls to each league, we no more obtain a correct idea of that distribution of the population on which the political power of nations depends, than we should of the climate of a country, that is to say, of the distribution of the heat in the different seasons, by the mere knowledge of the mean temperature of the whole year. If we take from the United States all their possessions west of the Mississippi, their relative population would be 121 instead of 58 to the square league; consequently much greater than that of New Spain. Taking from the latter country the Provincias internas (north and north-east of Nueva Galicia) we should find 190 instead of 90 souls to the square league.

The provinces of Caracas, Maracaybo, Cumana and Barcelona, that is, the maritime provinces of the north, are the most populous of the old Capitania-General of Caracas; but, in comparing this relative population with that of New Spain, where the two intendencias of Mexico and Puebla alone contain, on an extent scarcely equal to the superficies of the province of Caracas, a greater population than that of the whole republic of Columbia, we see that some Mexican intendencias which, with respect to the concentration of their culture, occupy but the seventh or eighth rank (Zacatecas and Guadalajara), contain more inhabitants to the square league than the province of Caracas. The average of the relative population of Cumana, Barcelona, Caracas and Maracaybo, is fifty-six; and, as 6200 square leagues, that is, one half of the extent of these four provinces are almost desert Llanos, we find, in reckoning the superficies and the scanty population of the plains, 102 inhabitants to the square league. An analogous modification gives the province of Caracas alone a relative population of 208, that is, only one-seventh less than that of the Atlantic States of North America.

As in political economy numerical statements become instructive only by a comparison with analogous facts I have carefully examined what, in the present state of the two continents, might be considered as a small relative population in Europe, and a very great relative population in America. I have, however, chosen examples only from among the provinces which have a continued surface of more than 600 square leagues in order to exclude the accidental accumulations of population which occur around great cities; for instance, on the coast of Brazil, in the valley of Mexico, on the table-lands of Santa Fe de Bogota and Cuzco; or finally, in the smaller West India Islands (Barbadoes, Martinique and St. Thomas) of which the relative population is from 3000 to 4700 inhabitants to the square league, and consequently equal to the most fertile parts of Holland, France and Lombardy.

MINIMUM OF EUROPE: INHABITANTS TO THE SQUARE LEAGUE.

The four least populous Governments of European Russia:
Archangel : 10.
Olonez : 42.
Wologda and Astracan : 52.
Finland : 106.
The least populous Province of Spain, that of Cuenca : 311.

The Duchy of Luneburg (on account of the heaths) : 550.

The least populous Department of Continental France : 758.
(Hautes Alps)
Departments of France thinly peopled (the Creuse, : 1300. the Var and the Aude)

MAXIMUM OF AMERICA.

The central part of the Intendencias of : 1300.
Mexico and Puebla, above
In the United States, Massachusetts, but having only 522 square leagues of surface : 900.

Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, together : 840.

The whole Intendencia of Puebla : 540.

The whole Intendencia of Mexico : 460.

These two Mexican Intendencias together are nearly a third of the superficial extent of France, with a suitable population (in 1823 nearly 2,800,000 souls) to prevent the towns of Mexico and Puebla from having a sensible influence on the relative population.

Northern part of the Province of Caracas : 208. (without the Llanos)

This table shows that those parts of America which we now consider as the most populous attain the relative population of the kingdom of Navarre, of Galicia and the Asturias, which, next to the province of Guipuscoa, and the kingdom of Valencia, reckon the greatest number of inhabitants to the square league in all Spain; the maximum of America is, however, below the relative population of the whole of France (1778 to the square league), and would, in the latter country, be considered as a very thin population. If, taking a survey of the whole surface of America, we direct our attention to the Capitania-General of Venezuela, we find that the most populous of its subdivisions, the province of Caracas, considered as a whole, without excepting the Llanos, has, as yet, only the relative population of Tennessee; and that this province, without the Llanos, furnishes in its northern part, or more than 1800 square leagues, the relative population of South Carolina. Those 1800 square leagues, the centre of agriculture, are twice as numerously peopled as Finland, but still a third less than the province of Cuenca, which is the least populous of all Spain. We cannot dwell on this result without a painful feeling. Such is the state to which colonial politics and maladministration have, during three centuries, reduced a country which, for natural wealth, may vie with all that is most wonderful on earth. For a region equally desert, we must look either to the frozen regions of the north, or westward of the Allegheny mountains towards the forests of Tennessee, where the first clearings have only begun within the last eighty years!

The most cultivated part of the province of Caracas, the basin of the lake of Valencia, commonly called Los Valles de Aragua, contained in 1810 nearly 2000 inhabitants to the square league. Supposing a relative population three times less, and taking off from the whole surface of the Capitania-General nearly 24,000 square leagues as being occupied by the Llanos and the forests of Guiana, and, therefore, presenting great obstacles to agricultural labourers, we should still obtain a population of six millions for the remaining 9700 square leagues. Those who, like myself, have lived long within the tropics, will find no exaggeration in these calculations; for I suppose for the portion the most easily cultivated a relative population equal to that in the intendencias of Puebla and Mexico,* full of barren mountains, and extending towards the coast of the Pacific over regions almost desert. (* These two Intendencias contain together 5520 square leagues and a relative population of 508 inhabitants to the square sea-league.) If the territories of Cumana, Barcelona, Caracas, Maracaybo, Varinas and Guiana should be destined hereafter to enjoy good provincial and municipal institutions as confederate states, they will not require a century and a half to attain a population of six millions of inhabitants. Venezuela, the eastern part of the republic of Columbia, would not, even with nine millions, have a more considerable population than Old Spain; and can it be doubted that that part of Venezuela which is most fertile and easy of cultivation, that is, the 10,000 square leagues remaining after deducting the Llanos and the almost impenetrable forests between the Orinoco and the Cassiquiare, could support in the fine climate of the tropics as many inhabitants as 10,000 square leagues of Estramadura, the Castiles, and other provinces of the table-land of Spain? These predictions are by no means problematical, inasmuch as they are founded on physical analogies and on the productive power of the soil; but before we can indulge the hope that they will be actually accomplished, we must be secure of another element less susceptible of calculation—that national wisdom which subdues hostile passions, destroys the germs of civil discord and gives stability to free and energetic institutions.

When we take a view of the soil of Venezuela and New Grenada we perceive that no other country of Spanish America furnishes commerce with such various and rich productions of the vegetable kingdom. If we add the harvests of the province of Caracas to those of Guayaquil, we find that the republic of Columbia alone can furnish nearly all the cacao annually demanded by Europe. The union of Venezuela and New Grenada has also placed in the hands of one people the greater part of the quinquina exported from the New Continent. The temperate mountains of Merida, Santa Fe, Popayan, Quito and Loxa produce the finest qualities of this febrifugal bark hitherto known. I might swell the list of these valuable productions by the coffee and indigo of Caracas, so long esteemed in commerce; the sugar, cotton and flour of Bogota; the ipecacuanha of the banks of the Magdelena; the tobacco of Varinas; the Cortex Angosturae of Caroni; the balsam of the plains of Tolu; the skins and dried provisions of the Llanos; the pearls of Panama, Rio Hacha and Marguerita; and finally the gold of Popayan and the platinum which is nowhere found in abundance but at Choco and Barbacoa: but conformably with the plan I have adopted, I shall confine myself to the old Capitania-General of Caracas.

Owing to a peculiar disposition of the soil in Venezuela the three zones of agricultural, pastoral and hunting-life succeed each other from north to south along the coast in the direction of the equator. Advancing in that direction we may be said to traverse, in respect to space, the different stages through which the human race has passed in the lapse of ages, in its progress towards cultivation and in laying the foundations of civilized society. The region of the coast is the centre of agricultural industry; the region of the Llanos serves only for the pasturage of the animals which Europe has given to America and which live there in a half-wild state. Each of those regions includes from seven to eight thousand square leagues; further south, between the delta of the Orinoco, the Cassiquiare and the Rio Negro, lies a vast extent of land as large as France, inhabited by hunting nations, covered with thick forests and impassable swamps. The productions of the vegetable kingdom belong to the zones at each extremity; the intermediary savannahs, into which oxen, horses, and mules were introduced about the year 1548, afford food for some millions of those animals. At the time when I visited Venezuela the annual exportation from thence to the West India Islands amounted to 30,000 mules, 174,000 ox-hides and 140,000 arrobas (of twenty-five pounds) of tasajo,* or dried meat slightly salted. (* The back of the animal is cut in slices of moderate thickness. An ox or cow of the weight of 25 arrobas produces only 4 to 5 arrobas of tasajo or tasso. In 1792 the port of Barcelona alone exported 98,017 arrobas to the island of Cuba. The average price is 14 reals and varies from 10 to 18 (the real is worth about 6 1/2 pence English). M. Urquinasa estimates the total exportation of Venezuela in 1809 at 200,000 arrobas of tasajo.) It is not from the advancement of agriculture or the progressive encroachments on the pastoral lands that the hatos (herds and flocks) have diminished so considerably within twenty years; it is rather owing to the disorders of every kind that have prevailed, and the want of security for property. The impunity conceded to the skin-stealers and the accumulation of marauders in the savannahs preceded that destruction of cattle caused by the ravages of civil war and the supplies required for troops. A very considerable number of goat-skins is exported to the island of Marguerita, Punta Araya and Corolas; sheep abound only in Carora and Tocuyo. The consumption of meat being immense in this country the diminution of animals has a greater influence here than in any other district on the well-being of the inhabitants. The town of Caracas, of which the population in my time was one-tenth of that of Paris, consumed more than one-half the quantity of beef annually used in the capital of France.

I might add to the productions of the vegetable and animal kingdoms of Venezuela the enumeration of the minerals, the working of which is worthy the attention of the government; but having from my youth been engaged in the practical labours of mines I know how vague and uncertain are the judgments formed of the metallic wealth of a country from the mere appearance of the rocks and of the veins in their beds. The utility of such labours can be determined only by well directed experiments by means of shafts or galleries. All that has been done in researches of this kind, under the dominion of the mother-country, has left the question wholly undecided and the most exaggerated ideas have been recently spread through Europe concerning the riches of the mines of Caracas. The common denomination of Columbia given to Venezuela and New Grenada has doubtless contributed to foster those illusions. It cannot be doubted that the gold-washings of New Grenada furnished, in the last years of public tranquillity, more than 18,000 marks of gold; that Choco and Barbacoa supply platinum in abundance; the valley of Santa Rosa in the province of Antioquia, the Andes of Quindiu and Gauzum near Cuenca, yield sulphuretted mercury; the table-land of Bogota (near Zipaquira and Canoas), fossil-salt and pit-coal; but even in New Grenada subterranean labours on the silver and gold veins have hitherto been very rare. I am far, however, from wishing to discourage the miners of those countries: I merely conceive that for the purpose of proving to the old world the political importance of Venezuela, the amazing territorial wealth of which is founded on agriculture and the produce of pastoral life, it is not necessary to describe as realities, or as the acquisitions of industry, what is, as yet, founded solely on hopes and probabilities more or less uncertain. The republic of Columbia also possesses on its coast, on the island of Marguerita, on the Rio Hacha and in the gulf of Panama pearl fisheries of ancient celebrity. In the present state of things, however, fishing for these pearls is an object of as little importance as the exportation of the metals of Venezuela. The existence of metallic veins on several points of the coast cannot be doubted. Mines of gold and silver were worked at the beginning of the conquest at Buria, near Barquesimeto, in the province of Los Mariches, at Baruta, on the south of Caracas, and at Real de Santa Barbara near the Villa de Cura. Grains of gold are found in the whole mountainous territory between Rio Yaracuy, the Villa de San Felipe and Nirgua, as well as between Guigue and Los Moros de San Juan. M. Bonpland and myself, during our long journey, saw nothing in the gneiss granite of Spanish Guiana to confirm the old faith in the metallic wealth of that district; yet it seems certain from several historical notices that there exist two groups of auriferous alluvial land; one between the sources of the Rio Negro, the Uaupes and the Iquiare; the other between the sources of the Essequibo, the Caroni and the Rupunuri. Hitherto only one working is found in Venezuela, that of Aroa: it furnished, in 1800, near 1500 quintals of copper of excellent quality. The green-stone rocks of the transition mountains of Tucutunemo (between Villa de Cura and Parapara) contain veins of malachite and copper pyrites. The indications of both ochreous and magnetic iron in the coast-chain, the native alum of Chuparipari, the salt of Araya, the kaolin of the Silla, the jade of the Upper Orinoco, the petroleum of Buen-Pastor and the sulphur of the eastern part of New Andalusia equally merit the attention of the government.

It is easy to ascertain the existence of some mineral substances which afford hopes of profitable working but it requires great circumspection to decide whether the mineral be sufficiently abundant and accessible to cover the expense.* (* In 1800 a day-labourer (peon) employed in working the ground gained in the province of Caracas 15 sous, exclusive of his food. A man who hewed building timber in the forests on the coast of Paria was paid at Cumana 45 to 50 sous a day, without his food. A carpenter gained daily from 3 to 6 francs in New Andalusia. Three cakes of cassava (the bread of the country), 21 inches in diameter, 1 1/2 lines thick, and 2 1/2 pounds weight, cost at Caracas one half-real, or 6 1/2 sous. A man eats daily not less than 2 sous' worth of cassava, that food being constantly mixed with bananas, dried meat (tasajo) and panelon, or unrefined sugar.) Even in the eastern part of South America gold and silver are found dispersed in a manner that surprises the European geologist; but that dispersion, together with the divided and entangled state of the veins and the appearance of some metals only in masses, render the working extremely expensive. The example of Mexico sufficiently proves that the interest attached to the labours of the mines is not prejudicial to agricultural pursuits, and that those two branches of industry may simultaneously promote each other. The failure of the attempts made under the intendant, Don Jose Avalo, must be attributed solely to the ignorance of the persons employed by the Spanish government who mistook mica and hornblende for metallic substances. If the government would order the Capitania-General of Caracas to be carefully examined during a series of years by men of science, well versed in geognosy and chemistry, the most satisfactory results might be expected.

The description above given of the productions of Venezuela and the development of its coast sufficiently shows the importance of the commerce of that rich country. Even under the thraldom of the colonial system, the value of the exported products of agriculture and of the gold-washings amount to eleven or twelve millions of piastres in the countries at present united under the denomination of the Republic of Columbia. The exports of the Capitania-General of Caracas alone, exclusive of the precious metals which are the objects of regular working, was (with the contraband) from five to six millions of piastres at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Cumana, Barcelona, La Guayra, Porto Cabello and Maracaybo are the most important parts of the coast; those that lie most eastward have the advantage of an easier communication with the Virgin Islands, Guadaloupe, Martinique and St. Vincent. Angostura, the real name of which is Santo Tome de Nueva Guiana, may be considered as the port of the rich province of Varinas. The majestic river on whose banks this town is built, affords by its communications with the Apure, the Meta and the Rio Negro the greatest advantages for trade with Europe.

The shores of Venezuela, from the beauty of their ports, the tranquillity of the sea by which they are washed and the fine timber that covers them, possess great advantages over the shores of the United States. In no part of the world do we find firmer anchorage or better positions for the establishment of ports. The sea of this coast is constantly calm, like that which extends from Lima to Guayaquil. The storms and hurricanes of the West Indies are never felt on the Costa Firme; and when, after the sun has passed the meridian, thick clouds charged with electricity accumulate on the mountains of the coasts, a pilot accustomed to these latitudes knows that this threatening aspect of the sky denotes only a squall. The virgin-forests near the sea, in the eastern part of New Andalusia, present valuable resources for the establishment of dockyards. The wood of the mountains of Paria may vie with that of the island of Cuba, Huasacualco, Guayaquil and San Blas. The Spanish Government at the close of the last century fixed its attention on this important object. Marine engineers were sent to mark the finest trunks of Brazil-wood, mahogany, cedrela and laurinea between Angostura and the mouth of the Orinoco, as well as on the banks of the Gulf of Paria, commonly called the Golfo triste. It was not intended to establish docks on that spot, but to hew the weighty timber into the forms necessary for ship-building, and to transport it to Caraque, near Cadiz. Though trees fit for masts are not found in this country, it was nevertheless hoped that the execution of this project would considerably diminish the importation of timber from Sweden and Norway. The experiment of forming this establishment was tried in a very unhealthy spot, the valley of Quebranta, near Guirie; I have already adverted to the causes of its destruction. The insalubrity of the place would, doubtless, have diminished in proportion as the forest (el monte virgen) should have been removed from the dwellings of the inhabitants. Mulattos, and not whites, ought to have been employed in hewing the wood, and it should have been remembered that the expense of the roads (arastraderos) for the transport of the timber, when once laid out, would not have been the same, and that, by the increase of the population, the price of day labour would progressively have diminished. It is for ship-builders alone, who determine the localities, to judge whether, in the present state of things, the freight of merchant-vessels be not far too high to admit of sending to Europe large quantities of roughly-hewn wood; but it cannot be doubted that Venezuela possesses on its maritime coast, as well as on the banks of the Orinoco, immense resources for ship-building. The fine ships which have been launched from the dockyards of the Havannah, Guayaquil and San Blas have, no doubt, cost more than those constructed in Europe; but from the nature of tropical wood they possess the advantages of hardness and amazing durability.

The great struggle during which Venezuela has fought for independence has lasted more than twelve years. That period has been no less fruitful than civil commotions usually are in heroic and generous actions, guilty errors and violent passions. The sentiment of common danger has strengthened the ties between men of various races who, spread over the plains of Cumana or insulated on the table-land of Cundinamarca, have a physical and moral organization as different as the climates in which they live. The mother-country has several times regained possession of some districts; but as revolutions are always renewed with more violence when the evils that produce them can no longer be remedied these conquests have been transitory. To facilitate and give greater energy to the defence of this country the governments have been concentrated, and a vast state has been formed, extending from the mouth of the Orinoco to the other side of the Andes of Riobamba and the banks of the Amazon. The Capitania-General of Caracas has been united to the Vice-royalty of New Grenada, from which it was only separated entirely in 1777. This union, which will always be indispensable for external safety, this centralization of powers in a country six times larger than Spain, has been prompted by political views. The tranquil progress of the new government has justified the wisdom of those views, and the Congress will find still fewer obstacles in the execution of its beneficent projects for national industry and civilization, in proportion as it can grant increased liberty to the provinces, must render the people sensible to the advantages of institutions which they have purchased at the price of their blood. In every form of government, in republics as well as in limited monarchies, improvements, to be salutary, must be progressive. New Andalusia, Caracas, Cundinamarca, Popayan and Quito, are not confederate states like Pennsylvania, Virginia and Maryland. Without juntas, or provincial legislatures, all those countries are directly subject to the congress and government of Columbia. In conformity with the constitutional act, the intendants and governors of the departments and provinces are nominated by the president of the republic. It may be naturally supposed that such dependence has not always been deemed favourable to the liberty if the communes, which love to discuss their own local interests. The ancient kingdom of Quito, for instance, is connected by the habits and language of its mountainous inhabitants with Peru and New Grenada. If there were a provincial junta, if the congress alone determined the taxes necessary for the defence and general welfare of Columbia, the feeling of an individual political existence would render the inhabitants less interested in the choice of the spot which is the seat of the central government. The same argument applies to New Andalusia or Guiana which are governed by intendants named by the president. It may be said that these provinces have hitherto been in a position differing but little from those territories of the United States which have a population below 60,000 souls. Peculiar circumstances, which cannot be justly appreciated at such a distance, have doubtless rendered great centralization necessary in the civil administration; every change would be dangerous as long as the state has external enemies; but the forms useful for defence are not always those which, after the struggle, sufficiently favour individual liberty and the development of public prosperity.

