Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
- Page 200 of 208 - First - Home
We Shall Here Again Remind The Reader That The Group
Of The Mountains Of Los Teques, Eight Hundred And Fifty Toises
High, Separates Two Longitudinal Valleys, Formed In Gneiss,
Granite, And Mica-Slate.
The most eastern of these valleys,
containing the capital of Caracas, is 200 toises higher than the
western valley, which may be considered as the centre of
agricultural industry.
Having been for a long time accustomed to a moderate temperature,
we found the plains of the Tuy extremely hot, although the
thermometer kept, in the day-time, between eleven in the morning
and five in the afternoon, at only 23 or 24 degrees. The nights
were delightfully cool, the temperature falling as low as 17.5
degrees. As the heat gradually abated, the air became more and more
fragrant with the odour of flowers. We remarked above all the
delicious perfume of the Lirio hermoso,* (* Pancratium undulatum.)
a new species of pancratium, of which the flower, eight or nine
inches long, adorns the banks of the Rio Tuy. We spent two very
agreeable days at the plantation of Don Jose de Manterola, who in
his youth had accompanied the Spanish embassy to Russia. The farm
is a fine plantation of sugar-canes; and the ground is as smooth as
the bottom of a drained lake. The Rio Tuy winds through districts
covered with plantains, and a little wood of Hura crepitans,
Erythrina corallodendron, and fig-trees with nymphaea leaves. The
bed of the river is formed of pebbles of quartz. I never met with
more agreeable bathing than in the Tuy. The water, as clear as
crystal, preserves even during the day a temperature of 18.6
degrees; a considerable coolness for these climates, and for a
height of three hundred toises; but the sources of the river are in
the surrounding mountains. The house of the proprietor, situated on
a hillock, of fifteen or twenty toises of elevation, is surrounded
by the huts of the negroes. Those who are married provide food for
themselves; and here, as everywhere else in the valleys of Aragua,
a small spot of ground is allotted to them to cultivate. They
labour on that ground on Saturdays and Sundays, the only days in
the week on which they are free. They keep poultry, and sometimes
even a pig. Their masters boast of their happiness, as in the north
of Europe the great landholders love to descant upon the ease
enjoyed by peasants who are attached to the glebe. On the day of
our arrival we saw three fugitive negroes brought back; they were
slaves newly purchased. I dreaded having to witness one of those
punishments which, wherever slavery prevails, destroys all the
charm of a country life. Happily these blacks were treated with
humanity.
In this plantation, as in all those of the province of Venezuela,
three species of sugar-cane can be distinguished even at a distance
by the colour of their leaves; the old Creole sugar-cane, the
Otaheite cane, and the Batavia cane. The first has a deep-green
leaf, the stem not very thick, and the knots rather near together.
This sugar-cane was the first introduced from India into Sicily,
the Canary Islands, and West Indies. The second is of a lighter
green; and its stem is higher, thicker, and more succulent. The
whole plant exhibits a more luxuriant vegetation. We owe this plant
to the voyages of Bougainville, Cook, and Bligh. Bougainville
carried it to the Mauritius, whence it passed to Cayenne,
Martinique, and, since 1792, to the rest of the West India Islands.
The sugar-cane of Otaheite, called by the people of that island To,
is one of the most important acquisitions for which colonial
agriculture is indebted to the travels of naturalists. It yields
not only one-third more juice than the creolian cane on the same
space of ground; but from the thickness of its stem, and the
tenacity of its ligneous fibres, it furnishes much more fuel. This
last advantage is important in the West Indies, where the
destruction of the forests has long obliged the planters to use
canes deprived of juice, to keep up the fire under the boilers. But
for the knowledge of this new plant, together with the progress of
agriculture on the continent of Spanish America, and the
introduction of the East India and Java sugar, the prices of
colonial produce in Europe would have been much more sensibly
affected by the revolutions of St. Domingo, and the destruction of
the great sugar plantations of that island. The Otaheite sugar-cane
was carried from the island of Trinidad to Caracas, under the name
of Cana solera, and it passed from Caracas to Cucuta and San Gil in
the kingdom of New Grenada. In our days its cultivation during
twenty-five years has almost entirely removed the apprehension at
first entertained, that being transplanted to America, the cane
would by degrees degenerate, and become as slender as the creole
cane. The third species, the violet sugar-cane, called Cana de
Batavia, or de Guinea, is certainly indigenous in the island of
Java, where it is cultivated in preference in the districts of
Japara and Pasuruan.* (* Raffles History of Java tome 1 page 124.)
Its foliage is purple and very broad; and this cane is preferred in
the province of Caracas for rum. The tablones, or grounds planted
with sugar-canes, are divided by hedges of a colossal gramen; the
lata, or gynerium, with distich leaves. At the Tuy, men were
employed in finishing a dyke, to form a canal of irrigation. This
enterprise had cost the proprietor seven thousand piastres for the
expense of labour, and four thousand piastres for the costs of
lawsuits in which he had become engaged with his neighbours. While
the lawyers were disputing about a canal of which only one-half was
finished, Don Jose de Manterola began to doubt even of the
possibility of carrying the plan into execution. I took the level
of the ground with a lunette d'epreuve, on an artificial horizon,
and found, that the dam had been constructed eight feet too low.
What sums of money have I seen expended uselessly in the Spanish
colonies, for undertakings founded on erroneous levelling!
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 200 of 208
Words from 203118 to 204162
of 211363