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 Nature Of The Wood,
And The Lichens Which Covered Its Bark, Bore Evidence That This
Trunk Had Not Belonged To These Submarine Forests Which Ancient
Revolutions Of The Globe Have Deposited In The Polar Regions.
If
the cedrela, instead of having been cast on the strand of
Teneriffe, had been carried farther south, It would probably have
made the whole tour of the Atlantic, and returned to its native
soil with the general current of the tropics.
This conjecture is
supported by a fact of more ancient date, recorded in the history
of the Canaries by the abbe Viera. In 1770, a small vessel laden
with corn, and bound from the island of Lancerota, to Santa Cruz,
in Teneriffe, was driven out to sea, while none of the crew were on
board. The motion of the waters from east to west, carried it to
America, where it went on shore at La Guayra, near Caracas.
Whilst the art of navigation was yet in its infancy, the
Gulf-stream suggested to the mind of Christopher Columbus certain
indications of the existence of western regions. Two corpses, the
features of which indicated a race of unknown men, were cast ashore
on the Azores, towards the end of the 15th century. Nearly at the
same period, the brother-in-law of Columbus, Peter Correa, governor
of Porto Santo, found on the strand of that island pieces of bamboo
of extraordinary size, brought thither by the western currents. The
dead bodies and the bamboos attracted the attention of the Genoese
navigator, who conjectured that both came from a continent situate
towards the west.
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