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The Tribunal constituted at The Hague by the Governments of the United States and Venezuela has completed its deliberations and has rendered an award in the case of the Orinoco Steamship Company against Venezuela.
On comparing the descriptions of the most interesting objects in Europe and Asia Greece and the Himalaya range by these two distinguished British travellers, with the pictures given by Humboldt of the Andes, the falls of the Orinoco, the forests of the same river, and the expanse of the Pampas in South America, every one must admit the great superiority of the German's powers of painting Nature.
Violent rains, and the prodigious quantity of mosquitos with which the air is filled on the banks of the Orinoco and the Cassiquiare, necessarily occasioned some interruptions; but I supplied the omission by notes taken a few days after. I here subjoin some extracts from my journal.
Having passed the fifth degree of latitude, you are somewhat less stung; but on the Upper Orinoco the stings are more painful, because the heat and the absolute want of wind render the air more burning and more irritating in its contact with the skin.
The doctor, as he was going, told me that he could not bring himself to abandon his chests, and that he hoped to find means to carry them in safety down the Orinoco to Angostura, whence he could ship them to Europe, he having learned that the whole of that part of the country was in the hands of the patriots.
From Caracas we proposed to direct our course across the great plains or llanos, to the Missions of the Orinoco; to go up that vast river, to the south of the cataracts, as far as the Rio Negro and the frontiers of Brazil; and thence to return to Cumana by the capital of Spanish Guiana, commonly called, on account of its situation, Angostura, or the Strait.
Both facts were probably ascertained by chance. Humboldt informs us that he saw an Indian child of the Orinoco rubbing the seed of a trailing plant to make it attract the wild cotton; and, perhaps, a prehistoric tribesman of the Baltic or the plains of Sicily found in the yellow stone he had polished the mysterious power of collecting dust.
Guecubu, or Huecuvu, is named Mavari by the natives on the Orinoco, and is the same with the Aherman of the ancient Persians. To him every evil is attributed. If a horse tire, he has been ridden by Guecubu. In an earthquake, Guecubu has given the world a shock; and the like in all things.
Should you decline coming on in the way I mention, the captain advises that you should go back on the log, and try to find the entrance of a much wider and deeper channel, which he is sure exists some way to the northward; and it is by this channel that the captain hopes to carry his vessel, when built, into the waters of the Orinoco."
If, even in the peaceful times when M. Bonpland and myself had the good fortune to travel through North and South America, the Llanos were the refuge of malefactors who had committed crimes in the missions of the Orinoco, or who had escaped from the prisons on the coast, how much worse must that state of things have been rendered by discord during the continuance of that sanguinary struggle which has terminated in conferring freedom and independence on those vast regions!
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