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.
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. Every part of the landscape was familiar to us; the forest of cactus, the scattered huts and that enormous ceiba, beneath which we loved to bathe at the approach of night. Our friends at Cumana came out to meet us: men of all castes, whom our frequent herborizations had brought into contact with us, expressed the greater joy at sight of us, as a report that we had perished on the banks of the Orinoco had been current for several months. These reports had their origin either in the severe illness of M. Bonpland, or in the fact of our boat having been nearly lost in a gale above the mission of Uruana.
We hastened to visit the governor, Don Vicente Emparan, whose recommendations and constant solicitude had been so useful to us during the long journey we had just terminated. He procured for us, in the centre of the town, a house which, though perhaps too lofty in a country exposed to violent earthquakes, was extremely useful for our instruments. We enjoyed from its terraces a majestic view of the sea, of the isthmus of Araya, and the archipelago of the islands of Caracas, Picuita and Borracha. The port of Cumana was every day more and more closely blockaded, and the vain expectation of the arrival of Spanish packets detained us two months and a half longer. We were often nearly tempted to go to the Danish islands which enjoyed a happy neutrality; but we feared that, if we left the Spanish colonies, we might find some obstacles to our return. With the ample freedom which in a moment of favour had been granted to us, we did not consider it prudent to hazard anything that might give umbrage to the local authorities. We employed our time in completing the Flora of Cumana, geologically examining the eastern part of the peninsula of Araya, and observing many eclipses of satellites, which confirmed the longitude of the place already obtained by other means. We also made experiments on the extraordinary refractions, on evaporation and on atmospheric electricity.
The living animals which we had brought from the Orinoco were objects of great curiosity to the inhabitants of Cumana. The capuchin of the Esmeralda (Simia chiropotes), which so much resembles man in the expression of its physiognomy; and the sleeping monkey (Simia trivirgata), which is the type of a new group; had never yet been seen on that coast. We destined them for the menagerie of the Jardin des Plantes at Paris. The arrival of a French squadron which had failed in an attack upon Curacao furnished us, unexpectedly, with an excellent opportunity for sending them to Guadaloupe; and General Jeannet, together with the commissary Bresseau, agent of the executive power at the Antilles, promised to convey them. The monkeys and birds died at Guadaloupe but fortunately the skin of the Simia chiropotes, the only one in Europe, was sent a few years ago to the Jardin des Plantes, where the couxio (Simia satanas) and the stentor or alouate of the steppes of Caracas (Simia ursina) had been already received. The arrival of so great a number of French military officers and the manifestation of political and religious opinions not altogether conformable with the interests of the governments of Europe excited singular agitation in the population of Cumana. The governor treated the French authorities with the forms of civility consistent with the friendly relations subsisting at that period between France and Spain. In the streets the coloured people crowded round the agent of the French Directory, whose dress was rich and theatrical. White men, too, with indiscreet curiosity, whenever they could make themselves understood, made enquiries concerning the degree of influence granted by the republic to the colonists in the government of Guadaloupe. The king's officers doubled their zeal in furnishing provision for the little squadron. Strangers, who boasted that they were free, appeared to these people troublesome guests; and in a country of which the growing prosperity depended on clandestine communication with the islands, and on a freedom of trade forced from the ministry, the European Spaniards extolled the wisdom of the old code of laws (leyes de Indias) which permitted the entrance of foreign vessels into their ports only in extreme cases of want or distress. These contrasts between the restless desires of the colonists and the distrustful apathy of the government, throw some light on the great political events which, after long preparation, have separated Spain from her colonies.
We again passed a few agreeable days, from the third to the fifth of November, at the peninsula of Araya, situated beyond the gulf of Cariaco, opposite to Cumana.* (* I have already described the pearls of Araya; its sulphurous deposits and submarine springs of liquid and colourless petroleum. See volume 1.5.) We were informed that the Indians carried to the town from time to time considerable quantities of native alum, found in the neighbouring mountains. The specimens shown to us sufficiently indicated that it was neither alunite, similar to the rock of Tolfa and Piombino, nor those capillary and silky salts of alkaline sulphate of alumina and magnesia that line the clefts and cavities of rocks, but real masses of native alum, with a conchoidal or imperfectly lamellar fracture. We were led to hope that we should find the mine of alum (mina de alun) in the slaty cordillera of Maniquarez, and so new a geological phenomenon was calculated to rivet our attention. The priest Juan Gonzales, and the treasurer, Don Manuel Navarete, who had been useful to us from our first arrival on this coast, accompanied us in our little excursion. We disembarked near Cape Caney and again visited the ancient salt-pit (which is converted into a lake by the irruption of the sea), the fine ruins of the castle of Araya and the calcareous mountain of the Barigon, which, from its steepness on the western side is somewhat difficult of access. Muriatiferous clay mixed with bitumen and lenticular gypsum and sometimes passing to a darkish brown clay, devoid of salt, is a formation widely spread through this peninsula, in the island of Margareta and on the opposite continent, near the castle of San Antonio de Cumana. Probably the existence of