Central America and South America

“ A subordinate rôle is its fate. Australia will always follow in the train of Eurasia, whence alone it has derived its incentives and means of progress. Neither the southern half of Africa nor South America has ever in historical times struck out a road to advancement unaided by its northern neighbors. Primitive South America developed the only independent civilization that ever blossomed in the Southern Hemisphere, but the Peruvian achievements in progress were inferior to those of Mexico and Central America.771
Isolation of the southern continents. ”

“ We know as little of portions of the continent as we do of Central Africa, yet there is no section of the globe which suggests a greater degree of physical interest, or which would respond more readily and profitably to intelligent effort at development. When the Spaniards first came to South America, it was only in Peru, the land of the Incas, that they found natives who had made any substantial progress in civilization. ”

“ The effort to account for South American civilization [Pg 169] by climate falls to pieces before the splendid and bracing altitudes of the Andes, the ideal conditions of Argentine, Uruguay, and Chile, and the delightful regions of the higher elevations of Central America. There is nothing inherently demoralizing in the climate of lands inhabited by the Latin peoples in America, but there is something distinctly vitiating in the moral miasma breathed by these peoples for three hundred years. ”

“ Central North-America is to an extraordinary degree worked out everywhere in careful detail, in moderate hill and valley, in undulating prairie and fertile plain,—not tossed into barren mountain-masses and table-lands, like that vast desert plateau which stretches through Central Asia,—not struck out in blank, like the Russian steppes and the South American llanos, as if Nature had wanted leisure to elaborate and finish. ”

“ To bring together North and South America as a simultaneous geological phenomena is wrong, to make them other than an accidental geographical continuity questionable. It is this intermediate zone—the Antillean continent with lateral elongations, grasping within its continental solidarity the parallel zones of Central America and the Isthmus, that gives them terrestrial unity. Extend the axis of the Rocky Mountains, and it passes almost two thousand miles west of the coast of South America ”

“ On one side of the Andes are the rich valleys of Central Chile, on the other side the wide plains of the Argentine Pampa, formerly given over to pasture, now producing wheat, maize, flax, barley and oats as well as meat, hides and wool.
South America has been called the fertile continent. Considering that most of the land lies within the tropics, it might be called the habitable continent—habitable in comfort and health by white men. ”

“ Central America, occupied by no less than a dozen distinct linguistic stocks, forms a fourth cultural district. Its peoples show not only the influences of the Maya and Nahua to the north (a tribe of the Nahuatlan stock had penetrated as far south as Lake Nicaragua) , but also of the Chibchan civilization of the southern continent, dominant in the Isthmus of Panama, and extending beyond Costa Rica up into Nicaragua. In addition, there is more than a suggestion of influence from the Antilles and from the sea-faring Carib. Here, we can truly say, is the meeting-place of the continents. ”

“ Even if he fails in either or both these aims his work is justified if it contains individual conceptions of the myriad wonders which the continent discloses to the seeing eye. For this far-reaching stretch of earth is the last to be really explored and civilised by Western man. Compared with many portions of it, the forests of Central Africa, the plateaus of Middle Asia, and the deserts of Australia, are as open books. It is only South America to-day, or, to be more correct, a great part of it that is “a field enclosed, a fountain sealed.” ”

“ And so it is with the distribution of tribes and races. Large areas, like those of the Algonkins and Iroquois, are conterminous with groups of unfixed and almost isolated languages: so that what we have found in Mexico, as opposed to Canada, we shall find in Central South America, as opposed to Brazil and Peru.
Still there are important points of difference. South America, like Africa, lies not only between the tropics, but under the equator. Like Africa, too, only farther than Africa, it extends towards the Antarctic Circle ”

“ Many well-informed people do not know. North America and South America are easily realizable as geographical entities, but where can a third America exist? Central America is not the centre of the South American Continent, as some well-meaning [23] people think, but is that part of America lying between the two continents, and includes no less than six independent Republics, together with British Honduras. ”

“ The republic of Salvador, the only one of Central America not having a coast line on the Atlantic, is 572 bounded on the north and east by Honduras, on the south-east by Fonseca Bay, on the south by the Pacific Ocean, and on the north-west by Guatemala. ”

“ In respect to the abundance and value of its ethnological materials, South America, especially for its interior, is one of the dark spots of the world—it is better known than Central Africa, and better known than New Guinea: and saying this we have said all.
And here it may be well to indicate an ethnological method. In Tierra del Fuego we have one of the six extreme points of population; i.e. points from which no population has been supposed to have been determined elsewhere; Easter Island, Van Dieman's Land, the Cape of Good Hope, Lapland, and Ireland, being the other five. ”

“ But no wonder that so little is known here about South America, when one of the standard School Geographies and most recent publications describes the products of Venezuela in these few lines:
“Its principal products are the woods and fruits of the forest and the cattle of the plains.”
“Exports.—The principal exports are the tropical fruits, which grow without cultivation; and hides, cattle, horses, and mules.” ”

“ The continuous connection of the blocks is in no way contradictory to the fact that South America detached itself from Africa before North America did from Europe, particularly if the great plastic deformations which Central America must have undergone are borne in mind. The movement of South America consisted to a great extent in a rotation. ”

“ Nothing in the history of modern adventure can compare in hardihood, determination, and reckless disregard of life, with those haphazard undertakings{401} in the heart of South America which, although proving invariably most disastrous to their promoters, resulted ultimately in a real benefit to the colonial possessions of Spain in the New World, by extending the geographical knowledge of those regions. ”

