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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There Are Scarcely Seven Hundred Inhabitants:
And, Excepting In The Village Of Mariguitar, We Saw Only
Plantations Of Cocoa-Trees,
Which are the olives of the country.
This palm occupies on both continents a zone, of which the mean
temperature
Of the year is not below 20 degrees.* (* The cocoa-tree
grows in the northern hemisphere from the equator to latitude 28
degrees. Near the equator we find it from the plains to the height
of 700 toises above the level of the sea.) It is, like the
chamaerops of the basin of the Mediterranean, a true palm-tree of
the coast. It prefers salt to fresh water; and flourishes less
inland, where the air is not loaded with saline particles, than on
the shore. When cocoa-trees are planted in Terra Firma, or in the
Missions of the Orinoco, at a distance from the sea, a considerable
quantity of salt, sometimes as much as half a bushel, is thrown
into the hole which receives the nut. Among the plants cultivated
by man, the sugar-cane, the plantain, the mammee-apple, and
alligator-pear (Laurus persea), alone have the property of the
cocoa-tree; that of being watered equally well with fresh and salt
water. This circumstance is favourable to their migrations; and if
the sugarcane of the sea-shore yield a syrup that is a little
brackish, it is believed at the same time to be better fitted for
the distillation of spirit than the juice produced from the canes
in inland situations.
The cocoa-tree, in the other parts of America, is in general
cultivated around farm-houses, and the fruit is eaten; in the gulf
of Cariaco, it forms extensive plantations. In a fertile and moist
ground, the tree begins to bear fruit abundantly in the fourth
year; but in dry soils it bears only at the expiration of ten
years. The duration of the tree does not in general exceed eighty
or a hundred years; and its mean height at that age is from seventy
to eighty feet. This rapid growth is so much the more remarkable,
as other palm-trees, for instance, the moriche,* (* Mauritia
flexuosa.) and the palm of Sombrero,* (* Corypha tectorum.) the
longevity of which is very great, frequently do not attain a
greater height than fourteen or eighteen feet in the space of sixty
years. 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.
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