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 393 of 407 - First - Home
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!
The valley of the Tuy has its 'gold mine,' like almost every part
of America inhabited by whites, and backed by primitive mountains.
I was assured, that in 1780, foreign gold-gatherers had been
engaged in picking up grains of that metal, and had established a
place for washing the sand in the Quebrada del Oro. An overseer of
a neighbouring plantation had followed these indications; and after
his death, a waistcoat with gold buttons being found among his
clothes, this gold, according to the logic of the people here,
could only have proceeded from a vein, which the falling in of the
earth had rendered invisible. In vain I objected, that I could not,
by the mere view of the soil, without digging a large trench in the
direction of the vein, judge of the existence of the mine; I was
compelled to yield to the desire of my hosts. For twenty years past
the overseer's waistcoat had been the subject of conversation in
the country. Gold extracted from the bosom of the earth is far more
alluring in the eyes of the vulgar, than that which is the produce
of agricultural industry, favoured by the fertility of the soil,
and the mildness of the climate.
North-west of the Hacienda del Tuy, in the northern range of the
chain of the coast, we find a deep ravine, called the Quebrada
Seca, because the torrent, by which it was formed, loses its waters
through the crevices of the rock, before it reaches the extremity
of the ravine. The whole of this mountainous country is covered
with thick vegetation. We there found the same verdure as had
charmed us by its freshness in the mountains of Buenavista and Las
Lagunetas, wherever the ground rises as high as the region of the
clouds, and where the vapours of the sea have free access.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 393 of 407
Words from 203952 to 204475
of 211363