Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, During the Years 1799-1804, Vol.3 — 11 - Chapter 3.26, Part 4

After three days' journey we began to perceive the chain of the mountains of Cumana, which separates the Llanos, or, as they are often called here, the great sea of verdure,* from the coast of the Caribbean Sea.

(* Los Llanos son como un mar de yerbas--The Llanos are like a vast sea of grass--is an observation often repeated in these regions.

) If the Bergantin be more than eight hundred toises high, it may be seen supposing only an ordinary refraction of one fourteenth of the arch, at the distance of twenty-seven nautical leagues; but the state of the atmosphere long concealed from us the majestic view of this curtain of mountains.

It appeared at first like a fog-bank which hid the stars near the pole at their rising and setting; gradually this body of vapour seemed to augment and condense, to assume a bluish tint, and become bounded by sinuous and fixed outlines.

The same effects which the mariner observes on approaching a new land present themselves to the traveller on the borders of the Llano.

The horizon began to enlarge in some part and the vault of heaven seemed no longer to rest at an equal distance on the grass-covered soil.

A llanero, or inhabitant of the Llanos, is happy only when, as expressed in the simple phraseology of the country, he can see everywhere well around him.

What appears to European eyes a covered country, slightly undulated by a few scattered hills, is to him a rugged region bristled with mountains.

After having passed several months in the thick forests of the Orinoco, in places where one is accustomed, when at any distance from the river, to see the stars only in the zenith, as through the mouth of a well, a journey in the Llanos is peculiarly agreeable and attractive.

The traveller experiences new sensations;

and, like the Llanero, he enjoys the happiness of seeing well around him.

But this enjoyment, as we ourselves experienced, is not of long duration.

There is doubtless something solemn and imposing in the aspect of a boundless horizon, whether viewed from the summits of the Andes or the highest Alps, amid the expanse of the ocean or in the vast plains of Venezuela and Tucuman.

Infinity of space, as poets in every language say, is reflected within ourselves; it is associated with ideas of a superior order; it elevates the mind which delights in the calm of solitary meditation.

It is true, also, that every view of unbounded space bears a peculiar character.

The prospect surveyed from a solitary peak varies according as the clouds reposing on the plain extend in layers, are conglomerated in groups, or present to the astonished eye, through broad openings, the habitations of man, the labour of agriculture, or the verdant tint of the aerial ocean.

An immense sheet of water, animated by a thousand various beings even to its utmost depths, changing perpetually in colour and aspect, moveable at its surface like the element that agitates it, all charm the imagination during long voyages by sea; but the dusty and creviced Llano, throughout a great part of the year, has a depressing influence on the mind by its unchanging monotony.

When, after eight or ten days' journey, the traveller becomes accustomed to the mirage and the brilliant verdure of a few tufts of mauritia* (* The fan-palm, or sago-tree of Guiana.

) scattered from league to league, he feels the want of more varied impressions.

He loves again to behold the great tropical trees, the wild rush of torrents or hills and valleys cultivated by the hand of the labourer.

If the deserts of Africa and of the Llanos or savannahs of the New Continent filled a still greater space than they actually occupy, nature would be deprived of many of the beautiful products peculiar to the torrid zone.

* (* In calculating from maps on a very large scale I found the Llanos of Cumana, Barcelona, and Caracas, from the delta of the Orinoco to the northern bank of the Apure, 7200 square leagues; the Llanos between the Apure and Putumayo, 21,000 leagues; the Pampas on the north-west of Buenos Ayres, 40,000 square leagues; the Pampas south of the parallel of Buenos Ayres, 37,000 square leagues.

The total area of the Llanos of South America, covered with gramina, is consequently 105,200 square leagues, twenty leagues to an equatorial degree.

) The heaths of the north, the steppes of the Volga and the Don, are scarcely poorer in species of plants and animals than are the twenty-eight thousand square leagues of savannahs extending in a semicircle from north-east to south-west, from the mouths of the Orinoco to the banks of the Caqueta and the Putumayo, beneath the finest sky in the world, and in the land of plantains and bread-fruit trees.

