This changed the Caribbean Sea from an island sea to part of the commercial highway between Europe and Asia, and it greatly increased the value of the islands which it cut off from the Atlantic Ocean. The Bahamas, which are English, and Cuba are a little too far out of the way, as is of course Bermuda, another English possession half-way between New York and Florida. But Jamaica (English) and Haiti and San Domingo (nominally independent, but ask Washington!) are in a better position to derive some benefits from the canal. So is Porto Rico and so are all the Lesser Antilles, the small islands to the east and the south, which (are the Greater Antilles, Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica, and Porto Rico.
These Lesser Antilles were of much greater value to the European nations of the seventeenth century than the American mainland. For they were hot and sufficiently moist to raise sugar cane, and the slaves, once on shore, could not disappear in the jungle. To-day they still cultivate sugar and cocoa and coffee, but most of them would be deeply grateful if they could make a few extra pennies as halfway stations for ships bound from Europe to the Panama canal. In order of their appearance these are first the so-called Leeward Islands, St Thomas, Santa Cruz, St Martin, Saba, St John, St Eustatius (a small rock, chief port for smuggled supplies during the Revolution), Guadalupe, Dominica, and Martinique (very volcanic like most of the others, and almost destroyed by Mt Pelée in 1902).
The Windward Islands consist of Grenada, St Vincent, the Grenadines, and St Lucia, and are British. Blanquilla (which belongs to Venezuela), Bonaire, Curasao, and Oruba, which are Dutch, lie parallel to the coast of Venezuela. All of these islands once upon a time were part of the outer ridge of a mountain chain that connected the Guiana Range of Venezuela with the Sierra Madre of Mexico. That mountain ridge was destroyed, but the high individual tops remained behind.
From an industrial point of view none of these islands is doing too well. The abolition of slavery has destroyed their former riches, and to-day they are best known as winter resorts or coaling stations or oil-distributing centres. Only Trinidad, just off the delta of the Orinoco, retains some of her prosperity, because her volcanoes have favoured her with large asphalt deposits, worked by Hindus, who came to take the place of the old slaves and who now form one-third of the total population.
During the war when we learned more geography and in a shorter space of time than we had ever done before (to forget most of it just as rapidly when we were no longer under any necessity of knowing where Kut-el-Amara and the Isonzo might be located) it was quite customary for the younger generation to switch from German (which soon was to be a dead language anyway) to Spanish, on the ground that there was “a great future for that language in South America.” That future did not manifest itself while the actual fighting was going on. Indeed, business transactions with that vast continent suffered a very serious slump.
Afterwards we discovered the reason. All the technical details of foreign trade in Peru and Brazil and Ecuador, and whatever these other countries might be called, had thus far been entrusted to patient little German clerks who were supposed to be familiar with that sort of thing, which was most unfortunately beyond the mental reach of their employers. When South America joined the Allies (for most of them had a few German ships in their harbours and needed loans) these poor Teutonic ink-slingers had been sent to concentration camps, and the foreign correspondence of those South American commercial establishments had come to a sudden end, to be resumed as soon as peace had been declared and the Fritzes were back at their ledgers.
Gradually the truth then began to dawn upon us. Although South America is a continent of tremendous natural wealth, it is so hopelessly underpopulated and in many respects so far behind the rest of the world that at least another half-century must pass before it can be of the slightest value to any one except the few rich families who retain their possessions from the days of Spanish domination or who gained them afterwards in their quality of uncle or nephew to one of the quick-change South American presidents.
THE OLDEST MOUNTAINS ARE BY NO MEANS THE HIGHEST
Now if in the present volume I devote only a few pages to South America, do not suspect me of anti-Latin feelings. On the contrary, being of northern descent myself, I am able to appreciate the many virtues of the southern races much better than they are able to do themselves. But at the outset 1 fold you that I would try to write a ‘human’ geography, being firmly convinced that the importance of any given piece of land depends entirely upon the sum total of the contributions the inhabitants of that particular territory, be it large or small, have made to the sum total of human happiness in the form of science or commerce or religion or one of the arts. From that angle, alas, South America so far has been almost as barren as Mongolia. Which, I repeat, may be due to the lack of population, which in turn may be due to the fact that a great deal of South America lies just south of the equator, and that in the other parts the white man has never been able to replace the native, or is so swamped by half-breeds of different hue (mulattos, who are the descendants of whites and Negroes, Mestizos, who are the children of Indians and whites, or Zambos, who are the offspring of Negroes and Indians) that they are never quite able to assert their political or intellectual, powers.
South America has been the scene of some strange political experiments. A Brazilian empire was something quite new under the sun, and that extraordinary Jesuit free state in Paraguay (which lasted much longer than the empire on its eastern front) will probably always receive honourable mention in learned works devoted to applied Utopias. And South America produced at least one man of more than extraordinary ability, the great Bolivar, who not merely set his country free but who was directly or indirectly responsible for the successful outcome of most of the revolutionary movements of the entire continent. I do not for a moment doubt that there have been a great many other men who have loomed large in the local histories of Uruguay and Bolivia, but our planet at large has not heard of them, and I wonder seriously whether upon close acquaintanceship they would prove to be of the calibre that is necessary to elevate them to the rank of world figures. And so it will be sufficient for the purpose of this book if I present you with a brief catalogue of mountains, rivers, and states, and promise you faithfully that I will fill in the human details a thousand years hence.
