GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS ON THE EXTENT AND PHYSICAL ASPECT OF THE KINGDOM OF NEW SPAIN, FROM BARON DE HUMBOLDT’S POLITICAL ESSAY ON THE KINGDOM OF NEW SPAIN.

Before entering on a political view of the kingdom of New Spain, it may be of importance to bestow a rapid glance on the extent and population of the Spanish possessions in the two Americas.

We must generalize our ideas, and consider each colony in its relations with the neighbouring colonies and with the mother country, if we would obtain accurate results, and assign to the country described the place to which it is entitled from its territorial wealth.

The Spanish possessions of the new continent occupy the immense extent of territory comprised between the 41° 43 minutes of south latitude, and the 37° 48 minutes of north latitude.

This space of seventy-nine degrees equals not only the length of all Africa, but it even much surpasses the breadth of the Russian empire, which includes about a hundred and sixty-seven degrees of longitude, under a parallel of which the degrees are not more than half the degrees of the equator.

The most southern point of the new continent inhabited by the Spaniards is Fort Maullin, near the small village of Carelmapu, on the coast of Chili, opposite the northern extremity of the island of Chiloe.

A road is opening from Valdivia to this fort of Maullin; a bold but useful undertaking, as a stormy sea prevents navigators for a great part of the year from landing on so dangerous a coast.

On the south and south-east of Fort Maullin in the gulfs of Ancud and Reloncavi, by which we reach the great lakes of Nahuelhapi and Todos los Santos, there are no Spanish establishments; but we meet with them in the islands near the eastern coast of Chiloe, even in 43° 34 minutes of south latitude, where the island Caylin (opposite the lofty summit of the Corcobado) is inhabited by several families of Spanish origin.

The most northern point of the Spanish colonies is the mission of San Francisco, on the coast of New California, seven leagues to the north-west of Santa Cruz.

The Spanish language is thus spread over an extent of more than one thousand nine hundred leagues in length.

Under the wise administration of count Florida Blanca, a regular communication of posts was established from Paraguay to the north-west coast of North America; and a monk in the mission of the Guaranis Indians can maintain a correspondence with another missionary inhabiting New Mexico, or the countries in the neighbourhood of Cape Mendocin, without their letters ever passing at any great distance from the continent of Spanish America.

The dominions of the king of Spain in America exceed in extent the vast regions possessed by the Russian empire, or Great Britain, in Asia. I thought, therefore, that a view of these differences and of the striking disproportion between the area and the population of the mother country, compared with those of the colonies, could hardly fail to be interesting.

To make this disproportion appear still more palpable, I have formed, according to exact scales, the drawings in the last plate.

A red parallelogram which serves for the base, represents the surface of the mother countries; and a blue parallelogram which reposes on the base, indicates the area of the Spanish and English possessions in America and Asia.

These views, similar to those of M. Playfair, have something fearful in them, particularly when we fix our eyes on the grand catastrophe represented in the fourth figure, of which the memory is still recent among us.

This plate alone should suggest important considerations to those who superintend the prosperity and tranquillity of the colonies.

The dread of a future evil is undoubtedly in itself a motive of no great dignity; but it is a powerful motive of vigilance and activity for great political bodies as well as for simple individuals.

The Spanish possessions in America are divided into nine great governments, which may be regarded as independent of one another.

Of these nine governments, five, viz. the viceroyalties of Peru and of New Grenada, the capitanias generales of Guatimala, of Portorico, and of Caraccas, are wholly comprised in the torrid zone; the four other divisions, viz. the viceroyalties of Mexico and Buenos Ayres, the capitanias generales of Chili and Havannah, including the Floridas, are composed of countries of which a great part is situated without the tropics, that is to say, in the temperate zone.

We shall afterwards see that this position alone does not determine the nature of the productions of these fine regions.

The union of several physical causes, such as the great height of the Cordilleras, their enormous masses, the number of plains, elevated more than from two to three thousand metres above the level of the ocean, give to a part of the equinoxial regions a temperature adapted to the cultivation of the wheat and fruit tree of Europe.

The geographical latitude has small influence on the fertility of a country, where, on the ridge and declivity of the mountains, nature exhibits a union of every climate.

From 6,561 feet to 9,842 feet. Trans.

Among the colonies subject to the king of Spain, Mexico occupies at present the first rank, both on account of its territorial wealth, and on account of its favourable position for commerce with Europe and Asia.

We speak here merely of the political value of the country, considering it in its actual state of civilization, which is very superior to that of the other Spanish possessions.

