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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The Aspect Of This Place Has In It Something Solitary And
Gloomy; We Seemed Not To Be On A Continent, Covered With Vast
Forests, But On A Rocky Island, Destitute Of Vegetation.
With the
exception of Cabo Blanco and the cocoa-trees of Maiquetia, no view
meets the eye but that of the horizon, the sea, and the azure vault
of heaven.
The heat is excessive during the day, and most
frequently during the night. The climate of La Guayra is justly
considered to be hotter than that of Cumana, Porto Cabello, and
Coro, because the sea-breeze is less felt, and the air is heated by
the radiant caloric which the perpendicular rocks emit from the
time the sun sets. The examination of the thermometric observations
made during nine months at La Guayra by an eminent physician,
enabled me to compare the climate of this port, with those of
Cumana, of the Havannah, and of Vera Cruz. This comparison is the
more interesting, as it furnishes an inexhaustible subject of
conversation in the Spanish colonies, and among the mariners who
frequent those latitudes. As nothing is more deceiving in such
matters than the testimony of the senses, we can judge of the
difference of climates only by numerical calculations.
The four places of which we have been speaking are considered as
the hottest on the shores of the New World. A comparison of them
may serve to confirm what we have several times observed, that it
is generally the duration of a high temperature, and not the excess
of heat, or its absolute quantity, which occasions the sufferings
of the inhabitants of the torrid zone.
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