this formation has contributed to produce those ruptures and rents in the ground which strike the eye of the geologist when he stands on one of the eminences of the peninsula of Araya. The cordillera of this peninsula, composed of mica-slate and clay-slate, is separated on the north from the chain of mountains of the island of Margareta (which are of a similar composition) by the channel of Cubagua; and on the south it is separated from the lofty calcareous chain of the continent, by the gulf of Cariaco. The whole intermediate space appears to have been heretofore filled with muriatiferous clay; and no doubt the continual erosions of the ocean have removed this formation and converted the plain, first into lakes, then into gulfs, and finally into navigable channels. The account of what has passed in the most modern times at the foot of the castle of Araya, the irruption of the sea into the ancient salt-pit, the formation of the laguna de Chacopata and a lake, four leagues in length, which cuts the island of Margareta nearly into two parts, afford evident proofs of these successive erosions. In the singular configuration of the coasts in the Morro of Chacopata; in the little islands of the Caribbees, the Lobos and Tunal; in the great island of Coche, and the capes of Carnero and Mangliers there still seem to be apparent the remains of an isthmus which, stretching from north to south, formerly joined the peninsula of Araya to the island of Margareta. In that island a neck of very low land, three thousand toises long, and less than two hundred toises broad, conceals on the northern sides the two hilly groups, known by the names of La Vega de San Juan and the Macanao. The Laguna Grande of Margareta has a very narrow opening to the south and small boats pass by portage over the neck of land or northern dyke. Though the waters on these shores seem at present to recede from the continent it is nevertheless very probable that in the lapse of ages, either by an earthquake or by a sudden rising of the ocean, the long island of Margareta will be divided into two rocky islands of a trapezoidal form.
The limestone of the Barigon, which is a part of the great formation of sandstone or calcareous breccia of Cumana, is filled with fossil shells in as perfect preservation as those of other tertiary limestones in France and Italy. We detached some blocks containing oysters eight inches in diameter, pectens, venuses, and lithophyte polypi. I recommend to naturalists better versed in the knowledge of fossils than I then was, to examine with care this mountainous coast (which is easy of access to European vessels) in their way to Cumana, Guayra or Curacao. It would be curious to discover whether any of these shells and these species of petrified zoophytes still inhabit the seas of the West Indies, as M. Bonpland conjectured, and as is the case in the island of Timor and perhaps in Guadaloupe.
We sailed on the 4th of November, at one o'clock in the morning, in search of the mine of native alum. I took with me the chronometer and my large Dollond telescope, intending to observe at the Laguna Chica (Small Lake), east of the village of Maniquarez, the immersion of the first satellite of Jupiter; this design, however, was not accomplished, contrary winds having prevented our arrival before daylight. The spectacle of the phosphorescence of the ocean and the sports of the porpoises which surrounded our canoe somewhat atoned for this disappointment. We again passed those spots where springs of petroleum gush from mica-slate at the bottom of the sea and the smell of which is perceptible from a considerable distance. When it is recollected that farther eastward, near Cariaco, the hot and submarine waters are sufficiently abundant to change the temperature of the gulf at its surface, we cannot doubt that the petroleum is the effect of distillation at an immense depth, issuing from those primitive rocks beneath which lies the focus of all volcanic commotion.
The Laguna Chica is a cove surrounded by perpendicular mountains, and connected with the gulf of Cariaco only by a narrow channel twenty-five fathoms deep. It seems, like the fine port of Acapulco, to owe its existence to the effect of an earthquake. A beach shows that the sea is here receding from the land, as on the opposite coast of Cumana. The peninsula of Araya, which narrows between Cape Mero and Cape las Minas to one thousand four hundred toises, is little more than four thousand toises in breadth near the Laguna Chica, reckoning from one sea to the other. We had to cross this distance in order to find the native alum and to reach the cape called the Punta de Chuparuparu. The road is difficult only because no path is traced; and between precipices of some depth we were obliged to step over ridges of bare rock, the strata of which are much inclined. The principal point is nearly two hundred and twenty toises high; but the mountains, as it often happens in a rocky isthmus, display very singular forms. The Paps (tetas) of Chacopata and Cariaco, midway between the Laguna Chica and the town of Cariaco, are peaks which appear isolated when viewed from the platform of the castle of Cumana. The vegetable earth in this country is only thirty toises above sea level. Sometimes there is no rain for the space of fifteen months; if, however, a few drops fall immediately after the flowering of the melons and gourds, they yield fruit weighing from sixty to seventy pounds, notwithstanding the apparent dryness of the air. I say apparent dryness, for my hygrometric observations prove that the atmosphere of Cumana and Araya contains nearly nine-tenths of the quantity of watery vapour necessary to its perfect saturation. It is this air, at once hot and humid, that nourishes those vegetable reservoirs, the cucurbitaceous plants, the agaves and melocactuses half-buried in the sand. When we visited the peninsula the preceding year there was a great scarcity of water; the goats for want of grass died by hundreds. During our stay at the Orinoco the order of the seasons seemed to be entirely changed. At Araya, Cochen, and even in the island of Margareta it had rained abundantly; and those showers were remembered by the inhabitants in the same way as a fall of aerolites would be noted in the recollection of the naturalists of Europe.
