De l’influence exercée sur les peuples indigènes de l’Amérique, par les circonstances locales au mil

CHAP. 40: > Of the influence exercised on the indigenous peoples of America, by the local circumstances in the midst of which they have been placed; or of the physical causes of the civilization of some and the barbarism of others.

There is no part of the globe that has experienced, in so short a space of time, revolutions as great as those of which the American continent has been the theater. In a very small number of centuries, the ancient population has been in large part destroyed or enslaved; peoples of different origins, morals, and religions have established themselves there, and have changed the morals and the religion of most of the ancient inhabitants, and even the surface of a large part of the soil. The vegetables and animals that existed in the other parts of the world have been naturalized there, and have multiplied there in a prodigious manner. The very temperature of the atmosphere has changed. This last revolution has been so rapid and so considerable that the life of one man has sufficed to mark its progress, and that naturalists have not been able to believe that so great an effect could have been produced by the modifications that human industry had made the soil undergo [411]. These revolutions and the uncertainty that reigns over the state to which the American peoples had attained at the moment when their country was invaded by the peoples of Europe, make the observation of the causes of the civilization of some and the barbarism of the greatest number very difficult. I will therefore limit myself to expounding those of these causes that have been the most influential, without contesting the power of secondary causes that may be unknown to us.

There has been much discussion on the question of how America was populated. The solution to this question is foreign to the object I propose. Whether the Americans are native to the American soil, or whether they came from the north of Asia or the north of Europe, matters little; it is enough for us to know that, in their true or supposed migration, they brought to the new continent nothing that belongs to the old, and that at the moment when the Spaniards arrived among them for the first time, they found neither in their languages, nor in their arts, nor in their morals, anything that announced an ancient or new communication with any other people of the globe [412].

These peoples possessed neither the animals that the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Europe have reduced to the state of domesticity, nor most of the vegetables of which these peoples make the basis of their subsistence. They did not even possess the most common animals among the peoples of the Pacific Ocean. They therefore had, like the natives of New Holland, communications only among themselves, and they were reduced, like them, to the resources of their own soil. They could multiply or perfect the products that their native country presented to them; but, on all points, it did not offer them the same facilities.

The climate of America, at equal latitude and elevation, is much more rigorous than that of the other continents. We have seen previously that the difference had been evaluated at fifteen to eighteen degrees of the Réaumur thermometer; the forty-fifth degree of north latitude thus corresponds to the sixtieth in Europe. In the seventeenth century, the lakes and small rivers of Canada began to freeze in the month of October, under the forty-seventh degree of latitude, and the earth was covered with three or four feet of snow until the month of April [413]. At the end of the last century, the climate was already much milder: however, under the sixtieth, the earth never thawed enough for it to be possible to bury the dead; under the sixty-ninth degree, it thawed, in the month of July, which is the period of the greatest heat, only four or five inches [414]. The duration of winter was therefore longer here than in Kamchatka, where it is however eight or nine months, since in this latter country one can cultivate at least some vegetables and some cereals, which is not possible on an eternally frozen land. The climate of America is not only more rigorous than that of the old continent; it is also more variable [415].

From the forty-seventh degree to the mouth of the Coppermine River, near the seventieth, the productions are analogous to the rigor of the temperature one experiences there; they are firs, poplars, birches, willows, spruces, larches, and pastures. The species diminish as one advances toward the pole; even those that can resist the rigor of the cold diminish in strength. When one arrives under the sixty-ninth, one sees only a small number of stunted willows, situated on the banks of the rivers; the largest do not rise above three feet [416]. The inhabitants of this part of America could not therefore multiply the vegetable productions proper for the subsistence of man, which grew in the other less cold parts of this continent.

This immense country is covered with forests, pastures, lakes, rivers, swamps, and populated with wild animals; but all the waters that flow to the east of the Rocky Mountains, or to the north of Lake Superior, are directed toward an icy sea inaccessible to navigators, or into Hudson Bay, a kind of inland sea from which one can exit only with difficulty, and by rising to the sixty-third degree of north latitude [417]. Thus, at the same time that the natives were deprived of vegetable productions by the nature of their soil and by the rigor of the climate, they were without communication with peoples placed in a happier situation. They had to draw their subsistence from fishing and hunting, and, if it was in their power to perfect the art of taking game or fish, it was not at least in their power to increase the quantity that existed in their country. These peoples were the least civilized of those who occupied the eastern part of North America, and that had to be, since they were those for whom it was most difficult to make progress [418].

The peoples situated at the other extremity of North America, the Mexicans and those who inhabited the mouths of the rivers that discharge into the Gulf of Mexico, were the most civilized of this part of the American continent. It is among them that the products of agriculture were the most varied, and that the soil was the best cultivated; but also, nowhere did one find a more fertile soil, nowhere did one enjoy a milder temperature, nowhere were the communications of the tribes among themselves more numerous or easier [419]. The maize, which formed the basis of the subsistence of these peoples, was cultivated with care, and its cultivation had spread as far as Canada; but there existed moreover on their soil, fruits and other food plants that had not been able to propagate in the north, for the reason that they could grow only under a hot or temperate climate [420].

