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For this reason, the Castilian conquerors, who penetrated first from Coro to the banks of the Apuré, named the regions to which they came, neither deserts, nor savannahs, nor meadows, but plains los Llanos. Over an extent of thirty leagues square, you will often not meet with an eminence a foot high.
The object of this memoir is to concentrate the geological observations which I collected during my journeys among the mountains of New Andalusia and Venezuela, on the banks of the Orinoco and in the Llanos of Barcelona, Calabozo and the Apure; consequently, from the coast of the Caribbean Sea to the valley of the Amazon, between 2 and 10 1/2 degrees north latitude.
The chain of mountains, bordering the lake of Tacarigua towards the south, forms in some sort the northern shore of the great basin of the Llanos or savannahs of Caracas. To descend from the valleys of Aragua into these savannahs, it is necessary to cross the mountains of Guigue and of Tucutunemo. From a peopled country embellished by cultivation, we plunge into a vast solitude.
When we reflect, that these documents are taken from the books of the custom-houses, where no mention is made of the fraudulent dealings in hides, we are tempted to believe that the estimate of 1,200,000 oxen wandering in the Llanos, from the Rio Carony and the Guarapiche to the lake of Maracaybo, is much underrated.
This Chaparro is remarkable, first, for the queer little Natural Order to which it belongs; secondly, for its tanning properties; thirdly, for the very nasty smell of its flowers; fourthly, for the roughness of its leaves, which make one's flesh creep, and are used, I believe, for polishing steel; and lastly, for its wide geographical range, from Isla de Pinos, near Cuba where Columbus, to his surprise, saw true pines growing in the Tropics all over the Llanos, and down to Brazil; an ancient, ugly, sturdy form of vegetation, able to get a scanty living out of the poorest soils, and consequently triumphant, as yet, in the battle of life.
The Caribbees, properly speaking, those who inhabit the Missions of the Cari, in the llanos of Cumana, the banks of the Caura, and the plains to the north-east of the sources of the Orinoco, are distinguished by their almost gigantic size from all the other nations I have seen in the new continent.
There are no roads in the Llanos; but he can gallop unerringly to any given point, be it hundreds of miles away. There are no boundaries to the huge estates; but he knows when the cattle he is set to protect are grazing upon their own territory or upon that of a neighbor. He leads a life in which the extremes of solitariness and of activity are combined.
The most active and enterprising colonists cannot, in the mountainous districts of Merida, Antioquia, and Los Pastos, in the llanos of Venezuela and Guaviare, in the forests of the Rio Magdalena, the Orinoco, and the province of Las Esmeraldas, west of Quito, extend their agricultural conquests as they have done in the woody plains westward of the Alleghenies, from the sources of the Ohio, the Tennessee and the Alabama, as far as the banks of the Missouri and the Arkansas.
Ten or twelve leagues may be reckoned as the distance from the descent of the northern chain which bounds the Caribbean Sea, to the descent of the southern chain bounding the immense basin of the Llanos.
I shall not hazard any general estimates, which from their nature are too uncertain; but shall only observe that, in the Llanos of Caracas, the proprietors of the great hatos are entirely ignorant of the number of the cattle they possess. They only know that of the young cattle, which are branded every year with a letter or mark peculiar to each herd.
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