We spent the first weeks of our stay in Cumaná testing our instruments, botanizing in the nearby countryside, and investigating the traces of the earthquake of the 14th of December 1797. Dazzled by the sheer amount of different objects we found it awkward to stick to a systematic way of studying and observing. If everything that we saw around us excited us, our instruments in their turn awoke the curiosity of the local inhabitants. The numerous visitors disturbed us; in order not to disappoint all those who seemed so pleased to see the spots of the moon through Dollond’s telescope,31 the absorption of two gases in a eudiometrical tube, or the effects of galvanism on the motions of a frog, we had to answer many obscure questions and repeat the same experiments for hours.
This same situation repeated itself over the five years of our journey whenever we settled down in a place where people knew we had microscopes, telescopes and electrical apparatus. This was all the more tiresome as those who visited us held confused notions of astronomy or physics, two sciences that in the Spanish colonies are called by the bizarre name of new philosophy, nueva filosofía. The half-scientific looked at us scornfully when they heard we had not brought with us books like Abbé Pluche’s Spectacle de la nature or Sigaud la Fond’s Cours de physique or Valmont de Bomare’s Dictionary. These, along with Baron Bielfeld’s Traité d’économie politique, are the foreign works most admired in Spanish America. No one is deemed learned who cannot quote from them in translation. Only in the great capitals are the names of Haller, Cavendish and Lavoisier replacing those who have been famous for over fifty years.
Our house in Cumaná was magnificently situated for observing the sky and meteorological phenomena; on the other hand, during the day, we witnessed scenes that disgusted us. A part of the great plaza is surrounded with arcades above which runs a long wooden gallery, common to all hot countries. This is where the slaves brought from Africa were once sold. Of all European countries Denmark was the first and for ages the only government to abolish the slave-trade; yet the first slaves we saw here were transported by a Danish slave-ship. What silences the speculations of vile interest in its struggle with the duties of humanity, national honour and the laws of the fatherland?
The slaves put up for sale were young people from fifteen to twenty years old. Every morning they were given coconut oil to rub into their bodies to make their skin black and shiny. All the time buyers would approach and, examining their teeth, would calculate their age and health; they forced open their mouths just as if dealing with horses at market. This debasing custom dates back to Africa as is faithfully shown in a play by Cervantes who, after a long captivity with the Moors, outlined the sale of Christian slaves in Algiers.32 It is distressing to think that still today in the Spanish West Indies slaves are branded with hot irons to identify them in case they escape. This is how one treats those ‘who save other men from the labour of sowing, working in the fields and harvesting’.33
The deep impression caused by our first sight of a slave sale in Cumaná was alleviated somewhat by the relief of finding ourselves with a people and on a continent where this spectacle is very rare, and the number of slaves, in general, insignificant. In 1800 there were not more than 600 slaves in the two provinces of Cumaná and New Barcelona, while the total population reached around 110,000. The trade in African slaves, never favoured by the Spanish Crown, has dwindled to almost nothing on these coasts where, in the sixteenth century, it reached a terrifying figure.
Our first excursion was to the Araya peninsula and those regions formerly so infamous for slave-trading and pearl fishing. On the 19th of August, at about two in the morning, we embarked on the Manzanares river, near the Indian settlement. Our main objectives on this short trip were to visit the ruins of the ancient Araya fort, the salt works and the mountains that form the narrow Maniquarez peninsula where we hoped to carry out some geological research. The night was deliciously cool, swarms of luminous insects (Elater noctilucus) shone in the air, on the ground covered with sesuvium, and in the mimosa (Lampyris italica) thickets bordering the river. We know how common glow-worms are in Italy and all southern Europe, yet the picturesque effect they produce cannot compare with these innumerable scattered and moving lights, which embellish the tropical nights all over the plains, repeating the spectacle of the stars in the sky on the ground.
Descending the river we passed the plantations or charas where negroes had lit bonfires for their fiestas. A light billowing smoke rose above the palm-tree tops, giving a reddish colour to the moon’s disk. It was a Sunday night and the slaves danced to the monotonous and noisy music of guitars. A fundamental feature of the black African races is their inexhaustible store of vitality and joy. After working painfully hard all week, they prefer to dance and sing on their fiesta days rather than sleep for a long time. We should be wary of criticizing this mixture of thoughtlessness and frivolity for it sweetens the evils of a life of deprivations and suffering!