The influence of the equinoctial climate, everywhere else so vivifying, is not felt in places where the great associations of gramina almost exclude every other plant.

Judging from the aspect of the soil we might have believed ourselves to be in the temperate zone and even still farther northward but that a few scattered palms, and at nightfall the fine constellations of the southern sky (the Centaur, Canopus, and the innumerable nebulae with which the Ship is resplendent), reminded us that we were only eight degrees distant from the equator.

A phenomenon which fixed the attention of De Luc and which in these latter years has furnished a subject of speculation to geologists, occupied us much during our journey across the Llanos.

I allude not to those blocks of primitive rock which occur, as in the Jura, on the slope of limestone mountains, but to those enormous blocks of granite and syenite which, in limits very distinctly marked by nature, are found scattered on the north of Holland, Germany and the countries of the Baltic.

It seems to be now proved that, distributed as in radii, they came at the time of the ancient revolutions of our globe from the Scandinavian peninsula southward; and that they did not primitively belong to the granitic chains of the Harz and Erzgeberg, which they approach without, however, reaching their foot.

* (* Leopold von Buch, Voyage en Norwege volume 1 page 30. ) I was surprised at not seeing one of these blocks in the Llanos of Venezuela, though these immense plains are bounded on the south by the Sierra Parima, a group of mountains entirely granitic and exhibiting in its denticulated and often columnar peaks traces of the most violent destruction.

Northward the granitic chain of the Silla de Caracas and Porto Cabello are separated from the Llanos by a screen of mountains that are schistose between Villa de Cura and Parapara, and calcareous between the Bergantin and Caripe.

I was no less struck by this absence of blocks on the banks of the Amazon.

La Condamine affirms that from the Pongo de Manseriche to the Strait of Pauxis not the smallest stone is to be found.

Now the basin of the Rio Negro and of the Amazon is also a Llano, a plain like those of Venezuela and Buenos Ayres.

The difference consists only in the state of vegetation.

The two Llanos situated at the northern and southern extremities of South America are covered with gramina; they are treeless savannahs; but the intermediate Llano, that of the Amazon, exposed to almost continual equatorial rains, is a thick forest.

I do not remember having heard that the Pampas of Buenos Ayres or the savannahs of the Missouri* and New Mexico contain granitic blocks.

(* Are there any isolated blocks in North America northward of the great lakes?

) The absence of this phenomenon appears general in the New World as it probably also is in Sahara, in Africa; for we must not confound the rocky masses that pierce the soil in the midst of the desert, and of which travellers often make mention, with mere scattered fragments.

These facts seem to prove that the blocks of Scandinavian granite which cover the sandy countries on the south of the Baltic, and those of Westphalia and Holland, must be traced to some local revolution.

The ancient conglomerate (red sandstone) which covers a great part of the Llanos of Venezuela and of the basin of the Amazon contains no doubt fragments of the same primitive rocks which constitute the neighbouring mountains; but the convulsions of which these mountains exhibit evident marks, do not appear to have been attended with circumstances favourable to the removal of great blocks.

This geognostic phenomenon was to me the more unexpected since there exists nowhere in the world so smooth a plain entirely granitic.

Before my departure from Europe I had observed with surprise that there were no primitive blocks in Lombardy and in the great plain of Bavaria which appears to be the bottom of an ancient lake, and which is situated two hundred and fifty toises above the level of the ocean.

It is bounded on the north by the granites of the Upper Palatinate; and on the south by Alpine limestone, transition-thonschiefer, and the mica-slates of the Tyrol.

We arrived, on the 23rd of July, at the town of Nueva Barcelona, less fatigued by the heat of the Llanos, to which we had been long accustomed, than annoyed by the winds of sand which occasion painful chaps in the skin.

Seven months previously, in going from Cumana to Caracas, we had rested a few hours at the Morro de Barcelona, a fortified rock, which, near the village of Pozuelos, is joined to the continent only by a neck of land.