In South America, the most advanced people was that of Peru. The natives of Paraguay, and a part of those of Brazil, had also made considerable progress, since among them the land was already divided into private properties. But the natives of the banks and mouths of the Orinoco, those of Guiana, those of the banks of the Amazon River, and those who inhabit the south of Buenos Aires, were still in the savage state; all drew their principal means of existence from fishing or hunting. These are phenomena that are contrary, in appearance, to those we have observed in the other parts of the globe; it is under temperate or cold climates, on the high places, on the plateaus of the mountains, that we find peoples marching toward civilization; and it is under a burning sky, in the low places, at the mouths and on the banks of the great rivers, or on the shores of the seas, that we find barbarous peoples. Several physical causes explain these phenomena.

Between the tropics, the rainy season begins with the month of April and does not end until around the month of August; the quantity of water that falls then is immense, and when it is received in basins as vast as those of the Orinoco and the Amazon, it covers, for nearly half the year, the lowest valleys. In this part of America, which extends from the tenth degree of north latitude to about the thirteenth of south latitude, as soon as the rains begin, the smallest ravines are transformed into torrents, the rivers leave their limits and spread far and wide; the streams overflow and resemble arms of the sea: the height to which the waters reach is such that the tallest trees, even when they are very far from the banks, let only their tops be seen, and serve as guides to the boatmen. The Orinoco, over a line of nearly two hundred leagues, spreads over one and the other bank to a distance of twenty or thirty leagues; and yet it rises today to a lesser height than that to which it once rose, since the flood marks, which remain on the rocks, are found at one hundred and thirty feet above the highest present-day waters [421].

This Orinoco River, which seems so imposing and so majestic to us, says M. de Humboldt, would thus be but a weak remnant of those immense currents of fresh water which, swollen by alpine snows or by more abundant rains, everywhere shaded by thick forests, devoid of those beaches that favor evaporation, once traversed the country to the east of the Andes, like arms of inland seas? What then must have been the state of those lowlands of Guiana, which today experience the effects of the annual floods? What a prodigious number of crocodiles, manatees, and boas must have inhabited those vast terrains converted in turn into pools of stagnant water or into arid and cracked plains.

The peaceful world we inhabit has succeeded a tumultuous world. Bones of mastodons and true American elephants are found scattered on the plateaus of the Andes. The megatherium inhabited the plains of Uruguay. By digging deeper into the earth, in the high valleys that today cannot nourish palm trees or tree ferns, one discovers layers of coal enclosing the gigantic debris of monocotyledonous plants. There was therefore a remote epoch when the classes of vegetables were otherwise distributed, when the animals were larger, the rivers wider and deeper [422].

But, although the volume of the waters that, in the rainy season, flow to the east of the Andes is less considerable than it once was, it is still large enough to explain how the peoples who live on the banks or at the mouths of the rivers have not made in agriculture and in the other arts of civil life, the same progress as the peoples of the same species who inhabited a soil less subject to these great revolutions. At the moment when the rains begin, the overflowing of the waters is so rapid and extends to so great a distance, that the horses that have not had time to reach the plateaus or domed parts of the llanos, perish by the hundreds. One then sees the mares, followed by their foals, swimming for part of the day to feed on grasses whose tips alone sway above the waters; and, while these animals thus go to seek a few blades of grass on the surface of the waters, they are pursued by crocodiles; it is not rare to encounter some that bear on them the imprint of the teeth of these carnivorous reptiles [423].

When the rains cease and the great heat arrives, the low and tree-covered lands like those of Guiana at the arrival of the Europeans, present only dangerous swamps, and are covered with insects and reptiles. The debris of vegetables that falls there and the excessive heat of the climate form on the surface a crust that is sometimes strong enough to support travelers or hunters; but, if it opens under their steps, they are swallowed up in an abyss [424]. On all the coasts that extend from the mouths of the Orinoco to the mouth of the Amazon, one encounters on a line of four hundred leagues only a curtain of mangroves, alternately destroyed and renewed by the mud and by the sand. Behind this curtain, there are savannas flooded by rainwater that has no outlet; and these savannas always extend laterally to the shore, in a more or less considerable depth, according to the distance or the proximity of the mountains [425]. The higher lands that leave the waters a free outlet, and where there are no trees capable of intercepting the sun's rays, present a different aspect; it is an immense steppe that extends from the entire chain of the mountains of Caracas to the forests of Guiana, and from the mountains of Mérida, where sulfurous and boiling springs emerge from beneath eternal snows, to the great delta that the Orinoco forms at its mouth; it extends to the southwest like an arm of the sea beyond the banks of the Méta [426]. Here, the grass is reduced to powder; the soil cracks, as if it had been shaken by earthquakes; the crocodile and the great serpents remain buried in the dried mud, until the first showers of spring awaken them from a long slumber [427]. The earth is then so arid that the mules gnaw even the melocactus bristling with thorns, to drink its refreshing juice, and to draw from it as from a vegetable spring [428].The same causes that, in this part of America, make the cultivation of the land so difficult, and we can even say impossible for peoples who have made no progress in the other arts, also make fishing easier for them. As the rivers and streams return to their limits, they leave behind in the low-lying places a considerable quantity of fish. The waters of these natural basins diminish little by little through evaporation, and fishing becomes easier and easier. When the terrain is completely dry, the quantity of fish that remains on the surface is sometimes so considerable that it is enough to infect the air [429]. Fishing in the rivers is, moreover, so easy, and its products so abundant, that it cannot occur to the natives to devote themselves to another kind of industry [430].

