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Updated: May 15, 2025
He says in a private letter: "I gave to the basin river its name of Humboldt and to the mountain lake the name of his companion traveler, Bonpland, and so put it in the map of that expedition." Amadé Bonpland was born at Rochelle, France, in 1773. He was educated as a physician but became a noted botanist.
M. Bonpland discovered the same tree west of Cumana, in the gulf of Santa Fe, where it may become one of the articles of exportation from New Andalusia. The Catalonian monks prepare an extract of the Cortex angosturae which they send to the convents of their province, and which deserves to be better known in the north of Europe.
Before proceeding further, I will here subjoin a description of La Guayra, and the extraordinary road which leads from thence to the town of Caracas, adding thereto all the observations made by M. Bonpland and myself, in an excursion to Cabo Blanco about the end of January 1800. La Guayra is rather a roadstead than a port.
And surely such a friend is a treasure, indeed. Bonpland was a linguist, as most of the Swiss are. He was a mountain-climber, and had been a soldier and a sailor, and he knew enough of literature and science, so he was an interesting companion. He was small in stature, lithe, immensely strong, absolutely fearless, and had left behind him neither family nor friends to mourn his loss.
We ran toward the Zambo, who, either from cowardice, common enough in people of this caste, or because he perceived at a distance some men on the beach, did not wait for us, but ran off in the direction of the Tunal, a little thicket of cactus and arborescent avicennia. He chanced to fall in running; and M. Bonpland, who reached him first, seized him round the body.
The forest was impenetrable; but M. Bonpland believed that large clumps of pancratium and other liliaceous plants were concealed in the neighbouring marshes. Descending the Orinoco by favour of the current, we passed first the mouth of the Rio Cunucunumo, and then the Guanami and the Puriname.
He told me that he was eighty-nine years old, and that he and Bonpland, alone, were living of those who in early life were on expeditions together; that Bonpland was eighty-five, and much the more vigorous of the two.
Having reposed for some months from their fatigues, Humboldt and Bonpland proceeded, in the first instance, to survey the country which had been devastated in 1797 by the dreadful earthquake, so frequent in those regions, and which swallowed up in a minute forty thousand persons. Then he set out, in June 1802, to visit the volcano of Tungaragno and the summit of Chimborazo.
M. Bonpland examined with attention the father's breasts, and found them wrinkled like those of a woman who has given suck. He observed that the left breast in particular was much enlarged; which Lozano explained to us from the circumstance, that the two breasts did not furnish milk in the same abundance.
This group, however, is a hundred leagues long and eighty broad; and though wherever M. Bonpland and I traversed this vast group of mountains, its structure seemed to us extremely uniform, it would be wrong to affirm that it may not contain very metalliferous transition rocks and mica-slates superimposed on the granite.
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