The Indian who was our guide scarcely knew in what direction we should find the alum; he was ignorant of its real position. This ignorance of localities characterises almost all the guides here, who are chosen from among the most indolent class of the people. We wandered for eight or nine hours among rocks totally bare of vegetation. The mica-slate passes sometimes to clay-slate of a darkish grey. I was again struck by the extreme regularity in the direction and inclination of the strata. They run north 50 degrees east, inclining from 60 to 70 degrees north-west. This is the general direction which I had observed in the gneiss-granite of Caracas and the Orinoco, in the hornblende-slates of Angostura, and even in the greater part of the secondary rocks we had just examined. The beds, over a vast extent of land, make the same angle with the meridian of the place; they present a parallelism, which may be considered as one of the great geologic laws capable of being verified by precise measures. Advancing toward Cape Chuparuparu, the veins of quartz that cross the mica-slate increase in size. We found some from one to two toises broad, full of small fasciculated crystals of rutile titanite. We sought in vain for cyanite, which we had discovered in some blocks near Maniquarez. Farther on the mica-state presents not veins, but little beds of graphite or carburetted iron. They are from two to three inches thick and have precisely the same direction and inclination as the rock. Graphite, in primitive soils, marks the first appearance of carbon on the globe—that of carbon uncombined with hydrogen. It is anterior to the period when the surface of the earth became covered with monocotyledonous plants. From the summit of those wild mountains there is a majestic view of the island of Margareta. Two groups of mountains already mentioned, those of Macanao and La Vega de San Juan, rise from the bosom of the waters. The capital of the island, La Asuncion, the port of Pampatar, and the villages of Pueblo de la Mar, Pueblo del Norte and San Juan belong to the second and most easterly of these groups. The western group, the Macanao, is almost entirely uninhabited. The isthmus that divides these large masses of mica-slate was scarcely visible; its form appeared changed by the effect of the mirage and we recognized the intermediate part, through which runs the Laguna Grande, only by two small hills of a sugarloaf form, in the meridian of the Punta de Piedras. Nearer we look down on the small desert archipelago of the four Morros del Tunal, the Caribbee and the Lobos Islands.
After much vain search we at length found, before we descended to the northern coast of the peninsula of Araya, in a ravine of very difficult access (Aroyo del Robalo), the mineral which had been shown to us at Cumana. The mica-slate changed suddenly into carburetted and shining clay-slate. It was an ampelite; and the waters (for there are small springs in those parts, and some have recently been discovered near the village of Maniquarez) were impregnated with yellow oxide of iron and had a styptic taste. We found the sides of the neighbouring rocks lined with capillary sulphate of alumina in effervescence; and real beds, two inches thick, full of native alum, extending as far as the eye could reach in the clay slate. The alum is greyish white, somewhat dull on the surface and of an almost glassy lustre internally. Its fracture is not fibrous but imperfectly conchoidal. It is slightly translucent when its fragments are thin; and has a sweetish and astringent taste without any bitter mixture. When on the spot, I proposed to myself the question whether this alum, so pure, and filling beds in the clay-slate without leaving the smallest void, be of a formation contemporary with the rock, or whether it be of a recent, and in some sort secondary, origin, like the muriate of soda, found sometimes in small veins, where strongly concentrated springs traverse beds of gypsum or clay. In these parts nothing seems to indicate a process of formation likely to be renewed in our days. The slaty rock exhibits no open cleft; and none is found parallel with the direction of the slates. It may also be inquired whether this aluminous slate be a transition-formation lying on the primitive mica-slate of Araya, or whether it owe its origin merely to a change of composition and texture in the beds of mica-slate. I lean to the latter proposition; for the transition is progressive, and the clay-slate (thonschiefer) and mica-slate appear to me to constitute here but one formation. The presence of cyanite, rutile-titanite, and garnets, and the absence of Lydian stone, and all fragmentary or arenaceous rocks, seem to characterise the formation we describe as primitive. It is asserted that even in Europe ampelite and green stone are found, though rarely, in slates anterior to transition-slate.
When, in 1785, after an earthquake, a great rocky mass was broken off in the Aroyo del Robalo, the Guaykeries of Los Serritos collected fragments of alum five or six inches in diameter, extremely pure and transparent. It was sold in my time at Cumana to the dyers and tanners, at the price of two reals* per pound, while alum from Spain cost twelve reals. (* The real is about 6 1/2 English pence.) This difference of price was more the result of prejudice and of the impediments to trade, than of the inferior quality of the alum of the country, which is fit for use without undergoing any purification. It is also found in the chain of mica-slate and clay-slate, on the north-west coast of the island of Trinidad, at Margareta and near Cape Chuparuparu, north of the Cerro del Distiladero.* (* Another place was mentioned to us, west of Bordones, the Puerto Escondido. But that coast appeared to me to be wholly calcareous; and I cannot conceive where could be the situation of ampelite and native alum on this point. Was it in the beds of slaty clay that alternate with the alpine limestone of Cumanacoa? Fibrous alum is found in Europe only in formations posterior to those of transition, in lignites and other tertiary formations belonging to the lignites.) The Indians, who are naturally addicted to concealment, are not inclined to make known the spots whence they obtain native alum; but it must be abundant, for I have seen very considerable quantities of it in their possession at a time.