SOUTH AMERICA
The entire western coast of South America consists of a continuation of the Rockies and of the Mexican Sierra Madre, and it is known as the Cordilleras de los Andes, or the Andes for short. The Andes was the Spanish name which the conquerors had given to those irrigation canals which the Indians had built all over the slopes of their native hills. By merely destroying those canals and dams, the Spaniards were afterwards able to let many tribes starve to death, and since the Conquistadores had taken the long and dangerous trip across the ocean to get rich quick and not to found a permanent home in a new world, this was as good a way of robbing the natives of their possessions as any other.
When approaching the South Pole, the Andes break off into a number of islands of which Tierra del Fuego is the best known. Between Chile and Tierra del Fuego lies the strait which Magellan navigated with such great difficulty on the white man’s first trip round the world, and which is still called after him. The southernmost point of the island is Cape Horn, so called after the native town of the man who discovered it (the little town of Hoorn in Holland). The Strait of Magellan is of course of great strategic importance; hence the Falkland Islands which guard it are British territory.
The Andes, like the whole of this enormous mountain-range that runs from the Arctic to the Antarctic Circle, are volcanic. The Chimborazo in Ecuador (now extinct) is 20,702 feet high. The Aconcagua in the Argentine beats them all with 22,863 feet. While the Cotopaxi with 19,550 feet (also in Ecuador) holds the record for being the highest active volcano of the entire planet.
The South American Andes resemble their North American sisters in two other respects. The high mountain ridges enclose several wide plateaux which form the na
tural confines for such states as Bolivia or Ecuador. Furthermore, there are very few convenient passes, so that the railway between the Argentine and Chile, the only trans-Andean railway, has to climb to a height which far surpasses that of Swiss mountain passes like the St Bernard or the Gotthard ere it can bore its tunnels.
THE RAILWAY ACROSS THE ANDES
As for the mountains of the east, the Appalachians of South America, they consist of the Guiana ridge in the north and the Brazilian highlands in the east, each containing a number of independent sierras and serras of its own, and forming the remnants of a much vaster range which was gradually cut in two by the valley of the Amazon. Though not the longest river in the world the Amazon takes care of more water than any other. It literally has hundreds of branches, of which more than fifteen are as long as the Rhine, while several others, such as the Madeira and the Tapajos, are a great deal longer.
North of the Guiana mountains there is another valley, that of the Orinoco river. The Orinoco, which is actually connected with the Amazon by way of the curious Rio Negro (imagine the Ohio being part of the Mississippi and the Potomac at the same time!), is much better suited to navigation than the Amazon. For it does not have to break its way through the mountains just before it reaches the sea, as the Amazon is obliged to do, and its mouth is almost twenty miles wide, while the river itself, a terrific water-carrier, maintains a steady depth of 300 feet for several hundred miles inland, which is of great convenience to sea-going vessels.
As for the Parana, the north-south river of South America, on the way to the sea it picks up the Paraguay and the Uruguay rivers and then becomes the Rio de la Plata on which Buenos Aires, the capital of the Argentine, is situated. Like the Orinoco, the Parana is a good inland waterway.
In one respect South America is much better off than most of the other continents, except Europe. It has practically no deserts. Except for northern Chile most of her country enjoys a sufficient amount of moisture, while the Amazon region and the whole of the eastern coast of Brazil are drenched by equatorial rains which make the Amazon territory much more densely and evenly wooded than that of the Congo. But as a result of its steady rainfall, the rest of the continent, especially in the southern part, which is not quite so near the equator, is excellently suited for agriculture, and the Argentine pampas and the Orinoco llanos and the Brazilian campos are close rivals of the Great Plains of the northern continent.
THE LLANOS OF VENEZUELA
As for the countries which we find in South America to-day, few of them grew out of what we might call historical inevitability. They were the unexpected and haphazard results of successful revolutions rather than the products of slow growth and development. The United States of Venezuela with a population of 3,216,000 is a little too near the equator to develop a very energetic race of men. But round the lagoon of Maracaibo in the north oil has been discovered, and that has made Maracaibo the most important harbour of Venezuela, a position previously held by La Guaira, the port of Caracas, the capital, which lies rather inconveniently just behind a low mountain ridge that separates it from the sea.
On the west of Venezuela lies Colombia with the capital city of Bogota, which lies so far inland that it was a most inconvenient place to reach until the introduction of a regular aeroplane service with Barranquilla at the mouth of the Magdalena river. Colombia is fertile and has a great natural wealth, and furthermore, like the United States, it is situated on two oceans. But it will need lots of immigrants from northern Europe before it can begin to develop its natural resources.
Ecuador is also a poor country, and although the port of Guayaquil, the harbour of Quito, the capital, has done a great deal better since the opening of the Panama Canal, there is nothing to report about this nation except that it used to export a lot of quinine, and nowadays exports more cocoa than anything else.
