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When he returned to Spain in 1651 he had still nine years of work before him. There were portraits of Philip's new Queen to be painted a young girl in a most uncomfortable dress and portraits of her child, the Infanta Marguerita.
Oyez, Padre Jarauta!" continued he, calling out in a tone of irony; "have you found Marguerita yet?" We could see between us and the dim rushlight that the Jarocho started, as if a shot had passed through his heart. "Hold!" he shouted to the men, who were about taking aim; "drag those scoundrels hither! A light there! fire the thatch! Vaya!"
The impunity conceded to the skin-stealers and the accumulation of marauders in the savannahs preceded that destruction of cattle caused by the ravages of civil war and the supplies required for troops. A very considerable number of goat-skins is exported to the island of Marguerita, Punta Araya and Corolas; sheep abound only in Carora and Tocuyo.
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.
The Guayquerie Indians and, generally speaking, all the inhabitants of the coast of Cumana and Barcelona, are imbued with an idea that the water of the shoals of Marguerita and the Testigos diminishes from year to year; they believe that, in the lapse of ages, the Morro do Chacopata on the peninsula of Araya will be joined by a neck of land to the islands of Lobos and Coche.
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?
The comparison of these scenes, which have again relapsed into a savage state, confirms what I have elsewhere advanced relative to the strange and sometimes retrograde nature of civilization in America. On one side, the coast of Paria, the islands of Cubagua and Marguerita; on the other, the Gulf of Uraba and Darien, received the first Spanish colonists.
Now, in the peninsula of Araya, and in the island of Marguerita, saliferous clay impregnated with bitumen is met with in connexion with this early formation, nearly as gem-salt appears in Calabria in flakes, in basins inclosed in strata of granite and gneiss.
The republic of Columbia also possesses on its coast, on the island of Marguerita, on the Rio Hacha and in the gulf of Panama pearl fisheries of ancient celebrity. In the present state of things, however, fishing for these pearls is an object of as little importance as the exportation of the metals of Venezuela. The existence of metallic veins on several points of the coast cannot be doubted.
Next day, soon after the observation of noon, we reached the meridian of the island of Tortugas. It is destitute of vegetation; and like the little islands of Coche and Cabagua is remarkable for its small elevation above the level of the sea. In the forenoon of the 26th we began to lose sight of the island of Marguerita and I endeavoured to verify the height of the rocky group of Macanao.
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