We were received with the kindest hospitality in the house of Don Pedro Lavie, a wealthy merchant of French extraction.

This gentleman, who was accused of having given refuge to the unfortunate Espana when a fugitive on these coasts in 1796, was arrested by order of the Audiencia, and conveyed as a prisoner to Caracas.

The friendship of the governor of Cumana and the remembrance of the services he had rendered to the rising commerce of those countries contributed to procure his liberty.

We had endeavoured to alleviate his captivity by visiting him in prison; and we had now the satisfaction of finding him in the midst of his family.

Illness under which he was suffering had been aggravated by confinement; and he sank into the grave without seeing the dawn of those days of independence, which his friend Don Joseph Espana had predicted on the scaffold prior to his execution.

"I die," said that man, who was formed for the accomplishment of grand projects, "I die an ignominious death; but my fellow citizens will soon piously collect my ashes, and my name will reappear with glory."

These remarkable words were uttered in the public square of Caracas, on the 8th of May, 1799. In 1790 Nueva Barcelona contained scarcely ten thousand inhabitants, and in 1800, its population was more than sixteen thousand.

The town was founded in 1637 by a Catalonian conquistador, named Juan Urpin.

A

fruitless attempt was then made, to give the whole province the name of New Catalonia.

As our maps often mark two towns, Barcelona and Cumanagoto, instead of one, and as the two names are considered as synonymous, it may be well to explain the cause of this error.

Anciently, at the mouth of the Rio Neveri, there was an Indian town, built in 1588 by Lucas Faxardo, and named San Cristoval de los Cumanagotos.

This town was peopled solely by natives who came from the saltworks of Apaicuare.

In 1637 Urpin founded, two leagues farther inland, the Spanish town of Nueva Barcelona, which he peopled with some of the inhabitants of Cumanagoto, together with some Catalonians.

For thirty-four years, disputes were incessantly arising between the two neighbouring communities till in 1671, the governor Angulo succeeded in persuading them to establish themselves on a third spot, where the town of Barcelona now stands.

According to my observations it is situated in latitude 10 degrees 6 minutes 52 seconds.

* (* These observations were made on the Plaza Major.

They are merely the result of six circum-meridian heights of Canopus, taken all in one night.

In Las Memorias de Espinosa the latitude is stated to be 10 degrees 9 minutes 6 seconds.

The result of M. Ferrer's observations made it 10 degrees 8 minutes 24 seconds.

) The ancient town of Cumanagoto is celebrated in the country for a miraculous image of the Virgin,* which the Indians say was found in the hollow trunk of an old tutumo, or calabash-tree (Crescentia cujete).

(* La milagrosa imagen de Maria Santissima del Socorro, also called La Virgen del Tutumo.

) This image was carried in procession to Nueva Barcelona; but whenever the clergy were dissatisfied with the inhabitants of the new city, the Virgin fled at night, and returned to the trunk of the tree at the mouth of the river.

This miracle did not cease till a fine convent (the college of the Propaganda) was built, to receive the Franciscans.

In a similar case, the Bishop of Caracas caused the image of Our Lady de los Valencianos to be placed in the archives of the bishopric, where she remained thirty years under seal.

The climate of Barcelona is not so hot as that of Cumana but it is extremely damp and somewhat unhealthy in the rainy season.

M.

Bonpland had borne very well the irksome journey across the Llanos; and had recovered his strength and activity.

With respect to myself, I suffered more at Barcelona than I did at Angostura, immediately after our passage on the rivers.

One of those extraordinary tropical rains during which, at sunset, drops of enormous size fall at great distances from one another, caused me to experience sensations which seemed to threaten an attack of typhus, a disease then prevalent on that coast.

We remained nearly a month at Barcelona where we found our friend Fray Juan Gonzales, of whom I have often spoken, and who had traversed the Upper Orinoco before us.

He expressed regret that we had not been able to prolong our visit to that unknown country; and he examined our plants and animals with that interest which must be felt by even the most uninformed man for the productions of a region he has long since visited.

