Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, During the Years 1799-1804, Vol.3 — 10 - Chapter 3.26, Part 3

On quitting the mission of Cari, we had some difficulties to settle with our Indian muleteers.

They had discovered that we had brought skeletons with us from the cavern of Ataruipe; and they were fully persuaded that the beasts of burden which carried the bodies of their old relations would perish on the journey.

* (* See volume 2. 24. ) Every precaution we had taken was useless; nothing escapes a Carib's penetration and keen sense of smell, and it required all the authority of the missionary to forward our passage.

We had to cross the Rio Cari in a boat, and the Rio de agua clara, by fording, or, it may almost be said, by swimming.

The quicksands of the bed of this river render the passage very difficult at the season when the waters are high.

The strength of the current seems surprising in so flat a country; but the rivers of the plains are precipitated, to quote a correct observation of Pliny the younger,* "less by the declivity of their course than by their abundance, and as it were by their own weight."

(* Epist.

lib.

8 ep.

8. Clitumnus non loci devexitate, sed ipsa sui copia et quasi pondere impellitur.

) We had two bad stations, one at Matagorda and the other at Los Riecetos, before we reached the little town of Pao.

We beheld everywhere the same objects; small huts constructed of reeds, and roofed with leather; men on horseback armed with lances, guarding the herds; herds of cattle half wild, remarkable for their uniform colour, and disputing the pasturage with horses and mules.

No sheep or goats are found on these immense plains.

Sheep do not thrive well in equinoctial America, except on table-lands above a thousand toises high, where their fleece is long and sometimes very fine.

In the burning climate of the plains, where the wolves give place to jaguars, these small ruminating animals, destitute of means of defence, and slow in their movements, cannot be preserved in any considerable numbers.

We arrived on the 15th of July at the Fundacion, or Villa, del Pao, founded in 1744, and situated very favourably for a commercial station between Nueva Barcelona and Angostura.

Its real name is El Concepcion del Pao.

Alcedo, La Cruz, Olmedilla, and many other geographers, have mistaken the situation of this small town of the Llanos of Barcelona, confounding it either with San Juan Bauptisto del Pao of the Llanos of Caracas, or with El Valle del Pao de Zarate.

Though the weather was cloudy I succeeded in obtaining some heights of alpha Centauri, serving to determine the latitude of the place; which is 8 degrees 37 minutes 57 seconds.

Some altitudes of the sun gave me 67 degrees 8 minutes 12 seconds for the longitude, supposing Angostura to be 66 degrees 15 minutes 21 seconds.

The astronomical determinations of Calabozo and Concepcion del Pao are very important to the geography of this country, where, in the midst of savannahs, fixed points are altogether wanting.

Some fruit-trees grow in the vicinity of Pao: they are rarely seen in the Llanos.

We even found some cocoa-trees, which appeared very vigorous, notwithstanding the great distance of the sea.

I was the more struck with this fact because doubts have recently been started respecting the veracity of travellers, who assert that they have seen the cocoa-tree, which is a palm of the shore, at Timbuctoo, in the centre of Africa.

We several times saw cocoa-trees amid the cultivated spots on the banks of the Rio Magdalena, more than a hundred leagues from the coast.

Five days, which to us appeared very tedious, brought us from Villa del Pao to the port of Nueva Barcelona.

As we advanced the sky became more serene, the soil more dusty, and the atmosphere more hot.

The heat from which we suffered is not entirely owing to the temperature of the air, but is produced by the fine sand mingled with it; this sand strikes against the face of the traveller, as it does against the ball of the thermometer.

I never observed the mercury rise in America, amid a wind of sand, above 45. 8 degrees centigrade.

Captain Lyon, with whom I had the pleasure of conversing on his return from Mourzouk, appeared to me also inclined to think that the temperature of fifty-two degrees, so often felt in Fezzan, is produced in great part by the grains of quartz suspended in the atmosphere.

Between Pao and the village of Santa Cruz de Cachipo, founded in 1749, and inhabited by five hundred Caribs, we passed the western elongation of the little table-land, known by the name of Mesa de Amana.

This table-land forms a point of partition between the Orinoco, the Guarapiche, and the coast of New Andalusia.

