Volume Iii Part 6 (2/2)

The road from Rio Blanco to Batabano runs across an uncultivated country, half covered with forests; in the open spots the indigo plant and the cotton-tree grow wild. As the capsule of the Gossypium opens at the season when the northern storms are most frequent, the down that envelops the seed is swept from one side to the other; and the gathering of the cotton, which is of a very fine quality, suffers greatly. Several of our friends, among whom was Senor de Mendoza, captain of the port of Valparaiso, and brother to the celebrated astronomer who resided so long in London, accompanied us to Potrero de Mopox. In herborizing further southward, we found a new palm-tree with fan-leaves (Corypha maritima), having a free thread between the interstices of the folioles. This Corypha covers a part of the southern coast and takes the place of the majestic palma real and the Cocos crispa of the northern coast. Porous limestone (of the Jura formation) appeared from time to time in the plain.

Batabano was then a poor village and its church had been completed only a few years previously. The Sienega begins at the distance of half a league from the village; it is a tract of marshy soil, extending from the Laguna de Cortez as far as the mouth of the Rio Xagua, on a length of sixty leagues from west to east. At Batabano it is believed that in those regions the sea continues to gain upon the land, and that the oceanic irruption was particularly remarkable at the period of the great upheaving which took place at the end of the eighteenth century, when the tobacco mills disappeared, and the Rio Chorrera changed its course. Nothing can be more gloomy than the aspect of these marshes around Batabano. Not a shrub breaks the monotony of the prospect: a few stunted trunks of palm-trees rise like broken masts, amidst great tufts of Junceae and Irides. As we stayed only one night at Batabano, I regretted much that I was unable to obtain precise information relative to the two species of crocodiles which infest the Sienega. The inhabitants give to one of these animals the name of cayman, to the other that of crocodile; or, as they say commonly in Spain, of cocodrilo. They a.s.sured us that the latter has most agility, and measures most in height: his snout is more pointed than that of the cayman, and they are never found together. The crocodile is very courageous and is said to climb into boats when he can find a support for his tail. He frequently wanders to the distance of a league from the Rio Cauto and the marshy coast of Xagua to devour the pigs on the islands. This animal is sometimes fifteen feet long, and will, it is said, pursue a man on horseback, like the wolves in Europe; while the animals exclusively called caymans at Batabano are so timid that people bathe without apprehension in places where they live in bands. These peculiarities, and the name of cocodrilo, given at the island of Cuba, to the most dangerous of the carnivorous reptiles, appear to me to indicate a different species from the great animals of the Orinoco, Rio Magdalena and Saint Domingo. In other parts of the Spanish American continent the settlers, deceived by the exaggerated accounts of the ferocity of crocodiles in Egypt, allege that the real crocodile is only found in the Nile. Zoologists have, however, ascertained that there are in America caymans or alligators with obtuse snouts, and legs not indented, and crocodiles with pointed snouts and indented legs; and in the old continent, both crocodiles and gaviales. The Crocodilus acutus of San Domingo, in which I cannot hitherto specifically distinguish the crocodiles of the great rivers of the Orinoco and the Magdalena, has, according to Cuvier, so great a resemblance to the crocodile of the Nile,* that it required a minute examination to prove that the rule laid down by Buffon relative to the distribution of species between the tropical regions of the two continents was correct. (* This striking a.n.a.logy was ascertained by M.

Geoffroy de Saint Hilaire in 1803 when General Rochambeau sent a crocodile from San Domingo to the Museum of Natural History at Paris.

M. Bonpland and myself had made drawings and detailed descriptions in 1801 and 1802 of the same species which inhabit the great rivers of South America, during our pa.s.sage on the Apure, the Orinoco and the Magdalena. We committed the mistake so common to travellers, of not sending them at once to Europe, together with some young specimens.)

On my second visit to the Havannah, in 1804, I could not return to the Sienega of Batabano; and therefore I had the two species, called caymans and crocodiles by the inhabitants, brought to me, at a great expense. Two crocodiles arrived alive; the oldest was four feet three inches long; they had been caught with great difficulty and were conveyed, muzzled and bound, on a mule, for they were exceedingly vigorous and fierce. In order to observe their habits and movements,*

we placed them in a great hall, where, by climbing on a very high piece of furniture, we could see them attack great dogs. (* M.

