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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We Admired The Conveniences
Which Industry And Commerce Furnish To Civilized Man.
Humble dwellings
appeared to us magnificent; and every person with whom we conversed
seemed to be endowed with superior intelligence.
Long privations give
a value to the smallest enjoyments; and I cannot express the pleasure
we felt when we saw for the first time wheaten bread on the governor's
table. Sensations of this sort are doubtless familiar to all who have
made distant voyages.
A painful circumstance obliged us to sojourn a whole month in the town
of Angostura. We felt ourselves on the first days after our arrival
tired and enfeebled, but in perfect health. M. Bonpland began to
examine the small number of plants which he had been able to save from
the influence of the damp climate; and I was occupied in settling by
astronomical observations the longitude and latitude of the capital,*
as well as the dip of the magnetic needle. (* I found the latitude of
Santo Tomas de la Nueva Guiana, commonly called Angostura, or the
Strait, near the cathedral, 8 degrees 8 minutes 11 seconds, the
longitude 66 degrees 15 minutes 21 seconds.) These labours were soon
interrupted. We were both attacked almost on the same day by a
disorder which with my fellow-traveller took the character of a
debilitating fever. At this period the air was in a state of the
greatest salubrity at Angostura; and as the only mulatto servant we
had brought from Cumana felt symptoms of the same disorder, it was
suspected that we had imbibed the germs of typhus in the damp forests
of Cassiquiare.
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