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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We Sent One Collection By Way
Of England To Germany, Another By Way Of Cadiz To France, And A Third
Remained At The Havannah.
We had reason to congratulate ourselves on
this foresight:
Each collection contained nearly the same species, and
no precautions were neglected to have the cases, if taken by English
or French vessels, remitted to Sir Joseph Banks or to the professors
of natural history at the Museum at Paris. It happened fortunately
that the manuscripts which I at first intended to send with the
collection to Cadiz were not intrusted to our much esteemed friend and
fellow traveller, Fray Juan Gonzales, of the order of the Observance
of St. Francis, who had followed us to the Havannah with the view of
returning to Spain. He left the island of Cuba soon after us, but the
vessel in which he sailed foundered on the coast of Africa, and the
cargo and crew were all lost. By this event we lost some of the
duplicates of our herbals, and what was more important, all the
insects which M. Bonpland had with great difficulty collected during
our voyage to the Orinoco and the Rio Negro. By a singular fatality,
we remained two years in the Spanish colonies without receiving a
single letter from Europe; and those which arrived in the three
following years made no mention of what we had transmitted. The reader
may imagine my uneasiness for the fate of a journal which contained
astronomical observations and barometrical measurements, of which I
had not made any copy.
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