Descourtils, who knows the habits of the crocodile better than any other author who has written on that reptile, saw, like Dampier and myself, the Crocodilus acutus often touch his tail with his mouth.) Having seen much of crocodiles during six months, on the Orinoco, the Rio Apure and the Magdalena, we were glad to have another opportunity of observing their habits before our return to Europe. The animals sent to us from Batabano had the snout nearly as sharp as the crocodiles of the Orinoco and the Magdalena (Crocodilus acutus, Cuv.); their colour was dark-green on the back, and white below the belly, with yellow spots on the flanks. I counted, as in all the real crocodiles, thirty-eight teeth in the upper jaw, and thirty in the lower; in the former, the tenth and ninth; and in the latter, the first and fourth, were the largest. In the description made by M.

Bonpland and myself on the spot, we have expressly marked that the lower fourth tooth rises over the upper jaw. The posterior extremities were palmated. These crocodiles of Batabano appeared to us to be specifically identical with the Crocodilus acutus. It is true that the accounts we heard of their habits did not quite agree with what we had ourselves observed on the Orinoco; but carnivorous reptiles of the same species are milder and more timid, or fiercer and more courageous, in the same river, according to the nature of the localities. The animal called the cayman, at Batabano, died on the way, and was not brought to us, so that we could make no comparison of the two species.* (* The four bags filled with musk (bolzas del almizcle) are, in the crocodile of Batabano, exactly in the same position as in that of the Rio Magdalena, beneath the lower jaw and near the a.n.u.s. I was much surprised at not perceiving the smell of musk at the Havannah, three days after the death of the animal, in a temperature of 30 degrees, while at Mompox, on the banks of the Magdalena, living crocodiles infected our apartment. I have since found that Dampier also remarked an absence of smell in the crocodile of Cuba where the caymans spread a very strong smell of musk.) I have no doubt that the crocodile with a sharp snout, and the alligator or cayman with a snout like a pike,* (* Crocodilus acutus of San Domingo.

Alligator lucius of Florida and the Mississippi.) inhabit together, but in distinct bands, the marshy coast between Xagua, the Surgidero of Batabano, and the island of Pinos. In that island Dampier was struck with the great difference between the caymans and the American crocodiles. After having described, though not always with perfect correctness, several of the characteristics which distinguish crocodiles from caymans, he traces the geographical distribution of those enormous saurians. ”In the bay of Campeachy,” he says, ”I saw only caymans or alligators; at the island of Great Cayman, there are crocodiles and no alligators; at the island of Pinos, and in the innumerable creeks of the coast of Cuba, there are both crocodiles and caymans.”* (* Dampier's Voyages and Descriptions, 1599.) To these valuable observations of Dampier I may add that the real crocodile (Crocodilus acutus) is found in the West India Islands nearest the mainland, for instance, at the island of Trinidad; at Marguerita; and also, probably, at Curacao, notwithstanding the want of fresh water.

It is observed, further south, in the Neveri, the Rio Magdalena, the Apure and the Orinoco, as far as the confluence of the Ca.s.siquiare with the Rio Negro (lat.i.tude 2 degrees 2 minutes), consequently more than four hundred leagues from Batabano. It would be interesting to verify on the eastern coast of Mexico and Guatimala, between the Mississippi and the Rio Chagres (in the isthmus of Panama), the limit of the different species of carnivorous reptiles.

We set sail on the 9th of March, somewhat incommoded by the extreme smallness of our vessel, which afforded us no sleeping-place but upon deck. The cabin (camera de pozo) received no air or light but from above; it was merely a hold for provisions, and it was with difficulty that we could place our instruments in it. The thermometer kept up constantly at 32 and 33 degrees (centesimal.) Luckily these inconveniences lasted only twenty days. Our several voyages in the canoes of the Orinoco, and a pa.s.sage in an American vessel laden with several thousand arrobas of salt meat dried in the sun had rendered us not very fastidious.

