TRUE VOLCANOES. 271 



The north- east storms thus excited have received 

 the name of Papagayos, and sometimes rage without inter- 

 mission for four or five days. They have the remarkable 

 peculiarity that, during their continuance the sky usually 

 remains quite cloudless. The name is borrowed from the part 

 of the west coast of Nicaragua between Brito or Cabo 

 Desolado and Punta S. Elena (from 11 22' to 10 50'), 

 which is called Golfo del Papagayo, and includes the small 

 bays of Salinas and S. Elena to the south of the Puerto 

 de San Juan del Sur. On my voyage from Guayaquil to 

 Acapulco, I was able to observe the Papagayos in all their 

 violence and peculiarity for more than two whole days 

 (9th llth March, 1803), although rather more to the 

 south, in less than 9 13' of latitude. The waves rose 

 higher than I have ever seen them ; and the constant visi- 

 bility of the disc of the sun in the bright, blue arch of hea- 

 ven, enabled me to measure the height of the waves by alti- 

 tudes of the sun taken upon the ridge of the wave and 

 in the trough, by a method which had not been tried at 

 that time. All Spanish, English 65 , and American voyagers 

 ascribe the above-described storms of the Southern Ocean 

 to the north-east trade-wind of the Atlantic. 



In a new work* which I have undertaken with much 



65 See Sir Edward Belcher, Voyage round the World, vol. i, p. 185. 

 According to my chronometric longitude I was in the Papagayo-storm 

 19 11' to the west of the meridian of Guayaquil, and consequently 

 99 9' west, and 880 miles west of the shore of Costa Rica. 



66 My earliest work upon seventeen linear volcanoes of Guatemala 

 and Nicaragua is contained in the Geographical Journal of Berghaus 

 (Hertha, Bd. vi, 1826, pp. 131161). Besides the old Chronista 

 Fuentes (lib. ix, cap. 9), I could then only make use of the important 

 work of Domingo Juarros, Compendia de la Historia de la Ciudad dc 

 Guatemala, and of the three maps by Galisteo (drawn in 1781, at the 

 command of the Mexican Viceroy, Matias de Galvez), by Jose' Rossi y 

 Rubi (Alcalde Mayor de Guatemala, 1800), and by Joaquin Ysasi and 

 Antonio de la Cerda (Alcalde de Granada) which I possessed princi- 

 pally in manuscript. In the French translation of his work upon the 

 Canary Islands, Leopold von Bnch has given a masterly extension of 

 my first sketch (Descr. Physique des Isles Canaries, 1836, pp. 500 514 ), 

 but the uncertainty of geographical synonyms and the confusion of 

 names caused thereby gave rise to many doubts, which have been for 

 the most part removed by the fine maps of Baily and Saunders; by 

 Molina's Bosquejo de la Republica de Costa Rica, and by the great and 

 very meritorious work of Squier (Nicaragua, its People and Monuments, 



