The Home of Mankind

by Hendrik Willem van Loon

  I have tried to talk of these things with Africans. They laughed at me. Such was life. Life was either stark poverty or overwhelming abundance. There was no golden mean. One either froze or one roasted. One either drank coffee from golden cups with an Arab merchant in Mogador or one took a pot-shot at an old Hottentot woman. She was no good anyway. For this land of contrasts seems to do dreadful things to people. It warps their vision. It kills their susceptibilities to the finer things of life. The ceaseless carnage of the veldt and forest gets into their blood. And a quiet little mousy official, fresh from the stiff respectability of a slumbering Belgian village, has had women flogged to death because they failed to bring an extra pound of rubber; and then has quietly smoked his after-dinner cigar while the insects devoured some poor black devil, mutilated because he was in arrears with his ivory.

  I am trying very hard not to be unfair. Other continents, too, have greatly contributed to the sum total of human cruelty and malevolence. But gentler forms walk across the countryside. Jesus preaches, Confucius teaches, Buddha implores, Mohammed sternly points to his harsh virtues. Africa alone has borne us no prophet. Other countries have been greedy and selfish, but at times the spirit has conquered the flesh and they have gone forth upon some mighty pilgrimage, the purpose of which lay hidden far beyond the gates of Heaven.

  The only sound of marching feet across the African desert and through the shrubs is that of flint-eyed Arabs in search of their human prey, of Dahomeyan Amazons, ready to pounce upon a sleeping village and steal the children of their neighbours to sell them into foreign slavery. In other parts of the world women ever since the beginning of time have tried to make themselves desirable in the eyes of their men that they might attract them and gain their favour. In Africa alone women have deliberately made themselves hideous that they might repel all those who should meet them unaware.

  Chapter XLVI

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  AMERICA, THE MOST FORTUNATE OF ALL

  The American continent is the most obliging continent of all. I am speaking, of course, of America as a purely geographical unit, not as an economic factor in the development of industry nor as a political laboratory for experiments in divers new forms of government. But from a geographical point of view America is almost everything that possibly could be desired.

  It is the only continent on the western hemisphere and therefore has no immediate competitors as Africa, Asia, and Europe have. It is situated between the two largest oceans of the world, and it was settled by white men during a period when the Atlantic had just become an important centre of civilization.

  It reaches almost from the North Pole to the South Pole, and therefore enjoys every sort of climate. Some of the part which is crossed by the equator is also the highest, and therefore enjoys a temperature which makes it fit for human habitation.

  Its deserts are relatively small. It has been blessed with wide plains which are situated in the moderate zone and which are therefore predestined to become the world’s granaries.

  It has a coastline which is neither too simple nor too complicated, and which is therefore eminently fitted for the establishment of deep-sea harbours.

  As its chief mountain-ranges run from north to south, its fauna and flora could freely escape the advance of the glaciers of the ice period, and had a better chance to survive than those of Europe.

  More than almost any other continent it is blessed with coal and iron and oil and copper and those other raw materials which the machine age needs in ever increasing quantities.

  It was practically uninhabited when the white man arrived (there were only 10,000,000 Indians on the whole continent) and there was therefore no teeming native population to prevent the invaders from doing whatever they pleased to do, or to interfere seriously with the development of the country according to the white man’s plans. As a result America has no serious race-problem except the unfortunate ones of its own making.

  The tremendous economic opportunities of the new and empty continent attracted the most energetic elements from every other nation, and together these were able to develop a mixed race of their own which has adapted itself to its novel and unusual but very simple geographical background in a remarkably short space of time.

  And finally, and perhaps most important of all, the people who inhabit that continent to-day have no history of their own that is for ever dragging them back to a past that will never come back. Unencumbered by that unfortunate luggage (which everywhere else has proved itself to be more of a nuisance than a blessing) they can forge ahead much faster than other races which must push the ancestral wheel-barrow ahead of them wherever they go.

  As for the actual geographic features of the two American continents, they are not only very simple and much more symmetrical than those of any other continents, but in their main features North and South America resemble each other so closely that we can discuss them at the same time without running any risk of confusing the reader.

  NORTH AMERICA

  Both North and South America resemble triangles, with the sole difference drat the South American triangle is situated a little farther towards the east than the northern triangle, which undoubtedly accounts for the fact that South America was discovered long before North America, and was already fairly well known while most of North America still bore the legend of Terra incognita.

  Both the western sides of the triangles of North and South America consist of a mountain ridge which runs sharply from the north to the south and which occupies approximately one-third of the surface, while the other two-thirds in the east consists of a wide plain, separated from the ocean (in both cases) by two shorter mountain-ranges, the hills of Labrador and the Appalachians in North America and the mountains of Guiana and the Brazilian highlands in South America.

