Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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On Recapitulating The Observations Here Recorded, We See, That Within
The Tropics, The Mosquitos And Zancudos Do Not Rise On
The slope of
the Cordilleras* toward the temperate region, where the mean heat is
below 19 or 20 degrees (* The
Culex pipiens of Europe does not, like
the culex of the torrid zone, shun mountainous places. Giesecke
suffered from these insects in Greenland, at Disco, in latitude 70
degrees. They are found in Lapland in summer, at three or four hundred
toises high, and at a temperature of 11 or 12 degrees.); and that,
with few exceptions, they shun the black waters, and dry and unwooded
spots.* (* Trifling modifications in the waters, or in the air, often
appear to prevent the development of the mosquitos. Mr. Bowdich
remarks that there are none at Coomassie, in the kingdom of the
Ashantees, though the town is surrounded by marshes, and though the
thermometer keeps up between seventeen and twenty-eight centesimal
degrees, day and night.) The atmosphere swarms with them much more in
the Upper than in the Lower Orinoco, because in the former the river
is surrounded with thick forests on its banks, and the skirts of the
forests are not separated from the river by a barren and extensive
beach. The mosquitos diminish on the New Continent with the diminution
of the water, and the destruction of the woods; but the effects of
these changes are as slow as the progress of cultivation. The towns of
Angostura, Nueva Barcelona, and Mompox, where from the want of police,
the streets, the great squares, and the interior of court-yards are
overgrown with brushwood, are sadly celebrated for the abundance of
zancudos.
People born in the country, whether whites, mulattoes, negroes, or
Indians, all suffer from the sting of these insects. But as cold does
not render the north of Europe uninhabitable, so the mosquitos do not
prevent men from dwelling in the countries where they abound, provided
that, by their situation and government, they afford resources for
agriculture and industry. The inhabitants pass their lives in
complaining of the insufferable torment of the mosquitos, yet,
notwithstanding these continual complaints, they seek, and even with a
sort of predilection, the commercial towns of Mompox, Santa Marta, and
Rio de la Hacha. Such is the force of habit in evils which we suffer
every hour of the day, that the three missions of San Borja, Atures,
and Esmeralda, where, to make use of an hyperbolical expression of the
monks, there are more mosquitos than air,* (* Mas moscas que aire.)
would no doubt become flourishing towns, if the Orinoco afforded
planters the same advantages for the exchange of produce, as the Ohio
and the Lower Mississippi.
It is a curious fact, that the whites born in the torrid zone may walk
barefoot with impunity, in the same apartment where a European
recently landed is exposed to the attack of the nigua or chegoe (Pulex
penetrans). This animal, almost invisible to the eye, gets under the
toe-nails, and there acquires the size of a small pea, by the quick
increase of its eggs, which are placed in a bag under the belly of the
insect. The nigua therefore distinguishes what the most delicate
chemical analysis could not distinguish, the cellular membrane and
blood of a European from those of a creole white. The mosquitos, on
the contrary, attack equally the natives and the Europeans; but the
effects of the sting are different in the two races of men. The same
venomous liquid, deposited in the skin of a copper-coloured man of
Indian race, and in that of a white man newly landed, causes no
swelling in the former, while in the latter it produces hard blisters,
greatly inflamed, and painful for several days; so different is the
action on the epidermis, according to the degree of irritability of
the organs in different races and different individuals!
I shall here recite several facts, which prove that the Indians, and
in general all the people of colour, at the moment of being stung,
suffer like the whites, although perhaps with less intensity of pain.
In the day-time, and even when labouring at the oar, the natives, in
order to chase the insects, are continually giving one another smart
slaps with the palm of the hand. They even strike themselves and their
comrades mechanically during their sleep. The violence of their blows
reminds one of the Persian tale of the bear that tried to kill with
his paw the insects on the forehead of his sleeping master. Near
Maypures we saw some young Indians seated in a circle and rubbing
cruelly each others' backs with the bark of trees dried at the fire.
Indian women were occupied, with a degree of patience of which the
copper-coloured race alone are capable, in extracting, by means of a
sharp bone, the little mass of coagulated blood that forms the centre
of every sting, and gives the skin a speckled appearance. One of the
most barbarous nations of the Orinoco, that of the Ottomacs, is
acquainted with the use of mosquito-curtains (mosquiteros) woven from
the fibres of the moriche palm-tree. At Higuerote, on the coast of
Caracas, the copper-coloured people sleep buried in the sand. In the
villages of the Rio Magdalena the Indians often invited us to stretch
ourselves as they did on ox-skins, near the church, in the middle of
the plaza grande, where they had assembled all the cows in the
neighbourhood. The proximity of cattle gives some repose to man. The
Indians of the Upper Orinoco and the Cassiquiare, seeing that M.
Bonpland could not prepare his herbal, owing to the continual torment
of the mosquitos, invited him to enter their ovens (hornitos). Thus
they call little chambers, without doors or windows, into which they
creep horizontally through a very low opening. When they have driven
away the insects by means of a fire of wet brushwood, which emits a
great deal of smoke, they close the opening of the oven.
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