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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The Whole Of This Country Is
Open, Full Of Fine Savannahs, And No Way Resembling That Through Which
We Passed On The Upper Orinoco.
The forests become impenetrable only
on advancing toward the south; on the north are meadows intersected
with woody hills.
The most picturesque scenes lie near the falls of
the Carony, and in that chain of mountains, two hundred and fifty
toises high, which separates the tributary streams of the Orinoco from
those of the Cuyuni. There are situate the Villa de Upata,* the
capital of the missions, Santa Maria, and Cupapui. (* Founded in 1762.
Population in 1797, 657 souls; in 1803, 769 souls. The most populous
villages of these missions, Alta Gracia, Cupapui, Santa Rosa de Cura,
and Guri, had between 600 and 900 inhabitants in 1797; but in 1818
epidemic fevers diminished the population more than a third. In some
missions these diseases have swept away nearly half of the
inhabitants.) Small table-lands afford a healthy and temperate
climate. Cacao, rice, cotton, indigo, and sugar grow in abundance
wherever a virgin soil, covered with a thick coat of grasses, is
subjected to cultivation. The first Christian settlements in those
countries are not, I believe, of an earlier date than 1721. The
elements of which the present population is composed are the three
Indian races of the Guayanos, the Caribs and the Guaycas. The last are
a people of mountaineers and are far from being so diminutive in size
as the Guaycas whom we found at Esmeralda.
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