The boat in which we crossed the Gulf of Cariaco was very spacious. They had spread large jaguar skins out so that we could rest at night. We had been scarcely two months in the torrid zone, and already our organs were so sensitive to the slightest temperature changes that cold stopped us sleeping. To our surprise we saw that the thermometer marked 21.8 °C. This fact is familiar to those who have lived long in the Indies. During our stay at Guayaquil in January 1803, we watched the Indians cover themselves and complain of the cold when the temperature sank to 23.8 °C, while they suffocated with heat at 30.5 °C. A difference of 6 °C or 7 °C was sufficient to cause the opposite sensations of cold and heat. At Cumaná, during heavy showers, people in the streets are heard to complain ‘Qué hielo! Estoy emparamado,’34 though the thermometer exposed to the rain sinks only to 21.5 °C.
At about eight in the morning we landed at Araya point, near the new salt works. A solitary house (La Ranchería de la Salina Nueva) stood in the middle of an arid plain, next to a battery of three cannons, sole defence on this coast since the destruction of the Santiago fort. The salt-works’ inspector spends his life in a hammock from where he passes on his orders to his workers, and a ‘king’s launch’ (la lancha del rey) brings him his supplies from Cumaná every week. It is astonishing that a salt works which once made the English, Dutch and other powerful maritime countries jealous did not lead to the founding of a village or even a farm. Only a few miserable Indian fishermen’s huts exist at the tip of Araya point.
The abundance of salt contained in the Araya peninsula was known to Alonso Niño when, following the tracks of Columbus, Ojeda and Amerigo Vespucci, he visited these countries in 1499. Though the Indians of South America consume the least salt of any people on the globe because they eat mainly vegetables, it appears that the Guaiquerí dug into the clayey and muriatic soil of Punta Arena for salt. The Spaniards, established first at Cubagua, then on the Cumaná coasts, worked the salt marshes from the beginning of the sixteenth century. As the peninsula had no settled population the Dutch availed themselves of the natural riches of a soil that to them seemed common property. In our days, each colony has its own salt works. Navigation has so improved that merchants in Cádiz can send salt, at little expense, from Spain to cure meat in Montevideo or Buenos Aires, some 1,900 leagues away. These advantages were unknown at the time of the conquest. Colonial industry has made so little progress that Araya salt was carried to Cartagena and Portobello.35 In 1605 the Madrid Court sent armed ships to expel the Dutch by force. The Dutch continued furtively to gather salt until a fort was built in 1622 near the salt works, which became known as Santiago fort, or the Real Fuerza de Araya. These great salt mines are laid down on the oldest Spanish maps. In 1726 a violent hurricane destroyed the Araya salt works and made the expensively built fort useless. This sudden hurricane was very rare in a region where the sea is generally as calm as the water of our large rivers; the high waves penetrated far inland and transformed the salty lake into a gulf several miles long. Since then there have been artificial deposits or vasets to the north of the chain of hills that separate the fort from the northern coast of the peninsula.36
Having examined the salt works and finished our geodesical observations, we left at dusk with the intention of spending the night in an Indian hut near the ruins of the Araya fort. We sent our instruments and provisions on ahead as the extreme heat and irradiation from the ground so exhausted us that we only felt like eating in the cool of night and early morning. Going southward, we crossed first the bare plain covered in salty clay, and then two chains of hills formed with sandstone between which there was a lagoon. Night surprised us while following a narrow path bordered on one side by the sea, and on the other by a wall of perpendicular rock. The tide was rising fast, and at each step narrowed the path. When we reached the foot of the old Araya fort we saw before us a natural picture that was melancholic and romantic. Yet neither the freshness of the dark jungle nor the grandeur of the plants could enhance the beauty of the ruins. These ruins stand on a bare, arid hill, with nothing but agave, columnar cacti and thorny mimosa, and seemed less like the work of men than masses of rock torn apart during the early revolutions of the earth.