South America at present receives its alum from Europe, as Europe in its turn received it from the natives of Asia previous to the fifteenth century. Mineralogists, before my travels, knew no substances which, without addition, calcined or not calcined, could directly yield alum (sulphate of alumina and potash), except rocks of trachytic formation, and small veins traversing beds of lignite and bituminous wood. Both these substances, so different in their origin, contain all that constitutes alum, that is to say, alumina, sulphuric acid and potash. The ores of Tolfa, Milo and Nipoligo; those of Montione, in which silica does not accompany the alumina; the siliceous breccia of Mont Dore, which contains sulphur in its cavities; the alumiferous rocks of Parad and Beregh in Hungary, which belong also to trachytic and pumice conglomerates, may no doubt be traced to the penetration of sulphurous acid vapours. They are the products of a feeble and prolonged volcanic action, as may be easily ascertained in the solfataras of Puzzuoli and the Peak of Teneriffe. The alumite of Tolfa, which, since my return to Europe, I have examined on the spot, conjointly with Gay-Lussac, has, by its oryctognostic characters and its chemical composition, a considerable affinity to compact feldspar, which constitutes the basis of so many trachytes and transition-porphyries. It is a siliciferous subsulphate of alumina and potash, a compact feldspar, with the addition of sulphuric acid completely formed in it. The waters circulating in these alumiferous rocks of volcanic origin do not, however, deposit masses of native alum, to yield which the rocks must be roasted. I know not of any deposits analogous to those I brought from Cumana; for the capillary and fibrous masses found in veins traversing beds of lignites (as on the banks of the Egra, between Saatz and Commothau in Bohemia), or efflorescing in cavities (as at Freienwalde in Brandenburg, and at Segario in Sardinia), are impure salts, often destitute of potash, and mixed with the sulphates of ammonia and magnesia. A slow decomposition of the pyrites, which probably act as so many little galvanic piles, renders the waters alumiferous, that circulate across the bituminous lignites and carburetted clays. These waters, in contact with carbonate of lime, even give rise to the deposits of subsulphate of alumina (destitute of potash), found near Halle, and formerly believed erroneously to be pure alumina belonging, like the porcelain earth (kaolin) of Morl, to porphyry of red sandstone. Analogous chemical actions may take place in primitive and transition slates as well as in tertiary formations. All slates, and this fact is very important, contain nearly five per cent of potash, sulphuret of iron, peroxide of iron, carbon, etc. The contact of so many moistened heterogeneous substances must necessarily lead them to a change of state and composition. The efflorescent salts that abundantly cover the aluminous slates of Robalo, show how much these chemical effects are favoured by the high temperature of the climate; but, I repeat, in a rock where there are no crevices, no vacuities parallel to the direction and inclination of the strata, native alum, semitransparent and of conchoidal fracture, completely filling its place (its beds), must be regarded as of the same age with the rock in which it is contained. The term contemporary formation is here taken in the sense attached to it by geologists, in speaking of beds of quartz in clay-slate, granular limestone in mica-slate or feldspar in gneiss.
After having for a long time wandered over barren scenes amidst rocks entirely devoid of vegetation, our eyes dwelt with pleasure on tufts of malpighia and croton, which we found in descending toward the coast. These arborescent crotons were of two new species,* very remarkable for their form, and peculiar to the peninsula of Araya. (* Croton argyrophyllus and C. marginatus.) We arrived too late at the Laguna Chica to visit another rock situated farther east and celebrated by the name of the Laguna Grande, or the Laguna del Obispo.* (* Great Lake, or the Bishop's Lake.) We contented ourselves with admiring it from the height of the mountains that command the view; and, excepting the ports of Ferrol and Acapulco, there is perhaps none presenting a more extraordinary configuration. It is an inland gulf two miles and a half long from east to west, and one mile broad. The rocks of mica-slate that form the entrance of the port leave a free passage only two hundred and fifty toises broad. The water is everywhere from fifteen to twenty-five fathoms deep. Probably the government of Cumana will one day take advantage of the possession of this inland gulf and of that of Mochima,* eight leagues east of the bad road of Nueva Barcelona. (* 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.
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. There only, at Mexico, Cundinamarca, Quito and Peru, they found traces of ancient civilization, agricultural nations and flourishing empires. This circumstance, together with the increase of the native mountain population, the almost exclusive possession of great metallic wealth, and the commercial relations established from the beginning of the sixteenth century with the Indian archipelago, have given a peculiar character to the Spanish possessions in equinoctial America. In the East Indies, the people who fell into the hands of the English and Portuguese settlers were wandering tribes or hunters. Far from forming a portion of the agricultural and laborious population, as on the tableland of Anahuac, at Guatimala and in Upper Peru, they generally withdrew at the approach of the whites. The necessity of labour, the preference given to the cultivation of the sugar-cane, indigo, and cotton, the cupidity which often accompanies and degrades industry, gave birth to that infamous slave-trade, the consequences of which have been alike fatal to the old and the new world. Happily, in the continental part of Spanish America, the number of African slaves is so inconsiderable that, compared with the slave population of Brazil, or with that of the southern part of the United States, it is found to be in the proportion of one to fourteen. The whole of the Spanish colonies, without excluding the islands of Cuba and Porto Rico, have not, over a surface which exceeds at least by one-fifth that of Europe, as many negroes as the single state of Virginia. The Spanish Americans, in the union of New Spain and Guatimala, present an example, unique in the torrid zone, namely, a nation of eight millions of inhabitants governed conformably with European institutions and laws, cultivating sugar, cacao, wheat and grapes, and having scarcely a slave brought from Africa.
