raccas, on the ridge of the Andes, in the burning plains of the Philippine islands, and whereever isolated in uninhabited countries they have had occasion to display that energy and activity, which are the true riches of a planter.

The Canarians are fond of considering their country as forming part of European Spain, and they have added some portion to the riches of Castilian literature. The names of Clavijo, author of the Pensador Madritense, of Vieyra, Yriarte, and Betancourt, are honourably distinguished in the scientific and in the literary world. The Canarians are endowed with that liveliness of imagination, which characterizes the inhabitants of Andalusia and Grenada; and we may be led to hope, that, at some future period, the Fortunate Islands, like every other climate of the Globe, either where man reposes on the lavish bounties of Nature, or shrinks from the severity of her frown, will inspire the muse of some native poet.

END OF VOL. I.

JOURNEY

TO THE

EQUINOCTIAL REGIONS

OF

THE NEW CONTINENT.

CHAPTER III.

Passage from Teneriffe to the coasts of South America. The Island of Tobago.- Arrival at Cumana.

WE left the road of Santa Cruz the evening of the 25th of June, and directed our course toward South America. The wind blew strong from the north-east, and the waves were short, and broken from the opposition of the currents. We soon lost sight of the Canary islands, the lofty mountains of which were covered with a reddish vapour. The Peak alone appeared from time to time in the breaks, as the wind, which must have blown strong in the upper regions of

the air, dispersed at intervals the clouds that enveloped the Piton. We felt for the first time how strong are the impressions left on the mind from the aspect of those countries placed on the limits of the torrid zone, and in which nature appears at once so rich, so various, and so majestic. Our stay at Teneriffe had been very short, and yet we withdrew from the island as if it had been for a long time our home.

Our passage from Santa Cruz to Cumana, the most eastern part of the New Continent, was very fine. We cut the tropic of Cancer the 27th, and though the Pizarro was not a very good sailer, we ran in twenty days the space of nine hundred leagues, which separates the coasts of Africa from those of the New Continent. We passed fifty leagues west of Cape Bajador, Cape Blanco, and the islands of Cape Verd. A few land birds, which had been driven to sea by the impetuosity of the wind, followed us for several days. If we had not exactly known, by our time-keepers, our longitude, we should have been tempted to think, that we were very near the coast of Africa.

Our course was such as is taken by all vessels destined for the Antilles since the first voyage of Columbus. The latitude diminished rapidly, almost without gaining in longitude, from the parallel of Madeira to the tropic. When we reach the zone, where the trade winds are constant, we

cross the ocean from east to west, on a calm and pacific sea, which Spanish sailors call the Ladies Gulf, el Golfo de las Damas. We found, as all do who frequent those latitudes, that, in proportion as we advance toward the west, the trade winds, which were at first east-north-east, fix to the east.

Those winds, the most generally adopted theory of which is explained in a celebrated treatise of Halley*, are a phenomenon much more complicated† than the greater number of naturalists admit. In the Atlantic Ocean, the longitude as well as the declination of the sun, influences the direction and limits of the trade winds. On the side of the New Continent, in both hemispheres,

* The existence of an upper current of air, which blows constantly from the equator to the poles, and of a lower current, which blows from the poles to the equator, had already been admitted, as Mr. Arago has shown, by Hooke. The ideas of the celebrated English naturalist are developed in a discourse on Earthquakes published in 1686. "I think (adds he,) that several phenomena, which are presented by the atmosphere and the ocean, especially the winds, may be explained by the polar currents." (Hooke's Posthumous Works, p. 364.) This curious passage is not cited by Halley (Phil. Trans. vol. xxxix, p. 58). On the other hand, Hooke, speaking directly of the trade winds (Post. Works, p. 88 and 363), adopts the erroneous theory of Galileo, who admits a difference of velocity between the movement of the Earth and that of the air.

† Mém. de l'Acad. 1760, p. 18. D'Alembert, sur les Causes gén, des Vents, p. 5.