  In the matter of their rivers, too, the two continents behave similarly. A few of the less important ones run northward, while the St Lawrence and the Amazon run almost parallel with each other, and the Parana and the Paraguay imitate the Mississippi and the Missouri by meeting each other half-way and then running the rest of their course at right angles with the St Lawrence and the Amazon respectively.

  As for Central America, the narrow strip of land which runs from east to west, geologically speaking it is really a part of the northern continent. Then suddenly, in Nicaragua, the landscape and the fauna and flora begin to change, and it becomes part of the southern continent. The rest of Central America consists of high mountains, which is one of the reasons why Mexico, although as near the equator as the Sahara, is a densely populated country with an excellent climate.

  South America, of course, is much nearer to the equator than North America, and the Amazon practically follows the line of the equator in the course of its magnificent career from the Andes to the Atlantic. But speaking in very general terms (as I am now doing) here we have a magnificent case wherewith to study the influence of the geographical surroundings upon Man and of Man upon his geographical surroundings.

  Nature built herself two large States and finished them both in practically the same way. A main entrance on the right, a high wall on the left, and a large open space in the middle provided with a richly-stored larder. Then she gave the northern stage to a company of Germanic strolling actors, who thus far had played the smaller theatres in the provincial towns, a troupe of humble origin, accustomed to long hours and the plain rôles of butchers and bakers and candlestick makers. But the southern stage she rented out to noble old tragedians of the best Mediterranean school, who were accustomed to perform only in the presence of royalty, and each one of whom could handle a sword or a rapier with a grace entirely unknown to their northern colleagues, whose arms were stiff from the handling of spade and axe, whose backs were permanently bent by their ceaseless struggle with an unyielding soil.

  Then she raised the curtain on both stages at almost exactly the same moment and bade the world come in and watch the entertainment. And behold, ere the first act was hall over, neither sta
ge looked quite the same as it had done when the opening lines were spoken. And when the second act began, sue It a change was noticeable among the ladies and gentlemen and the children of the cast that the audience gasped and whispered, “Can such things be?”

  THE SEQUOIA AS HISTORICAL CONTEMPORARY

  The vessels of the old Vikings looked very picturesque, but they were exceedingly clumsy craft when it came to the actual business of sailing them across a choppy sea. As a result those hardy Norsemen were continually blown out of their normal course, for they had neither compass nor log, and their sailing rig was as clumsy as that of those Egyptian ships which you may still admire on a roll of papyrus painted in the valley of the Nile three thousand years ago.

  Now if you will kindly look at the map of the Gulf Stream (there are several in this book) you will see that the Gulf Stream, after having crossed the ocean from Africa to America, re-crosses the northern part of the Atlantic from the south-west to the northeast in a leisurely fashion, bestows its blessings upon the coast of Norway, visits the Arctic Ocean, and then decides to go home by way of Iceland and Greenland, where it changes its name and its temperature, to travel southward once more, first as the Greenland current and next as the Labrador current, that accursed stream which sprinkles chunks of Greenland’s azure glaciers all over the northern part of the Atlantic.

  The Norsemen, sailing by God and by guess, as my own ancestors used to call this procedure, had reached Iceland as early as the ninth century. Once, however, regular communications had been established between Iceland and Europe, the discovery of Greenland and America became inevitable. Just as a Chinese or Japanese junk, blown out of its course, must inevitably reach the shores of British Columbia or California, being carried thither by the Kuro Siwo, the Gulf Stream of the Pacific, so a Norseman, bound from Trondhjem to Iceland and being prevented by fog from locating his place of destination (and even to-day, with all the instruments in the world, a fog is a terrible thing), would sooner or later find himself on the east coast of Greenland, or, if the fog continued and his luck held out, on the very coasts of the great land-barrier to the east which those early visitors called Vineland, because it raised a kind of grape from which they could make an excellent sort of wine.

  Now it is well to remember that there have been a great many discoveries made of which the world at large never heard. The average skipper has an instinctive fear of making a fool of himself before his friends by telling them a yarn which none of them will believe anyway, and which afterwards may prove to have been the result of a hallucination, or of low clouds mistaken for a mountain-range, or a strip of sunlight, maybe, interpreted as a flat coast. Australia was undoubtedly seen from the distance by a number of French and Spanish sailors long before Abel Tasman set foot on shore. The Azores and Canary Islands were discovered and forgotten and re-discovered so often that our school books have a hard time trying to find out just exactly when they should be first mentioned among the world’s great discoveries. French fishermen had undoubtedly found their way to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland centuries before the days of Columbus. But they merely told their neighbours that the fishing was good and let it go at that. Fish interested them. Another piece of land was just another piece of land. There was enough land in Brittany for everybody. Why worry about something that lay so far away from home?

