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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We There Find, What Is
So Rare In That Country, A Garden, Artificial Clumps Of Trees, And On
The Border Of The Water, Upon A Rock Of Gneiss, A Pavilion With A
Mirador, Or Belvidere.
The view is delightful over the western part of
the lake, the surrounding mountains, and a forest of palm-trees that
separates Guacara from the city of Nueva Valencia.
The fields of
sugar-cane, from the soft verdure of the young reeds, resemble a vast
meadow. Everything denotes abundance; but it is at the price of the
liberty of the cultivators. At Mocundo, with two hundred and thirty
negroes, seventy-seven tablones, or cane-fields, are cultivated, each
of which, ten thousand varas square,* (* A tablon, equal to 1849
square toises, contains nearly an acre and one-fifth: a legal acre has
1344 square toises, and 1.95 legal acre is equal to one hectare.)
yields a net profit of two hundred or two hundred and forty piastres
a-year. The creole cane and the cane of Otaheite* are planted in the
month of April, the first at four, the second at five feet distance.
(* In the island of Palma, where in the latitude of 29 degrees the
sugar-cane is said to be cultivated as high as 140 toises above the
level of the Atlantic, the Otaheite cane requires more heat than the
Creole cane.) The cane ripens in fourteen months. It flowers in the
month of October, if the plant be sufficiently vigorous; but the top
is cut off before the panicle unfolds. In all the monocotyledonous
plants (for example, the maguey cultivated at Mexico for extracting
pulque, the wine-yielding palm-tree, and the sugar-cane), the
flowering alters the quality of the juices. The preparation of sugar,
the boiling, and the claying, are very imperfect in Terra Firma,
because it is made only for home consumption; and for wholesale,
papelon is preferred to sugar, either refined or raw. This papelon is
an impure sugar, in the form of little loaves, of a yellow-brown
colour. It contains a mixture of molasses and mucilaginous matter. The
poorest man eats papelon, as in Europe he eats cheese. It is believed
to have nutritive qualities. Fermented with water it yields the
guarapo, the favourite beverage of the people. In the province of
Caracas subcarbonate of potash is used, instead of lime, to purify the
juice of the sugar-cane. The ashes of the bucare, which is the
Erythrina corallodendrum, are preferred.
The sugar-cane was introduced very late, probably towards the end of
the sixteenth century, from the West India Islands, into the valleys
of Aragua. It was known in India, in China, and in all the islands of
the Pacific, from the most remote antiquity; and it was planted at
Khorassan, in Persia, as early as the fifth century of our era, in
order to obtain from it solid sugar.* (* The Indian name for the
sugar-cane is sharkara. Thence the word sugar.) The Arabs carried this
reed, so useful to the inhabitants of hot and temperate countries, to
the shores of the Mediterranean.
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