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 Comparison Of These Scenes, Which Have
Again Relapsed Into A Savage State, Confirms What I Have Elsewhere
Advanced Relative To The Strange And Sometimes Retrograde Nature Of
Civilization In America.
On one side, the coast of Paria, the islands
of Cubagua and Marguerita; on the other, the Gulf of Uraba and Darien,
received the first Spanish colonists.
Gold and pearls, which were
there found in abundance, because from time immemorial they had been
accumulated in the hands of the natives, gave those countries a
popular celebrity from the beginning of the sixteenth century. At
Seville, Toledo, Pisa, Genoa and Antwerp those countries were viewed
like the realms of Ormuz and of Ind. The pontiffs of Rome mentioned
them in their bulls; and Bembo has celebrated them in those historical
pages which add lustre to the glory of Venice.
At the close of the fifteenth, and the beginning of the sixteenth
century, Europe saw, in those parts of the New World discovered by
Columbus, Ojeda, Vespucci and Rodrigo de Bastidas, only the advanced
capes of the vast territories of India and eastern Asia. The immense
wealth of those territories in gold, diamonds, pearls and spices had
been vaunted in the narratives of Benjamin de Tudela, Rubruquis, Marco
Polo and Mandeville. Columbus, whose imagination was excited by these
narrations, caused a deposition to be made before a notary, on the
12th of June, 1494, in which sixty of his companions, pilots, sailors
and passengers certified upon oath that the southern coast of Cuba was
a part of the continent of India.
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