At the mouth of the Orinoco river is the Island of Trinidad upon which is the famous pitch lake. This is the most noted deposit of asphalt known. This lake is a mile and a half across and looks, from a distance, like a pond surrounded with trees. Nearing it, however, one soon discovers that it contains anything but water.
This material is of a dark green color and at the border is hard and strong enough to bear quite a heavy weight, but near the center it is almost like a boiling mass. The asphalt is dug from the edges of the lake, loaded on carts, hauled to the port and from there shipped to nearly every country on the globe. Two hundred thousand tons per year have been taken from the lake and yet there is no hole to be seen. Negro workmen dig it to the depth of a couple of feet and in a week or so the hole is level with the top again.
The government of Trinidad has leased the asphalt lake to an American company and the income amounts to nearly a quarter of a million dollars per year. Nobody knows how deep the asphalt bed is for borings have been made a hundred feet or more deep and there was no bottom. The heat is intense all around this lake.
About fifty miles from the coast in Venezuela there is another asphalt lake and the material in it is of finer quality than at Trinidad, but it is hard to reach. Some believe that the two deposits are connected by a subterranean passage and supplied from the same source. It was from this inland lake of asphalt that the material was procured to protect the New York subway tunnels from moisture, so it is said.
In the central part of Venezuela are the llanos which are said to be about the best pasture lands in the world. The chief industry here is cattle raising. More than two million head of cattle feed, upon these llanos, but they are capable of feeding many times that number.
One reason why the people of this country have no ambition to lay up for the future or even get large herds of cattle has been because of the numerous revolutions of the past. Every time they have succeeded in getting large herds of cattle or stores of grain a revolution would come and their property be seized and often destroyed.
No people can be prosperous and happy without a stable government, schools and colleges and the influences that are uplifting. This is the great need of many of the countries of South America today. Just here it is well for the farmers of this country to congratulate themselves. The writer of these lines has traveled nearly all over the world and having been a farmer all his early life it is only natural that he would try to study the problems of the farmers in all lands.
It is therefore with pride that one can say that considering all the complex problems with which the American farmer has to grapple, he is a hundred times better off than his brother farmers in any country in the world. He is more independent, has more privileges, more opportunities for making the most of life, has higher ideals, and lives better than the tillers of the soil in any other country on earth.