Peru, further south along the coast of the Pacific, was the seat of a very powerful Indian State when the Spaniards first arrived in the New World. It was ruled by a caste of nobles, the Incas, or children of the sun, who elected the supreme ruler or the Inca of the whole country, who thereupon was granted despotic rights. Nevertheless and in spite of or because of their feudal character, the Peruvians had developed a much higher and much more human form of civilization than the Aztecs.
But when Pizarro reached these parts the Inca empire was more than 400 years old, and that is a long time for any particular form of government to last. There were many political parties in the land, and there was rivalry between different groups of nobles. Pizarro played one side against the other and then in 1531 conquered the whole country. He imprisoned the reigning Inca and turned the Indians into slaves. Whatever could be stolen or plundered was dragged away and sent to Spain. The ruins of the old Incas, the remnants of roads and castles around Lake Titicaca high up in the Andes (3300 square miles of water 12,466 feet above sea-level) and endless old bits of pottery and other bits of art show us what was lost when a capable and competent race was suddenly transformed into the indolent and miserable natives whose descendants now wander aimlessly through the streets of Cuzco, the old capital, or take part in some revolution.
Lima is the modern capital where the future fate of Peru’s treasures in silver and copper and oil is to he decided, unless the President of the Republic and his foreign banking friends have long since removed the contents of these mines and have deposited them in the vaults of the Banque de France. Such things are possible. They explain why this chapter can be so short.
THE AMAZON
Bolivia, the poor land-locked State, was not always a land locked State, and La Paz, the capital, once upon a time had direct access to the sea. But during the famous saltpetre war of 1879–82, when Peru and Chile fought for the Arica district, Bolivia was foolish enough to side against Chile. When Chile won the war, Bolivia lost her coastal region. Bolivia is a very rich country. Among other things it is the third tin-producing country of the world, but a density of population of less than five per square mile, a total population of less than 3,000,000, and most of those Indians who remained behind when the Inca empire was destroyed—no, it will take a great deal of time to do anything with, or for that unfortunate land.
The two southernmost states, Chile and the Argentine, are by far the most important of the entire continent, and their prosperity is a direct result of their geographical situation. They lie in the temperate zone. Hence they have fewer Indians (the tropics make them breed faster) and they have attracted a better class of immigrants.
Chile is richer in natural wealth than the Argentine. Arica (from where you take the train for Bolivia), Antofagasta, Iquique, and Valparaiso are the four most important harbours of the west coast of South America, just as Santiago, the capital, is the largest city of that entire region. The southern part of Chile is beginning to breed cattle, which are slaughtered and frozen and sent to Europe from Punta Arenas on the Strait of Magellan.
As for the Argentine, it is the great cow country of South America. The flat territory along the Parana river, almost as large as one-third of Europe, is the richest part of the entire continent. Meat and wool and hides and butter are exported in such quantities that they have been able to affect their competitors’ prices for those commodities in a most unpleasant fashion. The steady immigration of Italian labourers and farmers during the last ten years will make the Argentine one of the greatest grain and flax producers of the western hemisphere, while the breeding of sheep on a large scale makes Patagonia one of the most dangerous competitors of Australia and New Zealand.
IF THE STRAIT OF MAGELLAN SHOULD RUN DRY
The capital of the Argentine is Buenos Aires, also on the Rio de la Plata, just opposite the small State of Uruguay, of which Montevideo is the capital. Uruguay has very much the same soil and climate as the Argentine, and, having rid itself of the last of its Indian population, does in a small way, but very successfully, what the Argentinians are doing on such a very large scale that very often they run the risk of
coming to grief through over-speculation and bad financial management.
Paraguay, the third of the Rio de la Plata States and in many ways the most favoured of them all, would now be prosperous if it had not been for the disastrous war of 1864–70, when the poor Indians, trained in military service by their former Jesuit masters (who however in 1769 had lost the country to the Spanish crown), had gone to war on behalf of a crazy man who also happened to be their President. This poor man, having quite needlessly declared war on all his three powerful neighbours, continued the fight until five-sixths of the male population of the entire country had been killed. At the end of this period of slaughter conditions were so bad that the Paraguayans had to revert to polygamy to get their country repopulated. It will take another century, however, ere this rich little State can fully recover.
There remains one more country to be discussed Brazil. As a colony it was badly neglected, first by the Dutch and afterwards by the Portuguese who forbade the natives and the settlers to deal with anyone except a few accredited merchants in Lisbon, and who kept this entire region in a state of almost complete economic bondage until 1807, when the royal family of Portugal was forced to flee before Napoleon and moved over the Rio de Janeiro. Then the tables were turned, and for almost a dozen years the despised colony ruled the mother country. And when his Portuguese Majesty sailed for Lisbon in 1821 he left his son, Dom Pedro, behind as his representative. A year later the son proclaimed himself Emperor of an independent Brazil. And since then the Portuguese language is the only tie that binds the colony to the erstwhile mother country, for the House of Braganza, which had probably given Brazil the best government any South American State had ever enjoyed, was forced to abdicate in 1889 as the result of a military upheaval, and the last of the American emperors left for Paris and the cemetery.
The Home of Mankind Page 41