of the great Goschop, would indicate that a swelling of the ground
separates the domains or basins of these rivers. We know, indeed, but
imperfectly, how such a swelling or elevation may be connected with the
mountains of Habesch, and in what manner it may be continued southward
beyond the equator. Probably, and this is also the opinion of my friend
Carl Ritter, the Lupata mountains, which, according to the excellent
Wilhelm Peters, extend to 26° S. latitude, are connected with the
elevated parts of the Earth’s surface on the north side of the equator,
(or with the Abyssinian mountains), by the mountains of the Moon. The
word “Lupata,” we learn from the last-named African traveller, is used
in the language of Tette as an adjective, meaning “closed.” The chain
of mountains would thus be called the “closed” or “barred.” “The Lupata
chain, of Portuguese writers,” says Peters, “is about 90 legoas or
leagues from the mouth of the Zambeze, and is only about two thousand
feet high. The direction of this mountain rampart is north and south,
but with occasional bends alternately to the east and to the west. It
is sometimes interrupted by plains. Along the whole of the Zanzibar
coast, the traders into the interior speak of this long but not very
elevated ridge, which extends from 6° to 26° S. latitude, as far as the
Factory of Lourenzo-Marques, on the Rio de Espiritu Santo (in the Bay
da Lagoa, or Delagoa Bay of the English). The farther the Lupata chain
advances towards the south, the nearer it approaches the coast, from
which it is only fifteen legoas distant at Lourenzo-Marques.”
[24] p. 12.--“_Caused by the great revolving current._”
In the northern part of the Atlantic, between Europe, North Africa,
and the New Continent, the waters of the ocean are driven round in a
true revolving current, or circle. This general current,--which, from
its cause, might be called a “Rotation Current,”--moves between the
tropics, as is well known, with the trade wind, from east to west. It
accelerates the passage of ships sailing from the Canaries to South
America, and makes it almost impossible to sail “up stream,” or in a
direct line from Cartagena de Indias to Cumana. This set to the west,
attributed to the trade winds, receives, however, in the Caribbean
Sea, the accession of a much stronger movement, originating in a very
remote cause, which was discovered as early as 1560 by Sir Humphrey
Gilbert, (Hakluyt, Voyages, vol. iii. p. 14), and developed with
greater certainty by Rennell in 1832. The Mosambique current, flowing
from north to south between Madagascar and the east coast of Africa,
sets on the Lagullas Bank, turns on the north side of it round the
south point of Africa, and advances with much force up the western
coast of the Continent to a little beyond the equator near the Island
of St. Thomas. It gives at the same time a north-westerly direction to
a part of the water of the South Atlantic, causing it to strike Cape
St. Augustin, and to follow the coast of Guiana to beyond the mouth
of the Orinoco, the Boca del Drago, and the coast of Paria. (Rennell,
Investigation of the Currents of the Atlantic Ocean, 1832, p. 96 and
136.) The New Continent, from the Isthmus of Panama to the northern
part of Mexico, opposes a barrier to the farther continuance of this
movement of the waters, and thus the current is constrained to assume
a northerly course off Veragua, and thence to follow the windings of
the coast of Costa Rica, Mosquito, Campeachy, and Tabasco. The waters
which enter the Mexican Gulf between Cape Catoche of Yucatan and Cape
San Antonio of Cuba, after completing a great rotatory movement or
circuit, by Vera Cruz, Tamiagua, the mouth of the Rio Bravo del Norte,
and that of the Mississipi, force their way northwards through the
Bahama Channel, and re-issue into the open ocean. Here they form the
well-known “Gulf Stream,” a current or river of warm and rapidly moving
water, flowing in an oblique or diagonal direction carrying it farther
and farther from the North American coast. Ships from Europe bound for
this coast, when uncertain in respect to their longitude, are enabled
by this oblique direction of the current to direct their course, as
soon as they reach the Gulf Stream, by observations of latitude only.
