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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These Good People
Requested Us Mount Two By Two On The Same Horse; And, As The Heat Was
Excessive, We Accepted Their Offer.
The distance from the mouth of the
Rio Guaurabo to Trinidad is nearly four miles in a north-west
direction.
The road runs across a plain which seems as if it had been
levelled by a long sojourn of the waters. It is covered with
vegetation, to which the miraguama, a palm-tree with silvered leaves
(which we saw here for the first time), gives a peculiar character.*
(* Corypha miraguama. Probably the same species which struck Messrs.
John and William Fraser (father and son) in the vicinity of Matanzas.
Those two botanists, who introduced a great number of valuable plants
to the gardens of Europe, were shipwrecked on their voyage to the
Havannah from the United States, and saved themselves with difficulty
on the cayos at the entrance of the Old Channel, a few weeks before my
departure for Carthagena.) This fertile soil, although of tierra
colorada, requires only to be tilled and it would yield fruitful
harvests. A very picturesque view opens westward on the Lomas of San
Juan, a chain of calcareous mountains from 1800 to 2000 toises high
and very steep towards the south. Their bare and barren summits form
sometimes round blocks; and here and there rise up in points like
horns,* a little inclined. (* Wherever the rock is visible I perceived
compact limestone, whitish-grey, partly porous and partly with a
smooth fracture, as in the Jura formation.) Notwithstanding the great
lowering of the temperature during the season of the Nortes or north
winds, snow never falls; and only a hoar-frost (escarcha) is seen on
these mountains, as on those of Santiago. This absence of snow is
difficult to be explained. In emerging from the forest we perceived a
curtain of hills of which the southern slope is covered with houses;
this is the town of Trinidad, founded in 1514, by the governor Diego
Velasquez, on account of the rich mines of gold which were said to
have been discovered in the little valley of Rio Arimao.* (* This
river flows towards the east into the Bahia de Xagua.) The streets of
Trinidad have all a rapid descent: there, as in most parts of Spanish
America, it is complained that the Couquistadores chose very
injudiciously the sites for new towns.* (* It is questionable whether
the town founded by Velasquez was not situated in the plain and nearer
the ports of Casilda and Guaurabo. It has been suggested that the fear
of the French, Portuguese and English freebooters led to the
selection, even in inland places, of sites on the declivity of
mountains, whence, as from a watch-tower, the approach of the enemy
could be discerned; but it seems to me that these fears could have had
no existence prior to the government of Hernando de Soto. The Havannah
was sacked for the first time by French corsairs in 1539.) At the
northern extremity is the church of Nuestra Senora de la Popa, a
celebrated place of pilgrimage.
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