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Updated: May 7, 2025
A liquor is also taken from the cocoa-nut tree, called cocoa-wine; it is a most stupifying drink, of which the Indians make great use at their festivities. To produce the cocoa-wine, large groves of the cocoa-trees are laid out, from which merely the sap or juice is expected, but nothing in the shape of fruit.
The picturesque town, with its old buildings, and the white surf dashing in among the splendid cocoa-trees which grow down to the water's edge, combined to make up a charming picture. We went on board the 'Poonah' to breakfast as arranged, and afterwards all over the ship, which is in splendid order.
From afar the negro-groups are not unpicturesque in their bright red and brimstone yellow sheets, worn like Roman togas. Throughout the day sexes and ages keep apart. The nude boys perch upon stones or worn-out canoes. Their elders affect the shade, men on one side of the village and women on the other. All the settlements are backed by cocoa-trees in lines and clumps.
It was not without emotion that we beheld for the last time the disc of the moon illuminating the summit of the cocoa-trees that surround the banks of the Manzanares. The breeze was strong and in less than six hours we anchored near the Morro of Nueva Barcelona, where the vessel which was to take us to the Havannah was ready to sail.
The country gradually unfolded all its charms; the luxuriant growth of the trees, even to the mountains' tops, reminded us of the scenery of Brazil, and the picturesque valleys, with their thickets of bread-fruit, orange, and cocoa-trees, their cultivated fields, and plantations of bananas, became at length distinctly visible.
There was the forest which was to prove a sanctuary, and at last the cocoa-trees were behind, and we were parting the dense growth that now hid from us the glow of the burning house. "There is a track more to the right, Harry," whispered my uncle. Turning in that direction, I hurried the mule, burning as I did to get on to the direct route to the cavern.
The late cloud had passed, making the sky still brighter than before; the reaction had heightened our mutual passion to the intensity of non-resistance; and we walked on, her hand clasped in mine. We had eyes only for each other. We reached a clump of cocoa-trees; one of them had fallen, and its smooth trunk offered a seat, protected from the sun by the shadowy leaves of its fellows.
There are scarcely seven hundred inhabitants: and, excepting in the village of Mariguitar, we saw only plantations of cocoa-trees, which are the olives of the country. It prefers salt to fresh water; and flourishes less inland, where the air is not loaded with saline particles, than on the shore.
On these tracts not a tree or a bush is visible for acres together; but whether the soil was left naked by nature, or rendered so by cultivation, is yet to be ascertained. A ruined chapel on the top of a hill, a large mansion, apparently unoccupied, on the shore, and a few huts among the cocoa-trees, are the only evidences that men have ever been here.
It is a low narrow tongue of land, running out northward from the island, thickly shadowed by cocoa-trees, and forming, by its curve, the harbour of Matarai, not a very secure one, but generally preferred by sailors on account of the celebrity bestowed on it by Cook.
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