The powerful union of North America has long been insulated and without contact with any states having analogous institutions. Although the progress America is making from east to west is considerably retarded near the right bank of the Mississippi, she will advance without interruption towards the internal provinces of Mexico, and will there find a European people of another race, other manners, and a different religious faith. Will the feeble population of those provinces, belonging to another dawning federation, resist; or will it be absorbed by the torrent from the east and transformed into an Anglo-American state, like the inhabitants of Lower Louisiana? The future will soon solve this problem. On the other hand, Mexico is separated from Columbia only by Guatimala, a country and extreme fertility which has recently assumed the denomination of the republic of Central America. The political divisions between Oaxaca and Chiapa, Costa Rica and Veragua, are not founded either on the natural limits or the manners and languages of the natives, but solely on the habit of dependence on the Spanish chiefs who resided at Mexico, Guatimala or Santa Fe de Bogota. It seems natural that Guatimala should one day join the isthmuses of Veragua and Panama to the isthmus of Costa Rica; and that Quito should connect New Grenada with Peru, as La Paz, Charcas and Potosi link Peru with Buenos-Ayres. The intermediate parts from Chiapa to the Cordilleras of Upper Peru form a passage from one political association to another, like those transitory forms which link together the various groups of the organic kingdom in nature. In neighbouring monarchies the provinces that adjoin each other present those striking demarcations which are the effect of great centralization of power in federal republics, states situated at the extremities of each system are some time before they acquire a stable equilibrium. It would be almost a matter of indifference to the provinces between Arkansas and the Rio del Norte whether they send their deputies to Mexico or to Washington. Were Spanish America one day to show a more uniform tendency towards the spirit of federalism, which the example of the United States has created on several points, there would result from the contact of so many systems or groups of states, confederations variously graduated. I here only touch on the relations that arise from this assemblage of colonies on an uninterrupted line of 1600 leagues in length. We have seen in North America, one of the old Atlantic states divided into two, and each having a different representation. The separation of Maine and Massachusetts in 1820 was effected in the most peaceable manner. Schisms of this kind will, it may be feared, render such changes turbulent. It may also be observed that the importance of the geographical divisions of Spanish America, founded at the same time on the relations of local position and the habits of several centuries, have prevented the mother-country from retarding the separation of the colonies by attempting to establish Spanish princes in the New World. In order to rule such vast possessions it would have been requisite to form six or seven centres of government; and that multiplicity of centres was hostile to the establishment of new dynasties at the period when they might still have been salutary to the mother country.

Bacon somewhere observes that it would be happy if nations would always follow the example of time, the greatest of all innovators, but who acts calmly and almost without being perceived. This happiness does not belong to colonies when they reach the critical juncture of emancipation; and least of all to Spanish America, engaged in the struggle at first not to obtain complete independence, but to escape from a foreign yoke. May these party agitations be succeeded by a lasting tranquillity! May the germ of civil discord, disseminated during three centuries to secure the dominion of the mother-country, gradually perish; and may productive and commercial Europe be convinced that to perpetuate the political agitations of the New World would be to impoverish herself by diminishing the consumption of her productions and losing a market which already yields more than seventy millions of piastres. Many years must no doubt elapse before seventeen millions of inhabitants, spread over a surface one-fifth greater than the whole of Europe, will have found a stable equilibrium in governing themselves. The most critical moment is that when nations, after long oppression, find themselves suddenly at liberty to promote their own prosperity. The Spanish Americans, it is unceasingly repeated, are not sufficiently advanced in intellectual cultivation to be fitted for free institutions. I remember that at a period not very remote, the same reasoning was applied to other nations who were said to have made too great an advance in civilization. Experience, no doubt, proves that nations, like individuals, find that intellect and learning do not always lead to happiness; but without denying the necessity of a certain mass of knowledge and popular instruction for the stability of republics or constitutional monarchies, we believe that stability depends much less on the degree of intellectual improvement than on the strength of the national character; on that balance of energy and tranquillity of ardour and patience which maintains and perpetuates new institutions; on the local circumstances in which a nation is placed; and on the political relations of a country with neighbouring states.
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Re: Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions

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CHAPTER 3.28. PASSAGE FROM THE COAST OF VENEZUELA TO THE HAVANNAH. GENERAL VIEW OF THE POPULATION OF THE WEST INDIA ISLANDS, COMPARED WITH THE POPULATION OF THE NEW CONTINENT, WITH RESPECT TO DIVERSITY OF RACES, PERSONAL LIBERTY, LANGUAGE, AND WORSHIP.

We sailed from Nueva Barcelona on the 24th of November at nine o'clock in the evening; and we doubled the small rocky island of Borachita. The night was marked by coolness which characterizes the nights of the tropics, and the agreeable effect of which can only be conceived by comparing the nocturnal temperature, from 23 to 24 degrees centigrade, with the mean temperature of the day, which in those latitudes is generally, even on the coast, from 28 to 29 degrees. Next day, soon after the observation of noon, we reached the meridian of the island of Tortugas. It is destitute of vegetation; and like the little islands of Coche and Cabagua is remarkable for its small elevation above the level of the sea.

In the forenoon of the 26th we began to lose sight of the island of Marguerita and I endeavoured to verify the height of the rocky group of Macanao. It appeared under an angle of 0 degrees 16 minutes 35 seconds; which in a distance estimated at sixty miles would give the mica-slate group of Macanao the elevation of about 660 toises, a result which, in a zone where the terrestrial refractions are so unchanging, leads me to think that the island was less distant than we supposed. The dome of the Silla of Caracas, lying 62 degrees to the south-west, long fixed our attention. At those times when the coast is not loaded with vapours the Silla must be visible at sea, without reckoning the effects of refraction, at thirty-three leagues distance. During the 26th, and the three following days, the sea was covered with a bluish film which, when examined by a compound microscope, appeared formed of an innumerable quantity of filaments. We frequently find these filaments in the Gulf-stream, and the Channel of Bahama, as well as near the coast of Buenos Ayres. Some naturalists are of opinion that they are vestiges of the eggs of mollusca: but they appear to be more like fragments of fuci. The phosphorescence of sea-water seems however to be augmented by their presence, especially between 28 and 30 degrees of north latitude, which indicates an origin of some sort of animal nature.

On the 27th we slowly approached the island of Orchila. Like all the small islands in the vicinity of the fertile coast of the continent it has never been inhabited. I found the latitude of the northern cape 11 degrees 51 minutes 44 seconds and the longitude of the eastern cape 68 degrees 26 minutes 5 seconds (supposing Nueva Barcelona to be 67 degrees 4 minutes 48 seconds). Opposite the western cape there is a small rock against which the waves beat turbulently. Some angles taken with the sextant gave, for the length of the island from east to west, 8.4 miles (950 toises); and for the breadth scarcely three miles. The island of Orchila which, from its name, I figured to myself as a bare rock covered with lichens, was at that period beautifully verdant. The hills of gneiss were covered with grasses. It appears that the geological constitution of Orchila resembles, on a small scale, that of Marguerita. It consists of two groups of rocks joined by a neck of land; it is an isthmus covered with sand which seems to have issued from the floods by the successive lowering of the level of the sea. The rocks, like all those which are perpendicular and insulated in the middle of the sea, appear much more elevated than they really are, for they scarcely exceed from 80 to 90 toises. The Punta rasa stretches to the north-west and is lost, like a sandbank, below the waters. It is dangerous for navigators, and so is likewise the Mogote which, at the distance of two miles from the western cape, is surrounded by breakers. On a very near examination of these rocks we saw the strata of gneiss inclined towards the north-west and crossed by thick layers of quartz. The destruction of these layers has doubtless created the sands of the surrounding beach. Some clumps of trees shade the valleys, the summits of the hills are crowned with fan-leaved palm-trees; probably the palma de sombrero of the Llanos (Corypha tectorum). Rain is not abundant in these countries; but probably some springs might be found on the island of Orchila if sought for with the same care as in the mica-slate rocks of Punta Araya. When we recollect how many bare and rocky islands are inhabited and cultivated between the 17th and 26th degrees of latitude in the archipelago of the Lesser Antilles and Bahama islands, we are surprised to find those islands desert which are near to the coast of Cumana, Barcelona and Caracas. They would long have ceased to be so had they been under the dominion of any other government than that to which they belong. Nothing can engage men to circumscribe their industry within the narrow limits of a small island when a neighbouring continent offers them greater advantages.

We perceived at sunset the two points of the Roca de afuera, rising like towers in the midst of the ocean. A survey taken with the compass placed the most easterly of the points or roques at 0 degrees 19 minutes west of the western cape of Orchila. The clouds continued long accumulated over that island and showed its position from afar. The influence of a small tract of land in condensing the vapours suspended at an elevation of 800 toises is a very extraordinary phenomenon, although familiar to all mariners. From this accumulation of clouds the position of the lowest island may be recognized at a great distance.

On the 29th November we still saw very distinctly, at sunrise, the summit of the Silla of Caracas just rising above the horizon of the sea. At noon everything denoted a change of weather in the direction of the north: the atmosphere suddenly cooled to 12.6 degrees, while the sea maintained a temperature of 25.6 degrees at its surface. At the moment of the observation of noon the oscillations of the horizon, crossed by streaks or black bands of very variable size, produced changes of refraction from 3 to 4 degrees. The sea became rough in very calm weather and everything announced a stormy passage between Cayman Island and Cape St. Antonio. On the 30th the wind veered suddenly to north-north-east and the surge rose to a considerable height. Northward a darkish blue tint was observable on the sky, the rolling of our small vessel was violent and we perceived amidst the dashing of the waves two seas crossing each other, one the from north and the other from north-north-east. Waterspouts were formed at the distance of a mile and were carried rapidly from north-north-east to north-north-west. Whenever the waterspout drew near us we felt the wind grow sensibly cooler. Towards evening, owing to the carelessness of our American cook, our deck took fire; but fortunately it was soon extinguished. On the morning of the 1st of December the sea slowly calmed and the breeze became steady from north-east. On the 2nd of December we descried Cape Beata, in a spot where we had long observed the clouds gathered together. According to the observations of Acherner, which I obtained in the night, we were sixty-four miles distant. During the night there was a very curious optical phenomenon, which I shall not undertake to account for. At half-past midnight the wind blew feebly from the east; the thermometer rose to 23.2 degrees, the whalebone hygrometer was at 57 degrees. I had remained upon the deck to observe the culmination of some stars. The full-moon was high in the heavens. Suddenly, in the direction of the moon, 45 degrees before its passage over the meridian, a great arch was formed tinged with the prismatic colours, though not of a bright hue. The arch appeared higher than the moon; this iris-band was near 2 degrees broad, and its summit seemed to rise nearly from 80 to 85 degrees above the horizon of the sea. The sky was singularly pure; there was no appearance of rain; and what struck me most was that this phenomenon, which perfectly resembled a lunar rainbow, was not in the direction opposite to the moon. The arch remained stationary, or at least appeared to do so, during eight or ten minutes; and at the moment when I tried if it were possible to see it by reflection in the mirror of the sextant, it began to move and descend, crossing successively the Moon and Jupiter. It was 12 hours 54 minutes (mean time) when the summit of the arch sank below the horizon. This movement of an arch, coloured like the rainbow, filled with astonishment the sailors who were on watch on the deck. They alleged, as they do on the appearance of every extraordinary meteor, that it denoted wind. M. Arago examined the sketch of this arch in my journal; and he is of opinion that the image of the moon reflected in the waters could not have given a halo of such great dimensions. The rapidity of the movement is no small obstacle in the way of explanation of a phenomenon well worthy of attention.

On the 3rd of December we felt some uneasiness on account of the proximity of a small vessel supposed to be a pirate but which, as it drew near, we recognized to be the Balandra del Frayle (the sloop of the Monk). I was at a loss to conceive what so strange a denomination meant. The bark belonged to a Franciscan missionary, a rich priest of am Indian village in the savannahs (Llanos) of Barcelona, who had for several years carried on a very lucrative contraband trade with the Danish islands. M. Bonpland and several passengers saw in the night at the distance of a quarter of a mile, with the wind, a small flame on the surface of the ocean; it ran in the direction of south-west and lighted up the atmosphere. No shock of earthquake was felt and there was no change in the direction of the waves. Was it a phosphoric gleam produced by a great accumulation of mollusca in a state of putrefaction; or did this flame issue from the depth of the sea, as is said to have been sometimes observable in latitudes agitated by volcanoes? The latter supposition appears to me devoid of all probability. The volcanic flame can only issue from the deep when the rocky bed of the ocean is already heaved up so that the flames and incandescent scoriae escape from the swelled and creviced part without traversing the waters.

At half-past ten in the morning of the 4th of December we were in the meridian of Cape Bacco (Punta Abacou) which I found in 76 degrees 7 minutes 50 seconds, or 9 degrees 3 minutes 2 seconds west of Nueva Barcelona. Having attained the parallel of 17 degrees, the fear of pirates made us prefer the direct passage across the bank of Vibora, better known by the name of the Pedro Shoals. This bank occupies more than two hundred and eighty square sea leagues and its configuration strikes the eye of the geologist by its resemblance to that of Jamaica, which is in its neighbourhood. It forms an island almost as large as Porto Rico.

From the 5th of December, the pilots believed they took successively the measurement at a distance of the island of Ranas (Morant Keys), Cape Portland and Pedro Keys. They may probably have been deceived in several of these distances, which were taken from the mast-head. I have elsewhere noted these measurements, not with the view of opposing them to those which have been made by able English navigators in these frequented latitudes, but merely to connect, in the same system of observations, the points I determined in the forests of the Orinoco and in the archipelago of the West Indies. The milky colour of the waters warned us that we were on the eastern part of the bank; the centigrade thermometer which at a distance from the bank and on the surface of the sea had for several days kept at 27 and 27.3 degrees (the air being at 21.2 degrees) sank suddenly to 25.7 degrees. The weather was bad from the 4th to the 6th of December: it rained fast; thunder rolled at a distance, and the gusts of wind from the north-north-east became more and more violent. We were during some part of the night in a critical position; we heard before us the noise of the breakers over which we had to pass, and we could ascertain their direction by the phosphoric gleam reflected from the foam of the sea. The scene resembled the Raudal of Garzita and other rapids which we had seen in the bed of the Orinoco. We succeeded in changing our course and in less than a quarter of an hour were out of danger. While we traversed the bank of the Vibora from south-south-east to north-north-west I repeatedly tried to ascertain the temperature of the water on the surface of the sea. The cooling was less sensible on the middle of the bank than on its edge, a circumstance which we attributed to the currents that there mingle waters from different latitudes. On the south of Pedro Keys the surface of the sea, at twenty-five fathoms deep, was 26.4 and at fifteen fathoms deep 26.2 degrees. The temperature of the sea on the east of the bank had been 26.8 degrees. Some American pilots affirm that among the Bahama Islands they often know, when seated in the cabin, that they are passing over sand-banks; they allege that the lights are surrounded with small coloured halos and that the air exhaled from the lungs is visibly condensed. The latter circumstance appears very doubtful; below 30 degrees of latitude the cooling produced by the waters of the bank is not sufficiently considerable to cause this phenomenon. During the time we passed on the bank of the Vibora the constitution of the air was quite different from what it had been when we quitted it. The rain was circumscribed by the limits of the bank of which we could distinguish the form from afar by the mass of vapour with which it was covered.

On the 9th of December, as we advanced towards the Cayman Islands,* the north-east wind again blew with violence. (* Christopher Columbus in 1503 named the Cayman Islands Penascales de las Tortugas on account of the sea-tortoises which he saw swimming in those latitudes.) I nevertheless obtained some altitudes of the sun at the moment when we believed ourselves, though twelve miles distant, in the meridian of the centre of the Great Cayman, which is covered with cocoa-trees.

The weather continued bad and the sea extremely rough. The wind at length fell as we neared Cape St. Antonio. I found the northern extremity of the cape 87 degrees 17 minutes 22 seconds, or 2 degrees 34 minutes 14 seconds eastward of the Morro of the Havannah: this is the longitude now marked on the best charts. We were at the distance of three miles from land but we were made aware of the proximity of the island of Cuba by a delicious aromatic odour. The sailors affirm that this odour is not perceived when they approach from Cape Catoche on the barren coast of Mexico. As the weather grew clearer the thermometer rose gradually in the shade to 27 degrees: we advanced rapidly northward, carried on by a current from south-south-east, the temperature of which rose at the surface of the water to 26.7 degrees; while out of the current it was 24.6 degrees. We anchored in the port of the Havannah on the 19th December after a passage of twenty-five days in continuous bad weather.
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Re: Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions

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Part 1 of 3

CHAPTER 3.29. POLITICAL ESSAY ON THE ISLAND OF CUBA. THE HAVANNAH. HILLS OF GUANAVACOA, CONSIDERED IN THEIR GEOLOGICAL RELATIONS. VALLEY OF LOS GUINES, BATABANO, AND PORT OF TRINIDAD. THE KING AND QUEEN'S GARDENS.

Cuba owes its political importance to a variety of circumstances, among which may be enumerated the extent of its surface, the fertility of its soil, its naval establishments, and the nature of its population, of which three-fifths are free men. All these advantages are heightened by the admirable position of the Havannah. The northern part of the Caribbean Sea, known by the name of the Gulf of Mexico, forms a circular basin more than two hundred and fifty leagues in diameter: it is a Mediterranean with two outlets. The island of Cuba, or rather its coast between Cape St. Antonio and the town of Matanzas, situated at the opening of the old channel, closes the Gulf of Mexico on the south-east, leaving the ocean current known by the name of the Gulf Stream, no other outlet on the south than a strait between Cape St. Antonio and Cape Catoche; and no other on the north than the channel of Bahama, between Bahia-Honda and the shoals of Florida. Near the northern outlet, where the highways of so many nations may be said to cross each other, lies the fine port of the Havannah, fortified at once by nature and by art. The fleets which sail from this port and which are partly constructed of the cedrela and the mahogany of the island of Cuba, might, at the entrance of the Mexican Mediterranean, menace the opposite coast, as the fleets that sail from Cadiz command the Atlantic near the Pillars of Hercules. In the meridian of the Havannah the Gulf of Mexico, the old channel, and the channel of Bahama unite. The opposite direction of the currents and the violent agitations of the atmosphere at the setting-in of winter impart a peculiar character to these latitudes at the extreme limit of the equinoctial zone.

The island of Cuba is the largest of the Antilles.* (* Its area is little less in extent than that of England not including Wales.) Its long and narrow form gives it a vast development of coast and places it in proximity with Hayti and Jamaica, with the most southern province of the United States (Florida) and the most easterly province of the Mexican Confederation (Yucatan).* (* These places are brought into communication one with another by a voyage of ten or twelve days.) This circumstance claims serious attention when it is considered that Jamaica, St. Domingo, Cuba and the southern parts of the United States (from Louisiana to Virginia) contain nearly two million eight hundred thousand Africans. Since the separation of St. Domingo, the Floridas and New Spain from the mother-country, the island of Cuba is connected only by similarity of religion, language and manners with the neighbouring countries, which, during ages, were subject to the same laws.

Florida forms the last link in that long chain, the northern extremity of which reaches the basin of St. Lawrence and extends from the region of palm-trees to that of the most rigorous winter. The inhabitant of New England regards the increasing augmentation of the black population, the preponderance of the slave states and the predilection for the cultivation of colonial products as a public danger; and earnestly wishes that the strait of Florida, the present limit of the great American confederation, may never be passed but with the views of free trade, founded on equal rights. If he fears events which may place the Havannah under the dominion of a European power more formidable than Spain, he is not the less desirous that the political ties by which Louisiana, Pensacola and Saint Augustin of Florida were heretofore united to the island of Cuba may for ever be broken.