Many branches of agriculture have undoubtedly attained a higher degree of perfection in the province of Caraccas than in New Spain.

The fewer mines a colony has, the more the industry of the inhabitants is turned towards the productions of the vegetable kingdom.

The fertility of the soil is greater in the provinces of Cumana, of New Barcelona, and Venezuela; and it is greater on the banks of the lower Orinoco, and in the northern part of New Grenada, than in the kingdom of Mexico, of which several regions are barren, destitute of water, and incapable of vegetation.

But on considering the greatness of the population of Mexico, the number of considerable cities in the proximity of one another, the enormous value of the metallic produce, and its influence on the commerce of Europe and Asia; in short, on examining the imperfect state of cultivation observable in the rest of Spanish America we are tempted to justify the preference which the court of Madrid has long manifested for Mexico above its other colonies.

The denomination of New Spain designates, in general, the vast extent of country over which the viceroy of Mexico exercises his power.

Using the word in this sense, we are to consider as northern and southern limits the parallels of the 38th and 10th degrees of latitude.

But the captain-general of Guatimala, considered as administrator, depends very little on the viceroy of New Spain.

The kingdom of Guatimala contains, according to its political division, the governments of Costa Rica, and of Nicaragua. It is conterminous with the kingdom of New Grenada, to which Darien and the isthmus of Panama belong.

Whenever in the course of this work we use the denominations of New Spain and Mexico, we exclude the capitania-general of Guatimala, a country extremely fertile, well peopled, compared with the rest of the Spanish possessions, and so much the better cultivated as the soil, convulsed by volcanoes, contains, almost no metallic mines.

We consider the intendancies of Merida and Oaxaca as the most southern, and at the same time the most eastern parts of New Spain.

The confines which separate Mexico from the kingdom of Guatimala are washed by the great ocean to the east of the port of Tehuantepec, near la Barra de Tonala.

They terminate on the shore of the Atlantic, near the bay of Honduras.

The name of New Spain was at first only given in the year 1518 to the province of Yucatan, where the companions in arms of Grijalva were astonished at the cultivation of the fields and the beauty of the Indian edifices.

Cortez, in his first letter to the emperor Charles V. in 1520, employs the denomination of New Spain for the whole empire of Montezuma.

This empire, if we may believe Solis, extended from Panama to New California.

But we learn from the diligent researches of a Mexican historian, the Abbe Clavigero, that Montezuma the sultan of Tenochtitlan had a much smaller extent of country under his dominion.

His kingdom was bounded towards the eastern coast by the rivers of Guasacualco and Tuspan, and towards the western coast by the plains of Soconusco, and the port of Zacatula.

On looking into my general map of New Spain, divided into intendancies, it will be found, that according to these limits, the empire of Montezuma included only the intendancies of Vera Cruz, Oaxaca, la Puebla, Mexico, and Valladolid. I think its area may be estimated at fifteen thousand square leagues.

Dissertazione sopra i confini di Anahuac.

See Storia antica del Messico.

T. IV. p. 265.

Towards the beginning of the 16th century, the river of Santiago separated the agricultural nations of Mexico and Mechoacan from the barbarous and pastoral hordes called Otomites and Cicimecs.

These savages frequently carried their incursions as far as Tula, a town situated near the northern bank of the valley of Tenochtitlan.

They occupied the plains of Zelaya and Salamanca, now admired for their fine cultivation, and the multitude of farms scattered over their surface.

Neither should the denomination of Anahuac be confounded with that of New Spain.

Before the conquest, all the country between the 14th and 21st degrees of latitude was included under the name of Anahuac.

Besides the Aztec empire of Montezuma, the small republics of Tlaxcallan and Cholollan, the kingdoms of Tezcuco (or Acolhoacan) and Mechuacan, which comprised part of the intendancy of Valladolid, belonged to the ancient Anahuac.

Even the name of Mexico is of Indian origin.

It signifies in the Aztec language the habitation of the God of War, called Mexitli or Huitzilopochtli. It appears, however, that before the year 1530 the city was more commonly called Tenochtitlan than Mexico.

Cortez, who had made very little progress in the language of the country, called the capital, through corruption, Temixtitan.

These etymological observations will not be found too minute in a work which treats exclusively of the kingdom of Mexico.

The audacious man who overturned the Aztec monarchy considered this kingdom sufficiently extensive to advise Charles V. to unite the title of emperor of New Spain to that of Roman emperor.

Historia de Nueva Espana, por Lorenzana, (Mexico, 1770 p. 1.)

