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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.

Our several voyages in the canoes of the Orinoco, and a passage 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.

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.

Weyler sent troops into Pinar del Rio, where they found no one to oppose them, and he was soon able to inform the world by a proclamation that this province was pacified. But the ink was barely dry upon it when Maceo, having burnt the port of Batabano, on the southern coast, was back in the "pacified" province, where he made his head-quarters in the mountains and defied all the power of Spain.

In company with M. Bonpland I visited only the vicinity of the Havannah, the beautiful valley of Guines and the coast between Batabano and the port of Trinidad.

In July, 1515, the city of San Cristobal de la Habana was planted, deriving its name from the great Discoverer, but this name was transferred in 1519 to the present capital, and the original town was called Batabano. In 1518 the capital was fixed at Baracoa, which had by this time become a city of considerable importance, and the diocese of the colony.

The militia and the troops of the garrison were carefully drilled, and companies of volunteers were formed wherever materials for them could be found. The French, also, not content with mere preparations, made an actual descent on the island, first threatening Santiago, and afterwards landing at Batabano. The invaders consisted chiefly of refugees from St.

In a single decade, Velasquez founded the seven cities of Baracoa, Santiago de Cuba, Trinidad, Bayamo, Puerto del Principe, St. Spiritus, and, on the south coast near Batabano, Havana, since removed to its present site.

I hired a small vessel from Batabano, in the island of Cuba, to Portobello, and thence crossed the isthmus to the coast of the Pacific; this mistake of a journalist led M. Bonpland and myself to travel eight hundred leagues through a country we had no intention to visit.

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.