The population of the New Continent as yet surpasses but little that of France or Germany. It doubles in the United States in twenty-three or twenty-five years; and at Mexico, even under the government of the mother country, it doubles in forty or forty-five years. Without indulging too flattering hopes of the future, it may be admitted that in less than a century and a half the population of America will equal that of Europe. This noble rivalry in civilization and the arts of industry and commerce, far from impoverishing the old continent, as has often been supposed it might at the expense of the new one, will augment the wants of the consumer, the mass of productive labour, and the activity of exchange. Doubtless, in consequence of the great revolutions which human society undergoes, the public fortune, the common patrimony of civilization, is found differently divided among the nations of the old and the new world: but by degrees the equilibrium is restored; and it is a fatal, I had almost said an impious prejudice, to consider the growing prosperity of any other part of our planet as a calamity to Europe. The independence of the colonies will not contribute to isolate them from the old civilized nations, but will rather bring all more closely together. Commerce tends to unite countries which a jealous policy has long separated. It is the nature of civilization to go forward without any tendency to decline in the spot that gave it birth. Its progress from east to west, from Asia to Europe, proves nothing against this axiom. A clear light loses none of its brilliancy by being diffused over a wider space. Intellectual cultivation, that fertile source of national wealth, advances by degrees and extends without being displaced. Its movement is not a migration: and though it may seem to be such in the east, it is because barbarous hordes possessed themselves of Egypt, Asia Minor, and of once free Greece, the forsaken cradle of the civilization of our ancestors.
The barbarism of nations is the consequence of oppression exercised by internal despotism or foreign conquest; and it is always accompanied by progressive impoverishment, by a diminution of the public fortune. Free and powerful institutions, adapted to the interests of all, remove these dangers; and the growing civilization of the world, the competition of labour and of trade, are not the ruin of states whose welfare flows from a natural source. Productive and commercial Europe will profit by the new order of things in Spanish America, as it would profit from events that might put an end to barbarism in Greece, on the northern coast of Africa and in other countries subject to Ottoman tyranny. What most menaces the prosperity of the ancient continent is the prolongation of those intestine struggles which check production and diminish at the same time the number and wants of consumers. This struggle, begun in Spanish America six years after my departure, is drawing gradually to an end. We shall soon see both shores of the Atlantic peopled by independent nations, ruled by different forms of Government, but united by the remembrance of a common origin, uniformity of language, and the wants which civilization creates. It may be said that the immense progress of the art of navigation has contracted the boundaries of the seas. The Atlantic already assumes the form of a narrow channel which no more removes the New World from the commercial states of Europe, than the Mediterranean, in the infancy of navigation, removed the Greeks of Peloponnesus from those of Ionia, Sicily, and the Cyrenaic region.
I have thought it right to enter into these general considerations on the future connection of the two continents, before tracing the political sketch of the provinces of Venezuela. These provinces, governed till 1810 by a captain-general residing at Caracas, are now united to the old viceroyalty of New Grenada, or Santa Fe, under the name of the Republic of Columbia. I will not anticipate the description which I shall have hereafter to give of New Grenada; but, in order to render my observations on the statistics of Venezuela more useful to those who would judge of the political importance of the country and the advantages it may offer to the trade of Europe, even in its present unadvanced state of cultivation, I will describe the United Provinces of Venezuela in their relations with Cundinamarca, or New Grenada, and as forming part of the new state of Columbia. M. Bonpland and I passed nearly three years in the country which now forms the territory of the republic of Columbia; sixteen months in Venezuela and eighteen in New Grenada. We crossed the territory in its whole extent; on one hand from the mountains of Paria as far as Esmeralda on the Upper Orinoco, and San Carlo del Rio Negro, situated near the frontiers of Brazil; and on the other, from Rio Sinu and Carthagena as far as the snowy summits of Quito, the port of Guayaquil on the coast of the Pacific, and the banks of the Amazon in the province of Jaen de Bracamoros. So long a stay and an expedition of one thousand three hundred leagues in the interior of the country, of which more than six hundred and fifty were by water, have furnished me with a pretty accurate knowledge of local circumstances.
