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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From the 5th of December, the pilots believed they took successively
the measurement at a distance of the island of Ranas (Morant Keys),
Cape Portland and Pedro Keys.
They may probably have been deceived in
several of these distances, which were taken from the mast-head. I
have elsewhere noted these measurements, not with the view of opposing
them to those which have been made by able English navigators in these
frequented latitudes, but merely to connect, in the same system of
observations, the points I determined in the forests of the Orinoco
and in the archipelago of the West Indies. The milky colour of the
waters warned us that we were on the eastern part of the bank; the
centigrade thermometer which at a distance from the bank and on the
surface of the sea had for several days kept at 27 and 27.3 degrees
(the air being at 21.2 degrees) sank suddenly to 25.7 degrees. The
weather was bad from the 4th to the 6th of December: it rained fast;
thunder rolled at a distance, and the gusts of wind from the
north-north-east became more and more violent. We were during some
part of the night in a critical position; we heard before us the noise
of the breakers over which we had to pass, and we could ascertain
their direction by the phosphoric gleam reflected from the foam of the
sea. The scene resembled the Raudal of Garzita and other rapids which
we had seen in the bed of the Orinoco.
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