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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These People Are Scarcely More
Barbarous Than The Naked Indians Of The Missions, Who Have Been
Taught To Make The Sign Of The Cross.
It is a common error in
Europe, to look on all natives not reduced to a state of
subjection, as wanderers and hunters.
Agriculture was practised on
the American continent long before the arrival of Europeans. It is
still practised between the Orinoco and the river Amazon, in lands
cleared amidst the forests, places to which the missionaries have
never penetrated. It would be to imbibe false ideas respecting the
actual condition of the nations of South America, to consider as
synonymous the denominations of 'Christian,' 'reduced,' and
'civilized;' and those of 'pagan,' 'savage,' and 'independent.' The
reduced Indian is often as little of a Christian as the independent
Indian is of an idolater. Both, alike occupied by the wants of the
moment, betray a marked indifference for religious sentiments, and
a secret tendency to the worship of nature and her powers. This
worship belongs to the earliest infancy of nations; it excludes
idols, and recognises no other sacred places than grottoes,
valleys, and woods.
If the independent Indians have nearly disappeared for a century
past northward of the Orinoco and the Apure, that is, from the
Snowy Mountains of Merida to the promontory of Paria, it must not
thence be concluded, that there are fewer natives at present in
those regions, than in the time of the bishop of Chiapa, Bartolomeo
de las Casas. In my work on Mexico, I have shown that it is
erroneous to regard as a general fact the destruction and
diminution of the Indians in the Spanish colonies. There still
exist more than six millions of the copper-coloured race, in both
Americas; and, though numberless tribes and languages are either
extinct, or confounded together, it is beyond a doubt that, within
the tropics, in that part of the New World where civilization has
penetrated only since the time of Columbus, the number of natives
has considerably increased. Two of the Carib villages in the
Missions of Piritu or of Carony, contain more families than four or
five of the settlements on the Orinoco. The state of society among
the Caribbees who have preserved their independence, at the sources
of the Essequibo and to the south of the mountains of Pacaraimo,
sufficiently proves how much, even among that fine race of men, the
population of the Missions exceeds in number that of the free and
confederate Caribbees. Besides, the state of the savages of the
torrid zone is not like that of the savages of the Missouri. The
latter require a vast extent of country, because they live only by
hunting; whilst the Indians of Spanish Guiana employ themselves in
cultivating cassava and plantains. A very little ground suffices to
supply them with food. They do not dread the approach of the
whites, like the savages of the United States; who, being
progressively driven back behind the Alleghany mountains, the Ohio,
and the Mississippi, lose their means of subsistence, in proportion
as they find themselves reduced within narrow limits.
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