Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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The Little That Was Known, Up To The End Of The Last Century, Of The
Astronomical Geography Of The Interior
Of the New Continent, was owing
to these estimable and laborious men, the French and Spanish
academicians, who measured a
Meridian line at Quito, and to officers
who went from Valparaiso to Buenos Ayres to join the expedition of
Malaspina. Those persons who know the inaccuracy of the maps of South
America, and have seen those uncultivated lands between the Jupura and
the Rio Negro, the Madeira and the Ucayale, the Rio Branco and the
coasts of Cayenne, which up to our own days have been gravely disputed
in Europe, can be not a little surprised at the perseverance with
which the possession of a few square leagues is litigated. These
disputed grounds are generally separated from the cultivated part of
the colonies by deserts, the extent of which is unknown. In the
celebrated conferences of Puente de Caya the question was agitated,
whether, in fixing the line of demarcation three hundred and seventy
Spanish leagues to the west of the Cape Verde Islands, the pope meant
that the first meridian should be reckoned from the centre of the
island of St. Nicholas, or (as the court of Portugal asserted) from
the western extremity of the little island of St. Antonio. In the year
1754, the time of the expedition of Iturriaga and Solano, negociations
were entered into respecting the possession of the then desert banks
of the Tuamini, and of a marshy tract which we crossed in one evening
going from Javita to Cano Pimichin.
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