The extreme sterility of the soil, joined to the want of inhabitants and of cultivation, have at all times rendered the proximity of Florida of small importance to the trade of the Havannah; but the case is different on the coast of Mexico. The shores of that country, stretching in a semicircle from the frequented ports of Tampico, Vera Cruz, and Alvarado to Cape Catoche, almost touch, by the peninsula of Yucatan, the western part of the island of Cuba. Commerce is extremely active between the Havannah and the port of Campeachy; and it increases, notwithstanding the new order of things in Mexico, because the trade, equally illicit with a more distant coast, that of Caracas or Columbia, employs but a small number of vessels. In such difficult times the supply of salt meat (tasajo) for the slaves is more easily obtained from Buenos Ayres and the plains of Merida than from those of Cumana, Barcelona and Caracas. The island of Cuba and the archipelago of the Philippines have for ages derived from New Spain the funds necessary for their internal administration and for keeping up their fortifications, arsenals and dockyards. The Havannah was the military port of the New World; and, till 1808, annually received 1,800,000 piastres from the Mexican treasury. At Madrid it was long the custom to consider the island of Cuba and the archipelago of the Philippines as dependencies on Mexico, situated at very unequal distances east and west of Vera Cruz and Acapulco, but linked to the Mexican metropolis (then a European colony) by all the ties of commerce, mutual aid and ancient sympathies. Increased internal wealth has rendered unnecessary the pecuniary succour formerly furnished to Cuba from the Mexican treasury. Of all the Spanish possessions that island has been most prosperous: the port of the Havannah has, since the troubles of St. Domingo, become one of the most important points of the commercial world. A fortunate concurrence of political circumstances, joined to the intelligence and commercial activity of the inhabitants, have preserved to the Havannah the uninterrupted enjoyment of free intercourse with foreign nations.

I twice visited this island, residing there on one occasion for three months, and on the other for six weeks; and I enjoyed the confidence of persons who, from their abilities and their position, were enabled to furnish me with the best information. In company with M. Bonpland I visited only the vicinity of the Havannah, the beautiful valley of Guines and the coast between Batabano and the port of Trinidad. After having succinctly described the aspect of this scenery and the singular modifications of a climate so different from that of the other islands, I will proceed to examine the general population of the Island of Cuba; its area calculated from the most accurate sketch of the coast; the objects of trade and the state of the public revenue.

The aspect of the Havannah, at the entrance of the port, is one of the gayest and most picturesque on the shore of equinoctial America north of the equator. This spot is celebrated by travellers of all nations. It boasts not the luxuriant vegetation that adorns the banks of the river Guayaquil nor the wild majesty of the rocky coast of Rio de Janeiro; but the grace which in those climates embellishes the scenes of cultivated nature is at the Havannah mingled with the majesty of vegetable forms and the organic vigour that characterizes the torrid zone. On entering the port of the Havannah you pass between the fortress of the Morro (Castillo de los Santos Reyes) and the fort of San Salvador de la Punta: the opening being only from one hundred and seventy to two hundred toises wide. Having passed this narrow entrance, leaving on the north the fine castle of San Carlos de la Cabana and the Casa Blanca, we reach a basin in the form of a trefoil of which the great axis, stretching from south-south-west to north-north-east, is two miles and one-fifth long. This basin communicates with three creeks, those of Regla, Guanavacoa and Atares; in this last there are some springs of fresh water. The town of the Havannah, surrounded by walls, forms a promontory bounded on the south by the arsenal and on the north by the fort of La Punta. After passing beyond some wrecks of vessels sunk in the shoals of La Luz, we no longer find eight or ten, but five or six fathoms of water. The castles of Santo Domingo de Atares and San Carlos del Principe defend the town on the westward; they are distant from the interior wall, on the land side, the one 660 toises, the other 1240. The intermediate space is filled by the suburbs (arrabales or barrios extra muros) of the Horcon, Jesu-Maria, Guadaloupe and Senor de la Salud, which from year to year encroach on the Field of Mars (Campo de Marte). The great edifices of the Havannah, the cathedral, the Casa del Govierno, the house of the commandant of the marine, the Correo or General Post Office and the factory of Tobacco are less remarkable for beauty than for solidity of structure. The streets are for the most part narrow and unpaved. Stones being brought from Vera Cruz, and very difficult of transport, the idea was conceived a short time before my voyage of joining great trunks of trees together, as is done in Germany and Russia, when dykes are constructed across marshy places. This project was soon abandoned and travellers newly arrived beheld with surprise fine trunks of mahogany sunk in the mud of the Havannah. At the time of my sojourn there few towns of Spanish America presented, owing to the want of a good police, a more unpleasant aspect. People walked in mud up to the knee; and the multitude of caleches or volantes (the characteristic equipage of the Havannah) of carts loaded with casks of sugar, and porters elbowing passengers, rendered walking most disagreeable. The smell of tasajo often poisons the houses and the winding streets. But it appears that of late the police has interposed and that a manifest improvement has taken place in the cleanliness of the streets; that the houses are more airy and that the Calle de los Mercadores presents a fine appearance. Here, as in the oldest towns of Europe. an ill-traced plan of streets can only be amended by slow degrees.

There are two fine public walks; one called the Alameda, between the hospital of Santa Paula and the theatre, and the other between the Castillo de la Punta and the Puerta de la Muralla, called the Paseo extra muros; the latter is deliciously cool and is frequented by carriages after sunset. It was begun by the Marquis de la Torre, governor of the island, who gave the first impulse to the improvement of the police and the municipal government. Don Luis de las Casas and the Count de Santa Clara enlarged the plantations. Near the Campo de Marte is the Botanical Garden which is well worthy to fix the attention of the government; and another place fitted to excite at once pity and indignation—the barracoon, in front of which the wretched slaves are exposed for sale. A marble statue of Charles III has been erected since my return to Europe, in the extra muros walk. This spot was at first destined for a monument to Christopher Columbus whose ashes, after the cession of the Spanish part of St. Domingo, were brought to the island of Cuba.*

(* Columbus lies buried in the cathedral of the Havannah, close to the wall near the high altar. On the tomb is the following inscription:

O restos y Imagen del grande Colon;
Mil siglos duran guardados en la Urna,
Y en remembranca de nuestra Nacion.
Oh relics and image of the great Colon (Columbus)
A thousand ages are encompassed in thy Urn,
And in the memory of our Nation.

His remains were first deposited at Valladolid and thence were removed to Seville. In 1536 the bodies of Columbus and of his son Diego (El Adelantado) were carried to St. Domingo and there interred in the cathedral; but they were afterwards removed to the place where they now repose.)

The same year the ashes of Fernando Cortez were transferred in Mexico from one church to another: thus, at the close of the eighteenth century, the remains of the two greatest men who promoted the conquest of America were interred in new sepulchres.

The most majestic palm-tree of its tribe, the palma real, imparts a peculiar character to the landscape in the vicinity of the Havannah; it is the Oreodoxa regia of our description of American palm-trees. Its tall trunk, slightly swelled towards the middle, grows to the height of 60 or 80 feet; the upper part is glossy, of a delicate green, newly formed by the closing and dilatation of the petioles, contrasts with the rest, which is whitish and fendilated. It appears like two columns, the one surmounting the other. The palma real of the island of Cuba has feathery leaves rising perpendicularly towards the sky, and curved only at the point. The form of this plant reminded us of the vadgiai palm-tree which covers the rocks in the cataracts of the Orinoco, balancing its long points over a mist of foam. Here, as in every place where the population is concentrated, vegetation diminishes. Those palm-trees round the Havannah and in the amphitheatre of Regla on which I delighted to gaze are disappearing by degrees. The marshy places which I saw covered with bamboos are cultivated and drained. Civilization advances; and the soil, gradually stripped of plants, scarcely offers any trace of its wild abundance. From the Punta to San Lazaro, from Cabana to Regla and from Regla to Atares the road is covered with houses, and those that surround the bay are of light and elegant construction. The plan of these houses is traced out by the owners, and they are ordered from the United States, like pieces of furniture. When the yellow fever rages at the Havannah the proprietors withdraw to those country houses and to the hills between Regla and Guanavacoa to breathe a purer air. In the coolness of night, when the boats cross the bay, and owing to the phosphorescence of the water, leave behind them long tracks of light, these romantic scenes afford charming and peaceful retreats for those who wish to withdraw from the tumult of a populous city. To judge of the progress of cultivation travellers should visit the small plots of maize and other alimentary plants, the rows of pine-apples (ananas) in the fields of Cruz de Piedra and the bishop's garden (Quinta del Obispo) which of late is become a delicious spot.

The town of the Havannah, properly so called, surrounded by walls, is only 900 toises long and 500 broad; yet more than 44,000 inhabitants, of whom 26,000 are negroes and mulattoes, are crowded together in this narrow space. A population nearly as considerable occupies the two great suburbs of Jesu-Maria and La Salud.* (* Salud signifies Health.) The latter place does not verify the name it bears; the temperature of the air is indeed lower than in the city but the streets might have been larger and better planned. Spanish engineers, who have been waging war for thirty years past with the inhabitants of the suburbs (arrabales), have convinced the government that the houses are too near the fortifications, and that the enemy might establish himself there with impunity. But the government has not courage to demolish the suburbs and disperse a population of 28,000 inhabitants collected in La Salud only. Since the great fire of 1802 that quarter has been considerably enlarged; barracks were at first constructed, but by degrees they have been converted into private houses. The defence of the Havannah on the west is of the highest importance: so long as the besieged are masters of the town, properly so called, and of the southern part of the bay, the Morro and La Cabana, they are impregnable because they can be provisioned by the Havannah, and the losses of the garrison repaired. I have heard well-informed French engineers observe that an enemy should begin his operations by taking the town, in order to bombard the Cabana, a strong fortress, but where the garrison, shut up in the casemates, could not long resist the insalubrity of the climate. The English took the Morro without being masters of the Havannah; but the Cabana and the Fort Number 4 which commands the Morro did not then exist. The most important works on the south and west are the Castillos de Atares y del Principe, and the battery of Santa Clara.

We employed the months of December, January and February in making observations in the vicinity of the Havannah and the fine plains of Guines. We experienced, in the family of Senor Cuesta (who then formed with Senor Santa Maria one of the greatest commercial houses in America) and in the house of Count O'Reilly, the most generous hospitality. We lived with the former and deposited our collections and instruments in the spacious hotel of Count O'Reilly, where the terraces favoured our astronomical observations. The longitude of the Havannah was at this period more than one fifth of a degree uncertain.* (* I also fixed, by direct observations, several positions in the interior of the island of Cuba: namely Rio Blanco, a plantation of Count Jaruco y Mopex; the Almirante, a plantation of the Countess Buenavista; San Antonio de Beitia; the village of Managua; San Antonio de Bareto; and the Fondadero, near the town of San Antonio de los Banos.). It had been fixed by M. Espinosa, the learned director of the Deposito hidrografico of Madrid, at 5 degrees 38 minutes 11 seconds, in a table of positions which he communicated to me on leaving Madrid. M. de Churruca fixed the Morro at 5 hours 39 minutes 1 second. I met at the Havannah with one of the most able officers of the Spanish navy, Captain Don Dionisio Galeano, who had taken a survey of the coast of the strait of Magellan. We made observations together on a series of eclipses of the satellites of Jupiter, of which the mean result gave 5 hours 38 minutes 50 seconds. M. Oltmanns deduced in 1805 the whole of those observations which I marked for the Morro, at 5 hours 38 minutes 52.5 seconds—84 degrees 43 minutes 7.5 seconds west of the meridian of Paris. This longitude was confirmed by fifteen occultations of stars observed from 1809 to 1811 and calculated by M. Ferrer: that excellent observer fixes the definitive result at 5 degrees 38 minutes 50.9 seconds. With respect to the magnetic dip I found it by the compass of Borda (December 1800) 53 degrees 22 minutes of the old sexagesimal division: twenty-two years before, according to the very accurate observations made by Captain Sabine in his memorable voyage to the coasts of Africa, America and Spitzbergen, the dip was only 51 degrees 55 minutes; it had therefore diminished 1 degree 27 minutes.

The island of Cuba being surrounded with shoals and breakers along more than two-thirds of its length, and as ships keep out beyond those dangers, the real shape of the island was for a long time unknown. Its breadth, especially between the Havannah and the port of Batabano, has been exaggerated; and it is only since the Deposito hidrografico of Madrid published the observations of captain Don Jose del Rio, and lieutenant Don Ventura de Barcaiztegui, that the area of the island of Cuba could be calculated with any accuracy. Wishing to furnish in this work the most accurate result that can be obtained in the present state of our astronomical knowledge, I engaged M. Bauza to calculate the area. He found, in June, 1835, the surface of the island of Cuba, without the Isla dos Pinos, to be 3520 square sea leagues, and with that island 3615. From this calculation, which has been twice repeated, it results that the island of Cuba is one-seventh less than has hitherto been believed; that it is 32/100 larger than Hayti, or San Domingo; that its surface equals that of Portugal, and within one-eighth that of England without Wales; and that if the whole archipelago of the Antilles presents as great an area as the half of Spain, the island of Cuba alone almost equals in surface the other Great and Small Antilles. Its greatest length, from Cape San Antonio to Point Maysi (in a direction from west-south-west to east-north-east and from west-north-west to east-south-east) is 227 leagues; and its greatest breadth (in the direction north and south), from Point Maternillo to the mouth of the Magdalena, near Peak Tarquino, is 37 leagues. The mean breadth of the island, on four-fifths of its length, between the Havannah and Puerto Principe, is 15 leagues. In the best cultivated part, between the Havannah and Batabano, the isthmus is only eight sea leagues. Among the great islands of the globe, that of Java most resembles the island of Cuba in its form and area (4170 square leagues). Cuba has a circumference of coast of 520 leagues, of which 280 belong to the south shore, between Cape San Antonio and Punta Maysi.

The island of Cuba, over more than four-fifths of its surface, is composed of low lands. The soil is covered with secondary and tertiary formations, formed by some rocks of gneiss-granite, syenite and euphotide. The knowledge obtained hitherto of the geologic configuration of the country, is as unsatisfactory as what is known respecting the relative age and nature of the soil. It is only ascertained that the highest group of mountains lies at the south-eastern extremity of the island, between Cape Cruz, Punta Maysi, and Holguin. This mountainous part, called the Sierra or Las Montanas del Cobre (the Copper Mountains), situated north-west of the town of Santiago de Cuba, appears to be about 1200 toises in height. If this calculation be correct, the summits of the Sierra would command those of the Blue Mountains of Jamaica, and the peaks of La Selle and La Hotte in the island of San Domingo. The Sierra of Tarquino, fifty miles west of the town of Cuba, belongs to the same group as the Copper Mountains. The island is crossed from east-south-east to west-north-west by a chain of hills, which approach the southern coast between the meridians of La Ciudad de Puerto Principe and the Villa Clara; while, further to the westward towards Alvarez and Matanzas, they stretch in the direction of the northern coast. Proceeding from the mouth of the Rio Guaurabo to the Villa de la Trinidad, I saw on the north-west, the Lomas de San Juan, which form needles or horns more than 300 toises high, with their declivities sloping regularly to the south. This calcareous group presents a majestic aspect, as seen from the anchorage near the Cayo de Piedras. Xagua and Batabano are low coasts; and I believe that, in general, west of the meridian of Matanzas, there is no hill more than 200 toises high, with the exception of the Pan de Guaixabon. The land in the interior of the island is gently undulated, as in England; and it rises only from 45 to 50 toises above the level of the sea. The objects most visible at a distance, and most celebrated by navigators, are the Pan de Matanzas, a truncated cone which has the form of a small monument; the Arcos de Canasi, which appear between Puerto Escondido and Jaruco, like small segments of a circle; the Mesa de Mariel, the Tetas de Managua, and the Pan de Guaixabon. This gradual slope of the limestone formations of the island of Cuba towards the north and west indicates the submarine connection of those rocks with the equally low lands of the Bahama Islands, Florida and Yucatan.

Intellectual cultivation and improvement were so long restricted to the Havannah and the neighbouring districts, that we cannot be surprised at the ignorance prevailing among the inhabitants respecting the geologic formation of the Copper Mountains. Don Francisco Ramirez, a traveller versed in chemical and mineralogical science, informed me that the western part of the island is granitic, and that he there observed gneiss and primitive slate. Probably the alluvial deposits of auriferous sand which were explored with much ardour* at the beginning of the conquest, to the great misfortune of the natives came from those granitic formations (* At Cubanacan, that is, in the interior of the island, near Jagua and Trinidad, where the auriferous sands have been washed by the waters as far as the limestone soil. Martyr d'Anghiera, the most intelligent writer on the Conquest, says: "Cuba is richer in gold than Hispaniola (San Domingo); and at the moment I am writing, 180,000 castillanos of ore have been collected at Cuba." Herrera estimates the tax called King's-fifth (quinto del Rey), in the island of Cuba, at 6000 pesos, which indicates an annual product of 2000 marks of gold, at 22 carats; and consequently purer than the gold of Sibao in San Domingo. In 1804 the mines of Mexico altogether produced 7000 marks of gold; and those of Peru 3400. It is difficult, in these calculations, to distinguish between the gold sent to Spain by the first Conquistadores, that obtained by washings, and that which had been accumulated for ages in the hands of the natives, who were pillaged at will. Supposing that in the two islands of Cuba and San Domingo (in Cubanacan and Cibao) the product of the washings was 3000 marks of gold, we find a quantity three times less than the gold furnished annually (1790 to 1805) by the small province of Choco. In this supposition of ancient wealth there is nothing improbable; and if we are surprised at the scanty produce of the gold-washings attempted in our days at Cuba and San Domingo, which were heretofore so prolific, it must be recollected that at Brazil also the product of the gold-washings has fallen, from 1760 to 1820, from 6600 gold kilogrammes to less than 595. Lumps of gold weighing several pounds, found in our days in Florida and North and South Carolina, prove the primitive wealth of the whole basin of the Antilles from the island of Cuba to the Appalachian chain. It is also natural that the product of the gold-washings should diminish with greater rapidity than that of the subterraneous working of the veins. The metals not being renewed in the clefts of the veins (by sublimation) now accumulate in alluvial soil by the course of the rivers where the table-lands are higher than the level of the surrounding running waters. But in rocks with metalliferous veins the miner does not at once know all he has to work. He may chance to lengthen the labours, to go deep, and to cross other accompanying veins. Alluvial soils are generally of small depth where they are auriferous; they most frequently rest upon sterile rocks. Their superficial position and uniformity of composition help to the knowledge of their limits, and wherever workmen can be collected, and where the waters for the washings abound, accelerate the total working of the auriferous clay. These considerations, suggested by the history of the Conquest, and by the science of mining, may throw some light on the problem of the metallic wealth of Hayti. In that island, as well as at Brazil, it would be more profitable to attempt subterraneous workings (on veins) in primitive and intermediary soils than to renew the gold-washings which were abandoned in the ages of barbarism, rapine and carnage.); traces of that sand are still found in the rivers Holguin and Escambray, known in general in the vicinity of Villa-Clara, Santo Espiritu, Puerto del Principe de Bayamo and the Bahia de Nipe. The abundance of copper mentioned by the Conquistadores of the sixteenth century, at a period when the Spaniards were more attentive than they have been in latter times to the natural productions of America, may possibly be attributed to the formations of amphibolic slate, transition clay-slate mixed with diorite, and to euphotides analogous to those I found in the mountains of Guanabacoa.

