Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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Like the Malays, that hyperborean race reside
only on the sea-coasts.
They are almost all smaller in stature than
the other Americans, and are quick, lively, and talkative. Their
hair is almost straight, and black; but their skin (and this is
very characteristic of the race, which I shall designate under the
name of Tschougaz-Esquimaux) is originally whitish. It is certain
that the children of the Greenlanders are born white; some retain
that whiteness; and often in the brownest (the most tanned) the
redness of the blood is seen to appear on their cheeks.* (* Krantz,
Hist. of Greenland 1667 tome 1. Greenland does not seem to have
been inhabited in the eleventh century; at least the Esquimaux
appeared only in the fourteenth, coming from the west.)
The second portion of the natives of America includes all those
nations which are not Tschougaz-Esquimaux, beginning from Cook's
River to the Straits of Magellan, from the Ugaljachmouzes and the
Kinaese of Mount St. Elias, to the Puelches and Tehuelhets of the
southern hemisphere. The men who belong to this second branch, are
taller, stronger, more warlike, and more taciturn than the others.
They present also very remarkable differences in the colour of
their skin. In Mexico, Peru, New Grenada, Quito, on the banks of
the Orinoco and of the river Amazon, in every part of South America
which I have explored, in the plains as well as on the coldest
table-lands, the Indian children of two or three months old have
the same bronze tint as is observed in adults. The idea that the
natives may be whites tanned by the air and the sun, could never
have occurred to a Spanish inhabitant of Quito, or of the banks of
the Orinoco. In the north-east of America, on the contrary, we meet
with tribes among whom the children are white, and at the age of
virility they acquire the bronze colour of the natives of Mexico
and Peru. Michikinakoua, chief of the Miamis, had his arms, and
those parts of his body not exposed to the sun, almost white. This
difference of hue between the parts covered and not covered is
never observed among the natives of Peru and Mexico, even in
families who live much at their ease, and remain almost constantly
within doors. To the west of the Miamis, on the coast opposite to
Asia, among the Kolouches and Tchinkitans* of Norfolk Sound (*
Between 54 and 58 degrees of latitude. These white nations have
been visited successively by Portlock, Marchand, Baranoff, and
Davidoff. The Tchinkitans, or Schinkit, are the inhabitants of the
island of Sitka. Vater Mithridates volume 3 page 2. Marchand
Voyages volume 2.), grown-up girls, when they have gashed their
skin, display the white hue of Europeans. This whiteness is found
also, according to some accounts, among the mountaineers of Chile.*
(* Molina, Saggio sull' Istoria Nat. del Chile edition 2 page 293.
May we believe the existence of those blue eyes of the Boroas of
Chile and Guayanas of Uruguay; represented to us as nations of the
race of Odin? Azara Voyage tome 2.)
These facts are very remarkable, and contrary to the opinion so
generally spread, of the extreme conformity of organization among
the natives of America. If we divide them into Esquimaux and
non-Esquimaux, we readily admit that this classification is not
more philosophical than that of the ancients, who saw in the whole
of the habitable world only Celts and Scythians, Greeks, and
Barbarians. When, however, our purpose is to group numerous
nations, we gain something by proceeding in the mode of exclusion.
All we have sought to establish here is, that, in separating the
whole race of Tschougaz-Esquimaux, there remain still, among the
coppery-brown Americans, other races, the children of which are
born white, without our being able to prove, by going back as far
as the history of the Conquest, that they have been mingled with
European blood. This fact deserves to be cleared up by travellers
who may possess a knowledge of physiology, and may have
opportunities of examining the brown children of the Mexicans at
the age of two years, as well as the white children of the Miamis,
and those hordes* on the Orinoco (* These whitish tribes are the
Guaycas, the Ojos, and the Maquiritares.), who, living in the most
sultry regions, retain during their whole life, and in the fulness
of their strength, the whitish skin of the Mestizoes.
In man, the deviations from the common type of the whole race are
apparent in the stature, the physiognomy, or the form of the body,
rather than on the colour of the skin.* (* The circumpolar nations
of the two continents are small and squat, though of races entirely
different.) It is not so with animals, where varieties are found
more in colour than in form. The hair of the mammiferous class of
animals, the feathers of birds, and even the scales of fishes,
change their hue, according to the lengthened influence of light
and darkness, and the intensity of heat and cold. In man, the
colouring matter seems to be deposited in the epidermis by the
roots or the bulbs of the hair:* (* Adverting to the interesting
researches of M. Gaultier, on the organisation of the human skin,
John Hunter observes, that in several animals the colorating of the
hair is independent of that of the skin.) and all sound
observations prove, that the skin varies in colour from the action
of external stimuli on individuals, and not hereditarily in the
whole race. The Esquimaux of Greenland and the Laplanders are
tanned by the influence of the air; but their children are born
white. We will not decide on the changes which nature may have
produced in a space of time exceeding all historical tradition.
Reason stops short in these matters, when no longer under the
guidance of experience and analogy.
All white-skinned nations begin their cosmogony by white men; they
allege that the negroes and all tawny people have been blackened or
embrowned by the excessive heat of the sun.
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