Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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In The First Thirty Or Forty Years, A Cocoa-Tree Of The Gulf
Of Cariaco Bears Every Lunation A Cluster Of Ten Or Fourteen Nuts,
All Of Which, However, Do Not Ripen.
It may be reckoned that, on an
average, a tree produces annually a hundred nuts, which yield eight
flascos* of oil.
(One flasco contains 70 or 80 cubic inches, Paris
measure.) In Provence, an olive-tree thirty years old yields twenty
pounds, or seven flascos of oil, so that it produces something less
than a cocoa-tree. There are in the gulf of Cariaco plantations
(haciendas) of eight or nine thousand cocoa-trees. They resemble,
in their picturesque appearance, those fine plantations of
date-trees near Elche, in Murcia, where, over the superficies of
one square league, there may be found upwards of 70,000 palms. The
cocoa-tree bears fruit in abundance till it is thirty or forty
years old; after that age the produce diminishes, and a trunk a
hundred years old, without being altogether barren, yields very
little. In the town of Cumana there is prepared a great quantity of
cocoa-nut oil, which is limpid, without smell, and very fit for
burning. The trade in this oil is not less active than that on the
coast of Africa for palm-oil, which is obtained from the Elais
guineensis, and is used as food. I have often seen canoes arrive at
Cumana laden with 3000 cocoa-nuts.
We did not quit the farm of Pericantral till after sunset. The
south coast of the gulf presents a most fertile aspect, while the
northern coast is naked, dry, and rocky. In spite of this aridity,
and the scarcity of rain, of which sometimes none falls for the
space of fifteen months,* the peninsula of Araya, like the desert
of Canound in India, produces patillas, or water-melons, weighing
from fifty to seventy pounds. (* The rains appear to have been more
frequent at the beginning of the 16th century. At any rate, the
canon of Granada (Peter Martyr d'Anghiera), speaking in the year
1574, of the salt-works of Araya, or of Haraia, described in the
fifth chapter of this work, mentions showers (cadentes imbres) as a
very common phenomenon. The same author, who died in 1526, affirms
that the Indians wrought the salt-works before the arrival of the
Spaniards. They dried the salt in the form of bricks; and our
writer even then discussed the geological question, whether the
clayey soil of Haraia contained salt-springs, or whether it had
been impregnated with salt by the periodical inundations of the
ocean for ages.) In the torrid zone, the vapours contained by the
air form about nine-tenths of the quantity necessary to its
saturation: and vegetation is maintained by the property which the
leaves possess of attracting the water dissolved in the atmosphere.
At sunrise, we saw the Zamuro vultures,* (* Vultur aura.) in flocks
of forty or fifty, perched on the cocoa-trees. These birds range
themselves in files to roost together like fowls. They go to roost
long before sunset, and do not awake till after the sun is above
the horizon. This sluggishness seems as if it were shared in those
climates by the trees with pinnate leaves. The mimosas and the
tamarinds close their leaves, in a clear and serene sky,
twenty-five or thirty-five minutes before sunset, and unfold them
in the morning when the solar disk has been visible for an equal
space of time. As I noticed pretty regularly the rising and setting
of the sun, for the purpose of observing the effect of the mirage,
or of the terrestrial refractions, I was enabled to give continued
attention to the phenomena of the sleep of plants. I found them the
same in the steppes, where no irregularity of the ground
interrupted the view of the horizon. It appears, that, accustomed
during the day to an extreme brilliancy of light, the sensitive and
other leguminous plants with thin and delicate leaves are affected
in the evening by the smallest decline in the intensity of the
sun's rays; so that for vegetation, night begins there, as with us,
before the total disappearance of the solar disk. But why, in a
zone where there is scarcely any twilight, do not the first rays of
the sun stimulate the leaves with the more strength, as the absence
of light must have rendered them more susceptible? Does the
humidity deposited on the parenchyma by the cooling of the leaves,
which is the effect of the nocturnal radiation, prevent the action
of the first rays of the sun? In our climates, the leguminous
plants with irritable leaves awake during the twilight of the
morning, before the sun appears.
CHAPTER 1.9.
PHYSICAL CONSTITUTION AND MANNERS OF THE CHAYMAS.
THEIR LANGUAGE.
FILIATION OF THE NATIONS WHICH INHABIT NEW ANDALUCIA.
PARIAGOTOS SEEN BY COLUMBUS.
I did not wish to mingle with the narrative of our journey to the
Missions of Caripe any general considerations on the different
tribes of the indigenous inhabitants of New Andalusia; their
manners, their languages, and their common origin. Having returned
to the spot whence we set out, I shall now bring into one point of
view these considerations which are so nearly connected with the
history of the human race. As we advance into the interior of the
country, these subjects will become even more interesting than the
phenomena of the physical world. The north-east part of equinoctial
America, Terra Firma, and the banks of the Orinoco, resemble in
respect to the numerous races of people who inhabit them, the
defiles of the Caucasus, the mountains of Hindookho, at the
northern extremity of Asia, beyond the Tungouses, and the Tartare
settled at the mouth of the Lena. The barbarism which prevails
throughout these different regions is perhaps less owing to a
primitive absence of all kind of civilization, than to the effects
of long degradation; for most of the hordes which we designate
under the name of savages, are probably the descendants of nations
highly advanced in cultivation.
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