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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That Race
(Even In The Latitude Of Seventy-Five And Seventy-Six Degrees, Where
The Climate Is So Rigorous) Is Not In General So Diminutive As It Was
Long Believed To Be.
Ross' Voyage to the North.) In Guiana, the hordes
who live in the midst of the thickest forests are generally less tawny
than those who inhabit the shores of the Orinoco, and are employed in
fishing.
But this slight difference, which is alike found in Europe
between the artisans of towns and the cultivators of the fields or the
fishermen on the coasts, in no way explains the problem of the Indios
blancos. They are surrounded by other Indians of the woods (Indios del
monte) who are of a reddish-brown, although now exposed to the same
physical influences. The causes of these phenomena are very ancient,
and we may repeat with Tacitus, "est durans originis vis."
The fair-complexioned tribes, which we had an opportunity of seeing at
the mission of Esmeralda, inhabit part of a mountainous country lying
between the sources of six tributaries of the Orinoco; that is to say,
between the Padamo, the Jao, the Ventuari, the Erevato, the Aruy, and
the Paraguay.* (* They are six tributary streams on the right bank of
the Orinoco; the first three run towards the south, or the Upper
Orinoco; the three others towards the north, or the Lower Orinoco.)
The Spanish and Portuguese missionaries are accustomed to designate
this country more particularly by the name of Parima.* (* The name
Parima, which signifies water, great water, is applied sometimes, and
more especially, to the land washed by the Rio Parima, or Rio Branco
(Rio de Aguas Blancas), a stream running into the Rio Negro; sometimes
to the mountains (Sierra Parima), which divide the Upper and Lower
Orinoco.) Here, as in several other countries of Spanish America, the
savages have reconquered what had been wrested from them by
civilization, or rather by its precursors, the missionaries. The
expedition of the boundaries under Solano, and the extravagant zeal
displayed by a governor of Guiana for the discovery of El Dorado,
partially revived in the latter half of the eighteenth century that
spirit of enterprise which characterised the Spaniards at the period
of the discovery of America. In going along the Rio Padamo, a road was
observed across the forests and savannahs (the length of ten days'
journey), from Esmeralda to the sources of the Ventuari; and in two
days more, from those sources, by the Erevato, the missions on the Rio
Caura were reached. Two intelligent and enterprising men, Don Antonio
Santos and Captain Bareto, had established, with the aid of the
Miquiritares, a chain of military posts on this line from Esmeralda to
the Rio Erevato. These posts consisted of block-houses (casas
fuertes), mounted with swivels, such as I have already mentioned. The
soldiers, left to themselves, exercised all kinds of vexations on the
natives (Indians of peace), who had cultivated pieces of ground around
the casas fuertes; and the consequence was that, in 1776, several
tribes formed a league against the Spaniards.
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