  GREENLAND

  As in everything I have ever written, I have steadfastly defended the doctrine that humanity comes before nationality. I shall not lose myself in acrimonious disputes concerning the desirability of celebrating Columbus Day or Leif Day or a day in honour of some French sailor who eventually may be dug out of the archives of Normandy. Suffice it to say that we have evidence that the Norsemen visited America during the first ten years of the eleventh century, and that a small group of sailors, preponderantly Spanish but with certain foreign admixtures, and more or less obeying the commands of an Italian captain, visited those shores during the last ten years of the fifteenth century, and that when they arrived there they found that they could not possibly he the original discoverers because the country was already inhabited by people who were of unmistakable Asiatic origin, wherefore, if the honour of ‘having been there first’ must go to any specific group of people, the Mongolians are obviously entitled to all future commemorative tablets.

  NEWFOUNDLAND

  There are memorials to the Unknown Soldier. Another and slightly larger pile of marble erected to the Unknown Discoverer would not be out of place in America. But as the relatives of that poor man are now forbidden by law to set foot on the continent, I fear me that nothing will come of this suggestion.

  Concerning the descendants of those first intrepid explorers who undoubtedly hailed from the Far East, we know a great deal, but the one thing that would really interest us will probably remain a mystery until the end of time. And that one thing is this—how did the people of Asia actually reach the American continent? Did they sail across the narrow northern part of the Pacific Ocean, or did they walk across the ice of the Bering Strait, or did they come at a time when America and Asia were still connected by a narrow bridge of land? Well, we just don’t happen to know. Nor can I see that it matters very much. When the white man readied these distant shores he came In contact with a race which, except in a few isolated spots, had barely passed out of the late Stone Age, and which had not yet reached that stage of development when the wheel was used to relieve the human back of its manifold burdens, or when the domesticated animals had set their owners free from the everlasting drudgery of gaining a meagre daily livelihood by means of hunting and fishing. Even with his bows and arrows the copper-coloured man was no match for the white man, who was able to kill his enemies at a distance by means of a gun.

  The red man, reduced from the rank of a host to that of a guest, will continue to exist for a few centuries longer. Then he will be completely absorbed by his former enemies and will only survive as a vague historical memory. That is too bad, for the red man had many very excellent qualities, both of body and mind.

  But that is the way things happen, and I don’t see what we can do about it.

  THE THREE DISCOVERIES OF AMERICA

  And now let us for the last time look at a map.

  From the Bering Strait to the Isthmus of Panama the west coast of America is protected against the Pacific Ocean by a barrier of high mountains. This barrier is not everywhere of the same width, and parts of it consist of parallel ridges, all of which, however, run in the same direction, that is to say, from north, to south.

  In Alaska this mountain-chain is clearly a continuation of the mountains of eastern Asia. It is divided into two sections by the wide basin of the Yukon river, the main river of this northern territory, which was part of the Russian Empire until 1867, when the United States acquired 590,000 square miles of wilderness in consideration of 7,000,000 American dollars.

  The reason Russia was satisfied with so little was probably due to her ignorance about the country’s potential riches. Seven million dollars for a few fishing villages and a chaos of snow-covered mountains seemed quite a good bargain at that time. But in 1896 gold was discovered in the Klondyke, and Alaska got on the map, as the popular saying has it. The trip of a thousand miles from Vancouver to Juneau and then via Skagway and the Chilkoot and Chilkat passes to Dawson, the centre of the Klondyke territory (carrying one’s pack on one’s own back, as animals were very expensive and could hardly wade through the dense snow at the elevation of 3500 feet just south of the Polar Circle), was about as inconvenient as any trip ever undertaken by mankind in search of material wealth. But a pot of gold at the end of the trail awaited the early arrivals, and on such occasions every man is always certain that he will be the first on the spot.

  Since then, however, it has been found that Alaska is not merely a gold land (as well as the country most densely covered by glaciers) but that it also has a great deal of copper and silver and coal, besides being an ideal country for fur-trapping and fishing. As
a result the revenue derived from it during the first forty years of its existence as an American territory has been twenty times as large as the original cost.

  Just south of Alaska the mountain-range gets split into two parts, of which the eastern branch, the Rockies, turn farther inland, while the western branch continues to run exactly parallel with the ocean. But while the Rockies never change their name until they lose themselves among the highlands of Mexico, the mountains of the Pacific slope, after they have bidden farewell to Mount McKinley, the highest mountain of the Alaska range and the highest peak on the whole North American continent (20,300 feet), are known by quite a number of different names. In Canada they are called the St Elias Range and the Coast Range. But after they have passed Vancouver Island (a rocky island cut off from the mainland by Johnstone Strait and the Strait of Georgia) they are divided into two parts, of which the western half is still called the Coast Range while the eastern hills are known as the Cascades in Washington and Oregon and the Sierra Nevada in California. The wide open space between the two is the valley of the Sacramento river and the San Joaquin river, which meet in the middle just before they run into San Francisco bay, one of the widest and deepest and best-sheltered harbours of the world, which connects with the Pacific Ocean by means of the famous Golden Gate.