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 Are
Happy Gifts Of Nature To Which The Refinements Of European
Civilization Might Lend Additional Charms But Which, Nevertheless,
Please In Their Primitive Simplicity.
We quitted Trinidad on the night
of the 15th March.
The municipality caused us to be conducted to the
mouth of the Rio Guaurabo in a fine carriage lined with old crimson
damask; and, to add to our confusion, an ecclesiastic, the poet of the
place, habited in a suit of velvet notwithstanding the heat of the
climate, celebrated, in a sonnet, our voyage to the Orinoco.
On the road leading to the port we were forcibly struck by a spectacle
which our stay of two years in the hottest part of the tropics might
have rendered familiar to us; but previously I had nowhere seen such
an innumerable quantity of phosphorescent insects.* (* Cocuyo, Elater
noctilucus.) The grass that overspread the ground, the branches and
foliage of the trees, all shone with that reddish and moveable light
which varies in its intensity at the will of the animal by which it is
produced. It seemed as though the starry firmament reposed on the
savannah. In the hut of the poorest inhabitants of the country,
fifteen cocuyos, placed in a calabash pierced with holes, afford
sufficient light to search for anything during the night. To shake the
calabash forcibly is all that is necessary to excite the animal to
increase the intensity of the luminous discs situated on each side of
its body. The people of the country remark, with a simple truth of
expression, that calabashes filled with cocuyos are lanterns always
ready lighted. They are, in fact, only extinguished by the sickness or
death of the insects, which are easily fed with a little sugar-cane. A
young woman at Trinidad de Cuba told us that during a long and
difficult passage from the main land, she always made use of the
phosphorescence of the cocuyos, when she gave suck to her child at
night; the captain of the ship would allow no other light on board,
from the fear of corsairs.
As the breeze freshened in the direction of north-east we sought to
avoid the group of the Caymans but the current drove us towards those
islands. Sailing to south 1/4 south-east, we gradually lost sight of
the palm-covered shore, the hills rising above the town of Trinidad
and the lofty mountains of the island of Cuba. There is something
solemn in the aspect of land from which the voyager is departing and
which he sees sinking by degrees below the horizon of the sea. The
interest of this impression was heightened at the period to which I
here advert; when Saint Domingo was the centre of great political
agitations, and threatened to involve the other islands in one of
those sanguinary struggles which reveal to man the ferocity of his
nature. These threatened dangers were happily averted; the storm was
appeased on the spot which gave it birth; and a free black population,
far from troubling the peace of the neighbouring islands, has made
some steps in the progress of civilization and has promoted the
establishment of good institutions.
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