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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On Entering The Streets Of Santa Cruz, We Felt A Suffocating Heat,
Though The Thermometer Was Not Above Twenty-Five Degrees.
Those who
have for a long time inhaled the air of the sea suffer every time
they land; not
Because this air contains more oxygen than the air
on shore, as has been erroneously supposed, but because it is less
charged with those gaseous combinations, which the animal and
vegetable substances, and the mud resulting from their
decomposition, pour into the atmosphere. Miasms that escape
chemical analysis have a powerful effect on our organs, especially
when they have not for a long while been exposed to the same kind
of irritation.
Santa Cruz, the Anaza of the Guanches, is a neat town, with a
population of 8000 souls. I was not struck with the vast number of
monks and secular ecclesiastics, which travellers have thought
themselves bound to find in every country under the Spanish
government; nor shall I stop to enter into the description of the
churches; the library of the Dominicans, which contains scarcely a
few hundred volumes; the mole, where the inhabitants assemble to
inhale the freshness of the evening breeze; or the famed monument
of Carrara marble, thirty feet high, dedicated to Our Lady of
Candelaria, in memory of the miraculous appearance of the Virgin,
in 1392, at Chimisay, near Guimar. The port of Santa Cruz may be
considered as a great caravanserai, on the road to America and the
Indies. Every traveller who writes the narrative of his adventures,
begins by a description of Madeira and Teneriffe; and if in the
natural history of these islands there yet remains an immense field
untrodden, we must admit that the topography of the little towns of
Funchal, Santa Cruz, Laguna, and Orotava, leaves scarcely anything
untold.
The recommendation of the court of Madrid procured for us, in the
Canaries, as in all the other Spanish possessions, the most
satisfactory reception. The captain-general gave us immediate
permission to examine the island. Colonel Armiaga, who commanded a
regiment of infantry, received us into his house with kind
hospitality. We could not cease admiring the banana, the papaw
tree, the Poinciana pulcherrima, and other plants, which we had
hitherto seen only in hot-houses, cultivated in his garden in the
open air. The climate of the Canaries however is not warm enough to
ripen the real Platano Arton, with triangular fruit from seven to
eight inches long, and which, requiring a temperature of 24
centesimal degrees, does not flourish even in the valley of
Caracas. The bananas of Teneriffe are those named by the Spanish
planters Camburis or Guineos, and Dominicos. The Camburi, which
suffers least from cold, is cultivated with success even at Malaga,
where the temperature is only 18 degrees; but the fruit we see
occasionally at Cadiz comes from the Canary Islands by vessels
which make the passage in three or four days. In general, the musa,
known by every people under the torrid zone, though hitherto never
found in a wild state, has as great a variety of fruit as our apple
and pear trees.
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