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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This Fact Is Familiar To
Those Who Have Lived Long In The Indies, And Is Worthy The
Attention Of Physiologists.
Bouguer relates, that when he reached
the summit of Montagne Pelee, in the island of Martinique, he and
his companions shivered with cold, though the heat was above 21.5
degrees.
In reading the interesting narrative of captain Bligh,
who, in consequence of a mutiny on board the Bounty, was forced to
make a voyage of twelve hundred leagues in an open boat, we find
that that navigator, in the tenth and twelfth degrees of south
latitude, suffered much more from cold than from hunger. During our
abode at Guayaquil, in the month of January 1803, we observed that
the natives covered themselves, and complained of the cold, when
the thermometer sank to 23.8 degrees, whilst they felt the heat
suffocating at 30.5 degrees. Six or seven degrees were sufficient
to cause the opposite sensations of cold and heat; because, on
these coasts of South America, the ordinary temperature of the
atmosphere is twenty-eight degrees. The humidity, which modifies
the conducting power of the air for heat, contributes greatly to
these impressions. In the port of Guayaquil, as everywhere else in
the low regions of the torrid zone, the weather grows cool only
after storms of rain: and I have observed that when the thermometer
sinks to 23.8 degrees, De Luc's hygrometer keeps up to fifty and
fifty-two degrees; it is, on the contrary, at thirty-seven degrees
in a temperature of 30.5 degrees. At Cumana, during very heavy
showers, people in the streets are heard exclaiming, que hielo!
estoy emparamado;* though the thermometer exposed to the rain sinks
only to 21.5 degrees. (* "What an icy cold! I shiver as if I was on
the top of the mountains." The provincial word emparamarse can be
translated only by a very long periphrasis. Paramo, in Peruvian
puna, is a denomination found on all the maps of Spanish America.
In the colonies it signifies neither a desert nor a heath, but a
mountainous place covered with stunted trees, exposed to the winds,
and in which a damp cold perpetually reigns. In the torrid zone,
the paramos are generally from one thousand six hundred to two
thousand toises high. Snow often falls on them, but it remains only
a few hours; for we must not confound, as geographers often do, the
words paramo and puna with that of nevado, in Peruvian ritticapa, a
mountain which enters into the limits of perpetual snow. These
notions are highly interesting to geology and the geography of
plants; because, in countries where no height has been measured, we
may form an exact idea of the lowest height to which the
Cordilleras rise, on looking into the map for the words paramo and
nevado. As the paramos are almost continually enveloped in a cold
and thick fog, the people say at Santa Fe and at Mexico, cae un
paramito when a thick small rain falls, and the temperature of the
air sinks considerably.
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