The central and western parts of the island contain two formations of compact limestone; one of clayey sandstone and another of gypsum. The former has, in its aspect and composition, some resemblance to the Jura formation. It is white, or of a clear ochre-yellow, with a dull fracture, sometimes conchoidal, sometimes smooth; divided into thin layers, furnishing some balls of pyromac silex, often hollow (at Rio Canimar two leagues east of Matanzas), and petrifications of pecten, cardites, terebratules and madrepores.* (* I saw neither gryphites nor ammonites of Jura limestone nor the nummulites and cerites of coarse limestone.) I found no oolitic beds, but porous beds almost bulbous, between the Potrero del Conde de Mopox, and the port of Batabano, resembling the spongy beds of Jura limestone in Franconia, near Dondorf, Pegnitz, and Tumbach. Yellowish cavernous strata, with cavities from three to four inches in diameter, alternate with strata altogether compact,* and poorer in petrifications. (* The western part of the island has no deep ravines; and we recognize this alternation in travelling from the Havannah to Batabano, the deepest beds (inclined from 30 to 40 degrees north-east) appear as we advance.) The chain of hills that borders the plain of Guines on the north and is linked with the Lomas de Camua, and the Tetas de Managua, belongs to the latter variety, which is reddish white, and almost of lithographic nature, like the Jura limestone of Pappenheim. The compact and cavernous beds contain nests of brown ochreous iron; possibly the red earth (tierra colorada) so much sought for by the coffee planters (haciendados) owes its origin to the decomposition of some superficial beds of oxidated iron, mixed with silex and clay, or to a reddish sandstone* (* Sandstone and ferruginous sand; iron-sand?) superposed on limestone. The whole of this formation, which I shall designate by the name of the limestone of Guines, to distinguish it from another much more recent, forms, near Trinidad, in the Lomas of St. Juan, steep declivities, resembling the mountains of limestone of Caripe, in the vicinity of Cumana. They also contain great caverns, near Matanzas and Jaruco, where I have not heard that any fossil bones have been found. The frequency of caverns in which the pluvial waters accumulate, and where small rivers disappear, sometimes causes a sinking of the earth. I am of opinion that the gypsum of the island of Cuba belongs not to tertiary but to secondary soil; it is worked in several places on the east of Matanzas, at San Antonio de los Banos, where it contains sulphur, and at the Cayos, opposite San Juan de los Remedios. We must not confound with this limestone of Guines, sometimes porous, sometimes compact, another formation so recent that it seems to augment in our days. I allude to the calcareous agglomerates, which I saw in the islands of Cayos that border the coast between the Batabano and the bay of Xagua, principally south of the Cienega de Zapata, Cayo Buenito, Cayo Flamenco and Cayo de Piedras. The soundings prove that they are rocks rising abruptly from a bottom of between twenty and thirty fathoms. Some are at the water's edge, others one-fourth or one-fifth of a toise above the surface of the sea. Angular fragments of madrepores, and cellularia from two to three cubic inches, are found cemented by grains of quartzose sand. The inequalities of the rocks are covered by mould, in which, by help of a microscope, we only distinguish the detritus of shells and corals. This tertiary formation no doubt belongs to that of the coast of Cumana, Carthagena, and the Great Land of Guadaloupe, noticed in my geognostic table of South America.* (* M. Moreau de Jonnes has well distinguished, in his Histoire physique des Antilles Francoises, between the Roche a ravets of Martinique and Hayti, which is porous, filled with terebratulites, and other vestiges of sea-shells, somewhat analogous to the limestone of Guines and the calcareous pelagic sediment called at Guadaloupe Platine, or Maconne bon Dieu. In the cayos of the island of Cuba, or Jardinillos del Rey y del Reyna, the whole coral rock lying above the surface of the water appeared to me to be fragmentary, that is, composed of broken blocks. It is, however, probable, that in the depth it reposes on masses of polypi still living.) MM. Chamiso and Guiamard have recently thrown great light on the formation of the coral islands in the Pacific. At the foot of the Castillo de in Punta, near the Havannah, on shelves of cavernous rocks,* covered with verdant sea-weeds and living polypi, we find enormous masses of madrepores and other lithophyte corals set in the texture of those shelves. (* The surface of these shelves, blackened and excavated by the waters, presents ramifications like the cauliflower, as they are observed on the currents of lava. Is the change of colour produced by the waters owing to the manganese which we recognize by some dendrites? The sea, entering into the clefts of the rocks, and in a cavern at the foot of the Castillo del Morro, compresses the air and makes it issue with a tremendous noise. This noise explains the phenomena of the baxos roncadores (snoring bocabeoos), so well known to navigators who cross from Jamaica to the mouth of Rio San Juan of Nicaragua, or to the island of San Andres.) We are at first tempted to admit that the whole of this limestone rock, which constitutes the principal portion of the island of Cuba, may be traced to an uninterrupted operation of nature—to the action of productive organic forces—an action which continues in our days in the bosom of the ocean; but this apparent novelty of limestone formations soon vanishes when we quit the shore, and recollect the series of coral rocks which contain the formations of different ages, the muschelkalk, the Jura limestone and coarse limestone. The same coral rocks as those of the Castillo and La Punta are found in the lofty inland mountains, accompanied with petrifications of bivalve shells, very different from those now seen on the coasts of the Antilles. Without positively assigning a determinate place in the table of formations to the limestone of Guines, which is that of the Castillo and La Punta, I have no doubt of the relative antiquity of that rock with respect to the calcareous agglomerate of the Cayos, situated south of Batabano, and east of the island of Pinos. The globe has undergone great revolutions between the periods when these two soils were formed; the one containing the great caverns of Matanzas, the other daily augmenting by the agglutination of fragments of coral and quartzose sand. On the south of the island of Cuba, the latter soil seems to repose sometimes on the Jura limestone of Guines, as in the Jardinillos, and sometimes (towards Cape Cruz) immediately over primitive rocks. In the lesser Antilles the corals are covered with volcanic productions. Several of the Cayos of the island of Cuba contain fresh water; and I found this water very good in the middle of the Cayo de Piedras. When we reflect on the extreme smallness of these islands we can scarcely believe that the fresh-water wells are filled with rain-water not evaporated. Do they prove a submarine communication between the limestone of the coast with the limestone serving as the basis of lithophyte polypi, and is the fresh water of Cuba raised up by hydrostatic pressure across the coral rocks of Cayos, as it is in the bay of Xagua, where, in the middle of the sea, it forms springs frequented by the lamantins?
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Re: Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions

Postby admin » Mon Jun 04, 2018 7:37 am

Part 2 of 3

The secondary formations on the east of the Havannah are pierced in a singular manner by syenitic and euphotide rocks united in groups. The southern bottom of the bay as well as the northern part (the hills of the Morro and the Cabana) are of Jura limestone; but on the eastern bank of the two Ensenadas de Regla and Guanabacoa, the whole is transition soil. Going from north to south, and first near Marimelena, we find syenite consisting of a great quantity of hornblende, partly decomposed, a little quartz, and a reddish-white feldspar seldom crystallized. This fine syenite, the strata of which incline to the north-west, alternates twice with serpentine. The layers of intercalated serpentine are three toises thick. Farther south, towards Regla and Guanabacoa, the syenite disappears, and the whole soil is covered with serpentine, rising in hills from thirty to forty toises high, and running from east to west. This rock is much fendillated, externally of a bluish-grey, covered with dendrites of manganese, and internally of leek and asparagus-green, crossed by small veins of asbestos. It contains no garnet or amphibole, but metalloid diallage disseminated in the mass. The serpentine is sometimes of an esquillous, sometimes of a conchoidal fracture: this was the first time I had found metalloid diallage within the tropics. Several blocks of serpentine have magnetic poles; others are of such a homogeneous texture, and have such a glossiness, that at a distance they may be taken for pechstein (resinite). It were to be wished that these fine masses were employed in the arts as they are in several parts of Germany. In approaching Guanabacoa we find serpentine crossed by veins between twelve and fourteen inches thick, and filled with fibrous quartz, amethyst, and fine mammelonnes, and stalactiforme chalcedonies; it is possible that chrysoprase may also one day be found. Some copper pyrites appear among these veins accompanied, it is said, by silvery-grey copper. I found no traces of this grey copper: it is probably the metalloid diallage that has given the Cerro de Guanabacoa the reputation of riches in gold and silver which it has enjoyed for ages. In some places petroleum flows* from rents in the serpentine. (* Does there exist in the Bay of the Havannah any other source of petroleum than that of Guanabacoa, or must it be admitted that the betun liquido, which in 1508 was employed by Sebastian de Ocampo for the caulking of ships, is dried up? That spring, however, fixed the attention of Ocampo on the port of the Havannah, where he gave it the name of Puerto de Carenas. It is said that abundant springs of petroleum are also found in the eastern part of the island (Manantialis de betun y chapapote) between Holguin and Mayari, and on the coast of Santiago de Cuba.) Springs of water are frequent; they contain a little sulphuretted hydrogen, and deposit oxide of iron. The Baths of Bareto are agreeable, but of nearly the same temperature as the atmosphere. The geologic constitution of this group of serpentine rocks, from its insulated position, its veins, its connection with syenite and the fact of its rising up across shell-formations, merits particular attention. Feldspar with a basis of souda (compact feldspar) forms, with diallage, the euphotide and serpentine; with pyroxene, dolerite and basalt; and with garnet, eclogyte. These five rocks, dispersed over the whole globe, charged with oxidulated and titanious iron, are probably of similar origin. It is easy to distinguish two formations in the euphotide; one is destitute of amphibole, even when it alternates with amphibolic rocks (Joria in Piedmont, Regla in the island of Cuba) rich in pure serpentine, in metalloid diallage and sometimes in jasper (Tuscany, Saxony); the other, strongly charged with amphibole, often passing to diorite,* has no jasper in layers, and sometimes contains rich veins of copper; (Silesia, Mussinet in Piedmont, the Pyrenees, Parapara in Venezuela, Copper Mountains of North America). (* On a serpentine that flows like a penombre, veins of greenstone (diorite) near Lake Clunie in Perthshire. See MacCulloch in Edinburgh Journal of Science 1824 July pages 3 to 16. On a vein of serpentine, and the alterations it produces on the banks of Carity, near West-Balloch in Forfarshire see Charles Lyell l.c. volume 3 page 43.) It is the latter formation of euphotide which, by its mixture with diorite, is itself linked with hyperthenite, in which real beds of serpentine are sometimes developed in Scotland and in Norway. No volcanic rocks of a more recent period have hitherto been discovered in the island of Cuba; for instance, neither trachytes, dolerites, nor basalts. I know not whether they are found in the rest of the Great Antilles, of which the geologic constitution differs essentially from that of the series of calcareous and volcanic islands which stretch from Trinidad to the Virgin Islands. Earthquakes, which are in general less fatal at Cuba than at Porto Rico and Hayti, are most felt in the eastern part, between Cape Maysi, Santiago de Cuba and La Ciudad de Puerto Principe. Perhaps towards those regions the action of the crevice extends laterally, which is believed to cross the neck of granitic land between Port-au-Prince and Cape Tiburon and on which whole mountains were overthrown in 1770.

The cavernous texture of the limestone formations (soboruco) just described, the great inclination of the shelvings, the smallness of the island, the nakedness of the plains and the proximity of the mountains that form a lofty chain on the southern coast, may be considered as among the principal causes of the want of rivers and the drought which is felt, especially in the western part of Cuba. In this respect, Hayti, Jamaica, and several of the Lesser Antilles, which contain volcanic heights covered with forests, are more favoured by nature. The lands most celebrated for their fertility are the districts of Xagua, Trinidad, Matanzas and Mariel. The valley of Guines owes its reputation to artificial irrigation (sanjas de riego). Notwithstanding the want of great rivers and the unequal fertility of the soil, the island of Cuba, by its undulated surface, its continually renewed verdure, and the distribution of its vegetable forms, presents at every step the most varied and beautiful landscape. Two trees with large, tough, and glossy leaves, the Mammea and the Calophyllum calaba, five species of palm-trees (the palma real, or Oreodoxa regia, the common cocoa-tree, the Cocos crispa, the Corypha miraguama and the C. maritima), and small shrubs constantly loaded with flowers, decorate the hills and the savannahs. The Cecropia peltata marks the humid spots. It would seem as if the whole island had been originally a forest of palm, lemon, and wild orange trees. The latter, which bear a small fruit, are probably anterior to the arrival of Europeans,* who transported thither the agrumi of the gardens; they rarely exceed the height of from ten to fifteen feet. (* The best informed inhabitants of the island assert that the cultivated orange-trees brought from Asia preserve the size and all the properties of their fruits when they become wild. The Brazilians affirm that the small bitter orange which bears the name of loranja do terra and is found wild, far from the habitations of man, is of American origin. Caldcleugh, Travels in South America.) The lemon and orange trees are most frequently separate; and the new planters, in clearing the ground by fire, distinguish the quality of the soil according as it is covered with one or other of those groups of social plants; they prefer the soil of the naranjal to that which produces the small lemon. In a country where the making of sugar is not sufficiently improved to admit of the employment of any other fuel than the bagasse (dried sugar-cane) the progressive destruction of the small woods is a positive calamity. The aridity of the soil augments in proportion as it is stripped of the trees that sheltered it from the heat of the sun; for the leaves, emitting heat under a sky always serene, occasion, as the air cools, a precipitation of aqueous vapours.

Among the few rivers worthy of attention, the Rio Guines may be noticed, the Rio Armendaris or Chorrera, of which the waters are led to the Havannah by the Sanja de Antoneli; the Rio Canto on the north of the town of Bayamo; the Rio Maximo which rises on the east of Puerto Principe; the Rio Sagua Grande near Villa Clara; the Rio de las Palmas which issues opposite Cayo Galiado; the small rivers of Jaruco and Santa Cruz between Guanabo and Matanzas, navigable at the distance of some miles from their mouths and favourable for the shipment of sugar-casks; the Rio San Antonio which, like many others, is engulfed in the caverns of limestone rocks; the Rio Guaurabo west of the port of Trinidad; and the Rio Galafre in the fertile district of Filipinas, which throws itself into the Laguna de Cortez. The most abundant springs rise on the southern coast where, from Xagua to Punta de Sabina, over a length of forty-six leagues, the soil is extremely marshy. So great is the abundance of the waters which filter by the clefts of the stratified rock that, from the effect of an hydrostatic pressure, fresh water springs far from the coast, and amidst salt water. The jurisdiction of the Havannah is not the most fertile part of the island; and the few sugar-plantations that existed in the vicinity of the capital are now converted into farms for cattle (potreros) and fields of maize and forage, of which the profits are considerable. The agriculturists of the island of Cuba distinguish two kinds of earth, often mixed together like the squares of a draught-board, black earth (negra o prieta), clayey and full of moisture, and red earth (bermeja), more silicious and containing oxide of iron. The tierra negra is generally preferred (on account of its best preserving humidity) for the cultivation of the sugarcane, and the tierra bermeja for coffee; but many sugar plantations are established on the red soil.

The climate of the Havannah is in accordance with the extreme limits of the torrid zone: it is a tropical climate, in which a more unequal distribution of heat at different parts of the year denotes the passage to the climates of the temperate zone. Calcutta (latitude 22 degrees 34 minutes north), Canton (latitude 23 degrees 8 minutes north), Macao (latitude 22 degrees 12 minutes north), the Havannah (latitude 23 degrees 9 minutes north) and Rio Janeiro (latitude 22 degrees 54 minutes south) are places which, from their position at the level of the ocean near the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, consequently at an equal distance from the equator, afford great facilities for the study of meteorology. This study can only advance by the determination of certain numerical elements which are the indispensable basis of the laws we seek to discover. The aspect of vegetation being identical near the limits of the torrid zone and at the equator, we are accustomed to confound vaguely the climates of two zones comprised between 0 and 10 degrees, and between 15 and 23 degrees of latitude. The region of palm-trees, bananas and arborescent gramina extends far beyond the two tropics: but it would be dangerous to apply what has been observed at the extremity of the tropical zone to what may take place in the plains near the equator. In order to rectify those errors it is important that the mean temperature of the year and months be well known, as also the thermometric oscillations in different seasons at the parallel of the Havannah; and to prove by an exact comparison with other points alike distant from the equator, for instance, with Rio Janeiro and Macao, that the lowering of temperature observed in the island of Cuba is owing to the irruption and the stream of layers of cold air, borne from the temperate zones towards the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. The mean temperature of the Havannah, according to four years of good observations, is 25.7 degrees (20.6 degrees R.), only 2 degrees centigrade above that of the regions of America nearest the equator. The proximity of the sea raises the mean temperature of the year on the coast; but in the interior of the island, when the north winds penetrate with the same force, and where the soil rises to the height of forty toises, the mean temperature attains only 23 degrees (18.4 degrees R.) and does not exceed that of Cairo and Lower Egypt. The difference between the mean temperature of the hottest and coldest months rises to 12 degrees in the interior of the island; at the Havannah and on the coast, to 8 degrees; at Cumana, to scarcely 3 degrees. The hottest months, July and August, attain 28.8 degrees, at the island of Cuba, perhaps 29.5 degrees of mean temperature, as at the equator. The coldest months are December and January; their mean temperature in the interior of the island, is 17 degrees; at the Havannah, 21 degrees, that is, 5 to 8 degrees below the same months at the equator, yet still 3 degrees above the hottest month at Paris.

It will be interesting to compare the climate of the Havannah with that of Macao and Rio Janeiro; two places, one of which is near the limit of the northern torrid zone, on the eastern coast of Asia; and the other on the eastern coast of America, towards the extremity of the southern torrid zone.

The climate of the Havannah, notwithstanding the frequency of the north and north-west winds, is hotter than that of Macao and Rio Janeiro. The former partakes of the cold which, owing to the frequency of the west winds, is felt in winter along all the eastern coast of a great continent. The proximity of spaces of land covered with mountains and table-lands renders the distribution of heat in different months of the year more unequal at Macao and Canton than in an island bounded on the west and north by the hot waters of the Gulf-stream. The winters are therefore much colder at Canton and Macao than at the Havannah: yet the latitude of Macao is 1 degree more southerly than that of the Havannah; and the latter town and Canton are, within nearly a minute, on the same parallel. The thermometer at Canton has sometimes almost reached the point zero; and by the effect of reflection, ice has been found on the terraces of houses. Although this great cold never lasts more than one day, the English merchants residing at Canton like to make chimney-fires in their apartments from November to January; while at the Havannah, the artificial warmth even of a brazero is not required. Hail is frequent and the hail-stones are extremely large in the Asiatic climate of Canton and Macao, while it is scarcely seen once in fifteen years at the Havannah. In these three places the thermometer sometimes keeps up for several hours between 0 and 4 degrees (centigrade); and yet (a circumstance which appears to be very remarkable) snow has never been seen to fall; and notwithstanding the great lowering of the temperature, the bananas and the palm-trees are as beautiful around Canton, Macao and the Havannah as in the plains nearest the equator.

In the island of Cuba the lowering of the temperature lasts only during intervals of such short duration that in general neither the banana, the sugar-cane nor other productions of the torrid zone suffer much. We know how well plants of vigorous organization resist temporary cold, and that the orange trees of Genoa survive the fall of snow and endure cold which does not more than exceed 6 or 7 degrees below freezing-point. As the vegetation of the island of Cuba bears the character of the vegetation of the regions near the equator, we are surprised to find even in the plains a vegetable form of the temperate climates and mountains of the equatorial part of Mexico. I have often directed the attention of botanists to this extraordinary phenomenon in the geography of plants. The pine (Pinus occidentalis) is not found in the Lesser Antilles; not even in Jamaica (between 17 3/4 and 18 1/2 degrees of latitude). It is only seen further north, in the mountains of San Domingo, and in all that part of the island of Cuba situated between 20 and 23 degrees of latitude. It attains a height of from sixty to seventy feet; and it is remarkable that the cahoba* (mahogany (* Swieteinia Mahogani, Linn.)) and the pine vegetate at the island of Pinos in the same plains. We also find pines in the south-eastern part of the island of Cuba, on the declivity of the Copper Mountains where the soil is barren and sandy. The interior table-land of Mexico is covered with the same species of coniferous plants; at least the specimens brought by M. Bonpland and myself from Acaguisotla, Nevado de Toluca and Cofre de Perote do not appear to differ specifically from the Pinus occidentalis of the West India Islands described by Schwartz. Now those pines which we see at sea level in the island of Cuba, in 20 and 22 degrees of latitude, and which belong only to the southern part of that island, do not descend on the Mexican continent between the parallels of 17 1/2 and 19 1/2 degrees, below the elevation of 500 toises. I even observed that, on the road from Perote to Xalapa in the eastern mountains opposite to the island of Cuba, the limit of the pines is 935 toises; while in the western mountains, between Chilpanzingo and Acapulco, near Quasiniquilapa, two degrees further south, it is 580 toises and perhaps on some points 450. These anomalies of stations are very rare in the torrid zone and are probably less connected with the temperature than with the nature of the soil. In the system of the migration of plants we must suppose that the Pinus occidentalis of Cuba came from Yucatan before the opening of the channel between Cape Catoche and Cape San Antonio, and not from the United States, so rich in coniferous plants; for in Florida the species of which we have here traced the botanical geography has not been discovered.

