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Updated: May 8, 2025
This was addressed to Laguna, some days' journey from the spot where Tristan was; but instead of attending to this circumstance, he sent it five hundred leagues beyond, to the other side of the Cordilleras, and himself remained in the Portuguese missions, carrying on trade.
Of the foreign colony in Camaguay some fifty were Americans, and from the rest of the world they were as hopelessly separated as the crew of a light-ship. From the Pacific they were cut off by the Cordilleras, from the Caribbean by a nine-day mule-ride. To the north and south, jungle, forests, swamp-lands, and mountains hemmed them in.
But for the rapine, carnage and violence of war, such a tour through the enchanting valley of the Cordilleras, in the midst of fruits and flowers, and bird songs, and traversing populous villages inhabited by a gentle and amiable people, would have been an enterprise full of enjoyment. But the path of these demoniac men was marked by the ravages of fiends.
Nowhere, perhaps, can be found collected together, in so small a space, productions so beautiful, and so remarkable in regard to the geography of plants. It also investigates the relations between the alpine plants of both hemispheres. It compares the vegetation of the Alleghanies and the Cordilleras of Mexico, with that of the mountains of Chile and Brazil.
The southern expeditions became a common topic of speculation among the colonists of Panama. But the region of gold, as it lay behind the mighty curtain of the Cordilleras, was still veiled in obscurity.
Thus, while the summer lies in full power on the burning regions of the palm and the cocoa-tree that fringe the borders of the ocean, the broad surface of the table-land blooms with the freshness of perpetual spring, and the higher summits of the Cordilleras are white with everlasting winter.
The kingdoms of New Grenada and Mexico have no connection with foreign colonies, and through them with the nations of Europe, except by the ports of Carthagena, of Santa Martha, of Vera Cruz, and of Campeachy. These vast countries, from the nature of their coasts, and the isolation of their inhabitants on the back of the Cordilleras, have few points of contact with foreign lands.
Vincent in the directions of south, west and south-west, first by the chain of the Caribbee Islands, then by the littoral chain of Cumana and Venezuela, and finally by the Cordilleras of New Grenada, along a distance of three hundred and eighty leagues, we find no active volcano before we arrive at Purace, near Popayan.
It was a difficult task to traverse the Cordilleras during these summer months; the melting of snows beneath the sun of June often made unforeseen cataracts spout from beneath the steps of the traveler; often frightful masses, detaching themselves from the summits of the peaks, were engulfed near them in fathomless abysses!
On the western slopes of Chimborazo, and in several other regions extending from the wooded heights of Merida and Santa Martha, at the northern end of the Cordilleras, as far as the Republic of Bolivia, 19 degrees south, the chinchona-tree has its range. Vegetation in the Cordilleras within the tropics reaches to a much greater height than in higher latitudes.
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