Its height is so inconsiderable that it would scarcely be an obstacle to the establishment of inland navigation in this part of the Llanos.

The Rio Mano however, which flows into the Orinoco above the confluence of the Carony, and which D'Anville (I know not on what authority) has marked in the first edition of his great map as issuing from the lake of Valencia, and receiving the waters of the Guayra, could never have served as a natural canal between two basins of rivers.

No bifurcation of this kind exists in the Llano.

A great number of Carib Indians, who now inhabit the missions of Piritu, were formerly on the north and east of the table-land of Amana, between Maturin, the mouth of the Rio Arco, and the Guarapiche.

The incursions of Don Joseph Careno, one of the most enterprising governors of the province of Cumana, occasioned a general migration of independent Caribs toward the banks of the Lower Orinoco in 1720. The whole of this vast plain consists of secondary formations which to the southward rest immediately on the granitic mountains of the Orinoco.

On the north-west they are separated by a narrow band of transition-rocks from the primitive mountains of the shore of Caracas.

This abundance of secondary rocks, covering without interruption a space of more than seven thousand square leagues,* is a phenomenon the more remarkable in that region of the globe, because in the whole of the Sierra da la Parima, between the right bank of the Orinoco and the Rio Negro, there is, as in Scandinavia, a total absence of secondary formations.

(* Reckoning only that part of the Llanos which is bounded by the Rio Apure on the south, and by the Sierra Nevada de Merida and the Parima de las Rosas on the west.

) The red sandstone, containing some vestiges of fossil wood (of the family of monocotyledons) is seen everywhere in the plains of Calabozo: farther east it is overlaid by calcareous and gypseous rocks which conceal it from the research of the geologist.

The marly gypsum, of which we collected specimens near the Carib mission of Cachipo, appeared to me to belong to the same formation as the gypsum of Ortiz.

To class it according to the type of European formations I would range it among the gypsums, often muriatiferous, that cover the Alpine limestone or zechstein.

Farther north, in the direction of the mission of San Josef de Curataquiche, M.

Bonpland picked up in the plain some fine pieces of riband jasper, or Egyptian pebbles.

We did not see them in their native place enchased in the rock, and cannot determine whether they belong to a very recent conglomerate or to that limestone which we saw at the Morro of Nueva Barcelona, and which is not transition limestone though it contains beds of schistose jasper (kieselschiefer).

We rested on the night of the 16th of July in the Indian village of Santa Cruz de Cachipo.

This mission, founded in 1749 by several Carib families who inhabited the inundated and unhealthy banks of the Lagunetas de Auache, is opposite the confluence of the Zir Puruay with the Orinoco.

We lodged at the house of the missionary, Fray Jose de las Piedras; and, on examining the registers of the parish, we saw how rapidly the prosperity of the community has been advanced by his zeal and intelligence.

Since we had reached the middle of the plains, the heat had increased to such a degree that we should have preferred travelling no more during the day; but we were without arms and the Llanos were then infested by large numbers of robbers who attacked and murdered the whites who fell into their hands.

Nothing can be worse than the administration of justice in these colonies.

We everywhere found the prisons filled with malefactors on whom sentence is not passed till after the lapse of seven or eight years.

Nearly a third of the prisoners succeed in making their escape; and the unpeopled plains, filled with herds, furnish them with booty.

They commit their depredations on horseback in the manner of the Bedouins.

The insalubrity of the prisons would be attended with fatal results but that these receptacles are cleared from time to time by the flight of the prisoners.

It also frequently happens that sentences of death, tardily pronounced by the Audiencia of Caracas, cannot be executed for want of a hangman.

In these cases the barbarous custom is observed of pardoning one criminal on condition of his hanging the others.

Our guides related to us that, a short time before our arrival on the coast of Cumana, a Zambo, known for the great ferocity of his manners, determined to screen himself from punishment by turning executioner.

The preparations for the execution however, shook his resolution; he felt a horror of himself, and preferring death to the disgrace of thus saving his life, he called again for his irons which had been struck off.

He did not long remain in prison, and he underwent his sentence through the baseness of one of his accomplices.