About the end of April, M. Bonpland and myself, having completed the observations we proposed to make at the northern extremity of the torrid zone, were on the point of proceeding to Vera Cruz with the squadron of Admiral Ariztizabal; but being misled by false intelligence respecting the expedition of Captain Baudin, we were induced to relinquish the project of passing through Mexico on our way to the Philippine Islands. The public journals announced that two French sloops, the Geographe and Naturaliste, had sailed for Cape Horn; that they were to proceed along the coasts of Chili and Peru, and thence to New Holland. This intelligence revived in my mind all the projects I had formed during my stay in Paris, when I solicited the Directory to hasten the departure of Captain Baudin. On leaving Spain, I had promised to rejoin the expedition wherever I could reach it. M. Bonpland and I resolved instantly to divide our herbals into three portions, to avoid exposing to the risks of a long voyage the objects we had obtained with so much difficulty on the banks of the Orinoco, the Atabapo and the Rio Negro. We sent one collection by way of England to Germany, another by way of Cadiz to France, and a third remained at the Havannah. We had reason to congratulate ourselves on this foresight: each collection contained nearly the same species, and no precautions were neglected to have the cases, if taken by English or French vessels, remitted to Sir Joseph Banks or to the professors of natural history at the Museum at Paris. It happened fortunately that the manuscripts which I at first intended to send with the collection to Cadiz were not intrusted to our much esteemed friend and fellow traveller, Fray Juan Gonzales, of the order of the Observance of St. Francis, who had followed us to the Havannah with the view of returning to Spain. He left the island of Cuba soon after us, but the vessel in which he sailed foundered on the coast of Africa, and the cargo and crew were all lost. By this event we lost some of the duplicates of our herbals, and what was more important, all the insects which M. Bonpland had with great difficulty collected during our voyage to the Orinoco and the Rio Negro. By a singular fatality, we remained two years in the Spanish colonies without receiving a single letter from Europe; and those which arrived in the three following years made no mention of what we had transmitted. The reader may imagine my uneasiness for the fate of a journal which contained astronomical observations and barometrical measurements, of which I had not made any copy. After having visited New Grenada, Peru and Mexico, and just when I was preparing to leave the New Continent, I happened, at a public library of Philadelphia, to cast my eyes on a scientific Publication, in which I found these words: "Arrival of M. de Humboldt's manuscripts at his brother's house in Paris, by way of Spain!" I could scarcely suppress an exclamation of joy.

While M. Bonpland laboured day and night to divide and put our collections in order, a thousand obstacles arose to impede our departure. There was no vessel in the port of the Havannah that would convey us to Porto Bello or Carthagena. The persons I consulted seemed to take pleasure in exaggerating the difficulties of the passage of the isthmus, and the dangerous voyage from Panama to Guyaquil, and from Guyaquil to Lima and Valparaiso. Not being able to find a passage in any neutral vessel, I freighted a Catalonian sloop, lying at Batabano, which was to be at my disposal to take me either to Porto Bello or Carthagena, according as the gales of Saint Martha might permit.* (* The gales of Saint Martha blow with great violence at that season below latitude 12 degrees.) The prosperous state of commerce at the Havannah and the multiplied connections of that city with the ports of the Pacific would facilitate for me the means of procuring funds for several years. General Don Gonzalo O'Farrill resided at that time in my native country as minister of the court of Spain. I could exchange my revenues in Prussia for a part of his at the island of Cuba; and the family of Don Ygnacio O'Farrill y Herera, brother of the general, concurred kindly in all that could favour my new projects. On the 6th of March the vessel I had freighted was ready to receive us. The road to Batabano led us once more by Guines to the plantation of Rio Blanco, the property of Count Jaruco y Mopox.

The road from Rio Blanco to Batabano runs across an uncultivated country, half covered with forests; in the open spots the indigo plant and the cotton-tree grow wild. As the capsule of the Gossypium opens at the season when the northern storms are most frequent, the down that envelops the seed is swept from one side to the other; and the gathering of the cotton, which is of a very fine quality, suffers greatly. Several of our friends, among whom was Senor de Mendoza, captain of the port of Valparaiso, and brother to the celebrated astronomer who resided so long in London, accompanied us to Potrero de Mopox. In herborizing further southward, we found a new palm-tree with fan-leaves (Corypha maritima), having a free thread between the interstices of the folioles. This Corypha covers a part of the southern coast and takes the place of the majestic palma real and the Cocos crispa of the northern coast. Porous limestone (of the Jura formation) appeared from time to time in the plain.

Batabano was then a poor village and its church had been completed only a few years previously. The Sienega begins at the distance of half a league from the village; it is a tract of marshy soil, extending from the Laguna de Cortez as far as the mouth of the Rio Xagua, on a length of sixty leagues from west to east. At Batabano it is believed that in those regions the sea continues to gain upon the land, and that the oceanic irruption was particularly remarkable at the period of the great upheaving which took place at the end of the eighteenth century, when the tobacco mills disappeared, and the Rio Chorrera changed its course. Nothing can be more gloomy than the aspect of these marshes around Batabano. Not a shrub breaks the monotony of the prospect: a few stunted trunks of palm-trees rise like broken masts, amidst great tufts of Junceae and Irides. As we stayed only one night at Batabano, I regretted much that I was unable to obtain precise information relative to the two species of crocodiles which infest the Sienega. The inhabitants give to one of these animals the name of cayman, to the other that of crocodile; or, as they say commonly in Spain, of cocodrilo. They assured us that the latter has most agility, and measures most in height: his snout is more pointed than that of the cayman, and they are never found together. The crocodile is very courageous and is said to climb into boats when he can find a support for his tail. He frequently wanders to the distance of a league from the Rio Cauto and the marshy coast of Xagua to devour the pigs on the islands. This animal is sometimes fifteen feet long, and will, it is said, pursue a man on horseback, like the wolves in Europe; while the animals exclusively called caymans at Batabano are so timid that people bathe without apprehension in places where they live in bands. These peculiarities, and the name of cocodrilo, given at the island of Cuba, to the most dangerous of the carnivorous reptiles, appear to me to indicate a different species from the great animals of the Orinoco, Rio Magdalena and Saint Domingo. In other parts of the Spanish American continent the settlers, deceived by the exaggerated accounts of the ferocity of crocodiles in Egypt, allege that the real crocodile is only found in the Nile. Zoologists have, however, ascertained that there are in America caymans or alligators with obtuse snouts, and legs not indented, and crocodiles with pointed snouts and indented legs; and in the old continent, both crocodiles and gaviales. The Crocodilus acutus of San Domingo, in which I cannot hitherto specifically distinguish the crocodiles of the great rivers of the Orinoco and the Magdalena, has, according to Cuvier, so great a resemblance to the crocodile of the Nile,* that it required a minute examination to prove that the rule laid down by Buffon relative to the distribution of species between the tropical regions of the two continents was correct. (* This striking analogy was ascertained by M. Geoffroy de Saint Hilaire in 1803 when General Rochambeau sent a crocodile from San Domingo to the Museum of Natural History at Paris. M. Bonpland and myself had made drawings and detailed descriptions in 1801 and 1802 of the same species which inhabit the great rivers of South America, during our passage on the Apure, the Orinoco and the Magdalena. We committed the mistake so common to travellers, of not sending them at once to Europe, together with some young specimens.)

On my second visit to the Havannah, in 1804, I could not return to the Sienega of Batabano; and therefore I had the two species, called caymans and crocodiles by the inhabitants, brought to me, at a great expense. Two crocodiles arrived alive; the oldest was four feet three inches long; they had been caught with great difficulty and were conveyed, muzzled and bound, on a mule, for they were exceedingly vigorous and fierce. In order to observe their habits and movements,* we placed them in a great hall, where, by climbing on a very high piece of furniture, we could see them attack great dogs. (* M. Descourtils, who knows the habits of the crocodile better than any other author who has written on that reptile, saw, like Dampier and myself, the Crocodilus acutus often touch his tail with his mouth.) Having seen much of crocodiles during six months, on the Orinoco, the Rio Apure and the Magdalena, we were glad to have another opportunity of observing their habits before our return to Europe. The animals sent to us from Batabano had the snout nearly as sharp as the crocodiles of the Orinoco and the Magdalena (Crocodilus acutus, Cuv.); their colour was dark-green on the back, and white below the belly, with yellow spots on the flanks. I counted, as in all the real crocodiles, thirty-eight teeth in the upper jaw, and thirty in the lower; in the former, the tenth and ninth; and in the latter, the first and fourth, were the largest. In the description made by M. Bonpland and myself on the spot, we have expressly marked that the lower fourth tooth rises over the upper jaw. The posterior extremities were palmated. These crocodiles of Batabano appeared to us to be specifically identical with the Crocodilus acutus. It is true that the accounts we heard of their habits did not quite agree with what we had ourselves observed on the Orinoco; but carnivorous reptiles of the same species are milder and more timid, or fiercer and more courageous, in the same river, according to the nature of the localities. The animal called the cayman, at Batabano, died on the way, and was not brought to us, so that we could make no comparison of the two species.* (* The four bags filled with musk (bolzas del almizcle) are, in the crocodile of Batabano, exactly in the same position as in that of the Rio Magdalena, beneath the lower jaw and near the anus. I was much surprised at not perceiving the smell of musk at the Havannah, three days after the death of the animal, in a temperature of 30 degrees, while at Mompox, on the banks of the Magdalena, living crocodiles infected our apartment. I have since found that Dampier also remarked an absence of smell in the crocodile of Cuba where the caymans spread a very strong smell of musk.) I have no doubt that the crocodile with a sharp snout, and the alligator or cayman with a snout like a pike,* (* Crocodilus acutus of San Domingo. Alligator lucius of Florida and the Mississippi.) inhabit together, but in distinct bands, the marshy coast between Xagua, the Surgidero of Batabano, and the island of Pinos. In that island Dampier was struck with the great difference between the caymans and the American crocodiles. After having described, though not always with perfect correctness, several of the characteristics which distinguish crocodiles from caymans, he traces the geographical distribution of those enormous saurians. "In the bay of Campeachy," he says, "I saw only caymans or alligators; at the island of Great Cayman, there are crocodiles and no alligators; at the island of Pinos, and in the innumerable creeks of the coast of Cuba, there are both crocodiles and caymans."* (* Dampier's Voyages and Descriptions, 1599.) To these valuable observations of Dampier I may add that the real crocodile (Crocodilus acutus) is found in the West India Islands nearest the mainland, for instance, at the island of Trinidad; at Marguerita; and also, probably, at Curacao, notwithstanding the want of fresh water. It is observed, further south, in the Neveri, the Rio Magdalena, the Apure and the Orinoco, as far as the confluence of the Cassiquiare with the Rio Negro (latitude 2 degrees 2 minutes), consequently more than four hundred leagues from Batabano. It would be interesting to verify on the eastern coast of Mexico and Guatimala, between the Mississippi and the Rio Chagres (in the isthmus of Panama), the limit of the different species of carnivorous reptiles.

We set sail on the 9th of March, somewhat incommoded by the extreme smallness of our vessel, which afforded us no sleeping-place but upon deck. The cabin (camera de pozo) received no air or light but from above; it was merely a hold for provisions, and it was with difficulty that we could place our instruments in it. The thermometer kept up constantly at 32 and 33 degrees (centesimal.) Luckily these inconveniences lasted only twenty days. Our several voyages in the canoes of the Orinoco, and a passage in an American vessel laden with several thousand arrobas of salt meat dried in the sun had rendered us not very fastidious.

The gulf of Batabano, bounded by a low and marshy coast, looks like a vast desert. The fishing birds, which are generally at their post whilst the small land birds, and the indolent vultures (Vultur aura.) are at roost, are seen only in small numbers. The sea is of a greenish-brown hue, as in some of the lakes of Switzerland; while the air, owing to its extreme purity, had, at the moment the sun appeared above the horizon, a cold tint of pale blue, similar to that which landscape painters observe at the same hour in the south of Italy, and which makes distant objects stand out in strong relief. Our sloop was the only vessel in the gulf; for the roadstead of Batabano is scarcely visited except by smugglers, or, as they are here politely called, the traders (los tratantes). The projected canal of Guines will render Batabano an important point of communication between the island of Cuba and the coast of Venezuela. The port is within a bay bounded by Punta Gorda on the east, and by Punta de Salinas on the west: but this bay is itself only the upper or concave end of a great gulf measuring nearly fourteen leagues from south to north, and along an extent of fifty leagues (between the Laguna de Cortez and the Cayo de Piedras) inclosed by an incalculable number of flats and chains of rocks. One great island only, of which the superficies is more than four times the dimensions of that of Martinique, with mountains crowned with majestic pines, rises amidst this labyrinth. This is the island of Pinos, called by Columbus El Evangelista, and by some mariners of the sixteenth century, the Isla de Santa Maria. It is celebrated for its mahogany (Swietenia mahagoni) which is an important article of commerce. We sailed east-south-east, taking the passage of Don Cristoval, to reach the rocky island of Cayo de Piedras, and to clear the archipelago, which the Spanish pilots, in the early times of the conquest, designated by the names of Gardens and Bowers (Jardines y Jardinillos). The Queen's Gardens, properly so called, are nearer Cape Cruz, and are separated from the archipelago by an open sea thirty-five leagues broad. Columbus gave them the name they bear, in 1494, when, on his second voyage, he struggled during fifty-eight days with the winds and currents between the island of Pinos and the eastern cape of Cuba. He describes the islands of this archipelago as verdant, full of trees and pleasant* (verdes, llenos de arboledas, y graciosos). (* There exists great geographical confusion, even at the Havannah, in reference to the ancient denominations of the Jardines del Rey and Jardines de la Reyna. In the description of the island of Cuba, given in the Mercurio Americano, and in the Historia Natural de la Isla de Cuba, published at the Havannah by Don Antonio Lopez Gomez, the two groups are placed on the southern coast of the island. Lopez says that the Jardines del Rey extend from the Laguna de Cortez to Bahia de Xagua; but it is historically certain that the governor Diego Velasquez gave his name to the western part of the chain of rocks of the Old Channel, between Cayo Frances and Le Monillo, on the northern coast of the island of Cuba. The Jardines de la Reyna, situated between Cabo Cruz and the port of the Trinity, are in no manner connected with the Jardines and Jardinillos of the Isla de Pinos. Between the two groups of the chain of rocks are the flats (placeres) of La Paz and Xagua.)

A part of these so-styled gardens is indeed beautiful; the voyager sees the scene change every moment, and the verdure of some of the islands appears the more lovely from its contrast with chains of rocks, displaying only white and barren sands. The surface of these sands, heated by the rays of the sun, seems to be undulating like the surface of a liquid. The contact of layers of air of unequal temperature produces the most varied phenomena of suspension and mirage from ten in the morning till four in the afternoon. Even in those desert places the sun animates the landscape, and gives mobility to the sandy plain, to the trunks of trees, and to the rocks that project into the sea like promontories. When the sun appears these inert masses seem suspended in air; and on the neighbouring beach the sands present the appearance of a sheet of water gently agitated by the winds. A train of clouds suffices to seat the trunks of trees and the suspended rocks again on the soil; to render the undulating surface of the plains motionless; and to dissipate the charm which the Arabian, Persian, and Hindoo poets have celebrated as "the sweet illusions of the solitary desert."
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Re: Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions

Postby admin » Mon Jun 04, 2018 7:37 am

Part 3 of 3

We doubled Cape Matahambre very slowly. The chronometer of Louis Berthoud having kept time accurately at the Havannah, I availed myself of this occasion to determine, on this and the following days, the positions of Cayo de Don Cristoval, Cayo Flamenco, Cayo de Diego Perez and Cayo de Piedras. I also employed myself in examining the influence which the changes at the bottom of the sea produce on its temperature at the surface. Sheltered by so many islands, the surface is calm as a lake of fresh water, and the layers of different depths being distinct and separate, the smallest change indicated by the lead acts on the thermometer. I was surprised to see that on the east of the little Cayo de Don Cristoval the high banks are only distinguished by the milky colour of the water, like the bank of Vibora, south of Jamaica, and many other banks, the existence of which I ascertained by means of the thermometer. The bottom of the rock of Batabano is a sand composed of coral detritus; it nourishes sea-weeds which scarcely ever appear on the surface: the water, as I have already observed, is greenish; and the absence of the milky tint is, no doubt, owing to the perfect calm which pervades those regions. Whenever the agitation is propagated to a certain depth, a very fine sand, or a mass of calcareous particles suspended in the water, renders it troubled and milky. There are shallows, however, which are distinguished neither by the colour nor by the low temperature of the waters; and I believe that phenomenon depends on the nature of a hard and rocky bottom, destitute of sand and corals; on the form and declivity of the shelvings; the swiftness of the currents; and the absence of the propagation of motion towards the lower layers of the water. The cold frequently indicated by the thermometer, at the surface of the high banks, must be traced to the molecules of water which, owing to the rays of heat and the nocturnal cooling, fall from the surface to the bottom, and are stopped in their fall by the high banks; and also to the mingling of the layers of very deep water that rise on the shelvings of the banks as on an inclined plane, to mix with the layers of the surface.

Notwithstanding the small size of our bark and the boasted skill of our pilot, we often ran aground. The bottom being soft, there was no danger; but, nevertheless, at sunset, near the pass of Don Cristoval, we preferred to lie at anchor. The first part of the night was beautifully serene: we saw an incalculable number of falling-stars, all following one direction, opposite to that from whence the wind blew in the low regions of the atmosphere. The most absolute solitude prevails in this spot, which, in the time of Columbus, was inhabited and frequented by great numbers of fishermen. The inhabitants of Cuba then employed a small fish to take the great sea turtles; they fastened a long cord to the tail of the reves (the name given by the Spaniards to that species of Echeneis*). (* To the sucet or guaican of the natives of Cuba the Spaniards have given the characteristic name of reves, that is, placed on its back, or reversed. In fact, at first sight, the position of the back and the abdomen is confounded. Anghiera says: Nostrates reversum appellant, quia versus venatur. I examined a remora of the South Sea during the passage from Lima to Acapulco. As he lived a long time out of the water, I tried experiments on the weight he could carry before the blades of the disk loosened from the plank to which the animal was fixed; but I lost that part of my journal. It is doubtless the fear of danger that causes the remora not to loose his hold when he feels that he is pulled by a cord or by the hand of man. The sucet spoken of by Columbus and Martin d'Anghiera was probably the Echeneis naucrates and not the Echeneis remora.) The fisher-fish, formerly employed by the Cubans by means of the flattened disc on his head, furnished with suckers, fixed himself on the shell of the sea-turtle, which is so common in the narrow and winding channels of the Jardinillos. "The reves," says Christopher Columbus, "will sooner suffer himself to be cut in pieces than let go the body to which he adheres." The Indians drew to the shore by the same cord the fisher-fish and the turtle. When Gomara and the learned secretary of the emperor Charles V, Peter Martyr d'Anghiera, promulgated in Europe this fact which they had learnt from the companions of Columbus, it was received as a traveller's tale. There is indeed an air of the marvellous in the recital of d'Anghiera, which begins in these words: Non aliter ac nos canibus gallicis per aequora campi lepores insectamur, incolae [Cubae insulae] venatorio pisce pisces alios capiebant. (Exactly as we follow hares with greyhounds in the fields, so do the natives [of Cuba] take fishes with other fish trained for that purpose). We now know, from the united testimony of Rogers, Dampier and Commerson, that the artifice resorted to in the Jardinillos to catch turtles is employed by the inhabitants of the eastern coast of Africa, near Cape Natal, at Mozambique and at Madagascar. In Egypt, at San Domingo and in the lakes of the valley of Mexico, the method practised for catching ducks was as follows: men, whose heads were covered with great calabashes pierced with holes, hid themselves in the water, and seized the birds by the feet. The Chinese, from the remotest antiquity, have employed the cormorant, a bird of the pelican family, for fishing on the coast: rings are fixed round the bird's neck to prevent him from swallowing his prey and fishing for himself. In the lowest degree of civilization, the sagacity of man is displayed in the stratagems of hunting and fishing: nations who probably never had any communication with each other furnish the most striking analogies in the means they employ in exercising their empire over animals.

