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 243 of 407 - First - Home
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.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 243 of 407
Words from 125628 to 126136
of 211363