Fray Juan had resolved to go to Europe and to accompany us as far as the island of Cuba.

We were together for the space of seven months, and his society was most agreeable: he was cheerful, intelligent and obliging.

How little did we anticipate the sad fate that awaited him.

He took charge of a part of our collections; and a friend of his own confided to his care a child who was to be conveyed to Spain for its education.

Alas!

the collection, the child and the young ecclesiastic were all buried in the waves.

South-east of Nueva Barcelona, at the distance of two Leagues, there rises a lofty chain of mountains, abutting on the Cerro del Bergantin, which is visible at Cumana.

This spot is known by the name of the hot waters, (aguas calientes).

When I felt my health sufficiently restored, we made an excursion thither on a cool and misty morning.

The waters, which are loaded with sulphuretted hydrogen, issue from a quartzose sandstone, lying on compact limestone, the same as that we had examined at the Morro.

We again found in this limestone intercalated beds of black hornstein, passing into kieselschiefer.

It is not, however, a transition rock; by its position, its division into small strata, its whiteness and its dull and conchoidal fractures (with very flattened cavities), it rather approximates to the limestone of Jura.

The real kieselschiefer and Lydian-stone have not been observed hitherto except in the transition-slates and limestones.

Is the sandstone whence the springs of the Bergantin issue of the same formation as the sandstone of the Imposible and the Tumiriquiri?

The temperature of the thermal waters is only 43. 2 degrees centigrade (the atmosphere being 27).

They flow first to the distance of forty toises over the rocky surface of the ground; then they rush down into a natural cavern; and finally they pierce through the limestone to issue out at the foot of the mountain on the left bank of the little river Narigual.

The springs, while in contact with the oxygen of the atmosphere, deposit a good deal of sulphur.

I did not collect, as I had done at Mariara, the bubbles of air that rise in jets from these thermal waters.

They no doubt contain a large quantity of nitrogen because the sulphuretted hydrogen decomposes the mixture of oxygen and nitrogen dissolved in the spring.

The sulphurous waters of San Juan which issue from calcareous rock, like those of the Bergantin, have also a low temperature (31. 3 degrees); while in the same region the temperature of the sulphurous waters of Mariara and Las Trincheras (near Porto Cabello), which gush immediately from gneiss-granite, is 58. 9 degrees the former, and 90. 4 degrees the latter.

It would seem as if the heat which these springs acquire in the interior of the globe diminishes in proportion as they pass from primitive to secondary superposed rocks.

Our excursion to the Aguas Calientes of Bergantin ended with a vexatious accident.

Our host had lent us one of his finest saddle-horses.

We were warned at the same time not to ford the little river of Narigual.

We passed over a sort of bridge, or rather some trunks of trees laid closely together, and we made our horses swim, holding their bridles.

The horse I had ridden suddenly disappeared after struggling for some time under water: all our endeavours to discover the cause of this accident were fruitless.

Our guides conjectured that the animal's legs had been seized by the caymans which are very numerous in those parts.

My perplexity was extreme: delicacy and the affluent circumstances of my host forbade me to think of repairing his loss; and M. Lavie, more considerate of our situation than sensible of his own misfortune, endeavoured to tranquillize us by exaggerating the facility with which fine horses were procurable from the neighbouring savannahs.

The crocodiles of the Rio Neveri are large and numerous, especially near the mouth of the river; but in general they are less fierce than the crocodiles of the Orinoco.

These animals manifest in America the same contrasts of ferocity as in Egypt and Nubia: this fact is obvious when we compare with attention the narratives of Burckhardt and Belzoni.

The state of cultivation in different countries and the amount of population in the proximity of rivers modify the habits of these large saurians: they are timid when on dry ground and they flee from man, even in the water, when they are not in want of food and when they perceive any danger in attacking.

The Indians of Nueva Barcelona convey wood to market in a singular manner.

Large logs of zygophyllum and caesalpinia* are thrown into the river and carried down by the stream, while the owners of the wood swim here and there to float the pieces that are stopped by the windings of the banks.