The position of this great current was first indicated with accuracy by
Franklin, Williams, and Pownall.
From the 41st degree of latitude, the river of warm water, which has
been gradually diminishing in rapidity and increasing in breadth, turns
suddenly to the east. It almost touches the southern edge of the great
Newfoundland bank, where I found the greatest amount of difference
between the temperature of the warm water of the Gulf stream, and
that of the waters resting on the banks and subjected thereby to a
cooling process. Before the stream reaches the westernmost of the
Azores it divides into two branches, one of which, at least at certain
seasons, advances towards Ireland and Norway, and the other towards the
Canaries and the West Coast of Africa. This Atlantic rotatory movement,
(described by me in more detail in the first volume of my Voyage to
the Equinoctial Regions), explains the possibility of trunks of South
American and West Indian trees being carried, in spite of the trade
winds, to the coasts of the Canary Islands, and stranded there. I have
made many experiments on the temperature of the Gulf Stream in the
vicinity of the Banks of Newfoundland. The Stream brings the warmer
water of lower latitudes into more northern regions with much rapidity,
and I have thus found its temperature two or three degrees of Reaumur
(5° to 7° Fah.) higher than that of the adjacent unmoved masses of
water, which form as it were the banks of the warm oceanic river.
The flying fish of the tropics (Exocetus volitans) accompanies the warm
water of the Gulf Stream far into the temperate zone. Floating sea-weed
(Fucus natans), chiefly taken up by the stream in the Gulf of Mexico,
shews when a ship is entering the current, and the arrangement of the
branches of the sea-weed shews the direction of the movement of the
water. The mainmast of the English ship of war, the Tilbury, destroyed
by fire on the coast of San Domingo, was carried by the Gulf Stream
to the north coast of Scotland. Even casks filled with palm oil, the
remains of the cargo of a ship wrecked off Cape Lopez on the coast of
Africa, were carried in the same manner to Scotland[*], after having
twice traversed the whole breadth of the Atlantic; once from east to
west with the equatorial current between 2° and 12° N. lat., and once
from west to east by the aid of the Gulf Stream, between 45° and 55°
N. lat. Rennell, in p. 347 of the “Investigation of Currents,” relates
the voyage of a bottle with papers enclosed, thrown overboard by the
English ship Newcastle on the 20th of January, 1819, in lat. 38° 52′,
and long. 63° 58′, which was picked up on the 2nd of June, 1820, at
the Rosses, (near the Island of Arran), on the west coast of Ireland.
A short time before my arrival at Teneriffe a stem of South American
cedar (Cedrela odorata), well covered with lichens, had been cast
ashore in the harbour of Santa Cruz.
Effects of the Gulf Stream in stranding on the Islands of Fayal,
Flores, and Corvo in the Azores, bamboos, artificially cut pieces of
wood, trunks of an unknown species of Pine from Mexico and the West
Indian Islands, and corpses of men of unknown race with unusually broad
faces, contributed to the discovery of America, by confirming Columbus
in his belief of the existence to the westward of Asiatic countries and
islands at no impassable distance. The great discoverer even heard from
the lips of settlers near the Cape de la Verga in the Azores, of some,
“who, in sailing westward, had met decked or covered boats, manned by
persons of strange and foreign appearance, and built apparently in
such a manner that they could not founder,--almadias con casa movediza
que nunca se hunden.” There is highly credible and well-confirmed
testimony to the fact, much as it has long been doubted, of natives
of America, (probably Esquimaux from Greenland or Labrador), carried
by currents or driven by storms from the North West, having actually
crossed the Atlantic in their canoes and reached our shores. James
Wallace, in his “Account of the Islands of Orkney, (1700, p. 60),”
relates, that in 1682 a Greenlander was seen in his boat off the South
Point of the Island of Eda by several persons, who did not succeed
in bringing him to shore. In 1684, a Greenland fisherman appeared in
his boat off the Island of Westram. In the church at Barra there was
suspended an Esquimaux boat, driven thither by currents and tempests.