We wanted to linger and admire the superb spectacle, and to observe the setting of Venus, whose disc appeared now and then between the broken fragments of the fort; but our mulatto guide was parched with thirst and insistently begged us to return. For a long time he had thought that we were lost, and, trying to scare us, he talked of the dangers of tigers and rattlesnakes. It is true that venomous reptiles are very common near the fort, and that a few days before two jaguars had been killed near the entrance to the village of Maniquarez. Judging by the skins we saw they could not be much smaller than tigers from India. We vainly tried to calm our man by telling him that those animals do not attack humans on a coast where goats offer copious prey: but we had to give in and retrace our steps. When we had been walking for three quarters of an hour along a beach covered by high tide we met the negro who was carrying our food; on seeing that we had not returned he had got worried and set out to find us. He led us through a wood of nopal cacti to the hut of an Indian family. We were received with that frank hospitality common in these lands to people from all social classes. From the outside the hut where we slung our hammocks looked very clean. Inside we found fish, bananas and other edibles, and, something that in this arid zone is far more appreciated than delicious food, excellent fresh water.
At dawn the next day we realized that the hut where we had spent the night formed part of a group of huts situated on the banks of a salt lake. They are the few remains left of a considerable village formed long ago around the fort. The ruins of the church were half buried in sand and covered with brushwood. When in 1762 the Araya fort was completely dismantled, to save the expense of maintaining a garrison, the Indians and other coloured residents who lived around about emigrated one by one to Maniquarez, Cariaco and the Guaiquerí suburb at Cumaná. Only a few remained in the wild and desolate village, deeply attached to their native land. These poor people live from fishing on the coast and in neighbouring shoals rich in fish. They seemed content with their fate and found it strange that I asked them why they had no gardens to cultivate nutritious plants. ‘Our gardens,’ they replied, ‘lie on the other side of the strait; we bring fish to Cumaná and they give us cassava, bananas and coconuts in return.’ This economic system, which flatters laziness, is followed at Maniquarez and throughout the Araya peninsula. The principal wealth of these inhabitants consists of large, beautiful goats. They move freely about like the goats on the Tenerife peak; they are completely wild, and are branded like the mules because it would be difficult to recognize them from their colour or spots. These fawn goats do not vary in colour like domestic ones. When a settler out hunting shoots a goat that is not his, he brings it to whichever neighbour it belongs to.
Among the mulattos whose huts surround the salt lake we found a shoemaker of Castilian descent. He received us with that gravity and self-sufficiency characteristic in those countries where the people feel they possess some special talent. He was stretching the string of a bow, and sharpening arrows to shoot birds. His trade of shoemaking could not be very lucrative in a country where the majority go barefoot; and he complained that the expense of European gunpowder reduced him to using the same weapons as the Indians. He was the sage of this place; he understood the formation of salt through the influence of the sun and full moon, the symptoms of earthquakes, the marks by which gold and silver mines are found, and the structure of medicinal plants, which he divided, like everybody in South America, into hot and cold. Having collected local traditions he gave us some curious accounts of the pearls of Cubagua, objects of luxury, which he treated with contempt. To show how familiar he was with the Bible he liked quoting Job, who preferred wisdom to all the pearls of the Indies. His philosophy was limited to the narrow circle of his vital needs. All he wanted was a strong ass to carry a load of bananas to the loading-wharf.
After a long speech on the vanity of human greatness he pulled a few small opaque pearls from out of his leather pouch and forced us to accept them, making us note down on our writing tablets that a poor shoemaker of Araya, white and of noble Castilian race, had given us something that, across the ocean,37 was thought of as very precious.
The pearl-oyster (Aviculidae, Meleagrina margaritifera, Cuvier) abounds on the shoals that extend from Cape Paria to Cape La Vela. The islands of Margarita, Cubagua, Coche, Punta Araya and the mouth of the Hacha river were as famous in the sixteenth century as the Persian Gulf and the island of Taprobana were to the ancients.
Benzoni38 relates the adventure of one Louis Lampagnano, to whom Charles V granted the privilege of proceeding with five caravels to the Cumaná coasts to fish for pearls. The settlers sent him back with the bold message that the Emperor, too liberal with what was not his own, had no right to dispose of the oysters living at the bottom of the sea.
