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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The Small Crazy Boats Employed
By The Natives Here, Bear Testimony To The Extreme Calmness Of The
Sea In These Regions.
Our boat, though the best we could procure,
was so leaky, that the pilot's son was constantly employed in
baling out the water with a tutuma, or shell of the Crescentia
cujete (calabash).
It often happens in the gulf of Cariaco, and
especially to the north of the peninsula of Araya, that canoes
laden with cocoa-nuts are upset in sailing too near the wind, and
against the tide.
The inhabitants of Araya, whom we visited a second time on
returning from the Orinoco, have not forgotten that their peninsula
was one of the points first peopled by the Spaniards. They love to
talk of the pearl fishery; of the ruins of the castle of Santiago,
which they hope to see some day rebuilt; and of everything that
recalls to mind the ancient splendour of those countries. In China
and Japan those inventions are considered as recent, which have not
been known above two thousand years; in the European colonies an
event appears extremely old, if it dates back three centuries, or
about the period of the discovery of America.
CHAPTER 1.6.
MOUNTAINS OF NEW ANDALUCIA.
VALLEY OF THE CUMANACOA.
SUMMIT OF THE COCOLLAR.
MISSIONS OF THE CHAYMA INDIANS.
Our first visit to the peninsula of Araya was soon succeeded by an
excursion to the mountains of the missions of the Chayma Indians,
where a variety of interesting objects claimed our attention. We
entered on a country studded with forests, and visited a convent
surrounded by palm-trees and arborescent ferns. It was situated in
a narrow valley, where we felt the enjoyment of a cool and
delicious climate, in the centre of the torrid zone. The
surrounding mountains contain caverns haunted by thousands of
nocturnal birds; and, what affects the imagination more than all
the wonders of the physical world, we find beyond these mountains a
people lately nomad, and still nearly in a state of nature, wild
without being barbarous. It was in the promontory of Paria that
Columbus first descried the continent; there terminate these
valleys, laid waste alternately by the warlike anthropophagic Carib
and by the commercial and polished nations of Europe. At the
beginning of the sixteenth century the ill-fated Indians of the
coasts of Carupano, of Macarapan, and of Caracas, were treated in
the same manner as the inhabitants of the coast of Guinea in our
days. The soil of the islands was cultivated, the vegetable produce
of the Old World was transplanted thither, but a regular system of
colonization remained long unknown on the New Continent. If the
Spaniards visited its shores, it was only to procure, either by
violence or exchange, slaves, pearls, grains of gold, and
dye-woods; and endeavours were made to ennoble the motives of this
insatiable avarice by the pretence of enthusiastic zeal in the
cause of religion.
The trade in the copper-coloured Indians was accompanied by the
same acts of inhumanity as that which characterizes the traffic in
African negroes; it was attended also by the same result, that of
rendering both the conquerors and the conquered more ferocious.
Thence wars became more frequent among the natives; prisoners were
dragged from the inland countries to the coast, to be sold to the
whites, who Loaded them with chains in their ships.
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