Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 3 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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The Inhabitants Of Spanish And Portuguese America Form Together A
Population Twice As Numerous As The Inhabitants Of English Race.
The
French, Dutch, and Danish possessions of the new continent are of
small extent; but, to complete the general
View of the nations which
may influence the destiny of the other hemisphere, we ought not to
forget the colonists of Scandinavian origin who are endeavouring to
form settlements from the peninsula of Alashka as far as California;
and the free Africans of Hayti who have verified the prediction made
by the Milanese traveller Benzoni in 1545. The situation of these
Africans in an island more than three times the size of Sicily, in the
middle of the West Indian Mediterranean, augments their political
importance. Every friend of humanity prays for the development of the
civilization which is advancing in so calm and unexpected a manner. As
yet Russian America is less like an agricultural colony than the
factories established by Europeans on the coast of Africa, to the
great misfortune of the natives; they contain only military posts,
stations of fishermen, and Siberian hunters. It is a curious
phenomenon to find the rites of the Greek Church established in one
part of America and to see two nations which inhabit the eastern and
western extremities of Europe (the Russians and the Spaniards) thus
bordering on each other on a continent on which they arrived by
opposite routes; but the almost savage state of the unpeopled coasts
of Ochotsk and Kamtschatka, the want of resources furnished by the
ports of Asia, and the barbarous system hitherto adopted in the
Scandinavian colonies of the New World, are circumstances which will
hold them long in infancy. Hence it follows that if in the researches
of political economy we are accustomed to survey masses only, we
cannot but admit that the American continent is divided, properly
speaking, between three great nations of English, Spanish, and
Portuguese race. The first of these three nations, the
Anglo-Americans, is, next to the English of Europe, that whose flag
waves over the greatest extent of sea. Without any distant colonies,
its commerce has acquired a growth attained in the old world by that
nation alone which communicated to North America its language, its
literature, its love of labour, its predilection for liberty, and a
portion of its civil institutions.
The English and Portuguese colonists have peopled only the coasts
which lie opposite to Europe; the Castilians, on the contrary, in the
earliest period of the conquest, crossed the chain of the Andes and
made settlements in the most western regions. There only, at Mexico,
Cundinamarca, Quito and Peru, they found traces of ancient
civilization, agricultural nations and flourishing empires. This
circumstance, together with the increase of the native mountain
population, the almost exclusive possession of great metallic wealth,
and the commercial relations established from the beginning of the
sixteenth century with the Indian archipelago, have given a peculiar
character to the Spanish possessions in equinoctial America. In the
East Indies, the people who fell into the hands of the English and
Portuguese settlers were wandering tribes or hunters.
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