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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A Light And Undulating
Smoke Rose To The Tops Of The Palm-Trees, And Imparted A Reddish
Hue To The Disk Of The Moon.
It was on a Sunday night, and the
slaves were dancing to the music of the guitar.
The people of
Africa, of negro race, are endowed with an inexhaustible store of
activity and gaiety. After having ended the labours of the week,
the slaves, on festival days, prefer to listless sleep the
recreations of music and dancing.
The bark in which we passed the gulf of Cariaco was very spacious.
Large skins of the jaguar, or American tiger, were spread for our
repose during the night. Though we had yet scarcely been two months
in the torrid zone, we had already become so sensible to the
smallest variation of temperature that the cold prevented us from
sleeping; while, to our surprise, we saw that the centigrade
thermometer was as high as 21.8 degrees. This fact is familiar to
those who have lived long in the Indies, and is worthy the
attention of physiologists. Bouguer relates, that when he reached
the summit of Montagne Pelee, in the island of Martinique, he and
his companions shivered with cold, though the heat was above 21.5
degrees. In reading the interesting narrative of captain Bligh,
who, in consequence of a mutiny on board the Bounty, was forced to
make a voyage of twelve hundred leagues in an open boat, we find
that that navigator, in the tenth and twelfth degrees of south
latitude, suffered much more from cold than from hunger. During our
abode at Guayaquil, in the month of January 1803, we observed that
the natives covered themselves, and complained of the cold, when
the thermometer sank to 23.8 degrees, whilst they felt the heat
suffocating at 30.5 degrees. Six or seven degrees were sufficient
to cause the opposite sensations of cold and heat; because, on
these coasts of South America, the ordinary temperature of the
atmosphere is twenty-eight degrees. The humidity, which modifies
the conducting power of the air for heat, contributes greatly to
these impressions. In the port of Guayaquil, as everywhere else in
the low regions of the torrid zone, the weather grows cool only
after storms of rain: and I have observed that when the thermometer
sinks to 23.8 degrees, De Luc's hygrometer keeps up to fifty and
fifty-two degrees; it is, on the contrary, at thirty-seven degrees
in a temperature of 30.5 degrees. At Cumana, during very heavy
showers, people in the streets are heard exclaiming, que hielo!
estoy emparamado;* though the thermometer exposed to the rain sinks
only to 21.5 degrees. (* "What an icy cold! I shiver as if I was on
the top of the mountains." The provincial word emparamarse can be
translated only by a very long periphrasis. Paramo, in Peruvian
puna, is a denomination found on all the maps of Spanish America.
In the colonies it signifies neither a desert nor a heath, but a
mountainous place covered with stunted trees, exposed to the winds,
and in which a damp cold perpetually reigns. In the torrid zone,
the paramos are generally from one thousand six hundred to two
thousand toises high. Snow often falls on them, but it remains only
a few hours; for we must not confound, as geographers often do, the
words paramo and puna with that of nevado, in Peruvian ritticapa, a
mountain which enters into the limits of perpetual snow. These
notions are highly interesting to geology and the geography of
plants; because, in countries where no height has been measured, we
may form an exact idea of the lowest height to which the
Cordilleras rise, on looking into the map for the words paramo and
nevado. As the paramos are almost continually enveloped in a cold
and thick fog, the people say at Santa Fe and at Mexico, cae un
paramito when a thick small rain falls, and the temperature of the
air sinks considerably. From paramo has been made emparamarse,
which signifies to be as cold as if we were on the ridge of the
Andes.) From these observations it follows, that between the
tropics, in plains where the temperature of the air is in the
day-time almost invariably above twenty-seven degrees, warmer
clothing during the night is requisite, whenever in a damp air the
thermometer sinks four or five degrees.
We landed about eight in the morning at the point of Araya, near
the new salt-works. A solitary house, near a battery of three guns,
the only defence of this coast, since the destruction of the fort
of Santiago, is the abode of the inspector. It is surprising that
these salt-works, which formerly excited the jealousy of the
English, Dutch, and other maritime powers, have not created a
village, or even a farm; a few huts only of poor Indian fishermen
are found at the extremity of the point of Araya.
This spot commands a view of the islet of Cubagua, the lofty hills
of Margareta, the ruins of the castle of Santiago, the Cerro de la
Vela, and the calcareous chain of the Brigantine, which bounds the
horizon towards the south. I availed myself of this view to take
the angles between these different points, from a basis of four
hundred toises, which I measured between the battery and the hill
called the Pena. As the Cerro de la Vela, the Brigantine, and the
castle of San Antonio at Cumana, are equally visible from the Punta
Arenas, situated to the west of the village of Maniquarez, the same
objects were available for an approximate determination of the
respective positions of several points, which are laid down in the
mineralogical chart of the peninsula of Araya.
The abundance of salt contained in the peninsula of Araya was known
to Alonzo Nino, when, following the tracks of Columbus, Ojeda, and
Amerigo Vespucci, he visited these countries in 1499. Though of all
the people on the globe the natives of South America consume the
least salt, because they scarcely eat anything but vegetables, it
nevertheless appears, that at an early period the Guayquerias dug
into the clayey and muriatiferous soil of Punta Arenas.
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