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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"Cortes," Says Herrera,
"Paso A La Villa De San Cristoval Que A La Sazon Estaba En La Costa
Del Sur,
Y despues se paso a la Habana." [Cortes proceeded to the town
of San Cristoval, which at that time was
On the sea-coast, and
afterwards he repaired to the Havannah.]) In February, 1519, Cortes
assembled his whole fleet near cape San Antonio, probably on the spot
which still bears the name of Ensenada de Cortes, west of Batabano and
opposite to the island of Pinos. From thence, believing he should
better escape the snares laid for him by the governor, Velasquez, he
passed almost clandestinely to the coast of Mexico. Strange
vicissitude of events! the empire of Montezuma was shaken by a handful
of men who, from the western extremity of the island of Cuba, landed
on the coast of Yucatan; and in our days, three centuries later,
Yucatan, now a part of the new confederation of the free states of
Mexico, has nearly menaced with conquest the western coast of Cuba.
On the morning of the 11th March we visited Cayo Flamenco. I found the
latitude 21 degrees 59 minutes 39 seconds. The centre of this island
is depressed and only fourteen inches above the surface of the sea.
The water here is brackish while in other cayos it is quite fresh. The
mariners of Cuba attribute this freshness of the water to the action
of the sands in filtering sea-water, the same cause which is assigned
for the freshness of the lagunes of Venice. But this supposition is
not justified by any chemical analogy. The cayos are composed of
rocks, and not of sands, and their smallness renders it extremely
improbable that the pluvial waters should unite in a permanent lake.
Perhaps the fresh water of this chain of rocks comes from the
neighbouring coast, from the mountains of Cuba, by the effect of
hydrostatic pressure. This would prove a prolongation of the strata of
Jura limestone below the sea and a superposition of coral rock on that
limestone.* (* Eruptions of fresh water in the sea, near Baiae,
Syracuse and Aradus (in Phenicia) were known to the ancients. Strabo
lib. 16 page 754. The coral islands that surround Radak, especially
the low island of Otdia, furnish also fresh water. Chamisso in
Kotzebue's Entdekkungs-Reise volume 3 page 108.)
It is too general a prejudice to consider every source of fresh or
salt water to be merely a local phenomenon: currents of water
circulate in the interior of lands between strata of rocks of a
particular density or nature, at immense distances, like the floods
that furrow the surface of the globe. The learned engineer, Don
Francisco Le Maur, informed me that in the bay of Xagua, half a degree
east of the Jardinillos, there issue in the middle of the sea, springs
of fresh water, two leagues and a half from the coast. These springs
gush up with such force that they cause an agitation of the water
often dangerous for small canoes.
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