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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The State
Of Salvador, Belonging To The Confederation Of Central America, Now
Throws 12,000 Tercios Annually, Or 1,800,
000 pounds of indigo into
trade; an exportation which amounts to more than 2,000,000 piastres.
The cultivation of
Wheat succeeds (to the great astonishment of
travellers who have passed through Mexico), near the Quatro Villas, at
small heights above the level of the ocean, though in general it is
very limited. The flour is fine; but colonial productions are more
tempting, and the plains of the United States - that Crimea of the New
World - yield harvests too abundant for the commerce of native cereals
to be efficaciously protected by the prohibitive system of the
custom-house, in an island near the mouth of the Mississippi and the
Delaware. Analogous difficulties oppose the cultivation of flax, hemp,
and the vine. Possibly the inhabitants of Cuba are themselves ignorant
of the fact that, in the first years of the conquest by the Spaniards,
wine was made in their island of wild grapes.* (* De muchas parras
monteses con ubas se ha cogido vino, aunque algo agrio. [From several
grape-bearing vines which grow in the mountains, they extract a kind
of wine; but it is very acid.] Herera Dec. 1 page 233. Gabriel de
Cabrera found a tradition at Cuba similar to that which the people of
Semitic race have of Noah experiencing for the first time the effect
of a fermented liquor. He adds that the idea of two races of men, one
naked, another clothed, is linked to the American tradition. Has
Cabrera, preoccupied by the rites of the Hebrews, imperfectly
interpreted the words of the natives, or, as seems more probable, has
he added something to the analogies of the woman-serpent, the conflict
of two brothers, the cataclysm of water, the raft of Coxcox, the
exploring bird, and many other things that teach us incontestably that
there existed a community of antique traditions between the nations of
the two worlds? Views of the Cordilleras and Monuments of America.)
This kind of vine, peculiar to America, has given rise to the general
error that the true Vitis vinifera is common to the two continents.
The Parras monteses which yields the somewhat sour wine of the island
of Cuba, was probably gathered on the Vitis tiliaefolia which Mr.
Willdenouw has described from our herbals. In no part of the northern
hemisphere has the vine hitherto been cultivated with the view of
producing wine south of the 27 degrees 48 minutes, or the latitude of
the island of Ferro, one of the Canaries, and of 29 degrees 2 minutes,
or the latitude of Bushire in Persia.
WAX.
This is not the produce of native bees (the Melipones of Latreille),
but of bees brought from Europe by way of Florida. The trade in wax
has only become important since 1772. The exportation of the whole
island, which from 1774 to 1779 was only 2700 arrobas (average year),
was estimated in 1803, including contraband, at 42,700 arrobas, of
which 25,000 were destined for Vera Cruz.
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