Three days elapsed before we could emerge from the labyrinth of Jardines and Jardinillos. At night we lay at anchor; and in the day we visited those islands or chains of rocks which were most easily accessible. As we advanced eastward the sea became less calm and the position of the shoals was marked by water of a milky colour. On the boundary of a sort of gulf between Cayo Flamenco and Cayo de Piedras we found that the temperature of the sea, at its surface, augmented suddenly from 23.5 to 25.8 degrees centigrade. The geologic constitution of the rocky islets that rise around the island of Pinos fixed my attention the more earnestly as I had always rather doubted of the existence of those huge masses of coral which are said to rise from the abyss of the Pacific to the surface of the water. It appeared to me more probable that these enormous masses had some primitive or volcanic rock for a basis, to which they adhered at small depths. The formation, partly compact and lithographic, partly bulbous, of the limestone of Guines, had followed us as far as Batabano. It is somewhat analogous to Jura limestone; and, judging from their external aspect, the Cayman Islands are composed of the same rock. If the mountains of the island of Pinos, which present at the same time (as it is said by the first historians of the conquest) the pineta and palmeta, be visible at the distance of twenty sea leagues, they must attain a height of more than five hundred toises: I have been assured that they also are formed of a limestone altogether similar to that of Guines. From these facts I expected to find the same rock (Jura limestone) in the Jardinillos: but I saw, in the chain of rocks that rises generally five to six inches above the surface of the water, only a fragmentary rock, in which angular pieces of madrepores are cemented by quartzose sand. Sometimes the fragments form a mass of from one to two cubic feet and the grains of quartz so disappear that in several layers one might imagine that the polypi have remained on the spot. The total mass of this chain of rocks appears to me a limestone agglomerate, somewhat analogous to the earthy limestone of the peninsula of Araya, near Cumana, but of much more recent formation. The inequalities of this coral rock are covered by a detritus of shells and madrepores. Whatever rises above the surface of the water is composed of broken pieces, cemented by carbonate of lime, in which grains of quartzose sand are set. Whether rocks formed by polypi still living are found at great depth below this fragmentary rock of coral or whether these polypi are raised on the Jura formation are questions which I am unable to answer. Pilots believe that the sea diminishes in these latitudes, because they see the chain of rocks augment and rise, either by the earth which the waves heave up, or by successive agglutinations. It is not impossible that the enlarging of the channel of Bahama, by which the waters of the Gulf-stream issue, may cause, in the lapse of ages, a slight lowering of the waters south of Cuba, and especially in the gulf of Mexico, the centre of the great current which runs along the shores of the United States, and casts the fruits of tropical plants on the coast of Norway.* (* "The Gulf-stream, between the Bahamas and Florida, is very little wider than Behring's Strait; and yet the water rushing through this passage is of sufficient force and quantity to put the whole Northern Atlantic in motion, and to make its influence be felt in the distant strait of Gibraltar and on the more distant coast of Africa." Quarterly Review February 1818.) The configuration of the coast, the direction, the force and the duration of certain winds and currents, the changes which the barometric heights undergo through the variable predominance of those winds, are causes, the concurrence of which may alter, in a long space of time, and in circumscribed limits of extent and height, the equilibrium of the seas.* (* I do not pretend to explain, by the same causes, the great phenomena of the coast of Sweden, where the sea has, on some points, the appearance of a very unequal lowering of from three to five feet in one hundred years. The great geologist, Leopold von Buch, has imparted new interest to these observations by examining whether it be not rather some parts of the continent of Scandinavia which insensibly heaves up. An analogous supposition was entertained by the inhabitants of Dutch Guiana.) When the coast is so low that the level of the soil, at a league within the island, does not change to extent of a few inches, these swellings and diminution of the waters strike the imagination of the inhabitants.

The Cayo bonito (Pretty Rock), which we first visited, fully merits its name from the richness of its vegetation. Everything denotes that it has been long above the surface of the ocean; and the central part of the Cayo is not more depressed than the banks. On a layer of sand and land shells, five to six inches thick, covered by a fragmentary madreporic rock, rises a forest of mangroves (Rhizophora). From their form and foliage they might at a distance be mistaken for laurel trees. The Avicennia, the Batis, some small Euphorbia and grasses, by the intertwining of their roots, fix the moving sands. But the characteristic distinction of the Flora of these coral islands is the magnificent Tournefortia gnaphalioides of Jacquin, with silvered leaves, which we found here for the first time. This is a social plant and is a shrub from four feet and a half to five feet high. Its flowers emit an agreeable perfume; and it is the ornament of Cayo Flamenco, Cayo Piedras and perhaps of the greater part of the low lands of the Jardinillos. While we were employed in herborizing,* our sailors were searching among the rocks for lobsters. (* We gathered Cenchrus myosuroides, Euphorbia buxifolia, Batis maritima, Iresine obtusifolia, Tournefortia gnaphalioides, Diomedea glabrata, Cakile cubensis, Dolichos miniatus, Parthenium hysterophorus, etc. The last-named plant, which we had previously found in the valley of Caracas and on the temperate table-lands of Mexico, between 470 and 900 toises high, covers the fields of the island of Cuba. It is used by the inhabitants for aromatic baths, and to drive away the fleas which are so numerous in tropical climates. At Cumana the leaves of several species of cassia are employed, on account of their smell, against those annoying insects.) Disappointed at not finding them, they avenged themselves by climbing on the mangroves and making a dreadful slaughter of the young alcatras, grouped in pairs in their nests. This name is given, in Spanish America, to the brown swan-tailed pelican of Buffon. With the want of foresight peculiar to the great pelagic birds, the alcatra builds his nest where several branches of trees unite together. We counted four or five nests on the same trunk of a mangrove. The young birds defended themselves valiantly with their enormous beaks, which are six or seven inches long; the old ones hovered over our heads, making hoarse and plaintive cries. Blood streamed from the tops of the trees, for the sailors were armed with great sticks and cutlasses (machetes). In vain we reproved them for this cruelty. Condemned to long obedience in the solitude of the seas, this class of men feel pleasure in exercising a cruel tyranny over animals when occasion offers. The ground was covered with wounded birds struggling in death. At our arrival a profound calm prevailed in this secluded spot; now, everything seemed to say: Man has passed this way.

The sky was veiled with reddish vapours, which however dispersed in the direction of south-west; we hoped, but in vain, to discern the heights of the island of Pinos. Those spots have a charm in which most parts of the New World are wanting. They are associated with recollections of the greatest names of the Spanish monarchy—those of Christopher Columbus and of Hernan Cortez. It was on the southern coast of the island of Cuba, between the bay of Xagua and the island of Pinos, that the great Spanish Admiral, in his second voyage, saw, with astonishment, "that mysterious king who spoke to his subjects only by signs, and that group of men who wore long white tunics, like the monks of La Merced, whilst the rest of the people were naked." "Columbus in his fourth voyage found in the Jardinillos, great boats filled with Mexican Indians, and laden with the rich productions and merchandise of Yucatan." Misled by his ardent imagination, he thought he had heard from those navigators, "that they came from a country where the men were mounted on horses,* and wore crowns of gold on their heads." (* Compare the Lettera rarissima di Christoforo Colombo, di 7 di Julio, 1503; with the letter of Herrera, dated December 1. Nothing can be more touching and pathetic than the expression of melancholy which prevails in the letter of Columbus, written at Jamaica, and addressed to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. I recommend to the notice of those who wish to understand the character of that extraordinary man, the recital of the nocturnal vision, in which he imagined that he heard a celestial voice, in the midst of a tempest, encouraging him by these words: Iddio maravigliosamente fece sonar tuo nome nella terra. Le Indie que sono pa te del mondo cosi ricca, te le ha date per tue; tu le hai repartite dove ti e piaciuto, e ti dette potenzia per farlo. Delli ligamenti del mare Oceano che erano serrati con catene cosi forte, ti dono le chiave, etc. [God marvellously makes thy name resound throughout the world. The Indies, which are so rich a portion of the world, he gives to thee for thyself; thou mayest distribute them in the way thou pleasest, and God gives thee power to do so. Of the shores of the Atlantic, which were closed by such strong chains, he gives thee the key.] This fragment has been handed down to us only in an ancient Italian tradition; for the Spanish original mentioned in the Biblioteca Nautica of Don Antonio Leon has not hitherto been found. I may add a few more lines, characterized by great simplicity, written by the discoverer of the New World: "Your Highness," says Columbus, "may believe me, the globe of the earth is far from being so great as the vulgar admit. I was seven years at your royal court, and during seven years was told that my enterprise was a folly. Now that I have opened the way, tailors and shoemakers ask the privilege of going to discover new lands. Persecuted, forgotten as I am, I never think of Hispaniola and Paria without my eyes being filled with tears. I was twenty years in the service of your Highness; I have not a hair that is not white; and my body is enfeebled. Heaven and earth now mourn for me; all who have pity, truth, and justice, mourn for me (pianga adesso il cielo e pianga per me la terra; pianga per me chi ha carita, verita, giustizia)." Lettera rarissima pages 13, 19, 34, 37.) "Catayo (China), the empire of the Great Khan, and the mouth of the Ganges," appeared to him so near, that he hoped soon to employ two Arabian interpreters, whom he had embarked at Cadiz, in going to America. Other remembrances of the island of Pinos, and the surrounding Gardens, are connected with the conquest of Mexico. When Hernan Cortes was preparing his great expedition, he was wrecked with his Nave Capitana on one of the flats of the Jardinillos. For the space of five days he was believed to be lost, and the valiant Pedro de Alvarado sent (in November 1518) from the port of Carenas* (the Havannah) three vessels in search of him. (* At that period there were two settlements, one at Puerto de Carenas in the ancient Indian province of the Havannah, and the other—the most considerable—in the Villa de San Cristoval de Cuba. These settlements were only united in 1519 when the Puerto de Carenas took the name of San Cristoval de la Habana. "Cortes," says Herrera, "paso a la Villa de San Cristoval que a la sazon estaba en la costa del sur, y despues se paso a la Habana." [Cortes proceeded to the town of San Cristoval, which at that time was on the sea-coast, and afterwards he repaired to the Havannah.]) In February, 1519, Cortes assembled his whole fleet near cape San Antonio, probably on the spot which still bears the name of Ensenada de Cortes, west of Batabano and opposite to the island of Pinos. From thence, believing he should better escape the snares laid for him by the governor, Velasquez, he passed almost clandestinely to the coast of Mexico. Strange vicissitude of events! the empire of Montezuma was shaken by a handful of men who, from the western extremity of the island of Cuba, landed on the coast of Yucatan; and in our days, three centuries later, Yucatan, now a part of the new confederation of the free states of Mexico, has nearly menaced with conquest the western coast of Cuba.

On the morning of the 11th March we visited Cayo Flamenco. I found the latitude 21 degrees 59 minutes 39 seconds. The centre of this island is depressed and only fourteen inches above the surface of the sea. The water here is brackish while in other cayos it is quite fresh. The mariners of Cuba attribute this freshness of the water to the action of the sands in filtering sea-water, the same cause which is assigned for the freshness of the lagunes of Venice. But this supposition is not justified by any chemical analogy. The cayos are composed of rocks, and not of sands, and their smallness renders it extremely improbable that the pluvial waters should unite in a permanent lake. Perhaps the fresh water of this chain of rocks comes from the neighbouring coast, from the mountains of Cuba, by the effect of hydrostatic pressure. This would prove a prolongation of the strata of Jura limestone below the sea and a superposition of coral rock on that limestone.* (* Eruptions of fresh water in the sea, near Baiae, Syracuse and Aradus (in Phenicia) were known to the ancients. Strabo lib. 16 page 754. The coral islands that surround Radak, especially the low island of Otdia, furnish also fresh water. Chamisso in Kotzebue's Entdekkungs-Reise volume 3 page 108.)

It is too general a prejudice to consider every source of fresh or salt water to be merely a local phenomenon: currents of water circulate in the interior of lands between strata of rocks of a particular density or nature, at immense distances, like the floods that furrow the surface of the globe. The learned engineer, Don Francisco Le Maur, informed me that in the bay of Xagua, half a degree east of the Jardinillos, there issue in the middle of the sea, springs of fresh water, two leagues and a half from the coast. These springs gush up with such force that they cause an agitation of the water often dangerous for small canoes. Vessels that are not going to Xagua sometimes take in water from these ocean springs and the water is fresher and colder in proportion to the depth whence it is drawn. The manatees, guided by instinct, have discovered this region of fresh waters; and the fishermen who like the flesh of these herbivorous animals,* find them in abundance in the open sea. (* Possibly they subsist upon sea-weed in the ocean, as we saw them feed, on the banks of the Apure and the Orinoco, on several species of Panicum and Oplismenus (camalote?). It appears common enough, on the coast of Tabasco and Honduras, at the mouths of rivers, to find the manatees swimming in the sea, as crocodiles do sometimes. Dampier distinguishes between the fresh-water and the salt-water manatee. (Voyages and Descr. volume 2) Among the Cayos de las doce leguas, east of Xagua, some islands bear the name of Meganos del Manati.)

Half a mile east of Cayo Flamenco we passed close to two rocks on which the waves break furiously. They are the Piedras de Diego Perez (latitude 21 degrees 58 minutes 10 seconds.) The temperature of the sea at its surface lowers at this point to 22.6 degrees centigrade, the depth of the water being only about one fathom. In the evening we went on shore at Cayo de Piedras; two rocks connected together by breakers and lying in the direction of north-north-west to south-south-east. On these rocks which form the eastern extremity of the Jardinillos many vessels are lost, and they are almost destitute of shrubs because shipwrecked crews cut them to make fire-signals. The Cayo de Piedras is extremely precipitous on the side near the sea; and towards the middle there is a small basin of fresh water. We found a block of madrepore in the rock, measuring upwards of three cubic feet. Doubtless this limestone formation, which at a distance resembles Jura limestone, is a fragmentary rock. It would be well if this chain of cayos which surrounds the island of Cuba were examined by geologists with the view of determining what may be attributed to the animals which still work at the bottom of the sea, and what belongs to the real tertiary formations, the age of which may be traced back to the date of the coarse limestone abounding in remains of lithophite coral. In general, that which rises above the waters is only breccia, or aggregate of madreporic fragments cemented by carbonate of lime, broken shells, and sand. It is important to examine, in each of the cayos, on what this breccia reposes; whether it covers edifices of mollusca still living, or those secondary and tertiary rocks, which judging from the remains of coral they contain, seem to be the product of our days. The gypsum of the cayos opposite San Juan de los Remedios, on the northern coast of the island of Cuba, merits great attention. Its age is doubtless more remote than historic times, and no geologist will believe that it is the work of the mollusca of our seas.

From the Cayo de Piedras we could faintly discern in the direction of east-north-east the lofty mountains that rise beyond the bay of Xagua. During the night we again lay at anchor; and next day (12th March), having passed between the northern cape of the Cayo de Piedras and the island of Cuba, we entered a sea free from breakers. Its blue colour (a dark indigo tint) and the heightening of the temperature proved how much the depth of the water had augmented. We tried, under favour of the variable winds on sea and shore, to steer eastward as far as the port of La Trinidad so that we might be less opposed by the north-east winds which then prevail in the open sea, in making the passage to Carthagena, of which the meridian falls between Santiago de Cuba and the bay of Guantanamo. Having passed the marshy coast of Camareos,* (* Here the celebrated philanthropist Bartolomeo de las Casas obtained in 1514 from his friend Velasquez, the governor, a good repartimiente de Indios (grant of land so called). But this he renounced in the same year, from scruples of conscience, during a short stay at Jamaica.) we arrived (latitude 21 degrees 50 minutes) in the meridian of the entrance of the Bahia de Xagua. The longitude the chronometer gave me at this point was almost identical with that since published (in 1821) in the map of the Deposito hidrografico of Madrid.

The port of Xagua is one of the finest but least frequented of the island. "There cannot be another such in the world," is the remark of the Coronista major (Antonio de Herrera). The surveys and plans of defence made by M. Le Maur, at the time of the commission of Count Jaruco, prove that the anchorage of Xagua merits the celebrity it acquired even in the first years of the conquest. The town consists merely of a small group of houses and a fort (castillito.) On the east of Xagua, the mountains (Cerros de San Juan) near the coast, assume an aspect more and more majestic; not from their height, which does not seem to exceed three hundred toises, but from their steepness and general form. The coast, I was told, is so steep that a frigate may approach the mouth of the Rio Guaurabo. When the temperature of the air diminished at night to 23 degrees and the wind blew from the land it brought that delicious odour of flowers and honey which characterizes the shores of the island of Cuba.* (* Cuban wax, which is a very important object of trade, is produced by the bees of Europe (the species Apis, Latr.). Columbus says expressly that in his time the inhabitants of Cuba did not collect wax. The great loaf of that substance which he found in the island in his first voyage, and presented to King Ferdinand in the celebrated audience of Barcelona, was afterwards ascertained to have been brought thither by Mexican barques from Yucatan. It is curious that the wax of melipones was the first production of Mexico that fell into the hands of the Spaniards, in the month of November, 1492.) We sailed along the coast keeping two or three miles distant from land. On the 13th March a little before sunset we were opposite the mouth of the Rio San Juan, so much dreaded by navigators on account of the innumerable quantity of mosquitos and zancudos which fill the atmosphere. It is like the opening of a ravine, in which vessels of heavy burden might enter, but that a shoal (placer) obstructs the passage. Some horary angles gave me the longitude 82 degrees 40 minutes 50 seconds for this port which is frequented by the smugglers of Jamaica and the corsairs of Providence Island. The mountains that command the port scarcely rise to 230 toises. I passed a great part of the night on deck. The coast was dreary and desolate. Not a light announced a fisherman's hut. There is no village between Batabano and Trinidad, a distance of fifty leagues; scarcely are there more than two or three corrales or farm yards, containing hogs or cows. Yet, in the time of Columbus, this territory was inhabited along the shore. When the ground is dug to make wells, or when torrents furrow the surface of the earth in floods, stone hatchets and copper utensils* are often discovered; these are remains of the ancient inhabitants of America. (* Doubtless the copper of Cuba. The abundance of this metal in its native state would naturally induce the Indians of Cuba and Hayti to melt it. Columbus says that there were masses of native copper at Hayti, of the weight of six arrobas; and that the boats of Yucatan, which he met with on the eastern coast of Cuba, carried, among other Mexican merchandize, crucibles to melt copper.)