The inhabitants of the Orkneys call Greenlanders so appearing among
them Finns or “Finnmen.”
In Cardinal Bembo’s History of Venice, I find a narrative to the
effect that in 1508 a French ship captured near the English coast a
small boat, with seven persons of a strange and foreign appearance.
The description suits extremely well with Esquimaux, (homines erant
septem _mediocri statura, colore subobscuro, lato et patente vultu_,
cicatriceque una violacea signato.) No one understood their language.
Their clothing was composed of fish skins sewn together. On their heads
they wore “coronam e culmo pictam, septem quasi auriculis intextam.”
They ate raw flesh, and drank blood as we would wine. Six of the men
died during the passage of the vessel, on board which they had been
taken; but the seventh, a youth, was presented to the king of France,
who was then at Orleans. (Bembo, Historia Venetæ, ed. 1718, lib. vii.
p. 257).
The appearance of men called _Indians_ on the western coasts of
Germany, under the Othos, and under Frederic Barbarossa, in the 10th
and 12th centuries, and even, as is related by Cornelius Nepos, (ed.
Van Staveren, cur. Bardili, T. ii., 1820, p. 356), Pomponius Mela,
(lib. iii. cap. 5, § 8), and Pliny, (Hist. Nat., T. ii. p. 67), when
Quintus Metellus Celer was Pro-consul in Gaul, may be explained by
similar effects of currents and north-west winds of long continuance.
A king of the Boii, others say of the Suevi, gave the shipwrecked
dark-coloured men to Metellus Celer. Gomara, in his Historia Gen. de
las Indias, (Saragossa, 1553, fol. vii.), refers to this account, and
considers the Indians spoken of in it to have been natives of Labrador.
“Si ya no fuesen de Tierra del Labrador, y los tuviesen, los Romanos
por Indianos engañados en el color.” The appearance of Esquimaux on
the northern coasts of Europe may be believed to have occurred more
often in earlier times, because we know, from the researches of Rask
and Finn Magnusen, that in the 11th and 12th centuries this race
extended in considerable numbers, under the name of the Skrälinges of
Labrador, even as far south as the “good Vinland;” _i. e._, the coast
of Massachusets and Connecticut. (Kosmos, Bd. ii. S. 270; English ed.
p. 234; Examen critique de l’Hist. de la Géographie, T. ii. p. 247-278.)
As the winter cold of the most northern parts of Scandinavia is
softened by the influence of the Gulf Stream, by which American
tropical fruits (cocoa nuts, and seeds of the Mimosa scandens and the
Anacardium occidentale) are cast upon the shore beyond the 62nd degree
of latitude, so does Iceland also occasionally enjoy the beneficial
influence of the extension of the warm waters of the Gulf Stream far
to the northward. The coasts of Iceland as well as those of the Färoe
Islands, receive a great deal of drift-wood, which, coming formerly
in greater abundance, was cut into beams and planks and used for
building timber. Fruits of tropical plants, collected on the coast
of Iceland, between Raufarhavn and Vapnafiord, testify the movement
of the waters from the southward. (Sartorius von Waltershausen,
physisch-geographische Skizze von Island, 1847, S. 22-35.)
[25] p. 12.--“_Neither Lecideas nor other Lichens._”
In northern countries, the earth, if left bare, soon becomes covered
with Bæomyces roseus, Cenomyce rangiferinus, Lecidea muscorum, L.
icmadophila, and similar Cryptogameæ, which prepare the way for the
growth of grasses and herbaceous plants. In the tropics, where mosses
and lichens only abound in shady places, some species of succulent
plants take their place.
[26] p. 13.--“_The care of animals yielding milk_, ... ... _The ruins
of the Aztec fortress._”
The two kinds of cattle alluded to, and subsequently spoken of,--the
Bos americanus and Bos moschatus,--are peculiar to the American
continent. But the natives--
Queis neque mos, neque cultus erat, nec jungere tauros.
