VIII

OF AMERICA

CAN IT still be asked from whence came the men who peopled America? The same question might be asked with regard to the Terra Australis. They are much farther distant from the port which Columbus set out from, than the Antilles. Men and beasts have been found in all parts of the earth that are inhabitable; Who placed them there? We have already answered he that caused the grass to grow in the fields; and it is no more surprising to find men in America, than it is to find flies there.

It is pleasant enough to read the Jesuit Lafiteau in his preface to the History of the American Savages, where he says, that none but atheists can pretend to say that God created the Americans.

Maps of the ancient world are still engraven, where America appears under the title of the Atlantic Island. The Cape Verde islands are there called the Gorgades, and the Caribbees the Hesperides. This is only founded upon the discovery of the Canary Islands, and probably that of Madeira, whither the Phenicians and the Carthaginians sailed; they are almost close to Africa, and, perhaps, they were not so far distant from it formerly as they are at present.

Let Father Lafiteau make the inhabitants of the Caribbees descend from Caria, by reason of the affinity of the name, and because the women of both served their husbands for cooks; let him imagine that Caribbeans produce red children, and negro women black, because their forefathers accustomed themselves to paint their skins black or red.

It happened, says he, that the negro women observing their husbands’ complexions painted black, their imaginations were so much struck therewith, that their race ever after felt the effects of it. The same thing happened to the Caribbean women, who by the same strength of imagination brought forth red children. He supports his argument with the example of Jacob’s lambs, who were born with spotted skins, by the art of that patriarch, who put in their view branches of trees half peeled; these branches appearing at some distance of two different colors, communicated their color to the lambs of this patriarch. But the Jesuit should know that what happened in the time of Jacob does not happen now.

If Laban’s kinsman had been asked why his flocks, constantly seeing grass, did not produce green herds, he would have been somewhat embarrassed what to reply.

Lafiteau at length makes the Americans descend from the ancient Greeks, for which opinion he assigns the following reasons. The Greeks had their fables, the Americans have also fables; the first Greeks went a-hunting, the Americans also hunt; the first Greeks had oracles, the Americans have their sorcerers; there were dances performed at the feasts of the Greeks, the Americans dance. It must be allowed that these are very convincing reasons.

A reflection might be made upon the nations of the new world, which father Lafiteau has omitted, which is, that the people distant from the tropics have always been invincible; and that those people who were nearest the tropics have almost always been subdued by monarchs. It was for a long time the same in our continent; but we do not find that the people of Canada have ever attempted to subjugate Mexico, in the manner that the Tartars spread themselves over Asia and Europe. It should seem that the Canadians were never sufficiently numerous to detach colonies into other parts.

America in general could never have been so much peopled as Europe and Asia; it is covered with vast marshes, which render the air very unhealthy. Innumerable poisons are the produce of the earth; arrows steeped in the juice of these venomous herbs, always occasion mortal wounds. Nature, in fine, had given the Americans much less industry than the inhabitants of the ancient world: these causes united may have been greatly prejudicial to population.

Among the various physical observations which may be made upon this fourth part of our universe so long unknown, the most remarkable, perhaps, is that there is but one people who have any beards: these are the Esquimaux; they are situated about the fifty-second degree of northern latitude, where the cold is more intense than in sixty-six degrees of our continent; their neighbors are all beardless. Here then are two races of men absolutely different, bordering upon each other.

Towards the Isthmus of Panama is the race of the Dariens almost similar to the Albinoes, who shun light, and vegetate in caverns, a feeble race, and consequently not numerous.

The American lions are small and fearful; the sheep are large, and so vigorous that they are used to carry burdens. All the lakes are at least ten times as large as ours; in a word, the natural productions of the earth are not like those of our hemisphere. Thus are all things variegated, and that same providence which produced the elephant, the rhinoceros, and negroes, has given birth in other regions to misfits, contours, swine with navels upon their backs, and men with dispositions quite different from ours.