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 Great Mole, Constructed
With Wood, And Very Useful To Commerce, Was Damaged In Discharging
Pieces Of Artillery.
It is entirely destroyed, and it was undecided
whether it would be best to reconstruct it with masonry, according to
the project of Don Luis de Bassecourt, or to open the bar of Guaurabo
by dredging it.
The great disadvantage of Puerto de Casilda is the
want of fresh water, which vessels have to procure at the distance of
a league.
We passed a very agreeable evening in the house of one of the richest
inhabitants, Don Antonio Padron, where we found assembled at a
tertulia all the good company of Trinidad. We were again struck with
the gaiety and vivacity that distinguish the women of Cuba. 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.
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