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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When Well Prepared, It Is Limpid,
Inodorous, And Scarcely Yellow.
The missionaries compare it to the
best olive oil, and it is used not merely for burning in lamps, but
for cooking.
It is not easy, however, to procure oil of turtles' eggs
quite pure. It has generally a putrid smell, owing to the mixture of
eggs in which the young are already formed.
I acquired some general statistical notions on the spot, by consulting
the missionary of Uruana, his lieutenant, and the traders of
Angostura. The shore of Uruana furnishes one thousand botijas, or jars
of oil, annually. The price of each jar at Angostura varies from two
piastres to two and a half. We may admit that the total produce of the
three shores, where the cosecha, or gathering of eggs, is annually
made, is five thousand botijas. Now as two hundred eggs yield oil
enough to fill a bottle (limeta), it requires five thousand eggs for a
jar or botija of oil. Estimating at one hundred, or one hundred and
sixteen, the number of eggs that one tortoise produces, and reckoning
that one third of these is broken at the time of laying, particularly
by the mad tortoises, we may presume that, to obtain annually five
thousand jars of oil, three hundred and thirty thousand arrau
tortoises, the weight of which amounts to one hundred and sixty-five
thousand quintals, must lay thirty-three millions of eggs on the three
shores where this harvest is gathered. The results of these
calculations are much below the truth.
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