Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 3 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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If He Fears Events Which May
Place The Havannah Under The Dominion Of A European Power More
Formidable Than Spain,
He is not the less desirous that the political
ties by which Louisiana, Pensacola and Saint Augustin of Florida were
Heretofore united to the island of Cuba may for ever be broken.
The extreme sterility of the soil, joined to the want of inhabitants
and of cultivation, have at all times rendered the proximity of
Florida of small importance to the trade of the Havannah; but the case
is different on the coast of Mexico. The shores of that country,
stretching in a semicircle from the frequented ports of Tampico, Vera
Cruz, and Alvarado to Cape Catoche, almost touch, by the peninsula of
Yucatan, the western part of the island of Cuba. Commerce is extremely
active between the Havannah and the port of Campeachy; and it
increases, notwithstanding the new order of things in Mexico, because
the trade, equally illicit with a more distant coast, that of Caracas
or Columbia, employs but a small number of vessels. In such difficult
times the supply of salt meat (tasajo) for the slaves is more easily
obtained from Buenos Ayres and the plains of Merida than from those of
Cumana, Barcelona and Caracas. The island of Cuba and the archipelago
of the Philippines have for ages derived from New Spain the funds
necessary for their internal administration and for keeping up their
fortifications, arsenals and dockyards. The Havannah was the military
port of the New World; and, till 1808, annually received 1,800,000
piastres from the Mexican treasury.
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