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
Island Of St. Domingo Was At That Time, It Must Be Remembered, A
French Colony.)
Tea could be cultivated as well as coffee in the mountainous parts
of the provinces of Caracas and Cumana.
Every climate is there
found rising in stages one above another; and this new culture
would succeed there as well as in the southern hemisphere, where
the government of Brazil, protecting at the same time industry and
religious toleration, suffered at once the introduction of Chinese
tea and of the dogmas of Fo. It is not yet a century since the
first coffee-trees were planted at Surinam and in the West India
Islands, and already the produce of America amounts to fifteen
millions of piastres, reckoning the quintal of coffee at fourteen
piastres only.
On the eighth of February we set out at sunrise, to cross the
Higuerote, a group of lofty mountains, separating the two
longitudinal valleys of Caracas and Aragua. After passing, near Las
Ajuntas, the junction of the two small rivers San Pedro and
Macarao, which form the Rio Guayra, we ascended a steep hill to the
table-land of La Buenavista, where we saw a few lonely houses. The
view extends on the north-west to the city of Caracas, and on the
south to the village of Los Teques. The country has a very wild
aspect, and is thickly wooded. We had now gradually lost the plants
of the valley of Caracas.* (* The Flora of Caracas is characterized
chiefly by the following plants, which grow between the heights of
four hundred and six hundred toises.
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