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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But I Never Saw Any Colours Around Sirius,
Canopus, Or Acherner.
While the halo was visible at Cumana, the hygrometer denoted great
humidity; nevertheless the vapours appeared so perfectly in
solution, or rather so elastic and uniformly disseminated, that
they did not alter the transparency of the atmosphere.
The moon
arose after a storm of rain, behind the castle of San Antonio. As
soon as she appeared on the horizon, we distinguished two circles:
one large and whitish, forty-four degrees in diameter; the other a
small circle of 1 degree 43 minutes, displaying all the colours of
the rainbow. The space between the two circles was of the deepest
azure. At four degrees height, they disappeared, while the
meteorological instruments indicated not the slightest change in
the lower regions of the air. This phenomenon had nothing
extraordinary, except the great brilliancy of the colours, added to
the circumstance, that, according to the measures taken with
Ramsden's sextant, the lunar disk was not exactly in the centre of
the haloes. Without this actual measurement we might have thought
that the excentricity was the effect of the projection of the
circles on the apparent concavity of the sky.
If the situation of our house at Cumana was highly favourable for
the observation of the stars and meteorological phenomena, it
obliged us to be sometimes the witnesses of painful scenes during
the day. A part of the great square is surrounded with arcades,
above which is one of those long wooden galleries, common in warm
countries. This was the place where slaves, brought from the coast
of Africa, were sold. Of all the European governments Denmark was
the first, and for a long time the only power, which abolished the
traffic; yet notwithstanding that fact, the first negroes we saw
exposed for sale had been landed from a Danish slave-ship. What are
the duties of humanity, national honour, or the laws of their
country, to men stimulated by the speculations of sordid interest?
The slaves exposed to sale were young men from fifteen to twenty
years of age. Every morning cocoa-nut oil was distributed among
them, with which they rubbed their bodies, to give their skin a
black polish. The persons who came to purchase examined the teeth
of these slaves, to judge of their age and health; forcing open
their mouths as we do those of horses in a market. This odious
custom dates from Africa, as is proved by the faithful pictures
drawn by the inimitable Cervantes,* who after his long captivity
among the Moors, described the sale of Christian slaves at Algiers.
(* El Trato de Argel. Jorn. 2 Viage al Parnasso 1784 page 316.) It
is distressing to think that even at this day there exist European
colonists in the West Indies who mark their slaves with a hot iron,
to know them again if they escape. This is the treatment bestowed
on those "who save other men the labour of sowing, tilling, and
reaping."* (* La Bruyere Caracteres edition 1765 chapter 11 page
300. I will here cite a passage strongly characteristic of La
Bruyere's benevolent feeling for his fellow-creatures. "We find
(under the torrid zone) certain wild animals, male and female,
scattered through the country, black, livid, and all over scorched
by the sun, bent to the earth which they dig and turn up with
invincible perseverance. They have something like articulate
utterance; and when they stand up on their feet, they exhibit a
human face, and in fact these creatures are men.")
In 1800 the number of slaves did not exceed six thousand in the two
provinces of Cumana and Barcelona, when at the same period the
whole population was estimated at one hundred and ten thousand
inhabitants. The trade in African slaves, which the laws of the
Spaniards have never favoured, is almost as nothing on these coasts
where the trade in American slaves was carried on in the sixteenth
century with desolating activity. Macarapan, anciently called
Amaracapana, Cumana, Araya, and particularly New Cadiz, built on
the islet of Cubagua, might then be considered as commercial
establishments for facilitating the slave trade. Girolamo Benzoni
of Milan, who at the age of twenty-two visited Terra Firma, took
part in some expeditions in 1542 to the coasts of Bordones,
Cariaco, and Paria, to carry off the unfortunate natives, he
relates with simplicity, and often with a sensibility not common in
the historians of that time, the examples of cruelty of which he
was a witness. He saw the slaves dragged to New Cadiz, to be marked
on the forehead and on the arms, and for the payment of the quint
to the officers of the crown. From this port the Indians were sent
to the island of Haiti or St. Domingo, after having often changed
masters, not by way of sale, but because the soldiers played for
them at dice.
The first excursion we made was to the peninsula of Araya, and
those countries formerly celebrated for the slave-trade and the
pearl-fishery. We embarked on the Rio Manzanares, near the Indian
suburb, on the 19th of August, about two in the morning. The
principal objects of this excursion were, to see the ruins of the
castle of Araya, to examine the salt-works, and to make a few
geological observations on the mountains forming the narrow
peninsula of Maniquarez. The night was delightfully cool; swarms of
phosphorescent insects* glistened in the air (* Elater noctilucus.
), and over a soil covered with sesuvium, and groves of mimosa
which bordered the river. We know how common the glow-worm* (*
Lampyris italica, L. noctiluca.) is in Italy and in all the south
of Europe, but the picturesque effect it produces cannot be
compared to those innumerable, scattered, and moving lights, which
embellish the nights of the torrid zone, and seem to repeat on the
earth, along the vast extent of the savannahs, the brilliancy of
the starry vault of heaven.
When, on descending the river, we drew near plantations, or charas,
we saw bonfires kindled by the negroes.
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