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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AGRICULTURE.
When The Spaniards Began Their Settlements In The Islands And On The
Continent Of America Those Productions Of The Soil Chiefly Cultivated
Were, As In Europe, The Plants That Serve To Nourish Man.
This
primitive stage of the agricultural life of nations has been preserved
till the present time in Mexico, in Peru, in the cold and temperate
regions of Cundinamarca, in short, wherever the domination of the
whites comprehends a vast extent of territory.
The alimentary plants,
bananas, manioc, maize, the cereals of Europe, potatoes and quinoa,
have continued to be, at different heights above the level of the sea,
the basis of continental agriculture within the tropics. Indigo,
cotton, coffee and sugar-cane appear in those regions only in
intercalated groups. Cuba and the other islands of the archipelago of
the Antilles presented during the space of two centuries and a half a
uniform aspect: the same plants were cultivated which had nourished
the half-wild natives and the vast savannahs of the great islands were
peopled with numerous herds of cattle. Piedro de Atienza planted the
first sugar-canes in Saint Domingo about the year 1520; and
cylindrical presses, moved by water-wheels, were constructed.* (* On
the trapiches or molinos de agua of the sixteenth century see Oviedo,
Hist. nat. des Ind. lib. 4 cap. 8.) But the island of Cuba
participated little in these efforts of rising industry; and what is
very remarkable, in 1553, the historians of the Conquest* mention no
exportation of sugar except that of Mexican sugar for Spain and Peru.
(* Lopez de Gomara, Conquista de Mexico (Medina del Campo 1353) fol.
129.) Far from throwing into commerce what we now call colonial
produce, the Havannah, till the eighteenth century, exported only
skins and leather.
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