Aspects of nature, in different lands and different climates (Vol. 1 of 2): with scientific elucidationsHumboldt, Alexander von
Science
Aspects of nature, in different lands and different climates (Vol. 1 of 2): with scientific elucidations
Humboldt, Alexander von
Physical geography; Plant morphology; Science; South America -- Description and travel
Sir Walter Raleigh offers a later evidence of high authority; he says
expressly, in his description of Guiana, that on his second voyage in
1595, when in the mouth of the Orinoco, he saw the “_fires_” of the
Tivitives and the Oua-raa-etes (so he calls the Guaranis) “high up
in the trees” (Raleigh, Discov. of Guiana, 1596, p. 90). The fire is
represented in a drawing in the Latin edition: “brevis et admiranda
descriptio regni Guianæ,” (Norib. 1599) tab. 4. Raleigh was also the
first who brought to England the fruit of the Mauritia-palm, which he
very justly compared, on account of its scales, to a fir cone. The
Padre José Gumilla, who twice visited the Guaranis as a missionary,
says, indeed, that this people had their habitation in the palmares
(palm groves) of the morasses; but he only mentions dwellings raised
upon high pillars, and not scaffoldings attached to trees still in a
growing state; (Gumilla, Historia natural, civil, y geografica de las
Naciones situadas en las riveras del Rio Orinoco, nueva imp. 1791, p.
143, 145, and 163). Hillhouse and Sir Robert Schomburgk, (Journal of
the Royal Geographical Society, vol. xii. 1842, p. 175; and Description
of the Murichi or Ita Palm, read at the Meeting of the British
Association held at Cambridge, June 1845; printed in Simond’s Colonial
Magazine), are of opinion that both Bembo and Raleigh, (the former
speaking from the reports of others, the latter as an eye-witness),
were deceived by the high tops of the palm-trees being lit up at night
by the flames of fires beneath, so that those who sailed by thought the
habitations themselves were attached to the trees. “We do not deny that
in order to escape the attacks of the musquitos, the Indian sometimes
suspends his hammock from the tops of trees; on such occasions,
however, no fires are made under the hammock.” (Compare also Sir Robert
Schomburgk’s New Edition of Raleigh’s Discovery of Guiana, 1848, p. 50.)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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