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 Great Square
Of San Fernando, In The Centre Of The Village, Contains The Church,
The Dwelling Of The Missionary, And A Very Humble-Looking Edifice
Pompously Called The King's House (Casa Del Rey).
This is a
caravanserai, destined for lodging travellers; and, as we often
experienced, infinitely valuable in a country where the name of an
inn is still unknown.
The Casas del Rey are to be found in all the
Spanish colonies, and may be deemed an imitation of the tambos of
Peru, which were established in conformity with the laws of Manco
Capac.
We had been recommended to the friars who govern the Missions of
the Chayma Indians, by their syndic, who resides at Cumana. This
recommendation was the more useful to us, as the missionaries,
either from zeal for the purity of the morals of their
parishioners, or to conceal the monastic system from the indiscreet
curiosity of strangers, often adhere with rigour to an old
regulation, by which a white man of the secular state is not
permitted to sojourn more than one night in an Indian village. The
Missions form (I will not say according to their primitive and
canonical institutions, but in reality) a distinct and nearly
independent hierarchy, the views of which seldom accord with those
of the secular clergy.
The missionary of San Fernando was a Capuchin, a native of Aragon,
far advanced in years, but strong and healthy. His extreme
corpulency, his hilarity, the interest he took in battles and
sieges, ill accorded with the ideas we form in northern countries
of the melancholy reveries and the contemplative life of
missionaries.
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