The lakes situated in the highest part of Peru contain no species of fish; and as, at this elevation, the land is not susceptible to cultivation, the country is uninhabited. The fish found in the highest rivers are of only two species; those belonging to one are only an inch and a half in length; those belonging to the other are no more than a third of a vara: the waters of Quito are even less fish-bearing [431]. The peoples of these mountains could not, therefore, draw their subsistence from the rivers, like those on the banks of the Amazon or the Orinoco; but also, they were sheltered from those long and periodic floods, which cover the lowest lands for nearly six months, and consequently the cultivation of the land did not present them with the same obstacles.

A considerable part of South America produces only grass in the rainy season, and it is almost entirely sterile in times of drought. From the La Plata River to the Strait of Magellan, over an expanse of about eighteen degrees of latitude, the land is so devoid of trees that it is scarcely possible to encounter a bush there. The plains of Calabozo, which are likewise covered only with grass, extend, according to some, to the steppes or pampas of Buenos Aires, over a length of eight hundred leagues. This immense expanse of the American continent is little susceptible to cultivation, either because the soil is covered with only a few inches of topsoil, or because it is covered with salt, like the center of Asia and Africa. This entire country was a desert at the arrival of the Europeans; but since the domestic animals they brought there have multiplied, the natives have adopted the way of life and the morals of the Tatars. Their social physiognomy has thus been determined, in a manner that is perhaps irrevocable, by the nature of their soil and of the animals that have been introduced there [432].

The inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, who, of all the peoples of the copper-colored race, are incontestably the most poorly constituted and the most stupid, are also the most isolated peoples and those to whom the soil offers the fewest resources. Separated from the southern extremity of America by the Strait of Magellan, unable to draw any help from this part of the continent, which is but a desert roamed by a few hunting tribes, they cannot leave their island, since it is situated under too high a latitude to produce trees proper for navigation. In the least rigorous season, and when the sun remains eighteen hours on the horizon, the cold there is such that the country is covered with snow, and that it can even kill in a short time men who are not accustomed to it. This land is situated under a much colder climate than that of Norway or Lapland, although placed under a less elevated latitude [433]. It therefore produces neither fruits nor vegetables proper for the subsistence of man; and even if the natives managed to procure seeds, they would not know how to multiply them there. The only terrestrial animals that have been perceived there are falcons, eagles, vultures, thrushes, and a few small birds. Even fish are extremely rare there, and those that are caught are not good to eat; shellfish and mussels are found there in abundance, and seem to be the only things on which it is possible to live [434]. The inhabitants are therefore condemned by their position to be barbarous, as long as they remain isolated, and as long as they are powerless to add anything to the means of existence offered to them by their soil or by the waters of the sea.

It is easy to see now how the nature and configuration of the soil, the temperature of the atmosphere, and the volume and direction of the waters have determined the morals of the peoples placed to the east of the mountain chain that runs from the north to the south of America. Those who inhabit the boreal extremity of this continent have remained hunters and fishers, because their soil, little susceptible to producing food substances proper to man, abounded in game, and their lakes and rivers abounded in fish. Those who lived under a less elevated latitude had become agriculturalists without renouncing hunting or fishing, because the maize that their soil was susceptible to producing, and which they possessed, could be preserved for a long time; because the lakes, rivers, and forests by which they were surrounded still presented them with numerous resources; and because the rigor and length of the winters did not permit them other occupations than hunting and fishing for a large part of the year. Those who lived on the banks or at the mouths of the rivers of South America had remained nomadic or had established their dwellings on the tops of trees, because the peaty terrain on which they were placed was alternately covered by the overflowing of the waters or dried out by the ardors of the sun, and because fishing and hunting offered them easier resources than the cultivation of the soil. Finally, those who lived on the shores of the gulf or on the plateaus of Mexico, or in Peru, had devoted themselves almost exclusively to agriculture, because their soil could produce diverse species of vegetables proper to serve them as food; because it could be worked during a large part of the year; because it was not subject to floods; because the rigors of winter were little to be feared there; and because fishing and hunting presented only weak means of existence [435].

The peoples placed to the west of the same mountains have been subjected to local influences no less powerful; it would be easy to show that they have been more or less advanced according as the soil on which they found themselves was more or less watered, as it was more or less rich in topsoil, as it enjoyed a more or less variable temperature; according as fishing or hunting were more or less productive; according as communications were more or less easy; but this exposition would lead us too far and would only confirm the observations I have already made [436].