The gulf of Batabano, bounded by a low and marshy coast, looks like a vast desert. The fis.h.i.+ng birds, which are generally at their post whilst the small land birds, and the indolent vultures (Vultur aura.) are at roost, are seen only in small numbers. The sea is of a greenish-brown hue, as in some of the lakes of Switzerland; while the air, owing to its extreme purity, had, at the moment the sun appeared above the horizon, a cold tint of pale blue, similar to that which landscape painters observe at the same hour in the south of Italy, and which makes distant objects stand out in strong relief. Our sloop was the only vessel in the gulf; for the roadstead of Batabano is scarcely visited except by smugglers, or, as they are here politely called, the traders (los tratantes). The projected ca.n.a.l of Guines will render Batabano an important point of communication between the island of Cuba and the coast of Venezuela. The port is within a bay bounded by Punta Gorda on the east, and by Punta de Salinas on the west: but this bay is itself only the upper or concave end of a great gulf measuring nearly fourteen leagues from south to north, and along an extent of fifty leagues (between the Laguna de Cortez and the Cayo de Piedras) inclosed by an incalculable number of flats and chains of rocks. One great island only, of which the superficies is more than four times the dimensions of that of Martinique, with mountains crowned with majestic pines, rises amidst this labyrinth. This is the island of Pinos, called by Columbus El Evangelista, and by some mariners of the sixteenth century, the Isla de Santa Maria. It is celebrated for its mahogany (Swietenia mahagoni) which is an important article of commerce. We sailed east-south-east, taking the pa.s.sage of Don Cristoval, to reach the rocky island of Cayo de Piedras, and to clear the archipelago, which the Spanish pilots, in the early times of the conquest, designated by the names of Gardens and Bowers (Jardines y Jardinillos). The Queen's Gardens, properly so called, are nearer Cape Cruz, and are separated from the archipelago by an open sea thirty-five leagues broad. Columbus gave them the name they bear, in 1494, when, on his second voyage, he struggled during fifty-eight days with the winds and currents between the island of Pinos and the eastern cape of Cuba. He describes the islands of this archipelago as verdant, full of trees and pleasant* (verdes, llenos de arboledas, y graciosos). (* There exists great geographical confusion, even at the Havannah, in reference to the ancient denominations of the Jardines del Rey and Jardines de la Reyna. In the description of the island of Cuba, given in the Mercurio Americano, and in the Historia Natural de la Isla de Cuba, published at the Havannah by Don Antonio Lopez Gomez, the two groups are placed on the southern coast of the island. Lopez says that the Jardines del Rey extend from the Laguna de Cortez to Bahia de Xagua; but it is historically certain that the governor Diego Velasquez gave his name to the western part of the chain of rocks of the Old Channel, between Cayo Frances and Le Monillo, on the northern coast of the island of Cuba. The Jardines de la Reyna, situated between Cabo Cruz and the port of the Trinity, are in no manner connected with the Jardines and Jardinillos of the Isla de Pinos.

Between the two groups of the chain of rocks are the flats (placeres) of La Paz and Xagua.)

A part of these so-styled gardens is indeed beautiful; the voyager sees the scene change every moment, and the verdure of some of the islands appears the more lovely from its contrast with chains of rocks, displaying only white and barren sands. The surface of these sands, heated by the rays of the sun, seems to be undulating like the surface of a liquid. The contact of layers of air of unequal temperature produces the most varied phenomena of suspension and mirage from ten in the morning till four in the afternoon. Even in those desert places the sun animates the landscape, and gives mobility to the sandy plain, to the trunks of trees, and to the rocks that project into the sea like promontories. When the sun appears these inert ma.s.ses seem suspended in air; and on the neighbouring beach the sands present the appearance of a sheet of water gently agitated by the winds. A train of clouds suffices to seat the trunks of trees and the suspended rocks again on the soil; to render the undulating surface of the plains motionless; and to dissipate the charm which the Arabian, Persian, and Hindoo poets have celebrated as ”the sweet illusions of the solitary desert.”

We doubled Cape Matahambre very slowly. The chronometer of Louis Berthoud having kept time accurately at the Havannah, I availed myself of this occasion to determine, on this and the following days, the positions of Cayo de Don Cristoval, Cayo Flamenco, Cayo de Diego Perez and Cayo de Piedras. I also employed myself in examining the influence which the changes at the bottom of the sea produce on its temperature at the surface. Sheltered by so many islands, the surface is calm as a lake of fresh water, and the layers of different depths being distinct and separate, the smallest change indicated by the lead acts on the thermometer. I was surprised to see that on the east of the little Cayo de Don Cristoval the high banks are only distinguished by the milky colour of the water, like the bank of Vibora, south of Jamaica, and many other banks, the existence of which I ascertained by means of the thermometer. The bottom of the rock of Batabano is a sand composed of coral detritus; it nourishes sea-weeds which scarcely ever appear on the surface: the water, as I have already observed, is greenish; and the absence of the milky tint is, no doubt, owing to the perfect calm which pervades those regions. Whenever the agitation is propagated to a certain depth, a very fine sand, or a ma.s.s of calcareous particles suspended in the water, renders it troubled and milky. There are shallows, however, which are distinguished neither by the colour nor by the low temperature of the waters; and I believe that phenomenon depends on the nature of a hard and rocky bottom, dest.i.tute of sand and corals; on the form and declivity of the shelvings; the swiftness of the currents; and the absence of the propagation of motion towards the lower layers of the water. The cold frequently indicated by the thermometer, at the surface of the high banks, must be traced to the molecules of water which, owing to the rays of heat and the nocturnal cooling, fall from the surface to the bottom, and are stopped in their fall by the high banks; and also to the mingling of the layers of very deep water that rise on the shelvings of the banks as on an inclined plane, to mix with the layers of the surface.

