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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On Some
Well-Known Maps We Find Erroneously Marked Between The Meridians Of
Caracas And Cumana Two Cordilleras Stretching From
North to south, as
far as latitude 8 3/4 degrees, under the names of Cerros de Alta
Gracia and
Del Bergantin, thus describing as mountainous a territory
of 25 leagues broad, where we should seek in vain a hillock of a few
feet in height.
Turning to the island of Marguerita, composed, like the peninsula of
Araya, of micaceous slate, and anciently linked with that peninsula by
the Morro de Chacopata and the islands of Coche and Cubagua, we seem
to recognize in the two mountainous groups of Macanao and La Vega de
San Juan traces of a third coast-chain of the Cordillera of Venezuela.
Do these two groups of Marguerita, of which the most westerly is above
600 toises high, belong to a submarine chain stretching by the isle of
Tortuga, towards the Sierra de Santa Lucia de Coro, on the parallel of
11 degrees? Must we admit that in latitude 11 1/4 and 12 1/2 degrees a
fourth chain, the most northerly of all, formerly stretched out in the
direction of the island of Hermanos, by Blanquilla, Los Roques,
Orchila, Aves, Buen Ayre, Curacao and Oruba, towards Cape Chichivacoa?
These important problems can only be solved when the chain of islands
parallel with the coast has been properly examined. It must not be
forgotten that a great irruption of the ocean appears to have taken
place between Trinidad and Grenada,* and that no where else in the
long series of the Lesser Antilles are two neighbouring islands so far
removed from each other.
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