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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I Never Met With
More Agreeable Bathing Than In The Tuy.
The water, as clear as
crystal, preserves even during the day a temperature of 18.6
degrees; a considerable coolness for these climates, and for a
height of three hundred toises; but the sources of the river are in
the surrounding mountains.
The house of the proprietor, situated on
a hillock, of fifteen or twenty toises of elevation, is surrounded
by the huts of the negroes. Those who are married provide food for
themselves; and here, as everywhere else in the valleys of Aragua,
a small spot of ground is allotted to them to cultivate. They
labour on that ground on Saturdays and Sundays, the only days in
the week on which they are free. They keep poultry, and sometimes
even a pig. Their masters boast of their happiness, as in the north
of Europe the great landholders love to descant upon the ease
enjoyed by peasants who are attached to the glebe. On the day of
our arrival we saw three fugitive negroes brought back; they were
slaves newly purchased. I dreaded having to witness one of those
punishments which, wherever slavery prevails, destroys all the
charm of a country life. Happily these blacks were treated with
humanity.
In this plantation, as in all those of the province of Venezuela,
three species of sugar-cane can be distinguished even at a distance
by the colour of their leaves; the old Creole sugar-cane, the
Otaheite cane, and the Batavia cane.
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