Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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Great Fallings-In Of The Earth
Took Place In The Mountain Paurari, And Near The Rock Aravacoto A
Small Island Disappeared In The Orinoco.
The undulatory motion
continued during a whole hour.
This seemed the first signal of
those violent commotions which shook the coasts of Cumana and
Cariaco for more than ten months. It might be supposed that men
living in woods, with no other shelter than huts of reeds and
palm-leaves, could have little to dread from earthquakes. But at
Erevato and Caura, where these phenomena are of rare occurrence,
they terrify the Indians, frighten the beasts of the forests, and
impel the crocodiles to quit the waters for the shore. Nearer the
sea, where shocks are frequent, far from being dreaded by the
inhabitants, they are regarded with satisfaction as the prognostics
of a wet and fertile year.
In this dissertation on the earthquakes of Terra Firma and on the
volcanoes of the neighbouring archipelago of the West India
Islands, I have pursued the plan of first relating a number of
particular facts, and then considering them in one general point of
view. Everything announces in the interior of the globe the
operation of active powers, which, by mutual reaction, balance and
modify one another. The greater our ignorance of the causes of
these undulatory movements, these evolutions of heat, these
formations of elastic fluids, the more it becomes the duty of
persons who apply themselves to the study of physical science to
examine the relations which these phenomena so uniformly present at
great distances apart. It is only by considering these various
relations under a general point of view, and tracing them over a
great extent of the surface of the globe, through formations of
rocks the most different, that we are led to abandon the
supposition of trifling local causes, strata of pyrites, or of
ignited coal.* (* See "Views of Nature" - On the structure and
action of volcanoes in different parts of the world, page 353
(Bohn's edition); also "Cosmos" pages 199-225 (Bohn's edition).)
The following is the series of phenomena remarked on the northern
coasts of Cumana, Nueva Barcelona, and Caracas; and presumed to be
connected with the causes which produce earthquakes and eruptions
of lava. We shall begin with the most eastern extremity, the island
of Trinidad; which seems rather to belong to the shore of the
continent than to the system of the mountains of the West India
Islands.
1. The pit which throws up asphaltum in the bay of Mayaro, on the
eastern coast of the island of Trinidad, southward of Point
Guataro. This is the mine of chapapote or mineral tar of the
country. I was assured that in the months of March and June the
eruptions are often attended with violent explosions, smoke, and
flames. Almost on the same parallel, and also in the sea, but
westward of the island (near Punta de la Brea, and to the south of
the port of Naparaimo), we find a similar vent.
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