With Respect To The Inland Trade, The Most Active Is That Of The Province Of Varinas, Which Sends Mules, Cacao, Indigo, Cotton, And Sugar To Angostura; And In Return Receives Generos, That Is, The Products Of The Manufacturing Industry Of Europe.

I have seen long boats (lanchas) set off, the cargoes of which were valued at eight or ten thousand piastres.

These boats went first up the Orinoco to Cabruta; then along the Apure to San Vicente; and finally, on the Rio Santo Domingo, as far as Torunos, which is the port of Varinas Nuevas. The little town of San Fernando de Apure, of which I have already given a description, is the magazine of this river-trade, which might become more considerable by the introduction of steamboats.

I have now described the country through which we passed during a voyage of five hundred leagues; it remains for me to make known the small space of three degrees fifty-two minutes of longitude, that separates the present capital from the mouth of the Orinoco. Exact knowledge of the delta and the course of the Rio Carony is at once interesting to hydrography and to European commerce.

When a vessel coming from sea would enter the principal mouth of the Orinoco, the Boca de Navios, it should make the land at the Punta Barima. The right or southern bank is the highest: the granitic rock pierces the marshy soil at a small distance in the interior, between the Cano Barima, the Aquire, and the Cuyuni. The left, or northern bank of the Orinoco, which stretches along the delta towards the Boca de Mariusas and the Punta Baxa, is very low, and is distinguishable at a distance only by the clumps of moriche palm-trees which embellish the passage. This is the sago-tree* of the country (* The nutritious fecula or medullary flour of the sago-trees is found principally in a group of palms which M. Kunth has distinguished by the name of calameae. It is collected, however, in the Indian Archipelago, as an article of trade, from the trunks of the Cycas revoluta, the Phoenix farinifera, the Corypha umbraculifera, and the Caryota urens. (Ainslie, Materia Medica of Hindostan, Madras 1813.)) The quantity of nutritious matter which the real sago-tree of Asia affords (Sagus Rumphii, or Metroxylon sagu, Roxb.) exceeds that which is furnished by any other plant useful to man. One trunk of a tree in its fifteenth year sometimes yields six hundred pounds weight of sago, or meal (for the word sago signifies meal in the dialect of Amboyna). Mr. Crawfurd, who resided a long time in the Indian Archipelago, calculates that an English acre could contain four hundred and thirty-five sago-trees, which would yield one hundred and twenty thousand five hundred pounds avoirdupois of fecula, or more than eight thousand pounds yearly. History of the Indian Archipelago volume 1 pages 387 and 393. This produce is triple that of corn, and double that of potatoes in France. But the plantain produces, on the same surface of land, still more alimentary substance than the sago-tree.); it yields the flour of which the yuruma bread is made; and far from being a palm-tree of the shore, like the Chamaerops humilis, the common cocoa-tree, and the lodoicea of Commerson, is found as a palm-tree of the marshes as far as the sources of the Orinoco.* (* I dwell much on these divisions of the great and fine families of palms according to the distribution of the species:

Enter page number Go  Previous Next
Page 6 of 332
Words from 2634 to 3225 of 174507