At sunrise I requested the captain to heave the lead. There was no bottom to be found at sixty fathoms; and the ocean was warmer at its surface than anywhere else; it was at 26.8 degrees; the temperature exceeded 4.2 degrees that which we had found near the breakers of Diego Perez. At the distance of half a mile from the coast, the sea water was not more than 2.5 degrees; we had no opportunity of sounding but the depth of the water had no doubt diminished. On the 14th of March we entered the Rio Guaurabo, one of the two ports of Trinidad de Cuba, to put on shore the practico, or pilot of Batabano, who had steered us across the flats of the Jardinillos, though not without causing us to run aground several times. We also hoped to find a packet-boat (correo maritimo) in this port, which would take us to Carthagena. I landed towards the evening, and placed Borda's azimuth compass and the artificial horizon on the shore for the purpose of observing the passage of some stars by the meridian; but we had scarcely begun our preparations when a party of small traders of the class called pulperos, who had dined on board a foreign ship recently arrived, invited us to accompany them to the town. These good people requested us mount two by two on the same horse; and, as the heat was excessive, we accepted their offer. The distance from the mouth of the Rio Guaurabo to Trinidad is nearly four miles in a north-west direction. The road runs across a plain which seems as if it had been levelled by a long sojourn of the waters. It is covered with vegetation, to which the miraguama, a palm-tree with silvered leaves (which we saw here for the first time), gives a peculiar character.* (* Corypha miraguama. Probably the same species which struck Messrs. John and William Fraser (father and son) in the vicinity of Matanzas. Those two botanists, who introduced a great number of valuable plants to the gardens of Europe, were shipwrecked on their voyage to the Havannah from the United States, and saved themselves with difficulty on the cayos at the entrance of the Old Channel, a few weeks before my departure for Carthagena.) This fertile soil, although of tierra colorada, requires only to be tilled and it would yield fruitful harvests. A very picturesque view opens westward on the Lomas of San Juan, a chain of calcareous mountains from 1800 to 2000 toises high and very steep towards the south. Their bare and barren summits form sometimes round blocks; and here and there rise up in points like horns,* a little inclined. (* Wherever the rock is visible I perceived compact limestone, whitish-grey, partly porous and partly with a smooth fracture, as in the Jura formation.) Notwithstanding the great lowering of the temperature during the season of the Nortes or north winds, snow never falls; and only a hoar-frost (escarcha) is seen on these mountains, as on those of Santiago. This absence of snow is difficult to be explained. In emerging from the forest we perceived a curtain of hills of which the southern slope is covered with houses; this is the town of Trinidad, founded in 1514, by the governor Diego Velasquez, on account of the rich mines of gold which were said to have been discovered in the little valley of Rio Arimao.* (* This river flows towards the east into the Bahia de Xagua.) The streets of Trinidad have all a rapid descent: there, as in most parts of Spanish America, it is complained that the Couquistadores chose very injudiciously the sites for new towns.* (* It is questionable whether the town founded by Velasquez was not situated in the plain and nearer the ports of Casilda and Guaurabo. It has been suggested that the fear of the French, Portuguese and English freebooters led to the selection, even in inland places, of sites on the declivity of mountains, whence, as from a watch-tower, the approach of the enemy could be discerned; but it seems to me that these fears could have had no existence prior to the government of Hernando de Soto. The Havannah was sacked for the first time by French corsairs in 1539.) At the northern extremity is the church of Nuestra Senora de la Popa, a celebrated place of pilgrimage. This point I found to be 700 feet above the level of the sea; it commands a magnificent view of the ocean, the two ports (Puerto Casilda and Boca Guaurabo), a forest of palm-trees and the group of the lofty mountains of San Juan. We were received at the town of Trinidad with the kindest hospitality by Senor Munoz, the Superintendent of the Real Hacienda. I made observations during a great part of the night and found the latitude near the cathedral by the Spica Virginis, alpha of the Centaur, and beta of the Southern Cross, under circumstances not equally favourable, to be 21 degrees 48 minutes 20 seconds. My chronometric longitude was 82 degrees 21 minutes 7 seconds. I was informed at my second visit to the Havannah, in returning from Mexico, that this longitude was nearly identical with that obtained by the captain of a frigate, Don Jose del Rio, who had long resided on that spot; but that he marked the latitude of the town at 21 degrees 42 minutes 40 seconds.

The Lieutenant-Governor (Teniente Governadore) of Trinidad, whose jurisdiction then extended to Villa Clara, Principe and Santo Espiritu, was nephew to the celebrated astronomer Don Antonio Ulloa. He gave us a grand entertainment, at which we met some French emigrants from San Domingo who had brought their talents and industry to Spanish America. The exportation of the sugar of Trinidad, by the registers of the custom-house, did not then exceed 4000 chests.

The advantage of having two ports is often discussed at Trinidad. The distance of the town from Puerto de Casilda and Puerto Guaurabo is nearly equal; yet the expense of transport is greatest in the former port. The Boca del Rio Guaurabo, defended by a new battery, furnishes safe anchorage, although less sheltered than that of Puerto Casilda. Vessels that draw little water or are lightened to pass the bar, can go up the river and approach the town within a mile. The packet-boats (correos) that touch at Trinidad de Cuba prefer, in general, the Rio Guaurabo, where they find safe anchorage without needing a pilot. The Puerto Casilda is more inclosed and goes further back inland but cannot be entered without a pilot, on account of the breakers (arrecifes) and the Mulas and Mulattas. The great mole, constructed with wood, and very useful to commerce, was damaged in discharging pieces of artillery. It is entirely destroyed, and it was undecided whether it would be best to reconstruct it with masonry, according to the project of Don Luis de Bassecourt, or to open the bar of Guaurabo by dredging it. The great disadvantage of Puerto de Casilda is the want of fresh water, which vessels have to procure at the distance of a league.

We passed a very agreeable evening in the house of one of the richest inhabitants, Don Antonio Padron, where we found assembled at a tertulia all the good company of Trinidad. We were again struck with the gaiety and vivacity that distinguish the women of Cuba. These are happy gifts of nature to which the refinements of European civilization might lend additional charms but which, nevertheless, please in their primitive simplicity. We quitted Trinidad on the night of the 15th March. The municipality caused us to be conducted to the mouth of the Rio Guaurabo in a fine carriage lined with old crimson damask; and, to add to our confusion, an ecclesiastic, the poet of the place, habited in a suit of velvet notwithstanding the heat of the climate, celebrated, in a sonnet, our voyage to the Orinoco.

On the road leading to the port we were forcibly struck by a spectacle which our stay of two years in the hottest part of the tropics might have rendered familiar to us; but previously I had nowhere seen such an innumerable quantity of phosphorescent insects.* (* Cocuyo, Elater noctilucus.) The grass that overspread the ground, the branches and foliage of the trees, all shone with that reddish and moveable light which varies in its intensity at the will of the animal by which it is produced. It seemed as though the starry firmament reposed on the savannah. In the hut of the poorest inhabitants of the country, fifteen cocuyos, placed in a calabash pierced with holes, afford sufficient light to search for anything during the night. To shake the calabash forcibly is all that is necessary to excite the animal to increase the intensity of the luminous discs situated on each side of its body. The people of the country remark, with a simple truth of expression, that calabashes filled with cocuyos are lanterns always ready lighted. They are, in fact, only extinguished by the sickness or death of the insects, which are easily fed with a little sugar-cane. A young woman at Trinidad de Cuba told us that during a long and difficult passage from the main land, she always made use of the phosphorescence of the cocuyos, when she gave suck to her child at night; the captain of the ship would allow no other light on board, from the fear of corsairs.

As the breeze freshened in the direction of north-east we sought to avoid the group of the Caymans but the current drove us towards those islands. Sailing to south 1/4 south-east, we gradually lost sight of the palm-covered shore, the hills rising above the town of Trinidad and the lofty mountains of the island of Cuba. There is something solemn in the aspect of land from which the voyager is departing and which he sees sinking by degrees below the horizon of the sea. The interest of this impression was heightened at the period to which I here advert; when Saint Domingo was the centre of great political agitations, and threatened to involve the other islands in one of those sanguinary struggles which reveal to man the ferocity of his nature. These threatened dangers were happily averted; the storm was appeased on the spot which gave it birth; and a free black population, far from troubling the peace of the neighbouring islands, has made some steps in the progress of civilization and has promoted the establishment of good institutions. Porto Rico, Cuba and Jamaica, with 370,000 whites and 885,000 men of colour, surround Hayti, where a population of 900,000 negros and mulattos have been emancipated by their own efforts. The negros, more inclined to cultivate alimentary plants than colonial productions, augment with a rapidity only surpassed by the increase of the population of the United States.
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Re: Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions

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Part 1 of 2

CHAPTER 3.30. PASSAGE FROM TRINIDAD DE CUBA TO RIO SINU. CARTHAGENA. AIR VOLCANOES OF TURBACO. CANAL OF MAHATES.

On the morning of the 17th of March, we came within sight of the most eastern island of the group of the Lesser Caymans. Comparing the reckoning with the chronometric longitude, I ascertained that the currents had borne us in seventeen hours twenty miles westward. The island is called by the English pilots Cayman-brack, and by the Spanish pilots, Cayman chico oriental. It forms a rocky wall, bare and steep towards the south and south-east. The north and north-west part is low, sandy, and scantily covered with vegetation. The rock is broken into narrow horizontal ledges. From its whiteness and its proximity to the island of Cuba, I supposed it to be of Jura limestone. We approached the eastern extremity of Cayman-brack within the distance of 400 toises. The neighbouring coast is not entirely free from danger and breakers; yet the temperature of the sea had not sensibly diminished at its surface. The chronometer of Louis Berthoud gave me 82 degrees 7 minutes 37 seconds for the longitude of the eastern cape of Cayman-brack. The latitude reduced by the reckoning on the rhumbs of wind at the meridian observation, appeared to me to be 19 degrees 40 minutes 50 seconds.

As long as we were within sight of the rock of Cayman-brack sea-turtles of extraordinary dimensions swam round our vessel. The abundance of these animals led Columbus to give the whole group of the Caymans the name of Penascales de las Tortugas (rocks of the turtles.) Our sailors would have thrown themselves into the water to catch some of these animals; but the numerous sharks that accompany them rendered the attempt too perilous. The sharks fixed their jaws on great iron hooks which were flung to them; these hooks were very sharp and (for want of anzuelos encandenados* (* Fish-hooks with chains.)) they were tied to cords: the sharks were in this manner drawn up half the length of their bodies; and we were surprised to see that those which had their mouths wounded and bleeding continued to seize the bait over and over again during several hours.* (* Vidimus quoque squales, quotiescunque, hamo icti, dimidia parte corporis e fluctibus extrahebantur, cito alvo stercus emittere haud absimile excrementis caninis. Commovebat intestina (ut arbitramur) subitus pavor. Although the form and number of teeth change with age, and the teeth appear successively in the shark genus, I doubt whether Don Antonio Ulloa be correct in stating that the young sharks have two, and the old ones four rows of grinders. These, like many other sea-fish, are easily accustomed to live in fresh water, or in water slightly briny. It is observed that sharks (tiburones) abound of late in the Laguna of Maracaybo, whither they have been attracted by the dead bodies thrown into the water after the frequent battles between the Spanish royalists and the Columbian republicans.) At the sight of these voracious fish the sailors in a Spanish vessel always recollect the local fable of the coast of Venezuela, which describes the benediction of a bishop as having softened the habits of the sharks, which are everywhere else the dread of mariners. Do these wild sharks of the port of La Guayra specifically differ from those which are so formidable in the port of the Havannah? And do the former belong to the group of Emissoles with small sharp teeth, which Cuvier distinguishes from the Melandres, by the name of Musteli?

The wind freshened more and more from the south-east, as we advanced in the direction of Cape Negril and the western extremity of the great bank of La Vibora. We were often forced to diverge from our course; and, on account of the extreme smallness of our vessel, we were almost constantly under water. On the 18th of March at noon we found ourselves in latitude 18 degrees 17 minutes 40 seconds, and in 81 degrees 50 minutes longitude. The horizon, to the height of 50 degrees, was covered with those reddish vapours so common within the tropics, and which never seem to affect the hygrometer at the surface of the globe. We passed fifty miles west of Cape Negril on the south, nearly at the point where several charts indicate an insulated flat of which the position is similar to that of Sancho Pardo, opposite to Cape San Antonio de Cuba. We saw no change in the bottom. It appears that the rocky shoal at a depth of four fathoms, near Cape Negril, has no more existence than the rock (cascabel) itself, long believed to mark the western extremity of La Vibora (Pedro Bank, Portland Rock or la Sola), marking the eastern extremity. On the 19th of March, at four in the afternoon, the muddy colour of the sea denoted that we had reached that part of the bank of La Vibora where we no longer find fifteen, and indeed scarcely nine or ten, fathoms of water. Our chronometric longitude was 81 degrees 3 minutes; and our latitude probably below 17 degrees. I was surprised that, at the noon observation, at 17 degrees 7 minutes of latitude, we yet perceived no change in the colour of the water. Spanish vessels going from Batabano or Trinidad de Cuba to Carthagena, usually pass over the bank of La Vibora, on its western side, at between fifteen and sixteen fathoms water. The dangers of the breakers begin only beyond the meridian 80 degrees 45 minutes west longitude. In passing along the bank on its southern limit, as pilots often do in proceeding from Cumana or other parts of the mainland, to the Great Caymnan or Cape San Antonio, they need not ascend along the rocks, above 16 degrees 47 minutes latitude. Fortunately the currents run on the whole bank to south-west.

Considering La Vibora not as a submerged land, but as a heaved-up part of the surface of the globe, which has not reached the level of the sea, we are struck at finding on this great submarine island, as on the neighbouring land of Jamaica and Cuba, the loftiest heights towards its eastern boundary. In that direction are situated Portland Rock, Pedro Keys and South Key, all surrounded by dangerous breakers. The depth is six or eight fathoms; but, in advancing to the middle of the bank, along the line of the summit, first towards the west and then towards the north-west, the depth becomes successively ten, twelve, sixteen and nineteen fathoms. When we survey on the map the proximity of the high lands of San Domingo, Cuba and Jamaica, in the neighbourhood of the Windward Channel, the position of the island of Navaza and the bank of Hormigas, between Capes Tiburon and Morant; when we trace that chain of successive breakers, from the Vibora, by Baxo Nuevo, Serranilla, and Quita Sueno, as far as the Mosquito Sound, we cannot but recognize in this system of islands and shoals the almost-continued line of a heaved-up ridge running from north-east to south-west. This ridge, and the old dyke, which link, by the rock of Sancho Pardo, Cape San Antonio to the peninsula of Yucatan, divide the great sea of the West Indies into three partial basins, similar to those observed in the Mediterranean.

The colour of the troubled waters on the shoal of La Vibora has not a milky appearance like the waters in the Jardinillos and on the bank of Bahama; but it is of a dirty grey colour. The striking differences of tint on the bank of Newfoundland, in the archipelago of the Bahama Islands and on La Vibora, the variable quantities of earthy matter suspended in the more or less troubled waters of the soundings, may all be the effects of the variable absorption of the rays of light, contributing to modify to a certain point the temperature of the sea. Where the shoals are 8 to 10 degrees colder at their surface than the surrounding sea, it cannot be surprising that they should produce a local change of climate. A great mass of very cold water, as on the bank of Newfoundland, in the current of the Peruvian shore (between the port of Callao and Punta Parina* (* I found the surface of the Pacific ocean, in the month of October 1802 on the coast of Truxillo, 15.8 degrees centigrade; in the port of Callao, in November, 15.5; between the parallel of Callao and Punta Parina, in December, 19 degrees; and progressively, when the current advanced towards the equator and receded towards the west-north-west, 20.5 and 22.3 degrees)), or in the African current near Cape Verd, have necessarily an influence on the atmosphere that covers the sea, and on the climate of the neighbouring land; but it is less easy to conceive that those slight changes of temperature (for instance, a centesimal degree on the bank of La Vibora) can impart a peculiar character to the atmosphere of the shoals. May not these submarine islands act upon the formation and accumulation of the vesicular vapours in some other way than by cooling the waters of the surface?

Quitting the bank of La Vibora, we passed between the Baxo Nuevo and the light-house of Camboy; and on the 22nd March we passed more than thirty leagues to westward of El Roncador (The Snorer), a name which this shoal has received from the pilots who assert, on the authority of ancient traditions, that a sound like snoring is heard from afar. If such a sound be really heard, it arises, no doubt, from a periodical issuing of air compressed by the waters in a rocky cavern. I have observed the same phenomenon on several coasts, for instance, on the promontories of Teneriffe, in the limestones of the Havannah,* (* Called by the Spanish sailors El Cordonazo de San Francisco.) and in the granite of Lower Peru between Truxillo and Lima. A project was formed at the Canary Islands for placing a machine at the issue of the compressed air and allowing the sea to act as an impelling force. While the autumnal equinox is everywhere dreaded in the sea of the West Indies (except on the coast of Cumana and Caracas), the spring equinox produces no effect on the tranquillity of those tropical regions: a phenomenon almost the inverse of that observable in high latitudes. Since we had quitted La Vibora the weather had been remarkably fine; the colour of the sea was indigo-blue and sometimes violet, owing to the quantity of medusae and eggs of fish (purga de mar) which covered it. Its surface was gently agitated. The thermometer kept up, in the shade, from 26 to 27 degrees; not a cloud arose on the horizon although the wind was constantly north, or north-north-west. I know not whether to attribute to this wind, which cools the higher layers of the atmosphere, and there produces icy crystals, the halos which were formed round the moon two nights successively. The halos were of small dimensions, 45 degrees diameter. I never had an opportunity of seeing and measuring any* of which the diameter had attained 90 degrees. (* In Captain Parry's first voyage halos were measured round the sun and moon, of which the rays were 22 1/2 degrees; 22 degrees 52 minutes; 38 degrees; 46 degrees. North-west Passage, 1821.) The disappearance of one of those lunar halos was followed by the formation of a great black cloud, from which fell some drops of rain; but the sky soon resumed its fixed serenity, and we saw a long series of falling-stars and bolides which moved in one direction and contrary to that of the wind of the lower strata.

On the 23rd March, a comparison of the reckoning with the chronometric longitude, indicated the force of a current bearing towards west-south-west. Its swiftness, in the parallel of 17 degrees, was twenty to twenty-two miles in twenty-four hours. I found the temperature of the sea somewhat diminished; in latitude 12 degrees 35 minutes it was only 25.9 degrees (air 27.0 degrees). During the whole day the firmament exhibited a spectacle which was thought remarkable even by the sailors and which I had observed on a previous occasion (June 13th, 1799). There was a total absence of clouds, even of those light vapours called dry; yet the sun coloured, with a fine rosy tint, the air and the horizon of the sea. Towards night the sea was covered with great bluish clouds; and when they disappeared we saw, at an immense height, fleecy clouds in regular spaces, and ranged in convergent bands. Their direction was from north-north-west to south-south-east, or more exactly, north 20 degrees west, consequently contrary to the direction of the magnetic meridian.

On the 24th March we entered the gulf which is bounded on the east by the coast of Santa Marta, and on the west by Costa Rica; for the mouth of the Magdalena and that of the Rio San Juan de Nicaragua are on the same parallel, nearly 11 degrees latitude. The proximity of the Pacific Ocean, the configuration of the neighbouring lands, the smallness of the isthmus of Panama, the lowering of the soil between the gulf of Papagayo and the port of San Juan de Nicaragua, the vicinity of the snowy mountains of Santa Marta, and many other circumstances too numerous to mention, combine to create a peculiar climate in this gulf. The atmosphere is agitated by violent gales known in winter by the name of the brizotes de Santa Marta. When the wind abates, the currents bear to north-east, and the conflict between the slight breezes (from east and north-east) and the current renders the sea rough and agitated. In calm weather, the vessels going from Carthagena to Rio Sinu, at the mouth of the Atrato and at Portobello, are impeded in their course by the currents of the coast. The heavy or brizote winds, on the contrary, govern the movement of the waters, which they impel in an opposite direction, towards west-south-west. It is the latter movement which Major Rennell, in his great hydrographic work, calls drift; and he distinguishes it from real currents, which are not owing to the local action of the wind, but to differences of level in the surface of the ocean; to the rising and accumulation of waters in very distant latitudes. The observations which I have collected on the force and direction of the winds, on the temperature and rapidity of the currents, on the influence of the seasons, or the variable declination of the sun, have thrown some light on the complicated system of those pelagic floods that furrow the surface of the ocean: but it is less easy to conceive the causes of the change in the movement of the waters at the same season and with the same wind. Why is the Gulf-stream sometimes borne on the coast of Florida, sometimes on the border of the shoal of Bahama? Why do the waters flow, for the space of whole weeks, from the Havannah to Matanzas, and (to cite an example of the corriente por arriba, which is sometimes observed in the most eastern part of the main land during the prevalence of gentle winds) from La Guayra to Cape Codera and Cumana?