This awakening of a sentiment of honour in the soul of a murderer is a psychologic phenomenon worthy of reflection.

The man who had so often shed the blood of travellers in the plains recoiled at the idea of becoming the passive instrument of justice in inflicting upon others a punishment which he felt that he himself deserved.

If, even in the peaceful times when M. Bonpland and myself had the good fortune to travel through North and South America, the Llanos were the refuge of malefactors who had committed crimes in the missions of the Orinoco, or who had escaped from the prisons on the coast, how much worse must that state of things have been rendered by discord during the continuance of that sanguinary struggle which has terminated in conferring freedom and independence on those vast regions!

Our European wastes and heaths are but a feeble image of the savannahs of the New Continent which for the space of eight or ten thousand square leagues are smooth as the surface of the sea.

The immensity of their extent insures impunity to robbers, who conceal themselves more effectually in the savannahs than in our mountains and forests; and it is easy to conceive that even a European police would not be very effective in regions where there are travellers and no roads, herds and no herdsmen, and farms so solitary that notwithstanding the powerful action of the mirage, a journey of several days may be made without seeing one appear within the horizon.

Whilst traversing the Llanos of Caracas, New Barcelona, and Cumana, which succeed each other from west to east, from the snowy mountains of Merida to the Delta of the Orinoco, we feel anxious to know whether these vast tracts of land are destined by nature to serve eternally for pasture or whether they will at some future time be subject to the plough and the spade.

This question is the more important as the Llanos, situated at the two extremities of South America, are obstacles to the political union of the provinces they separate.

They prevent the agriculture of the coast of Venezuela from extending towards Guiana and they impede that of Potosi from advancing in the direction of the mouth of the Rio de la Plata.

The intermediate Llanos preserve, together with pastoral life, somewhat of a rude and wild character which separates and keeps them remote from the civilization of countries anciently cultivated.

Thus it has happened that in the war of independence they have been the scene of struggle between the hostile parties; and that the inhabitants of Calabozo have almost seen the fate of the confederate provinces of Venezuela and Cundinamarca decided before their walls.

In assigning limits to the new states and to their subdivisions, it is to be hoped there may not be cause hereafter to repent having lost sight of the importance of the Llanos, and the influence they may have on the disunion of communities which important common interests should bring together.

These plains would serve as natural boundaries like the seas or the virgin forests of the tropics, were it not that armies can cross them with greater facility, as their innumerable troops of horses and mules and herds of oxen furnish every means of conveyance and subsistence.

What we have seen of the power of man struggling against the force of nature in Gaul, in Germany and recently (but still beyond the tropics) in the United States, scarcely affords any just measure of what we may expect from the progress of civilization in the torrid zone.

Forests disappear but very slowly by fire and the axe when the trunks of trees are from eight to ten feet in diameter; when in falling they rest one upon another, and the wood, moistened by almost continual rains, is excessively hard.

The planters who inhabit the Llanos or Pampas do not generally admit the possibility of subjecting the soil to cultivation;

it is a problem not yet solved.

Most of the savannahs of Venezuela have not the same advantage as those of North America.

The latter are traversed longitudinally by three great rivers, the Missouri, the Arkansas, and the Red River of Nachitoches; the savannahs of Araura, Calabozo, and Pao are crossed in a transverse direction only by the tributary streams of the Orinoco, the most westerly of which (the Cari, the Pao, the Acaru, and the Manapire) have very little water in the season of drought.

These streams scarcely flow at all toward the north; so that in the centre of the Llanos there remain vast tracts of land called bancos and mesas* frightfully parched.

(* The Spanish words banco and mesa signify literally bench and table.

In the Llanos of South America little elevations rising slightly above the general elevation of the plain are called bancos and mesas from their supposed resemblance to benches and tables.

) The eastern parts, fertilized by the Portuguesa, the Masparro, and the Orivante, and by the tributary streams of those three rivers, are most susceptible of cultivation.

The soil is sand mixed with clay, covering a bed of quartz pebbles.

The vegetable mould, the principal source of the nutrition of plants, is everywhere extremely thin.

It is scarcely augmented by the fall of the leaves, which, in the forests of the torrid zone, is less periodically regular than in temperate climates.