_Virgil, Æn._ i. 316.
--drink the fresh blood, not the milk, of these animals. Single
exceptions have indeed been found, but only among tribes who at the
same time cultivated maize. I have before remarked, (p. 54), that
Gomara speaks of a people in the north-west of Mexico who possessed
herds of tame bisons, and derived from these animals clothing, meat,
and drink. The drink may have been the blood, (Prescott, Conquest of
Mexico, vol. iii. p. 416) for, as I have more than once remarked, the
dislike to milk, or at least the absence of its use, appears, before
the arrival of Europeans, to have been, generally speaking, a feature
common to all the natives of the New Continent,--and one which they
possess in common with the inhabitants of China and Cochin China, who
yet were near neighbours to true pastoral nations. The herds of tame
lamas, found in the highlands of Quito, Peru, and Chili, belonged to
a settled population, who cultivated the ground and did not follow a
nomadic life. Pedro de Cieça de Leon, (Chronica del Peru, Sevilla,
1553, cap. 110, p. 264) seems to imply, though certainly as a rare and
exceptional case, that in the Peruvian mountain plateau of Collao lamas
were used for drawing the plough. (Compare Gay, Zoologia de Chile,
Mamiferos, 1847, p. 154.) The usual custom in Peru was to plough with
men only. (See the Inca Garcilaso’s Commentarios reales, P. i. lib. v.
cap. 2, p. 133; and Prescott, Hist. of the Conquest of Peru, 1847, vol.
i. p. 136.) Mr. Barton has made it appear probable that, among some of
the tribes of Western Canada, the buffalo was from early times made an
object of care for the sake of its flesh and skin. (Fragments of the
Nat. Hist. of Pennsylvania, P. i. p. 4.) In Peru and Quito the lama
is now nowhere found in a state of original wildness. I was told by
the natives that the lamas on the western declivity of the Chimborazo
had become wild when the ancient residence of the rulers of Quito
“Lican” was laid in ashes. In the same manner the oxen in the Ceja de
la Montaña, in Middle Peru, have become perfectly wild: they are a
small and daring race, and often attack the Indians. The natives call
them Vacas del Monte, or Vacas cimarronas. (Tschudi, Fauna Peruana,
S. 256.) Cuvier’s opinion, that the lama had descended from the still
wild Guanaco, has been unfortunately still further disseminated by the
meritorious traveller Meyen, (Reise um die Erde, Th. iii. S. 64), but
has been completely refuted by von Tschudi.
The Lama, the Paco or Alpaca, and the Guanaco, are three originally
distinct species of animals. (Tschudi, S. 228 and 237.) The Guanaco
(Huanacu in the Quichua language) is the largest of the three; and
the Alpaca, measured from the ground to the crown of the head, the
smallest. The lama is next to the guanaco in stature. Herds of lamas,
when they are as numerous as I have seen them in the high plateau
between Quito and Riobamba, are a great ornament to the landscape. The
Moromoro of Chili appears to be a mere variety of the lama. Vicuñas,
Guanacoes, and Alpacas, still live wild at elevations of from 13000
to 16000 feet above the level of the sea. The two latter species are
sometimes met with tamed, but the guanaco only rarely. The alpaca does
not bear the warmer climate of the lower elevations so well as the
lama. Since the introduction of the more useful horses, mules, and
asses, (the latter acquire great spirit and beauty within the tropics),
the custom of rearing and using the lama and the alpaca as beasts of
burden, in the mountains and among the mines, has much decreased.
But the wool, of such different qualities in respect to fineness, is
still an important article in the industry of the inhabitants of the
mountains. In Chili the wild and the tamed guanaco are distinguished by
separate names; the wild being called Luan, and the tame Chilihueque.
The wide dissemination of the wild guanaco, from the Peruvian
Cordilleras to Tierra del Fuego, sometimes in herds of 500, has been
favoured by the circumstance that these animals can swim with great
ease from island to island, so that the Patagonian fiords offer no
obstacle to their wanderings. (See the pleasing descriptions by Darwin
in his Journal, 1845, p. 66.)