The pearl fisheries diminished rapidly towards the end of the sixteenth century, and had long ceased by 1683. The industrious Venetians who imitated fine pearls perfectly, and the growing popularity of cut diamonds, made the Cubagua fisheries less lucrative. At the same time the oysters became scarcer, not because, according to popular legend, they were frightened by the sound of oars and moved away, but because the rash gathering of thousands at a time stopped them propagating themselves. To form an idea of the destruction of the shells caused by the divers, we must remember that a boat collects in two to three weeks more than 35,000 oysters. The animal lives but nine to ten years, and only in its fourth year do pearls begin to show. In 10,000 shells there is often not a single pearl of value.
On the morning of the 20th the son of our host, a young, robust Indian, led us to the village of Maniquarez, passing through Barigon and Caney. It was a four-hour walk. Because of the reverberation of the sun’s rays on the sand the thermometer remained at 31.3 °C. The cylindrical cacti along the path made the landscape green, but without freshness or shade. We had walked barely a league when our guide decided, at every opportunity, to sit down and rest. When we got near to Casas de la Vela he even tried to lie down in the shade of a beautiful tamarind tree, to await nightfall. We observed this characteristic trait whenever we travelled with Indians; it has given rise to the most mistaken ideas about the physical constitutions of different races. The copper-coloured Indian, who is more used to the burning heat of these regions than a European, complains more because nothing stimulates his interest. Money is no bait, and if he is tempted by gain he repents of his decision as soon as he starts walking. This same Indian, who would complain when we loaded him with a box filled with plants while herborizing, would row his canoe against the strongest current for fourteen or fifteen hours in order to be back home.
We examined the remarkably solid ruins of Santiago. The 5-foot-thick walls of freestone have been toppled over by mines; but we still found huge sections with scarcely a crack in them. Our guide showed us a cistern (el aljibe), 30 feet deep, which though damaged furnishes water to the inhabitants of the Araya peninsula. This cistern was finished in 1681. As the basin is covered with an arched vault the excellent water remains very cool. Crossing the arid hills of Cape Cirial we detected a strong smell of petroleum. The wind blew from the place where the springs of petroleum, mentioned by the first chroniclers,39 are to be found.
The Maniquarez potteries, famous from time immemorial, are a specialized industry completely run by Indian women. They work with the same method that was used before the conquest. This reveals both the infancy of this craft and that immobility of manners so characteristic of American Indians. Three hundred years have not sufficed to introduce the potter’s wheel to a coast not more than forty days’ sailing from Spain. The Indians have a vague idea that something of the sort exists, and surely would adopt one should it be shown to them. The quarries where they extract their clay lie half a league to the east of Maniquarez. This clay is produced by the decomposition of a mica-slate stained red by iron oxide. The Indian women prefer the part most loaded with mica; and very skilfully shape vessels of 2 to 3 feet in diameter with regular curves. As they do not know how to use kilns they place scrub from desmanthus, cassia and arborescent capparis around the pots and bake them in the open air.
At Maniquarez we met some creoles who had been hunting at Cubagua. Deer of a small variety abound in this uninhabited island, and one person may kill three or four a day. I do not know how these animals got to the island as chroniclers mention only the great amount of rabbits. The venado of Cubagua belong to one of those numerous species of small American deer long confused under the vague name of Cervus mexicanus. In the plains of Cari we were shown something very rare in these hot climates, a completely white deer. Albino varieties are found in the New Continent even among tigers. Azara40 saw a completely white-skinned jaguar.
The most extraordinary, even most marvellous, object on the Araya coast is what the people call the ‘eye stone’ (piedra de los ojos). This calcareous substance is the subject of many conversations as it is, according to Indian science, both stone and animal. It is found in the sand, where it is motionless: but if it is picked up and placed on a polished surface, for example a pewter or pottery plate, it begins to move if you drip some lemon juice on it. If it is then placed in the eye this supposed animal will expel any other foreign substance that may accidentally get in there. At the new salt works, and in the village of Maniquarez, hundreds of eye stones were offered to us, and the Indians pressed us to test them with lemon juice. They wanted to put sand in our eyes to convince us of the virtues of this remedy. Very quickly we saw that these ‘stones’ are the thin and porous valves of diminutive univalve shells. They have a diameter of some 1 to 4 lines, with one surface plane, the other convex. These calcareous coverings effervesce with lemon juice and start moving as the carbonic acid is formed. When placed in eyes, these eye stones act as tiny round pearls and seeds, used by the Indians of America to stimulate the flow of tears. These explanations did not satisfy the inhabitants of Araya. For man nature seems more grand the more it is mysterious, and the physics of the people rejects any simple explanation.