I am aware that travellers, who have recently visited America, regard its progress as far more rapid than my statistical researches seem to indicate. For the year 1913 they promise one hundred and twelve millions of inhabitants in Mexico, of which they believe that the population is doubled every twenty-two years; and during the same interval one hundred and forty millions in the United States. These numbers, I confess, do not appear to me to be alarming from the motives that may excite fear among the disciples of Malthus. It is possible that some time or other, two or three hundred millions of men may find subsistence in the vast extent of the new continent between the lake of Nicaragua and lake Ontario. I admit that the United States will contain above eighty millions of inhabitants a hundred years hence, allowing a progressive change in the period of doubling from twenty-five to thirty-five and forty years; but, notwithstanding the elements of prosperity to be found in equinoctial America, I doubt whether the increase of the population in Venezuela, Spanish Guiana, New Grenada and Mexico can be in general so rapid as in the United States. The latter, which are situated entirely in the temperate zone, destitute of high chains of mountains, embrace an immense extent of country easy of cultivation. The hordes of Indian hunters flee both from the colonists, whom they abhor, and the methodist missionaries, who oppose their taste for indolence and a vagabond life. The more fertile land of Spanish America produces indeed on the same surface a greater amount of nutritive substances. On the table lands of the equinoctial regions wheat doubtless yields annually from twenty to twenty-four for one; but Cordilleras furrowed by almost inaccessible crevices, bare and arid steppes, forests that resist both the axe and fire, and an atmosphere filled with venomous insects, will long present powerful obstacles to agriculture and industry. The most active and enterprising colonists cannot, in the mountainous districts of Merida, Antioquia, and Los Pastos, in the llanos of Venezuela and Guaviare, in the forests of the Rio Magdalena, the Orinoco, and the province of Las Esmeraldas, west of Quito, extend their agricultural conquests as they have done in the woody plains westward of the Alleghenies, from the sources of the Ohio, the Tennessee and the Alabama, as far as the banks of the Missouri and the Arkansas. Calling to mind the account of my voyage on the Orinoco, it may be easy to appreciate the obstacles which nature opposes to the efforts of man in hot and humid climates. In Mexico, large extents of soil are destitute of springs; rain seldom falls, and the want of navigable rivers impedes communication. As the ancient native population is agricultural, and had been so long before the arrival of the Spaniards, the lands most easy of access and cultivation have already their proprietors. Fertile tracts of country, at the disposal of the first occupier, or ready to be sold in lots for the profit of the state, are much less common than Europeans imagine. Hence it follows that the progress of colonization cannot be everywhere as free and rapid in Spanish America as it has hitherto been in the western provinces of the United States. The population of that union is composed wholly of whites, and of negros, who, having been torn from their country, or born in the New World, have become the instruments of the industry of the whites. In Mexico, Guatimala, Quito, and Peru, on the contrary, there exist in our day more than five millions and a half of natives of copper-coloured race, whose isolated position, partly forced and partly voluntary, together with their attachment to ancient habits, and their mistrustful inflexibility of character, will long prevent their participation in the progress of the public prosperity, notwithstanding the efforts employed to disindianize them.
I dwell on the differences between the free states of temperate and equinoctial America, to show that the latter have to contend against obstacles connected with their physical and moral position; and to remind the reader that the countries embellished with the most varied and precious productions of nature, are not always susceptible of an easy, rapid, and uniformly extended cultivation. If we consider the limits which the population may attain as depending solely on the quantity of subsistence which the land is capable of producing, the most simple calculations would prove the preponderance of the communities established in the fine regions of the torrid zone; but political economy, or the positive science of government, is distrustful of ciphers and vain abstractions. We know that by the multiplication of one family only, a continent previously desert may reckon in the space of eight centuries more than eight millions of inhabitants; and yet these estimates, founded on the hypothesis of a continuous doubling in twenty-five or thirty years, are contradicted by the history of every country already advanced in civilization. The destinies which await the free states of Spanish America are too glorious to require to be embellished by illusions and chimerical calculations.
Among the thirty-four million inhabitants spread over the vast surface of continental America, in which estimate are comprised the savage natives, we distinguish, according to the three preponderant races, sixteen millions and a half in the possessions of the Spanish Americans, ten millions in those of the Anglo-Americans, and nearly four millions in those of the Portuguese Americans. The population of these three great divisions is, at the present time, in the proportion of 4, 2 1/2, 1; while the extent of surface over which the population is spread is, as the numbers 1.5, 0.7, 1. The area of the United States* is nearly one-fourth greater than that of Russia west of the Ural mountains; and Spanish America is in the same proportion more extensive than the whole of Europe. (* Notwithstanding the political changes which have taken place in the South American colonies, I shall throughout this work designate the country inhabited by the Spanish Americans by the denomination of Spanish America. I call the country of the Anglo-Americans the United States, without adding of North America, although other United States exist in South America. It is embarrassing to speak of nations who play a great part on the scene of the world without having collective names. The term American can no longer be applied solely to the citizens of the United States of North America; and it were to be wished that the nomenclature of the independent nations of the New Continent should be fixed in a manner at once convenient, harmonious, and precise.) The United States contain five-eighths of the proportion of the Spanish possessions, and yet their area is not one-half so large. Brazil comprehends tracts of country so desert toward the west that over an extent only a third less than that of Spanish America its population is in the proportion of one to four. The following table contains the results of an attempt which I made, conjointly with M. Mathieu, member of the Academy of Sciences, and of the Bureau des Longitudes, to estimate with precision the extent of the surface of the various states of America. We made use of maps on which the limits had been corrected according to the statements published in my Recueil d'Observations Astronomiques. Our scales were, generally speaking, so large that spaces from four to five leagues square were not omitted. We observed this degree of precision that we might not add the uncertainty of the measure of triangles, trapeziums, and the sinuosities of the coasts, to the uncertainty of geographical statements.
