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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I Accepted These Obliging Offers And Was Received With The Utmost
Kindness By Captain Garnier, Who Had Made The Voyage
To the north-west
coast of America with Vancouver, and who appeared to be highly
interested in all I related
To him respecting the great cataracts of
Atures and Maypures, the bifurcation of the Orinoco and its
communication with the Amazon. He introduced to me several of his
officers who had been with Lord Macartney in China. I had not, during
the space of a year, enjoyed the society of so many well-informed
persons. They had learned from the English newspapers the object of my
enterprise. I was treated with great confidence and the commander gave
me up his own state-room. They gave me at parting the astronomical
Ephemerides for those years which I had not been able to procure in
France or Spain. I am indebted to Captain Garnier for the observations
I was enabled to make on the satellites beyond the equator and I feel
it a duty to record here the gratitude I feel for his kindness. Coming
from the forests of Cassiquiare, and having been confined during whole
months to the narrow circle of missionary life, we felt a high
gratification at meeting for the first time with men who had sailed
round the world, and whose ideas were enlarged by so extensive and
varied a course. I quitted the English vessel with impressions which
are not yet effaced from my remembrance, and which rendered me more
than ever satisfied with the career on which I had entered.
We continued our passage on the following day; and were surprised at
the depth of the channels between the Caracas Islands, where the sloop
worked her way through them almost touching the rocks. How much do
these calcareous islets, of which the form and direction call to mind
the great catastrophe that separated from them the mainland, differ in
aspect from the volcanic archipelago on the north of Lanzerote where
the hills of basalt seem to have been heaved up from the bottom of the
sea! Numbers of pelicans and of flamingos, which fished in the nooks
or harassed the pelicans in order to seize their prey, indicated our
approach to the coast of Cumana. It is curious to observe at sunrise
how the sea-birds suddenly appear and animate the scene, reminding us,
in the most solitary regions, of the activity of our cities at the
dawn of day. At nine in the morning we reached the gulf of Cariaco
which serves as a roadstead to the town of Cumana. The hill, crowned
by the castle of San Antonio, stood out, prominent from its whiteness,
on the dark curtain of the inland mountains. We gazed with interest on
the shore, where we first gathered plants in America, and where, some
months later, M. Bonpland had been in such danger. Among the cactuses,
that rise in columns twenty feet high, appear the Indian huts of the
Guaykeries.
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