South of the Gila River, which, together with the Rio Colorado, enters
the Californian Gulf or Mar de Cortes, stand, in the solitude of the
Steppe, the enigmatical ruins of the Aztec Palace, called by the
Spaniards las Casas grandes. When the Aztecs, about the year 1160, came
from the unknown land of Aztlan to Anahuac, they settled themselves
for a time on the banks of the Gila. The Franciscan monks, Garces and
Font, are the latest travellers who have visited the Casas grandes,
and they did so in 1773. They stated the ruins to extend over above
a square German mile (16 English square miles). The whole plain is
strewed with fragments of painted pottery. The principal palace, (if a
house built of unburnt clay can be so designated), is 447 English feet
long and 277 English feet broad. (See a rare work printed in Mexico,
and entitled Cronica seráfica y apostólica del Colegio de Propaganda
Fide de la Santa Cruz de Querétaro por Fr. Juan Domingo Arricivita).
The Tayé of California, as drawn by Father Venegas, appears to differ
little from the Ovis musimon of the Old Continent. The same animal
is also seen on the “Stony Mountains,” near the sources of the Peace
River. Very different from it, on the other hand, is the small white
and black spotted goat-like creature which feeds near the Missouri and
Arkansas rivers. The synonymy of Antilope furcifer, A. tememazama of
Smith, and Ovis montana, is still very undetermined.
[27] p. 14.--“_The cultivation of farinaceous grasses._”
The original habitat of the farinaceous grasses is wrapped in the same
obscurity as that of the domestic animals which have accompanied man
since his earliest migrations. The German word for corn, “Getraide,”
has been ingeniously derived by Jacob Grimm from the old German
gitragidi, getregede. “It is as it were the _tame_ fruit (fruges,
frumentum), which has come into the hands of man; as we speak of
tame animals in opposition to wild ones.” (Jacob Grimm, Gesch. der
deutschen Sprache, 1848, Th. i. S. 62.) It is certainly a very striking
phenomenon, to find on one side of our planet nations to whom flour or
meal from small-eared grasses (Hordeaceæ and Avenaceæ), and the use of
milk, were completely unknown, while the nations of almost all parts
of the other hemisphere cultivate the Cerealia, and rear milk-yielding
animals. The cultivation of different kinds of grasses may be said to
afford a characteristic distinction between the two parts of the world.
In the New Continent, from 52° north to 46° south latitude, we see
only one species cultivated, viz. maize. In the Old Continent, on the
other hand, we find every where, from the earliest times of history,
the fruits of Ceres, wheat, barley, spelt or red wheat, and oats. That
wheat grew wild in the Leontine fields, as well as in several other
places in Sicily, was a belief entertained by ancient nations, and
is mentioned by Diodorus Siculus. (Lib. v. p. 199 and 232, Wessel.)
Ceres was found in the alpine meadow of Enna; and Diodorus fables that
“the inhabitants of the Atlantis were unacquainted with the fruits
of Ceres, because they had separated from the rest of mankind before
those fruits had been shewn to mortals.” Sprengel has collected several
interesting passages which lead him to think it probable that the
greater part of our European kinds of grain were originally wild in
the northern parts of Persia and India, namely, summer wheat in the
country of the Musicanes, a province in Northern India (Strabo, xv.