Notwithstanding the small size of our bark and the boasted skill of our pilot, we often ran aground. The bottom being soft, there was no danger; but, nevertheless, at sunset, near the pa.s.s of Don Cristoval, we preferred to lie at anchor. The first part of the night was beautifully serene: we saw an incalculable number of falling-stars, all following one direction, opposite to that from whence the wind blew in the low regions of the atmosphere. The most absolute solitude prevails in this spot, which, in the time of Columbus, was inhabited and frequented by great numbers of fishermen. The inhabitants of Cuba then employed a small fish to take the great sea turtles; they fastened a long cord to the tail of the reves (the name given by the Spaniards to that species of Echeneis*). (* To the sucet or guaican of the natives of Cuba the Spaniards have given the characteristic name of reves, that is, placed on its back, or reversed. In fact, at first sight, the position of the back and the abdomen is confounded.

Anghiera says: Nostrates reversum appellant, quia versus venatur. I examined a remora of the South Sea during the pa.s.sage from Lima to Acapulco. As he lived a long time out of the water, I tried experiments on the weight he could carry before the blades of the disk loosened from the plank to which the animal was fixed; but I lost that part of my journal. It is doubtless the fear of danger that causes the remora not to loose his hold when he feels that he is pulled by a cord or by the hand of man. The sucet spoken of by Columbus and Martin d'Anghiera was probably the Echeneis naucrates and not the Echeneis remora.) The fisher-fish, formerly employed by the Cubans by means of the flattened disc on his head, furnished with suckers, fixed himself on the sh.e.l.l of the sea-turtle, which is so common in the narrow and winding channels of the Jardinillos. ”The reves,” says Christopher Columbus, ”will sooner suffer himself to be cut in pieces than let go the body to which he adheres.” The Indians drew to the sh.o.r.e by the same cord the fisher-fish and the turtle. When Gomara and the learned secretary of the emperor Charles V, Peter Martyr d'Anghiera, promulgated in Europe this fact which they had learnt from the companions of Columbus, it was received as a traveller's tale. There is indeed an air of the marvellous in the recital of d'Anghiera, which begins in these words: Non aliter ac nos canibus gallicis per aequora campi lepores insectamur, incolae [Cubae insulae] venatorio pisce pisces alios capiebant. (Exactly as we follow hares with greyhounds in the fields, so do the natives [of Cuba] take fishes with other fish trained for that purpose). We now know, from the united testimony of Rogers, Dampier and Commerson, that the artifice resorted to in the Jardinillos to catch turtles is employed by the inhabitants of the eastern coast of Africa, near Cape Natal, at Mozambique and at Madagascar. In Egypt, at San Domingo and in the lakes of the valley of Mexico, the method practised for catching ducks was as follows: men, whose heads were covered with great calabashes pierced with holes, hid themselves in the water, and seized the birds by the feet. The Chinese, from the remotest antiquity, have employed the cormorant, a bird of the pelican family, for fis.h.i.+ng on the coast: rings are fixed round the bird's neck to prevent him from swallowing his prey and fis.h.i.+ng for himself. In the lowest degree of civilization, the sagacity of man is displayed in the stratagems of hunting and fis.h.i.+ng: nations who probably never had any communication with each other furnish the most striking a.n.a.logies in the means they employ in exercising their empire over animals.

