1931 ORINOCO River EXPEDITION magazine article Venezuela Brazil Natives animals

Description

Selling is a 1931 magazine article about:
ORINOCO EXPEDITION
Title: IN HUMBOLDT'S WAKE
Subtitled "Narrative of a National Geographic Society Expedition Up the Orinoco and Through the Strange Casiquiare Canal to Amazonian Waters"
Ernest G. Holtz, Leader of the National Geographic Society Venezuela-Brazil Expeditions
Quoting the first page "A small sailboat slips from the mouth of the Rio Apure and turns to battle the mighty Orinoco. The rains have begun, yet the stiff easterly trades still blow, and the great river is whipped into a sea of whitecaps 20 miles across. The boat is crudely fashioned and clumsy, and although her crew of Indians are skillful river men, she is tossed about wildly and, to the great anxiety of two white men huddled under the thatched covering aft, seems in imminent danger of swamping. The very next wave might spell the irrevocable loss of priceless instruments and records, specimens that have cost weeks of labor.
Such was the introduction to the Orinoco, on the 5th of April, 1800, of one of the greatest travelers of all time, Baron Friedrich Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt, and his friend, M. Aime Bonpland. Diego de Ordaz had made known the magnitude of the Orinoco almost three centuries earlier, but it is to Humboldt more than to any other man that the world owes what little knowledge it possesses of the vast hinterland lying along the upper reaches of this great river. And to Bonpland, as a direct result of his travels with Humboldt, is credited the enrichment of science by no less than 6,000 new species of plants. No mean event, this voyage of a primitive sailboat!
Four generations later, a small stern-wheel steamer breasted the Orinoco opposite the mouth of the Apure, and took up Humboldt's trail. She carried a government commission headed for the Brazilian- Venezuelan frontier to mark the boundary between two great republics sprung into existence since Humboldt passed. Yet, though the political map has been altered mightily, though astounding progress has been made in every field of science, could Humboldt retrace his Orinoco route to-day he would find little change. Four hundred years after its discovery, the Orinoco remains much the same, and, at least in its upper course, almost as little known as when Ordaz entered its mouth.
Through the generous courtesy of the Venezuelan Government, a National Geographic Society party was included among the voyagers on the little stern-wheeler.
Our purpose was to make natural history investigations in the almost unknown region lying along the Brazilian-Venezuelan line, and in the execution of this mission we traveled as guests of the Comision Venezolana de Limites for more than a thousand miles over inland waterways followed by the illustrious Humboldt.
Like Humboldt, we, too, began our journey to the Orinoco at Caracas, Venezuelan capital and first city, but we chose a very different means of transport. Humboldt traveled across the llanos by horseback Our impedimenta were too great for this, and as the season rendered the llanos still impassable for motor trucks, there remained for us no alternative to the water route via Trinidad. At Port of Spain we transshipped to a Venezuelan river steamer and disembarked at Ciudad Bolivar.
The Orinoco ranks third among the rivers of South America. Estimates of its length are as diverse as they are numerous, and all are but approximations, for the uppermost reaches have never been charted; but probably the best figures are those of the Venezuelan National Cartographic Office- 1,800 kilometers (1,118 miles). The mighty stream sprawls across the map of Venezuela like a giant fish- hook, the shank flattened out to form a…"
7” x 10”, 26 pages, 28 B&W photos
These are pages carefully removed from an actual 1931 magazine.
31K1
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