Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 3 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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Batabano Was Then A Poor Village And Its Church Had Been Completed
Only A Few Years Previously.
The Sienega begins at the distance of
half a league from the village; it is a tract of marshy soil,
extending from the Laguna de Cortez as far as the mouth of the Rio
Xagua, on a length of sixty leagues from west to east.
At Batabano it
is believed that in those regions the sea continues to gain upon the
land, and that the oceanic irruption was particularly remarkable at
the period of the great upheaving which took place at the end of the
eighteenth century, when the tobacco mills disappeared, and the Rio
Chorrera changed its course. Nothing can be more gloomy than the
aspect of these marshes around Batabano. Not a shrub breaks the
monotony of the prospect: a few stunted trunks of palm-trees rise like
broken masts, amidst great tufts of Junceae and Irides. As we stayed
only one night at Batabano, I regretted much that I was unable to
obtain precise information relative to the two species of crocodiles
which infest the Sienega. The inhabitants give to one of these animals
the name of cayman, to the other that of crocodile; or, as they say
commonly in Spain, of cocodrilo. They assured us that the latter has
most agility, and measures most in height: his snout is more pointed
than that of the cayman, and they are never found together. The
crocodile is very courageous and is said to climb into boats when he
can find a support for his tail. He frequently wanders to the distance
of a league from the Rio Cauto and the marshy coast of Xagua to devour
the pigs on the islands. This animal is sometimes fifteen feet long,
and will, it is said, pursue a man on horseback, like the wolves in
Europe; while the animals exclusively called caymans at Batabano are
so timid that people bathe without apprehension in places where they
live in bands. These peculiarities, and the name of cocodrilo, given
at the island of Cuba, to the most dangerous of the carnivorous
reptiles, appear to me to indicate a different species from the great
animals of the Orinoco, Rio Magdalena and Saint Domingo. In other
parts of the Spanish American continent the settlers, deceived by the
exaggerated accounts of the ferocity of crocodiles in Egypt, allege
that the real crocodile is only found in the Nile. Zoologists have,
however, ascertained that there are in America caymans or alligators
with obtuse snouts, and legs not indented, and crocodiles with pointed
snouts and indented legs; and in the old continent, both crocodiles
and gaviales. The Crocodilus acutus of San Domingo, in which I cannot
hitherto specifically distinguish the crocodiles of the great rivers
of the Orinoco and the Magdalena, has, according to Cuvier, so great a
resemblance to the crocodile of the Nile,* that it required a minute
examination to prove that the rule laid down by Buffon relative to the
distribution of species between the tropical regions of the two
continents was correct.
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