Three days elapsed before we could emerge from the labyrinth of Jardines and Jardinillos. At night we lay at anchor; and in the day we visited those islands or chains of rocks which were most easily accessible. As we advanced eastward the sea became less calm and the position of the shoals was marked by water of a milky colour. On the boundary of a sort of gulf between Cayo Flamenco and Cayo de Piedras we found that the temperature of the sea, at its surface, augmented suddenly from 23.5 to 25.8 degrees centigrade. The geologic const.i.tution of the rocky islets that rise around the island of Pinos fixed my attention the more earnestly as I had always rather doubted of the existence of those huge ma.s.ses of coral which are said to rise from the abyss of the Pacific to the surface of the water. It appeared to me more probable that these enormous ma.s.ses had some primitive or volcanic rock for a basis, to which they adhered at small depths. The formation, partly compact and lithographic, partly bulbous, of the limestone of Guines, had followed us as far as Batabano. It is somewhat a.n.a.logous to Jura limestone; and, judging from their external aspect, the Cayman Islands are composed of the same rock. If the mountains of the island of Pinos, which present at the same time (as it is said by the first historians of the conquest) the pineta and palmeta, be visible at the distance of twenty sea leagues, they must attain a height of more than five hundred toises: I have been a.s.sured that they also are formed of a limestone altogether similar to that of Guines. From these facts I expected to find the same rock (Jura limestone) in the Jardinillos: but I saw, in the chain of rocks that rises generally five to six inches above the surface of the water, only a fragmentary rock, in which angular pieces of madrepores are cemented by quartzose sand. Sometimes the fragments form a ma.s.s of from one to two cubic feet and the grains of quartz so disappear that in several layers one might imagine that the polypi have remained on the spot. The total ma.s.s of this chain of rocks appears to me a limestone agglomerate, somewhat a.n.a.logous to the earthy limestone of the peninsula of Araya, near c.u.mana, but of much more recent formation. The inequalities of this coral rock are covered by a detritus of sh.e.l.ls and madrepores. Whatever rises above the surface of the water is composed of broken pieces, cemented by carbonate of lime, in which grains of quartzose sand are set. Whether rocks formed by polypi still living are found at great depth below this fragmentary rock of coral or whether these polypi are raised on the Jura formation are questions which I am unable to answer. Pilots believe that the sea diminishes in these lat.i.tudes, because they see the chain of rocks augment and rise, either by the earth which the waves heave up, or by successive agglutinations. It is not impossible that the enlarging of the channel of Bahama, by which the waters of the Gulf-stream issue, may cause, in the lapse of ages, a slight lowering of the waters south of Cuba, and especially in the gulf of Mexico, the centre of the great current which runs along the sh.o.r.es of the United States, and casts the fruits of tropical plants on the coast of Norway.* (* ”The Gulf-stream, between the Bahamas and Florida, is very little wider than Behring's Strait; and yet the water rus.h.i.+ng through this pa.s.sage is of sufficient force and quant.i.ty to put the whole Northern Atlantic in motion, and to make its influence be felt in the distant strait of Gibraltar and on the more distant coast of Africa.” Quarterly Review February 1818.) The configuration of the coast, the direction, the force and the duration of certain winds and currents, the changes which the barometric heights undergo through the variable predominance of those winds, are causes, the concurrence of which may alter, in a long s.p.a.ce of time, and in circ.u.mscribed limits of extent and height, the equilibrium of the seas.* (* I do not pretend to explain, by the same causes, the great phenomena of the coast of Sweden, where the sea has, on some points, the appearance of a very unequal lowering of from three to five feet in one hundred years. The great geologist, Leopold von Buch, has imparted new interest to these observations by examining whether it be not rather some parts of the continent of Scandinavia which insensibly heaves up. An a.n.a.logous supposition was entertained by the inhabitants of Dutch Guiana.) When the coast is so low that the level of the soil, at a league within the island, does not change to extent of a few inches, these swellings and diminution of the waters strike the imagination of the inhabitants.

The Cayo bonito (Pretty Rock), which we first visited, fully merits its name from the richness of its vegetation. Everything denotes that it has been long above the surface of the ocean; and the central part of the Cayo is not more depressed than the banks. On a layer of sand and land sh.e.l.ls, five to six inches thick, covered by a fragmentary madreporic rock, rises a forest of mangroves (Rhizophora). From their form and foliage they might at a distance be mistaken for laurel trees. The Avicennia, the Batis, some small Euphorbia and gra.s.ses, by the intertwining of their roots, fix the moving sands. But the characteristic distinction of the Flora of these coral islands is the magnificent Tournefortia gnaphalioides of Jacquin, with silvered leaves, which we found here for the first time. This is a social plant and is a shrub from four feet and a half to five feet high. Its flowers emit an agreeable perfume; and it is the ornament of Cayo Flamenco, Cayo Piedras and perhaps of the greater part of the low lands of the Jardinillos. While we were employed in herborizing,* our sailors were searching among the rocks for lobsters. (* We gathered Cenchrus myosuroides, Euphorbia buxifolia, Batis maritima, Iresine obtusifolia, Tournefortia gnaphalioides, Diomedea glabrata, Cakile cubensis, Dolichos miniatus, Parthenium hysterophorus, etc. The last-named plant, which we had previously found in the valley of Caracas and on the temperate table-lands of Mexico, between 470 and 900 toises high, covers the fields of the island

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