Along the southern coast, east of Maniquarez, three strips of land run out to sea. In these parts the seabed is made of mica-slate, and from these orogenic rock formations, some 26 metres from the coast, issues a spring of petroleum whose smell reaches far inland. We had to wade into the water up to our waists to observe this interesting phenomenon. The waters are covered with zostera, and in the centre of a large bank of these plants you see a clear round patch, about 3 feet in diameter, across which float masses of Ulva lactuca. It is here that the springs are found. The bed of the bay is covered with sand, and the transparent and yellow petroleum resembles naphtha itself, bursting out in jets, accompanied by air bubbles. When we trod down the bottom with our feet we saw how these little springs changed place. The naphtha covers the sea for more than 1,000 feet from the shore line.
After exploring the outskirts of Maniquarez, we embarked in a fishing-boat for Cumaná. Nothing confirms how calm the sea is here as much as the tiny, badly kept boats with their one tall sail. Though we had picked the least damaged boat it leaked so much that the pilot’s son had to continually bale out the water with a tutumo, or shell of the fruit of the Crescentia cujete (or calabash). In the Gulf of Cariaco, especially north of the Araya peninsula, canoes laden with coconuts often capsize because they sail too near the wind and against the waves. These accidents inspire fear only in those travellers who do not swim well; for when a pirogue is manned by an Indian fisherman and his son, the father turns the pirogue round and bales out the water while the son swims around, gathering all the coconuts. In less than a quarter of an hour the pirogue is sailing again without the Indian, with his boundless impassivity, having once complained.
The inhabitants of Araya, whom we visited a second time when returning from the Orinoco, have not forgotten that their peninsula is one of the places most anciently populated by the Castilians. They like talking about the pearl fisheries, the ruins of the Santiago fort, which they hope will be rebuilt one day, and all that they call the ancient splendour of these countries. In China and Japan inventions are called recent if they are more than 2,000 years old: in the European colonies an event seems extremely ancient if it is three centuries old, dating back to the discovery.
This absence of memories, which characterizes these new people in the United States of America and in the Spanish and Portuguese possessions, is worthy of attention. It is not only distressing to the traveller, who becomes deprived of the pleasures of the imagination, it also influences the bonds that tie a settler to the land he inhabits, the form of the rocks around his hut, the trees shading his cradle.
Most of these modern colonies are founded in a zone where the climate, the produce, the sky and landscape, all differ completely from Europe. The settler vainly tries to name the mountains, rivers and valleys with names that recall his motherland; these names soon lose their charm, and mean nothing to later generations. Under the influence of an exotic nature new habits are born for new needs; national memories are slowly effaced, and those remembered, like ghosts of our imaginations, are not attached to any time or place. The glories of Don Pelayo or the Cid Campeador have penetrated the forests and mountains of America; people sometimes pronounce these famous names, but they seem to come from an ideal world, from vague, fabulous times.
Moreover, the American colonies are founded in countries where the dead leave barely any trace of their existence. To the north of Gila river, on the banks of the Missouri, and in the Andean plain, traditions date back only a century. In Peru, Guatemala and Mexico, ruins, historic paintings and sculptured monuments attest, it is true, to ancient Indian civilizations, but throughout an entire province only a few families have precise notions about Inca history or Mexican princesses. The Indian has kept his language, his customs and national character; but the loss of quipus41 and symbolic paintings, the introduction of Christianity, and other factors, have made the historic and religious traditions vanish. On the one hand the European settler scorns everything to do with the defeated Indians. Placed between memories of the metropolis and the actual country he was born in, he looks to both indifferently; in a climate where the equality of the seasons makes the succession of years almost indifferent he lives only for the pleasures of the moment and rarely looks to the past.