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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(* This Is A Long Narrow Gulf, Three
Miles From North To South, Similar To The Fiords Of Norway.) The
Family Of M. Navarete Were Waiting For Us With Impatience On The
Beach; And, Though Our Boat Carried A Large Sail, We Did Not Arrive At
Maniquarez Before Night.
We prolonged our stay at Cumana only a fortnight.
Having lost all hope
of the arrival of a packet from Corunna, we availed ourselves of an
American vessel, laden at Nueva Barcelona with salt provision for the
island of Cuba. We had now passed sixteen months on this coast and in
the interior of Venezuela, and on the 16th of November we parted from
our friends at Cumana to make the passage for the third time across
the gulf of Cariaco to Nueva Barcelona. The night was cool and
delicious. It was not without emotion that we beheld for the last time
the disc of the moon illuminating the summit of the cocoa-trees that
surround the banks of the Manzanares. The breeze was strong and in
less than six hours we anchored near the Morro of Nueva Barcelona,
where the vessel which was to take us to the Havannah was ready to
sail.
CHAPTER 3.27.
POLITICAL STATE OF THE PROVINCES OF VENEZUELA.
EXTENT OF TERRITORY.
POPULATION.
NATURAL PRODUCTIONS.
EXTERNAL TRADE.
COMMUNICATIONS BETWEEN THE DIFFERENT PROVINCES COMPRISING THE REPUBLIC
OF COLUMBIA.
Before I quit the coasts of Terra Firma and draw the attention of the
reader to the political importance of Cuba, the largest of the West
India Islands, I will collect into one point of view all those facts
which may lead to a just appreciation of the future relations of
commercial Europe with the united Provinces of Venezuela. When, soon
after my return to Germany, I published the Essai Politique sur la
Nouvelle-Espagne, I at the same time made known some of the facts I
had collected in relation to the territorial riches of South America.
This comparative view of the population, agriculture and commerce of
all the Spanish colonies was formed at a period when the progress of
civilization was restrained by the imperfection of social
institutions, the prohibitory system and other fatal errors in the
science of government. Since the time when I developed the immense
resources which the people of both North and South America might
derive from their own position and their relations with commercial
Europe and Asia, one of those great revolutions which from time to
time agitate the human race has changed the state of society in the
vast regions through which I travelled. The continental part of the
New World is at present in some sort divided between three nations of
European origin; one (and that the most powerful) is of Germanic race:
the two others belong by their language, their literature, and their
manners to Latin Europe. Those parts of the old world which advance
farthest westward, the Spanish Peninsula and the British Islands, are
those of which the colonies are most extensive; but four thousand
leagues of coast, inhabited solely by the descendants of Spaniards and
Portuguese, attest the superiority which in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries the peninsular nations had acquired, by their
maritime expeditions, over the navigators of other countries. It may
be fairly asserted that their languages, which prevail from California
to the Rio de la Plata and along the back of the Cordilleras, as well
as in the forests of the Amazon, are monuments of national glory that
will survive every political revolution.
The inhabitants of Spanish and Portuguese America form together a
population twice as numerous as the inhabitants of English race. The
French, Dutch, and Danish possessions of the new continent are of
small extent; but, to complete the general view of the nations which
may influence the destiny of the other hemisphere, we ought not to
forget the colonists of Scandinavian origin who are endeavouring to
form settlements from the peninsula of Alashka as far as California;
and the free Africans of Hayti who have verified the prediction made
by the Milanese traveller Benzoni in 1545. The situation of these
Africans in an island more than three times the size of Sicily, in the
middle of the West Indian Mediterranean, augments their political
importance. Every friend of humanity prays for the development of the
civilization which is advancing in so calm and unexpected a manner. As
yet Russian America is less like an agricultural colony than the
factories established by Europeans on the coast of Africa, to the
great misfortune of the natives; they contain only military posts,
stations of fishermen, and Siberian hunters. It is a curious
phenomenon to find the rites of the Greek Church established in one
part of America and to see two nations which inhabit the eastern and
western extremities of Europe (the Russians and the Spaniards) thus
bordering on each other on a continent on which they arrived by
opposite routes; but the almost savage state of the unpeopled coasts
of Ochotsk and Kamtschatka, the want of resources furnished by the
ports of Asia, and the barbarous system hitherto adopted in the
Scandinavian colonies of the New World, are circumstances which will
hold them long in infancy. Hence it follows that if in the researches
of political economy we are accustomed to survey masses only, we
cannot but admit that the American continent is divided, properly
speaking, between three great nations of English, Spanish, and
Portuguese race. The first of these three nations, the
Anglo-Americans, is, next to the English of Europe, that whose flag
waves over the greatest extent of sea. Without any distant colonies,
its commerce has acquired a growth attained in the old world by that
nation alone which communicated to North America its language, its
literature, its love of labour, its predilection for liberty, and a
portion of its civil institutions.
The English and Portuguese colonists have peopled only the coasts
which lie opposite to Europe; the Castilians, on the contrary, in the
earliest period of the conquest, crossed the chain of the Andes and
made settlements in the most western regions.
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