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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It Results From These Statements That Nearly Two-Thirds
Of The Population Of A Province Of Sixteen Thousand Eight Hundred
Square leagues are found concentrated between the Rio Imataca and the
town of Santo Thome del Angostura, on a space
Of ground only
fifty-five leagues in length, and thirty in breadth. Both of these
monastic governments are equally inaccessible to Whites, and form
status in statu. The first, that of the Observantins, I have described
from my own observations; it remains for me to record here the notions
I could procure respecting the second of these governments, that of
the Catalonian Capuchins. Fatal civil dissensions and epidemic fevers
have of late years diminished the long-increasing prosperity of the
missions of the Carony; but, notwithstanding these losses, the region
which we are going to examine is still highly interesting with respect
to political economy.
The missions of the Catalonian Capuchins, which in 1804 contained at
least sixty thousand head of cattle grazing in the savannahs, extend
from the eastern banks of the Carony and the Paragua as far as the
banks of the Imataca, the Curumu, and the Cuyuni; at the south-east
they border on English Guiana, or the colony of Essequibo; and toward
the south, in going up the desert banks of the Paragua and the
Paraguamasi, and crossing the Cordillera of Pacaraimo, they touch the
Portuguese settlements on the Rio Branco. The whole of this country is
open, full of fine savannahs, and no way resembling that through which
we passed on the Upper Orinoco. The forests become impenetrable only
on advancing toward the south; on the north are meadows intersected
with woody hills. The most picturesque scenes lie near the falls of
the Carony, and in that chain of mountains, two hundred and fifty
toises high, which separates the tributary streams of the Orinoco from
those of the Cuyuni. There are situate the Villa de Upata,* the
capital of the missions, Santa Maria, and Cupapui. (* Founded in 1762.
Population in 1797, 657 souls; in 1803, 769 souls. The most populous
villages of these missions, Alta Gracia, Cupapui, Santa Rosa de Cura,
and Guri, had between 600 and 900 inhabitants in 1797; but in 1818
epidemic fevers diminished the population more than a third. In some
missions these diseases have swept away nearly half of the
inhabitants.) Small table-lands afford a healthy and temperate
climate. Cacao, rice, cotton, indigo, and sugar grow in abundance
wherever a virgin soil, covered with a thick coat of grasses, is
subjected to cultivation. The first Christian settlements in those
countries are not, I believe, of an earlier date than 1721. The
elements of which the present population is composed are the three
Indian races of the Guayanos, the Caribs and the Guaycas. The last are
a people of mountaineers and are far from being so diminutive in size
as the Guaycas whom we found at Esmeralda. It is difficult to fix them
to the soil; and the three most modern missions in which they have
been collected, those of Cura, Curucuy, and Arechica, are already
destroyed.
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