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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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.
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