We stayed another month at Cumaná. The river journey we intended to take up the Orinoco and the Río Negro demanded all kinds of preparation. We had to choose the easiest instruments to carry on narrow canoes; we had to provide ourselves with the funds for a ten-month trip inland across a country without communications with the coast. As astronomic determination of places was the main aim of our undertaking I did not want to miss the solar eclipse that would be visible at the end of October. I chose to wait until then in Cumaná where the sky is usually beautiful and clear. It was too late to reach the Orinoco river banks, and the high Caracas valley offered less favourable chances due to the mists that gather round the neighbouring mountains. Having precisely fixed the Cumaná longitude I had a starting-point for my chronometric determinations, the only ones I could count on when usually I did not remain long enough to take lunar distances or to observe Jupiter’s satellites.
A dreadful accident almost made me put off my Orinoco journey, or postpone it for a long time. On the 27th of October, the night before the eclipse, we were strolling along the gulf shore as usual, to take some fresh air and observe high tide. Its highest point in this area was no more than 12 to 13 inches. It was eight at night and the breeze had not begun. The sky was overcast and during this dead calm it was extremely hot. We were crossing the beach that separates the landing-stage from the Guaiquerí Indian village. I heard somebody walking behind me; as I turned I saw a tall man, the colour of a mulatto, and naked to the waist. Just above my head he was holding a macana, a huge stick made of palm-tree wood, enlarged at the end like a club. I avoided his blow by leaping to the left. Bonpland, walking at my right, was less lucky. He had noticed the mulatto later than I had; he received the blow above his temple and fell to the ground. We were alone, unarmed, some half a league from any houses, in a vast plain bordered by the sea. The mulatto, instead of attacking me, turned back slowly to grab Bonpland’s hat, which had softened the blow and fallen far from us. Terrified at seeing my travelling companion on the ground and for a few seconds unconscious I was worried only about him. I helped him up; pain and anger doubled his strength. We made for the mulatto who, either due to that cowardice typical of his race or because he saw some men far off on the beach, rushed off into the tunal, a coppice of cacti and tree aviccenia. Luck had him fall as he was running, and Bonpland, who had reached him first, began fighting with him, exposing himself to great danger. The mulatto pulled out a long knife from his trousers, and in such an unequal fight we would surely have been wounded if some Basque merchants taking the fresh air on the beach had not come to our aid. Seeing himself surrounded the mulatto gave up all idea of defending himself: then he managed to escape again and we followed him for a long time through the thorny cacti until he threw himself exhausted into a cow shed from where he let himself be quietly led off to prison.
That night Bonpland had a fever; but being brave, and gifted with that good character which a traveller should rank higher than anything else, he took up his work the next morning. The blow from the macana reached the crown of his head; he felt it for two to three months, up to our stay in Caracas. When he bent down to pick up plants he was several times made dizzy, which made us worry that some internal damage might have been done. Luckily our fears had no base and these alarming symptoms slowly vanished. The Cumaná inhabitants showed us the greatest kindness. We discovered that the mulatto came from one of the Indian villages round the great Maracaibo lake. He had served on a pirate ship from the island of Santo Domingo and, after a quarrel with the captain, had abandoned ship on the Cumaná coast. Why, after knocking one of us down, did he then try to steal a hat? In an interrogation his answers were so confused and stupid that we were unable to clear this matter up.
Despite Bonpland’s tiresome accident I found myself the next day, the 28th of October, at five in the morning, on the roof terrace of our house, preparing to observe the eclipse. The sky was clear and beautiful. The crescent of Venus and the constellation of the Ship, so dazzling because of the proximity of their enormous nebulae, were soon lost by the rays of the rising sun. I congratulated myself for such a fine day, as during the last weeks storms had built up regularly in the south and south-east two or three hours after the sun passed the meridian and had prevented me setting the clocks with the corresponding heights. At night one of those reddish vapours, which hardly affect the hygrometer in the lower levels of the atmosphere, covered the stars. This phenomenon was all the more extraordinary as in previous years it often happened that for three or four months one did not see the least trace of cloud or vapour. I observed the complete progress and end of the eclipse.
The days before and after the eclipse were accompanied by strange atmospheric phenomena. We were in the season called winter here, that is, when clouds build up and release short stormy downpours. From the 10th of October to the 3rd of November the horizon is covered over each night by a reddish mist, quickly spreading across the sky-blue vault in a more or less thick veil. When this reddish mist lightly covered the sky not even the brightest stars could be seen even at their highest points. They twinkled at all altitudes as if after a rainstorm.