Surface Pop.
1. Possessions of the Spanish Americans : 371,380 : 16,785,000.
Mexico or New Spain : 75,830 : 6,800,000.Guatemala : 16,740 : 1,600,000.Cuba and Porto Rico : 4,430 : 800,000.Columbia—Venezuela : 33,700 : 785,000.Columbia—New Grenada and Quito : 58,250 : 2,000,000.Peru : 41,420 : 1,400,000.Chili : 14,240 : 1,100,000.Buenos Ayres : 126,770 : 2,300,000.
2. Possessions of the PortugueseAmericans (Brazil) : 256,990 : 4,000,000.
3. Possessions of theAnglo-Americans (United States) : 174,300 : 10,220,000.
From the statistical researches which have been made in several countries of Europe, important results have been obtained by a comparison of the relative population of maritime and inland provinces. In Spain these relations are to one another as nine to five; in the United Provinces of Venezuela, and, above all, in the ancient Capitania-General of Caracas, they are as thirty-five to one. How powerful soever may be the influence of commerce on the prosperity of states, and the intellectual development of nations, it would be wrong to attribute in America, as we do in Europe, to that cause alone the differences just mentioned. In Spain and Italy, if we except the fertile plains of Lombardy, the inland districts are arid and abounding in mountains or high table-lands: the meteorological circumstances on which the fertility of the soil depends are not the same in the lands bordering on the sea, as they are in the central provinces. Colonization in America has generally begun on the coast, and advanced slowly towards the interior; such is its progress in Brazil and in Venezuela. It is only where the coast is unhealthy, as in Mexico and New Grenada, or sandy and exempt from rain as in Peru, that the population is concentrated on the mountains, and the table-lands of the interior. These local circumstances are too often overlooked in considerations on the future fate of the Spanish colonies; they communicate a peculiar character to some of those countries, the physical and moral analogies of which are less striking than is commonly supposed. Considered with reference to the distribution of the population, the two provinces of New Grenada and Venezuela, which have been united in one political body, exhibit the most complete contrast. Their capitals (and the position of capitals always denotes where population is most concentrated) are at such unequal distances from the trading coasts of the Caribbean Sea, that the town of Caracas, to be placed on the same parallel with Santa-Fe de Bogota, must be transplanted southward to the junction of the Orinoco with the Guaviare, where the mission of San Fernando de Atabapo is situated.
The republic of Columbia is, with Mexico and Guatemala, the only state of Spanish America which occupies at once the coasts opposite to Europe and to Asia. From Cape Paria to the western extremity of Veragua is a distance of 400 sea leagues: and from Cape Burica to the mouth of Rio Tumbez the distance is 260. The shore possessed by the republic of Columbia consequently equals in length the line of coasts extending from Cadiz to Dantzic, or from Ceuta to Jaffa. This immense resource for national industry is combined with a degree of cultivation of which the importance has not hitherto been sufficiently acknowledged. The isthmus of Panama forms part of the territory of Columbia, and that neck of land, if traversed by good roads and stocked with camels, may one day serve as a portage for the commerce of the world, even though the plains of Cupica, the bay of Mandinga or the Rio Chagre should not afford the possibility of a canal for the passage of vessels proceeding from Europe to China,* or from the United States to the north-west coast of America. (* The old vice-royalty of Buenos Ayres extended also along a small portion of the South Sea coast.)
When considering the influence which the configuration of countries (that is, the elevation and the form of coasts) exercises in every district on the progress of civilization and the destiny of nations, I have pointed out the disadvantages of those vast masses of triangular continents, which, like Africa and the greater part of South America, are destitute of gulfs and inland seas. It cannot be doubted that the existence of the Mediterranean has been closely connected with the first dawn of human cultivation among the nations of the west, and that the articulated form of the land, the frequency of its contractions and the concatenation of peninsulas favoured the civilization of Greece, Italy, and perhaps of all Europe westward of the meridian of the Propontis. In the New World the uninterruptedness of the coasts and the monotony of their straight lines are most remarkable in Chili and Peru. The shore of Columbia is more varied, and its spacious gulfs, such as that of Paria, Cariaco, Maracaybo, and Darien, were, at the time of the first discovery better peopled than the rest and facilitated the interchange of productions. That shore possesses an incalculable advantage in being washed by the Caribbean Sea, a kind of inland sea with several outlets, and the only one pertaining to the New Continent. This basin, whose various shores form portions of the United States, of the republic of Columbia, of Mexico and several maritime powers of Europe, gives birth to a peculiar and exclusively American system of trade. The south-east of Asia with its neighbouring archipelago and, above all, the state of the Mediterranean in the time of the Phoenician and Greek colonies, prove that the nearness of opposite coasts, not having the same productions and not inhabited by nations of different races, exercises a happy influence on commercial industry and intellectual cultivation. The importance of the inland Caribbean Sea, bounded by Venezuela on the south, will be further augmented by the progressive increase of population on the banks of the Mississippi; for that river, the Rio del Norte and the Magdalena are the only great navigable streams which the Caribbean Sea receives. The depth of the American rivers, their immense branches, and the use of steam-boats, everywhere facilitated by the proximity of forests, will, to a certain extent, compensate for the obstacles which the uniform line of the coasts and the general configuration of the continent oppose to the progress of industry and civilization.