1017); barley (“antiquissimum frumentum,” as Pliny calls it, and which
is also the only cereal with which the Guanches of the Canaries were
acquainted), according to Moses of Chorene (Geogr, Armen. ed. Whiston,
1736, p. 360), on the Araxes or Kur in Georgia, and according to Marco
Polo in Balascham in Northern India (Ramusio, vol. ii. p. 10); and
spelt or red wheat, near Hamadan. But these passages, as has been
shewn by my keen-sighted friend and teacher Link, in an instructive
critical memoir (Abhandl. de Berl. Akad. 1816, S. 123), still leave
much uncertainty. I also early regarded the existence of originally
wild kinds of grain in Asia as extremely doubtful, and viewed such
as might have been seen there as having _become wild_. (Essai sur la
Géographie des Plantes, 1805, p. 28.) Reinhold Forster, who before
his voyage with Captain Cook, made by order of the Empress Catherine
an expedition into Southern Russia for purposes of natural history,
reported that the two-stalked summer barley (Hordeum distichon), grew
wild near the junction of the Samara and the Volga. At the end of the
month of September, 1829, Ehrenberg and myself, on our journey from
Orenburg and Uralsk to Saratow and the Caspian, also herborised on
the banks of the Samara. We were, indeed, struck with the quantity of
wheat and rye plants growing in what might be called a wild state in
the uncultivated ground, but the plants did not appear to us to differ
from the ordinary cultivated ones. Ehrenberg received from M. Carelin
a kind of rye, Secale fragile, gathered on the Kirgis Steppe, and
which Marschall von Bieberstein regarded for a time as the original or
mother plant of our cultivated rye, Secale cereale. Although Olivier
and Michaux speak of spelt (Triticum spelta) as growing wild at Hamadan
in Persia, Achill Richard does not consider that Michaux’s herbarium
bears out this statement. Greater confidence is due to the most
recent accounts obtained by the unwearied zeal of a highly-informed
traveller, Professor Carl Koch. He found much rye (Secale cereale,
var. β pectinata) in the Pontic Mountains, at elevations of upwards
of five or six thousand feet, in places where within the memory of
the inhabitants no grain of the kind had ever been cultivated. Koch
remarks, that the circumstance is “the more important because with us
this grain never propagates itself spontaneously.” In the Schirwan
parts of the Caucasus, Koch collected a kind of barley which he calls
“Hordeum spontaneum,” and considers to be the originally wild “Hordeum
zeocriton” of Linnæus. (Carl Koch Beiträge zur Flora des Orients, Heft
i. S. 139 and 142.)
A negro slave of the great Cortes was the first who cultivated wheat in
New Spain. He had found three grains of it amongst the rice which had
been brought from Spain for provision for the army. In the Franciscan
convent at Quito, I saw preserved as a relic the earthen vessel which
had contained the first wheat sowed there by the Franciscan monk Fray
Jodoco Rixi, a native of Ghent in Flanders. The first sowing had been
made in front of the convent, on what is now the Plazuela de San
Francisco, after cutting down the forest which then extended from the
foot of the volcano of Pichincha to the spot in question. The monks,
who I often visited during my stay at Quito, begged me to explain to
them the inscription on the earthen vessel, which they thought must
contain some mystic reference to the wheat. I read the motto, which
was in the old German dialect, and was--“Whoso drinks from me let him
not forget his God.” I too felt with the monks that this old German
drinking vessel was a truly venerable relic. Would that there had been
preserved every where in the New Continent the names, not of those
who made the earth desolate by bloody conquests, but of those who
first intrusted to it these its fruits so early associated with the
civilisation of mankind in the Old Continent! In respect generally to
the names of the kinds of grain, as bearing on the original affinities
of different languages, a high authority has remarked, that “such
indications are much more rare in the case of different kinds of grain,
and on subjects of agriculture, than on those connected with the care
of cattle: herdsmen when dispersed had still much in common, whereas
the subsequent cultivators of the soil had to create new words. But the
fact that in comparison with the Sanscrit, Romans and Greeks appear
nearly on a par with the Germans and Slavonians, argues in favour
of the very early contemporaneous emigration of the two latter. Yet
the Indian “java” (Frumentum hordeum), compared with the Lithuanian
“jawai,” and the Finnish “jywa,” offers a singular exception.” (Jac.
Grimm, Gesch. der deutschen Sprache, Th. i. S. 69.)
[28] p. 14.--“_Keeping by preference to the cooler mountain regions._”