TRUE VOLCANOES. 257 



Although the continent of Central America increases con- 

 siderably in breadth from the isthmus of Panama, through 

 Veragua, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua, to the latitude of 11^^, 

 the great area of the Lake of Nicaragua and the small eleva- 

 tion of its surface (scarcely 128 feet* above the two seas) gives 

 rise to such a degradation of the land exactly in this district, 

 that by it an overflow of air from the Caribbean Sea into the 

 Great South Sea is often caused, bringing danger to the voy- 

 ager in the so-called Pacific Ocean. The northeast storms 

 thus excited have received the name of Papagayos, and some- 

 times rage without intermission for four or five days. They 

 have the remarkable peculiarity that during their continu- 

 ance the sky usually remains quite cloudless. The name is 

 borrowed from the part of the west coast of Nicaragua be- 

 tween Brito or Cabo Desolado and Punta S. Elena (from 11° 

 22'' to 10° 50^), which is called Golfo del Papagayo, and in- 

 cludes 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 (9 th — U-th March, 1803), allhough rather more to the 

 south, in less than U° 13^ of latitude. The waves rose higher 

 than I have ever seen them ; and the constant visibility of 

 the disk of the sun in the bright, blue arch of heaven enabled 

 me to measure the height of the waves by altitudes 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 Span- 

 ish, English,! and American voyagers ascribe the above-de- 

 scribed storms of the Southern Ocean to the northeast trade- 

 wind of the Atlantic. 



In a new workf which I have undertaken with much as- 



* Even under the Spanish government in 1781, the Spanish engi- 

 neer, Don Jose Galisteo, had found for the surface of the Laguna of 

 Nicaragua an elevation only six feet greater than that ^ven by Baily 

 in his different levelings in 1838 (Humboldt, Relation Historique, t. iii., 

 p. 321). 



t 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 Eica. 



X My earliest work upon seventeen linear volcanoes of Guatemala 

 and Nicaragua is contained in the Geographyiji Journal of Berghaus 

 {Hertha, bd. vi., 1826, p. 131-161). Beside^he old Chronista Fu- 

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

 work of Domingo Juarros, Compendio de la Historia de la Civdad de 

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