From the 28th of October to the 3rd of November the reddish mist was thicker than usual: at night the heat was stifling yet the thermometer did not rise beyond 26 °C. The sea breeze, which usually refreshed the air from eight to nine at night, was not felt at all. The air was sweltering hot, and the dusty, dry ground started cracking everywhere. On the 4th of November, around two in the afternoon, extraordinarily thick black clouds covered the tall BrigantÌn and Tataraqual mountains, and then reached the zenith. At about four it began to thunder way above us without rumbling; making a cracking noise, which often suddenly stopped. At the moment that the greatest electrical discharge was produced, twelve minutes past four, we felt two successive seismic shocks, fifteen seconds from each other. Everybody ran out into the street screaming. Bonpland, who was examining some plants, leaning over a table, was almost thrown to the floor, and I felt the shock very clearly in spite of being in my hammock. The direction of the earthquake was from north to south, rare in Cumaná. Some slaves drawing water from a well, some 18 to 20 feet deep next to the Manzanares river, heard a noise comparable to artillery fire, which seemed to rise up out of the well; a surprising phenomenon, though quite common in American countries exposed to earthquakes.
A few minutes before the first shock there was a violent gust of wind, accompanied by flashes of lightning and large raindrops. The sky remained covered; after the storm the wind died down, staying quiet all night. The sunset was extraordinarily beautiful. The thick veil of clouds tore open into strips just above the horizon, forming shreds, and the sun shone at 12 degrees of altitude against an indigo-blue sky. Its disc appeared incredibly swollen, distorted and wavy at its edges. The clouds were gilded, and clusters of rays coloured like the rainbow spread in every direction from its centre. A great crowd had congregated in the main square. This phenomenon, the accompanying earthquake, thunder rolling as the earth shook, and that reddish mist lasting so many days were blamed on the eclipse.
Hardly twenty-two months had passed since a previous earthquake had nearly destroyed the city of Cumaná. The people regard the reddish mist veiling the sky and the absence of a sea breeze at night as infallible ill omens. Many people came to see us to ask if our instruments predicted any further quakes. Their anxiety increased greatly when on the 5th of November, at the same time as the day before, there was a violent gust of wind, accompanied by thunder and a few raindrops. But no shock was felt.
The earthquake of the 4th of November, the first I had experienced, made a great impression on me, heightened, perhaps accidentally, by remarkable meteorological variations. It was also a movement that went up and down, not in waves. I would never have thought then that, after a long stay in Quito and on the Peruvian coast, I would get as used to these often violent ground movements as in Europe we get used to thunder. In Quito we never considered getting out of bed when at night there were underground rumblings (bramidos), which seemed to announce a shock from the Pichincha volcano. The casualness of the inhabitants, who know that their city has not been destroyed in three centuries, easily communicates itself to the most frightened traveller. It is not so much a fear of danger as of the novelty of the sensation that strikes one so vividly when an earthquake is felt for the first time.
When shocks from an earthquake are felt, and the earth we think of as so stable shakes on its foundations, one second is long enough to destroy long-held illusions. It is like waking painfully from a dream. We think we have been tricked by nature’s seeming stability; we listen out for the smallest noise; for the first time we mistrust the very ground we walk on. But if these shocks are repeated frequently over successive days, then fear quickly disappears. On the Peruvian coasts we got as used to the earth tremors as sailors do to rough waves.
The night of the 11th was cool and exceptionally beautiful. A little before dawn, at about half past two in the morning, extraordinarily luminous meteors were seen. Bonpland, who had got up to get some fresh air in the gallery, was the first to notice them. Thousands of fire-balls and shooting stars fell continually over four hours from north to south. According to Bonpland, from the start of this phenomenon there was not a patch of sky the size of three quarters of the moon that was not packed with fire-balls and shooting stars. The meteors trailed behind them long luminous traces whose phosphorescence lasted some eight seconds.
Almost all Cumaná’s inhabitants witnessed this phenomenon as they got up before four in the morning to go to first mass. The sight of these fire-balls did not leave them indifferent, far to the contrary; the older ones recalled that the great 1766 earthquake was preceded by a similar manifestation.63