On comparing the extent of the territory with the absolute population, we obtain the result of the connection of those two elements of public prosperity, a connection that constitutes the relative population of every state in the New World. We shall find to every square sea league, in Mexico, 90; in the United States, 58; in the republic of Columbia, 30; and in Brazil, 15 inhabitants; while Asiatic Russia furnishes 11; the whole Russian Empire, 87; Sweden with Norway, 90; European Russia, 320; Spain, 763; and France, 1778. But these estimates of relative population, when applied to countries of immense extent, and of which a great part is entirely uninhabited, merely furnish mathematical abstractions of but little value. In countries uniformly cultivated—in France, for example—the number of inhabitants to the square league, calculated by separate departments, is in general only a third, more or less, than the relative population of the sum of all the departments. Even in Spain the deviations from the average number rise, with few exceptions, only from half to double. In America, on the contrary, it is only in the Atlantic states, from South Carolina to New Hampshire, that the population begins to spread with any uniformity. In that most civilized portion of the New World, from 130 to 900 inhabitants are reckoned to the square league, while the relative population on all the Atlantic states, considered together, is 240. The extremes (North Carolina and Massachusetts) are only in the relation of 1 to 7, nearly as in France, where the extremes, in the departments of the Hautes Alpes and the Cote-du-Nord are also in the relation of 1 to 6.7. The variations from the average number, which we generally find restricted to narrow limits in the civilized countries of Europe, exceed all measure in Brazil, in the Spanish colonies and even in the confederation of the United States, in its whole extent. We find in Mexico in some of the intendencias, for example, La Sonora and Durango, from 9 to 15 inhabitants to the square league, while in others, on the central table-land, there are more than 500. The relative population of the country situated between the eastern bank of the Mississippi and the Atlantic states is scarcely 47; while that of Connecticut, Rhode island, and Massachusetts is more than 800. Westward of the Mississippi as well as in the interior of Spanish Guiana there are not two inhabitants to the square league over much larger extents of territory than Switzerland or Belgium. The state of these countries is like that of the Russian Empire, where the relative population of some of the Asiatic governments (Irkutsk and Tobolsk) is to that of the best cultivated European districts as 1 to 300.
The enormous difference existing, in countries newly cultivated, between the extent of territory and the number of inhabitants, renders these partial estimates necessary. When we learn that New Spain and the United States, taking their entire extent at 75,000 and 174,000 square sea-leagues, give respectively 90 and 58 souls to each league, we no more obtain a correct idea of that distribution of the population on which the political power of nations depends, than we should of the climate of a country, that is to say, of the distribution of the heat in the different seasons, by the mere knowledge of the mean temperature of the whole year. If we take from the United States all their possessions west of the Mississippi, their relative population would be 121 instead of 58 to the square league; consequently much greater than that of New Spain. Taking from the latter country the Provincias internas (north and north-east of Nueva Galicia) we should find 190 instead of 90 souls to the square league.
The provinces of Caracas, Maracaybo, Cumana and Barcelona, that is, the maritime provinces of the north, are the most populous of the old Capitania-General of Caracas; but, in comparing this relative population with that of New Spain, where the two intendencias of Mexico and Puebla alone contain, on an extent scarcely equal to the superficies of the province of Caracas, a greater population than that of the whole republic of Columbia, we see that some Mexican intendencias which, with respect to the concentration of their culture, occupy but the seventh or eighth rank (Zacatecas and Guadalajara), contain more inhabitants to the square league than the province of Caracas. The average of the relative population of Cumana, Barcelona, Caracas and Maracaybo, is fifty-six; and, as 6200 square leagues, that is, one half of the extent of these four provinces are almost desert Llanos, we find, in reckoning the superficies and the scanty population of the plains, 102 inhabitants to the square league. An analogous modification gives the province of Caracas alone a relative population of 208, that is, only one-seventh less than that of the Atlantic States of North America.
As in political economy numerical statements become instructive only by a comparison with analogous facts I have carefully examined what, in the present state of the two continents, might be considered as a small relative population in Europe, and a very great relative population in America. I have, however, chosen examples only from among the provinces which have a continued surface of more than 600 square leagues in order to exclude the accidental accumulations of population which occur around great cities; for instance, on the coast of Brazil, in the valley of Mexico, on the table-lands of Santa Fe de Bogota and Cuzco; or finally, in the smaller West India Islands (Barbadoes, Martinique and St. Thomas) of which the relative population is from 3000 to 4700 inhabitants to the square league, and consequently equal to the most fertile parts of Holland, France and Lombardy.
The four least populous Governments of European Russia:Archangel : 10.Olonez : 42.Wologda and Astracan : 52.Finland : 106.
The least populous Province of Spain, that of Cuenca : 311.