“ We have no data for guessing at the population of the New World either in 1500 or in 1600, but at both dates there evidently were in Mexico and Central America far more inhabitants than in all the rest of the Northern Continent taken together. As regards South America, the empire of the Incas alone probably contained from nine to eleven millions129 of persons, a number many times greater than that of all the aborigines that at any one time dwelt between the Arctic circle and the Gulf of Mexico. ”

“ Those vast regions which occupy the central part of South America, stretching from Guinea to the foot of the Andes, overspread with gigantic and primeval forests, and watered by mighty rivers—those solitary wilds where man appears unessential in the scale of creation, and the traces of his power are few and far between—have lately occupied much of the attention of Europeans ”

“ South America is a triangular continent, with its axis, the Andes, not central, as in Europe, but lying on its extreme western edge, and in harmony with the well-known law that the highest mountains and the grandest volcanoes face the broadest ocean. The highlands of Brazil and [Pg 118] Guiana have neither volcanic nor snow-clad peaks. [53] Like all the dry land which first appeared, these primitive mountains on the Atlantic border trend east and west. ”

“ South America is bounded at its northern end by an isthmus and at its southern by a strait. They are the two gateways by which the western side of the Continent, cut off from the western and central portions by a long and lofty mountain range, can be approached from the Atlantic. It was by crossing the Isthmus that Vasco Nuñez de Balboa discovered the South Sea. It was by penetrating the Strait that Magellan, seven years later, discovered that this South Sea was a vast ocean stretching all the way to the coasts of Asia. ”

“ Nowhere in the English colonies existed such impediments to communication as the deserts of northern Chile and southern Peru, the swamps of eastern Colombia and western Venezuela, the forests of Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, or the gigantic chain of the Andes whose lowest point for thousands of miles is ten thousand feet above the sea. ”

“ As the United States has not been a colonizing nation, having undeveloped lands and resources at home for its surplus population, there has not been the intercourse between North and South America that there has been between South America and Europe. ”

“ Fifty millions of people now dwell beneath the Southern Cross and speak the Portuguese and Spanish languages, and it is estimated that, with the present rate of increase, 180 millions of people will speak these languages by 1920.
South America is, pre-eminently, the coming continent. It is more thinly settled than any other part of the world. At least six million miles of its territory are suitable for immigrants—double the available territory of the United States. "No other tract of good land exists that is so large and so unoccupied as South America." ”

“ We can toss a stone into Chili with one hand and into the Argentine Republic with the other. We are more than two miles in the air, and as we look away to the westward we can see the dark mass of the Pacific Ocean forming the curving rim of the horizon.
"We are at the crest of the Andes, and the South American continent is at our feet." ”

“ In the southern-most part of the New World, the tapering portion of the South American continent, lies a vast region of which comparatively little is heard or known, yet one which in the future must take its place in the economic development of the globe. This is the Territory extending throughout the lower portion of Argentina, Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. ”

“ Since the world war has battered down the wall with which we sought to separate ourselves from other nations, we have nothing left but to recognize and accept our place in the national neighborhood and do our share to make it decent.
The Latin-American has been at a disadvantage in the character of the continent in which he lives. South America is a land for promoters, organizers of industry, hardy pioneers of production, engineers, planters, and rugged explorers of commercial frontiers. ”

“ The recent meeting of the Pan-American Congress has called attention to South America, a part of our continent under republican forms of government and rich in products which we lack, while it relies mainly on other foreign countries for goods which we manufacture. North America and South America should be more closely united, for the one is the complement of the other.
The prominent features of South America are its long ranges of mountains—next to the Himalayas the highest in the world,—its great valley, and its immense plateau extending from the Straits of Magellan to the Caribbean sea. ”

“ For decades past Central America has been an unknown land to the United States. We have contentedly supposed that the only crop was that of revolutions and the only resources a few jungle fruits. But at last we are discovering Central America, and some of us are astonished to there find vast areas, fertile soils, varied and valuable products, intelligent peoples, a volume of commerce and climate fit for Eden. We knew little and cared less about Guatemala, Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama ”

“ We speak of North America as Teutonic—made prosperous by the stock of northern Europe—and South America as Spanish. Latin America, however, does not all lie south of the Panama Canal. We must begin to reckon it from the territory line which separates the United States from Mexico. Southwards from the banks of the Rio Grande the Latin tongue is spoken, chiefly Spanish, but with much Portuguese in Brazil, and Italian in places right down, through the Torrid Zone, the heavy tropics, reeking with luxuriant vegetation, to the bleak and rocky, inhospitable Tierra del Fuego. ”

“ The circumstance that South America is a Roman Catholic continent, where the Latin races are dominant, would enormously favour the experiment. On the Zone, the Spanish labourer works in order to save and to depart, the milieu being foreign to him and unattractive. ”

“ South America lies not merely to south, but also in the main to east of North America; the two lands are in echelon, as soldiers would say, and thus the broad ocean encircles South America, except for a minute proportion of its outline. ”

“ The richness and varied development of the old fauna of South America, as still existing, proves, however, that the country has always maintained an extensive area; and there is reason to believe that the last great change has been a long continued and steady increase of its surface, resulting in the formation of the vast alluvial plains of the Amazon, Orinoko, and La Plata, and thus greatly favouring the production of that wealth of specific forms, which distinguishes South America above all other parts of our globe. ”