During thousands of years the Llanos have been destitute of trees and brushwood; a few scattered palms in the savannah add little to that hydruret of carbon, that extractive matter, which, according to the experiments of Saussure, Davy, and Braconnot, gives fertility to the soil.

The social plants which almost exclusively predominate in the steppes, are monocotyledons; and it is known how much grasses impoverish the soil into which their fibrous roots penetrate.

This action of the killingias, paspalums and cenchri, which form the turf, is everywhere the same; but where the rock is ready to pierce the earth this varies according as it rests on red sandstone, or on compact limestone and gypsum; it varies according as periodical inundations accumulate mud on the lower grounds or as the shock of the waters carries away from the small elevations the little soil that has covered them.

Many solitary cultivated spots already exist in the midst of the pastures where running water and tufts of the mauritia palm have been found.

These farms, sown with maize, and planted with cassava, will multiply considerably if trees and shrubs be augmented.

The aridity and excessive heat of the mesas do not depend solely on the nature of their surface and the local reverberation of the soil;

their climate is modified by the adjacent regions; by the whole of the Llano of which they form a part.

In the deserts of Africa or Arabia, in the Llanos of South America, in the vast heaths extending from the extremity of Jutland to the mouth of the Scheldt, the stability of the limits of the desert, the savannahs, and the downs, depends chiefly on their immense extent and the nakedness these plains have acquired from some revolution destructive of the ancient vegetation of our planet.

By their extent, their continuity, and their mass they oppose the inroads of cultivation and preserve, like inland gulfs, the stability of their boundaries.

I will not enter upon the great question, whether in the Sahara, that Mediterranean of moving sands, the germs of organic life are increased in our days.

In proportion as our geographical knowledge has extended we have discovered in the eastern part of the desert islets of verdure; oases covered with date-trees crowd together in more numerous archipelagos, and open their ports to the caravans; but we are ignorant whether the form of the oases have not remained constantly the same since the time of Herodotus.

Our annals are too incomplete to enable us to follow Nature in her slow and gradual progress.

From these spaces entirely bare whence some violent catastrophe has swept away the vegetable covering and the mould; from those deserts of Syria and Africa which, by their petrified wood, attest the changes they have undergone; let us turn to the grass-covered Llanos and to the consideration of phenomena that come nearer the circle of our daily observations.

Respecting the possibility of a more general cultivation of the steppes of America, the colonists settled there, concur in the opinions I have deduced from the climatic action of these steppes considered as surfaces, or continuous masses.

They have observed that downs enclosed within cultivated and wooded land sooner yield to the labours of the husbandman than soils alike circumscribed, but forming part of a vast surface of the same nature.

This observation is extremely just whether in reference to soil covered with heath, as in the north of Europe;

with cistuses, mastic-trees, or palmettos, as in Spain; or with cactuses, argemones, or brathys, as in equinoctial America.

The more space the association occupies the more resistance do the social plants oppose to the labourer.

With this general cause others are combined in the Llanos of Venezuela; namely the action of the small grasses which impoverish the soil; the total absence of trees and brushwood; the sandy winds, the heat of which is increased by contact with a surface absorbing the rays of the sun during twelve hours, and unshaded except by the stalks of the aristides, chanchuses, and paspalums.

The progress observable on the vegetation of large trees and the cultivation of dicotyledonous plants in the vicinity of towns, (for instance around Calabozo and Pao) prove what may be gained upon the Llano by attacking it in small portions, enclosing it by degrees, and dividing it by coppices and canals of irrigation.

Possibly the influence of the winds which render the soil sterile might be diminished by sowing on a large scale, for example, over fifteen or twenty acres, the seeds of the psidium, the croton, the cassia, or the tamarind, which prefer dry, open spots.

I am far from believing that the savannahs will ever disappear entirely; or that the Llanos, so useful for pasturage and the trade in cattle, will ever be cultivated like the valleys of Aragua or other parts near the coast of Caracas and Cumana: but I am persuaded that in the lapse of ages a considerable portion of these plains, under a government favourable to industry, will lose the wild aspect which has characterized them since the first conquest by Europeans.