(* The Lecythis ollaria, in the vicinity of Nueva Barcelona, furnishes excellent timber.

We saw trunks of this tree seventy feet high.

Around the town, beyond that arid zone of cactus which separates Nueva Barcelona from the steppe, grow the Clerodendrum tenuifolium, the Ionidium itubu, which resembles the Viola, and the Allionia violacea.

) This could not be done in the greater part of those American rivers in which crocodiles are found.

The town of Barcelona has not, like Cumana, an Indian suburb; and the only natives who are seen there are inhabitants of the neighbouring missions or of huts scattered in the plain.

Neither the one nor the other are of Carib race, but a mixture of the Cumanagotos, Palenkas and Piritus; short, stunted, indolent and addicted to drinking.

Fermented cassava is here the favourite beverage; the wine of the palm-tree, which is used on the Orinoco, being almost unknown on the coast.

It is curious to observe that men in different zones, to satisfy the passion of inebriety, employ not only all the families of monocotyledonous and dicotyledonous plants, but even the poisonous Agaric (Amanita muscaria) of which, with disgusting economy, the Coriacs have learnt to drink the same juice several times during five successive days.

* (* Mr. Langsdor (Wetterauisches Journal part 1 page 254) first made known this very extraordinary physiological phenomenon, which I prefer describing in Latin: Coriaecorum gens, in ora Asiae septentrioni opposita, potum sibi excogitavit ex succo inebriante agarici muscarii.

Qui succus (aeque ut asparagorum), vel per humanum corpus transfusus, temulentiam nihilominus facit.

Quare gens misera et inops, quo rarius mentis sit suae, propriam urinam bibit identidem: continuoque mingens rursusque hauriens eundem succum (dicas, ne ulla in parte mundi desit ebrietas), pauculis agaricis producere in diem quintum temulentiam potest.

) The packet boats (correos) from Corunna bound for the Havannah and Mexico had been due three months; and it was believed they had been taken by the English cruisers stationed on this coast.

Anxious to reach Cumana, in order to avail ourselves of the first opportunity that might offer for our passage to Vera Cruz, we hired an open boat called a lancha, a sort of craft employed habitually in the latitudes east of Cape Codera where the sea is scarcely ever rough.

Our lancha, which was laden with cacao, carried on a contraband trade with the island of Trinidad.

For this reason the owner imagined we had nothing to fear from the enemy's vessels, which then blockaded all the Spanish ports.

We embarked our collection of plants, our instruments and our monkeys; and, the weather being delightful, we hoped to make a very short passage from the mouth of the Rio Neveri to Cumana: but we had scarcely reached the narrow channel between the continent and the rocky isles of Borracha and the Chimanas, when to our great surprise we came in sight of an armed boat, which, whilst hailing us from a great distance, fired some musket-shot at us.

The boat belonged to a privateer of Halifax; and I recognized among the sailors a Prussian, a native of Memel.

I had found no opportunity, since my arrival in America, of expressing myself in my native language, and I could have wished to have spoken it on a less unpleasant occasion.

Our protestations were without effect: we were carried on board the privateer, and the captain, affecting not to recognize the passports delivered by the governor of Trinidad for the illicit trade, declared us to be a lawful prize.

Being a little in the habit of speaking English, I entered into conversation with the captain, begging not to be taken to Nova Scotia, but to be put on shore on the neighbouring coast.

While I endeavoured, in the cabin, to defend my own rights and those of the owner of the lancha, I heard a noise on deck.

Something was whispered to the captain, who left us in consternation.

Happily for us, an English sloop of war, the Hawk, was cruising in those parts, and had signalled the captain to bring to; but the signal not being promptly answered, a gun was fired from the sloop and a midshipman sent on board our vessel.

He was a polite young man, and gave me hopes that the lancha, which was laden with cacao, would be given up, and that on the following day we might pursue our voyage.

In the meantime he invited me to accompany him on board the sloop, assuring me that his commander, Captain Garnier, would furnish me with better accommodation for the night than I should find in the vessel from Halifax.

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.