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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These Voyages Of 120 Or 150 Leagues, In An Open Sea, Out
Of Sight Of Land, Are Performed In Boats Without Decks, Like Those
Of The Ancients, Without Observations Of The Meridian Altitude Of
The Sun, Without Charts, And Generally Without A Compass.
The
Indian pilot directs his course at night by the pole-star, and in
the daytime by the sun and the wind.
I have seen Guaiqueries and
pilots of the Zambo caste, who could find the pole-star by the
direction of the pointers alpha and beta of the Great Bear, and
they seemed to me to steer less from the view of the pole-star
itself, than from the line drawn through these stars. It is
surprising, that at the first sight of land, they can find the
island of Guadaloupe, Santa Cruz, or Porto Rico; but the
compensation of the errors of their course is not always equally
fortunate. The boats, if they fall to leeward in making land, beat
up with great difficulty to the eastward, against the wind and the
current.
We descended rapidly the little river Manzanares, the windings of
which are marked by cocoa-trees, as the rivers of Europe are
sometimes bordered by poplars and old willows. On the adjacent arid
land, the thorny bushes, on which by day nothing is visible but
dust, glitter during the night with thousands of luminous sparks.
The number of phosphorescent insects augments in the stormy season.
The traveller in the equinoctial regions is never weary of admiring
the effect of those reddish and moveable fires, which, being
reflected by limpid water, blend their radiance with that of the
starry vault of heaven.
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