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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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.
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