As we advanced, on the 25th of March, towards the coast of Darien, the north-east wind increased with violence. We might have imagined ourselves transported to another climate. The sea became very rough during the night yet the temperature of the water kept up (from latitude 10 degrees 30 minutes, to 9 degrees 47 minutes) at 25.8 degrees. We perceived at sunrise a part of the archipelago* of Saint Bernard, which closes the gulf of Morrosquillo on the north. (* It is composed of the islands Mucara, Ceycen, Maravilla, Tintipan, Panda, Palma, Mangles, and Salamanquilla, which rise little above the sea. Several of them have the form of a bastion. There are two passages in the middle of this archipelago, from seventeen to twenty fathoms. Large vessels can pass between the Isla Panda and Tintipan, and between the Isla de Mangles and Palma.) A clear spot between the clouds enabled me to take the horary angles. The chronometer, at the little island of Mucara, gave longitude 78 degrees 13 minutes 54 seconds. We passed on the southern extremity of the Placer de San Bernardo. The waters were milky, although a sounding of twenty-five fathoms did not indicate the bottom; the cooling of the water was not felt, doubtless owing to the rapidity of the current. Above the archipelago of Saint Bernard and Cape Boqueron we saw in the distance the mountains of Tigua. The stormy weather and the difficulty of going up against the wind induced the captain of our frail vessel to seek shelter in the Rio Sinu, or rather, near the Punta del Zapote, situated on the eastern bank of the Ensenada de Cispata, into which flows the river Sinu or the Zenu of the early Conquistadores. It rained with violence, and I availed myself of that occasion to measure the temperature of the rain-water: it was 26.3 degrees, while the thermometer in the air kept up, in a place where the bulb was not wet, at 24.8 degrees. This result differed much from that we had obtained at Cumana, where the rain-water was often a degree colder than the air.* (* As, within the tropics, it takes but little time to collect some inches of water in a vase having a wide opening, and narrowing towards the bottom, I do not think there can be any error in the observation, when the heat of the rain-water differs from that of the air. If the heat of the rain-water be less than that of the air it may be presumed that only a part of the total effect is observed. I often found at Mexico at the end of June, the rain at 19.2 or 19.4 degrees, when the air was at 17.8 and 18 degrees. In general it appeared to me that, within the torrid zone, either at the level of the sea, or on table-lands from 1200 to 1500 toises high, there is no rain but that during storms, which falls in large drops very distant from each other, and is sensibly colder than the air. These drops bring with them, no doubt, the low temperature of the high regions. In the rain which I found hotter than the air, two causes may act simultaneously. Great clouds heat by the absorption of the rays of the sun which strike their surface; and the drops of water in falling cause an evaporation and produce cold in the air. The temperature of rain-water, to which I devoted much attention during my travels, has become a more important problem since M. Boisgiraud, Professor of Experimental Philosophy at Poitiers, has proved that in Europe rain is generally sufficiently cold, relatively to the air, to cause precipitation of vapour at the surface of every drop. From this fact he traces the cause of the unequal quantity of rain collected at different heights. When we recollect that one degree only of cooling precipitates more water in the hot climate of the tropics, than by a temperature of 10 to 13 degrees, we may cease to be surprised at the enormous size of the drops of rain that fall at Cumana, Carthagena and Guayaquil.)

Our passage from the island of Cuba to the coast of South America terminated at the mouth of the Rio Sinu, and it occupied sixteen days. The roadstead near the Punta del Zapote afforded very bad anchorage; and in a rough sea, and with a violent wind, we found some difficulty in reaching the coast in our canoe. Everything denoted that we had entered a wild region rarely visited by strangers. A few scattered houses form the village of Zapote: we found a great number of mariners assembled under a sort of shed, all men of colour, who had descended the Rio Sinu in their barks, to carry maize, bananas, poultry and other provisions to the port of Carthagena. These barks, which are from fifty to eighty feet long, belong for the most part to the planters (haciendados) of Lorica. The value of their largest freight amounts to about 2000 piastres. These boats are flat-bottomed, and cannot keep at sea when it is very rough. The breezes from the north-east had, during ten days, blown with violence on the coast, while, in the open sea, as far as 10 degrees latitude, we had only had slight gales, and a constantly calm sea. In the aerial, as in the pelagic currents, some layers of fluids move with extreme swiftness, while others near them remain almost motionless. The zambos of the Rio Sinu wearied us with idle questions respecting the purpose of our voyage, our books, and the use of our instruments: they regarded us with mistrust; and to escape from their importunate curiosity we went to herborize in the forest, although it rained. They had endeavoured, as usual, to alarm us by stories of boas (traga-venado), vipers and the attacks of jaguars; but during a long residence among the Chayma Indians of the Orinoco we were habituated to these exaggerations, which arise less from the credulity of the natives, than from the pleasure they take in tormenting the whites. Quitting the coast of Zapote, covered with mangroves,* (* Rhizophora mangle.) we entered a forest remarkable for a great variety of palm-trees. We saw the trunks of the Corozo del Sinu* pressed against each other, which formed heretofore our species Alfonsia, yielding oil in abundance (* In Spanish America palm-trees with leaves the most different in kind and species are called Corozo: the Corozo del Sinu, with a short, thick, glossy trunk, is the Elaeis melanococca of Martius, Palm. page 64 tab. 33, 55. I cannot believe it to be identical with the Elaeis guineensis (Herbal of Congo River page 37) since it vegetates spontaneously in the forests of the Rio Sinu. The Corozo of Caripe is slender, small and covered with thorns; it approaches the Cocos aculeata of Jacquin. The Corozo de los Marinos of the valley of Cauca, one of the tallest palm-trees, is the Cocus butyracea of Linnaeus.); the Cocos butyracea, called here palma dolce or palma real, and very different from the palma real of the island of Cuba; the palma amarga, with fan-leaves that serve to cover the roofs of houses, and the latta,* (* Perhaps of the species of Aiphanes.) resembling the small piritu palm-tree of the Orinoco. This variety of palm-trees was remarked by the first Conquistadores.* (* Pedro de Cieca de Leon, a native of Seville, who travelled in 1531, at the age of thirteen years, in the countries I have described, observes that Las tierras comarcanas del Rio Cenu y del Golfo de Uraba estan llena de unos palmares muy grandes y espessos, que son unos arboles gruessos, y llevan unas ramas como palma de datiles. [The lands adjacent to the Rio Cenu and the Gulf of Uraba are full of very tall, spreading palm-trees. They are of vast size and are branched like the date-palm.] See La Cronica del Peru nuevamenta escrita, Antwerp 1554 pages 21 and 204.) The Alfonsia, or rather the species of Elais, which we had nowhere else seen, is only six feet high, with a very large trunk; and the fecundity of its spathes is such that they contain more than 200,000 flowers. Although a great number of those flowers (one tree bearing 600,000 at the same time) never come to maturity,* the soil remains covered with a thick layer of fruits. (* I have carefully counted how many flowers are contained in a square inch on each amentum, from 100 to 120 of which are found united in one spathe.) We often made a similar observation under the shade of the mauritia palm-tree, the Cocos butyracea, the Seje and the Pihiguao of the Atabapo. No other family of arborescent plants is so prolific in the development of the organs of flowering. The almond of the Corozo del Sinu is peeled in the water. The thick layer of oil that swims in the water is purified by boiling, and yields the butter of Corozo (manteca de Corozo) which is thicker than the oil of the cocoa-tree, and serves to light churches and houses. The palm-trees of the section of Cocoinies of Mr. Brown are the olive-trees of the tropical regions. As we advanced in the forest, we began to find little pathways, looking as though they had been recently cleared out by the hatchet. Their windings displayed a great number of new plants: Mougeotia mollis, Nelsonia albicans, Melampodium paludosum, Jonidium anomalum, Teucrium palustre, Gomphia lucens, and a new kind of Composees, the Spiracantha cornifolia. A fine Pancratium embalmed the air in the humid spots, and almost made us forget that those gloomy and marshy forests are highly dangerous to health.

After an hour's walk we found, in a cleared spot, several inhabitants employed in collecting palm-tree wine. The dark tint of the zambos formed a strong contrast with the appearance of a little man with light hair and a pale complexion who seemed to take no share in the labour. I thought at first that he was a sailor who had escaped from some North American vessel; but I was soon undeceived. This fair-complexioned man was my countryman, born on the coast of the Baltic; he had served in the Danish navy and had lived for several years in the upper part of the Rio Sinu, near Santa Cruz de Lorica. He had come, to use the words of the loungers of the country para ver tierras, y pasear, no mas (to see other lands, and to roam about, nothing else.) The sight of a man who could speak to him of his country seemed to have no attraction for him; and, as he had almost forgotten German without being able to express himself clearly in Spanish, our conversation was not very animated. During the five years of my travels in Spanish America I found only two opportunities of speaking my native language. The first Prussian I met with was a sailor from Memel who served on board a ship from Halifax, and who refused to make himself known till after he had fired some musket-shot at our boat. The second, the man we met at the Rio Sinu, was very amicably disposed. Without answering my questions he continued repeating, with a smile, that the country was hot and humid; that the houses in the town of Pomerania were finer than those of Santa Cruz de Lorica; and that, if we remained in the forest, we should have the tertian fever (calentura) from which he had long suffered. We had some difficulty in testifying our gratitude to this good man for his kind advice; for according to his somewhat aristocratic principles, a white man, were he bare-footed, should never accept money "in the presence of those vile coloured people!" (gente parda). Less disdainful than our European countryman, we saluted politely the group of men of colour who were employed in drawing off into large calabashes, or fruits of the Crescentia cujete, the palm-tree wine from the trunks of felled trees. We asked them to explain to us this operation, which we had already seen practised in the missions of the Cataracts. The vine of the country is the palma dolce, the Cocos butyracea, which, near Malgar, in the valley of the Magdalena, is called the wine palm-tree, and here, on account of its majestic height, the royal palm-tree. After having thrown down the trunk, which diminishes but little towards the top, they make just below the point whence the leaves (fronds) and spathes issue, an excavation in the ligneous part, eighteen inches long, eight broad, and six in depth. They work in the hollow of the tree, as though they were making a canoe; and three days afterwards this cavity is found filled with a yellowish-white juice, very limpid, with a sweet and vinous flavour. The fermentation appears to commence as soon as the trunk falls, but the vessels preserve their vitality; for we saw that the sap flowed even when the summit of the palm-tree (that part whence the leaves sprout out) is a foot higher than the lower end, near the roots. The sap continues to mount as in the arborescent Euphorbia recently cut. During eighteen to twenty days, the palm-tree wine is daily collected; the last is less sweet but more alcoholic and more highly esteemed. One tree yields as much as eighteen bottles of sap, each bottle containing forty-two cubic inches. The natives affirm that the flowing is more abundant when the petioles of the leaves, which remain fixed to the trunk, are burnt.

The great humidity and thickness of the forest forced us to retrace our steps and to gain the shore before sunset. In several places the compact limestone rock, probably of tertiary formation, is visible. A thick layer of clay and mould rendered observation difficult; but a shelf of carburetted and shining slate seemed to me to indicate the presence of more ancient formations. It has been affirmed that coal is to be found on the banks of the Sinu. We met with Zambos carrying on their shoulders the cylinders of palmetto, improperly called the cabbage palm, three feet long and five to six feet thick. The stem of the palm-tree has been for ages an esteemed article of food in those countries. I believe it to be wholesome although historians relate that, when Alonso Lopez de Ayala was governor of Uraba, several Spaniards died after having eaten immoderately of the palmetto, and at the same time drinking a great quantity of water. In comparing the herbaceous and nourishing fibres of the young undeveloped leaves of the palm-trees with the sago of the Mauritia, of which the Indians make bread similar to that of the root of the Jatropha manihot, we involuntarily recollect the striking analogy which modern chemistry has proved to exist between ligneous matter and the amylaceous fecula. We stopped on the shore to collect lichens, opegraphas and a great number of mosses (Boletus, Hydnum, Helvela, Thelephora) that were attached to the mangroves, and there, to my great surprise, vegetating, although moistened by the sea-water.

Before I quit this coast, so seldom visited by travellers and described by no modern voyager, I may here offer some information which I acquired during my stay at Carthagena. The Rio Sinu in its upper course approaches the tributary streams of the Atrato which, to the auriferous and platiniferous province of Choco, is of the same importance as the Magdalena to Cundinamarca, or the Rio Cauca to the provinces of Antioquia and Popayan. The three great rivers here mentioned have heretofore been the only commercial routes, I might almost add, the only channels of communication for the inhabitants. The Rio Atrato receives, at twelve leagues distance from its mouth, the Rio Sucio on the east; the Indian village of San Antonio is situated on its banks. Proceeding upward beyond the Rio Pabarando, you arrive in the valley of Sinu. After several fruitless attempts on the part of the Archbishop Gongora to establish colonies in Darien del Norte and on the eastern coast of the gulf of Uraba, the Viceroy Espeleta recommended the Spanish Government to fix its whole attention on the Rio Sinu; to destroy the colony of Cayman; to fix the planters in the Spanish village of San Bernardo del Viento in the jurisdiction of Lorica; and from that post, which is the most westerly, to push forward the peaceful conquests of agriculture and civilization towards the banks of the Pabarando, the Rio Sucio and the Atrato.* (* I will here state some facts which I obtained from official documents during my stay at Carthagena, and which have not yet been published. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the name of Darien was given vaguely to the whole coast extending from the Rio Damaquiel to the Punta de San Blas, on 2 1/4 degrees of longitude. The cruelties exercised by Pedrarias Davila rendered almost inaccessible to the Spaniards a country which was one of the first they had colonized. The Indians (Dariens and Cunas-Cunas) remained masters of the coast, as they still are at Poyais, in the land of the Mosquitos. Some Scotchmen formed in 1698 the settlements of New Caledonia, New Edinburgh and Scotch Port, in the most eastern part of the isthmus, a little west of Punta Carreto. They were soon driven away by the Spaniards but, as the latter occupied no part of the coast, the Indians continued their attacks against Choco's boats, which from time to time descended the Rio Atrato, The sanguinary expedition of Don Manuel de Aldarete in 1729 served only to augment the resentment of the natives. A settlement for the cultivation of the cocoa-tree, attempted in the territory of Urabia in 1740 by some French planters under the protection of the Spanish Government, had no durable success; and the court, excited by the reports of the archbishop-viceroy, Gongora, ordered, by the cedule of the 15th August, 1783, either the conversion and conquest, or the destruction (reduccion o extincion) of the Indians of Darien. This order, worthy of another age, was executed by Don Antonio de Arebalo: he experienced little resistance and formed, in 1785, the four settlements and forts of Cayman on the eastern coast of the Gulf of Urabia, Concepcion, Carolina and Mandinga. The Lele, or high-priest of Mandinga, took an oath of fidelity to the King of Spain; but in 1786 the war with the Darien Indians recommenced and was terminated by a treaty concluded July 27th, 1787, between the archbishop-viceroy and the cacique Bernardo. The forts and new colonies, which figured only on the maps sent to Madrid, augmented the debt of the treasury of Santa Fe de Bogota, in 1789, to the sum of 1,200,000 piastres. The viceroy, Gil Lemos, wiser than his predecessor, obtained permission from the Court to abandon Carolina, Concepcion and Mandinga. The settlement of Cayman only was preserved, on account of the navigation of the Atrato, and it was declared free, under the government of the archbishop-viceroy: it was proposed to transfer this settlement to a more healthy spot, that of Uraba; but lieutenant-general Don Antonio Arebalo, having proved that the expense of this removal would amount to the sum of 40,000 piastres, the fort of Cayman was also destroyed, by order of the viceroy Espeleta in 1791, and the planters were compelled to join those of the village of San Bernardo.) The number of independent Indians who inhabit the lands between Uraba, Rio Atrato, Rio Sucio and Rio Sinu was, according to a census made in 1760, at least 1800. They were distributed in three small villages, Suraba, Toanequi and Jaraguia. This population was computed, at the period when I travelled there, to be 3000. The natives, comprehended in the general name of Caymans, live at peace with the inhabitants of San Bernardo del Viento (pueblo de Espanoles), situated on the western bank of the Rio Sinu, lower than San Nicolas de Zispata, and near the mouth of the river. These people have not the ferocity of the Darien and Cunas Indians, on the left bank of the Atrato; who often attack the boats trading with the town of Quidbo in the Choco; they also make incursions on the territory of Uraba, in the months of June and November, to collect the fruit of the cacao-trees. The cacao of Uraba is of excellent quality; and the Darien Indians sometimes come to sell it, with other productions, to the inhabitants of Rio Sinu, entering the valley of that river by one of its tributary streams, the Jaraguai.

It cannot be doubted that the Gulf of Darien was considered, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, as a nook in the country of the Caribs. The word Caribana is still preserved in the name of the eastern cape of that gulf. We know nothing of the languages of the Darien, Cunas and Cayman Indians: and we know not whether Carib or Arowak words are found in their idioms; but it is certain, notwithstanding the testimony of Anghiera on the identity of the race of the Caribs of the Lesser Antilles and the Indians of Uraba, that Pedro de Cieca, who lived so long among the latter, never calls them Caribs nor cannibals. He describes the race of that tribe as being naked with long hair, and going to the neighbouring countries to trade; and says the women are cleanly, well dressed and extremely engaging (amorosas y galanas). "I have not seen," adds the Conquistador, "any women more beautiful* in all the Indian lands I have visited: they have one fault, however, that of having too frequent intercourse with the devil." (* Cronica del Peru pages 21 and 22. The Indians of Darien, Uraba, Zenu (Sinu), Tatabe, the valleys of Nore and of Guaca, the mountains of Abibe and Antioquia, are accused, by the same author, of the most ferocious cannibalism; and perhaps that circumstance alone gives rise to the idea that they were of the same race as the Caribs of the West Indies. In the celebrated Provision Real of the 30th of October, 1503, by which the Spaniards are permitted to make slaves of the anthropophagic Indians of the archipelago of San Bernardo, opposite the mouth of the Rio Sinu, the Isla Fuerte, Isla Bura (Baru) and Carthagena, there is more of a question of morals than of race, and the denomination of Caribs is altogether avoided. Cieca asserts that the natives of the valley of Nore seized the women of neighbouring tribes, in order first to devour the children who were born of the union with foreign wives, and then the women themselves. Foreseeing that this horrible depravity would not be believed, although it had been observed by Columbus in the West Indies, he cites the testimony of Juan de Vadillo, who had observed the same facts and who was still living in 1554 when the Cronica del Peru appeared in Dutch. With respect to the etymology of the word cannibal, it seems to me entirely cleared up by the discovery of the journal kept by Columbus during his first voyage of discovery, and of which Bartholomew de las Casas has left us an abridged copy. Dice mas el Almirante que en las islas passadas estaban con gran temor de carib: y en algunas los llamaban caniba; pero en la Espanola carib y son gente arriscada, pues andan por todas estas islas y comen la gente que pueden haber. [And the Admiral moreover says that in the islands they passed, great apprehension was entertained on account of the caribs. Some call them canibas; but in Spanish they are called caribs. They are a very bold people, and they travel about these islands, and devour all the persons whom they capture.] Navarete tome 1 page 135. In this primitive form of words it is easy to perceive that the permutation of the letters r and n, resulting from the imperfection of the organs in some nations, might change carib into canib, or caniba. Geraldini who, according to the tendency of that age, sought, like Cardinal Bembo, to latinize all barbarous denominations, recognizes in the Cannibals the manners of dogs (canes) just as St. Louis desired to send the Tartars ad suas tartareas sedes unde exierint.)
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