Cortez says, in his first letter, dated from Villa Segura de la Frontera, the 30th October, 1520:

“Las cosas de esta terra son tantas y tales que Vuestra Alteza se puede entitular de nuevo Emperador de ella, y con titulo y non menos merito, que el de Alemana, que por la gracia de Dios Vuestra Sacra Magestad possee.” (Lorenzana, p. 38.)

We are tempted to compare together the extent and population of Mexico, and that of two empires with which this fine colony is in relations of union and rivalry.

Spain is five times smaller than Mexico.

Should no unforeseen misfortunes occur, we may reckon that in less than a century the population of New Spain will equal that of the mother country.

The United States of North America since the cession of Louisiana, and since they recognise no other boundary than the Rio Bravo del Norte, contain 240,000 square leagues.

Their population is not much greater than that of Mexico, as we shall afterwards see on examining carefully the population and the area of New Spain.

If the political force of two states depended solely on the space which they occupy on the globe, and on the number of their inhabitants; if the nature of the soil, the configuration of the coast; and if the climate, the energy of the nation, and above all the degree of perfection of its social institutions, were not the principal elements of this grand dynamical calculation, the kingdom of New Spain might, at present, be placed in opposition to the confederation of the American republics.

Both labour under the inconvenience of an unequally distributed population; but that of the United States, though in a soil and climate less favoured by nature, augments with an infinitely greater rapidity.

Neither does it comprehend, like the Mexican population, nearly two millions and a half of aborigines.

These Indians, degraded by the despotism of the ancient Aztec sovereigns, and by the vexations of the first conquerors, though protected by the Spanish laws, wise and humane in general, enjoy very little, however, of this protection, from the great distance of the supreme authority.

The kingdom of New Spain has one decided advantage over the United States.

The number of slaves there either Africans or of mixed race, is almost nothing; an advantage which the European colonists have only begun rightly to appreciate since the tragical events of the revolution of St. Domingo.

So true it is, that the fear of physical evils acts more powerfully than moral considerations on the true interests of society, or the principles of philanthropy, and of justice, so often the theme of the parliament, the constituent assembly, and the works of the philosophers.

The number of African slaves in the United States amounts to more than a million, and constitute a sixth part of the whole population.

The southern states, whose influence is increased since the acquisition of Louisiana, very inconsiderately increase the annual importation of these negroes.

It is not yet in the power of Congress, nor the chief of the confederation, (a magistrate whose name is dear to the true friends of humanity,) to oppose this augmentation, and to spare by that means much distress to the generations to come.

The present president, Mr. Thomas Jefferson, author of the excellent Essay on Virginia.

The Mexican population is composed of the same elements as the other Spanish colonies.

They reckon seven races: 1. The individuals born in Europe, vulgarly called Gachupines; 2. The Spanish Creoles, or whites of European extraction born in America; 3. The Mestizos, descendants of whites and Indians; 4. The Mulattoes, descendants of whites and negroes; 5. The Zambos, descendants of negroes and Indians; 6. The Indians, or copper-coloured indigenous race; and, 7. The African negroes.

Abstracting the sub-divisions there are four casts: the whites, comprehended under the general name of Spaniards, the negroes, the Indians, and the men of mixed extraction, from Europeans, Africans, American Indians, and Malays; for from the frequent communication between Acapulco and the Philippine islands, many individuals of Asiatic origin, both Chinese and Malays, have settled in New Spain.

A very general prejudice exists in Europe that an exceeding small number of the copper-coloured race, or descendants of the ancient Mexicans, remain at this day.

The cruelty of the Europeans has entirely extirpated the old inhabitants of the West Indies.

The continent of America, however, has witnessed no such horrible result.

The number of Indians in New Spain exceeds two millions and a half, including only those who have no mixture of European or African blood.

What is still more consolatory, and we repeat it, is, that the indigenous population far from declining, has been considerably on the increase for the last fifty years, as is proved by the registers of capitation or tribute.

In general the Indians appear to form two-fifths of the whole population of Mexico.

In the four intendancies of Guanaxuato, Valladolid, Oaxaca, and la Puebla, this population amounts even to three fifths.

The enumeration of 1793 gave the following result.

Names of intendancies.

Total population.

Number of Indians.

Guanaxuato 398,000 175,000 Valladolid 290,000 119,000 Puebla 638,000 416,000 Oaxaca 411,000 363,000

From this table it appears that in the intendancy of Oaxaca, of 100 individuals 88 were Indians.

So great a number of indigenous inhabitants undoubtedly proves the antiquity of the cultivation of this country.

Accordingly, we find near Oaxaca remaining monuments of Mexican architecture, which prove a singularly advanced state of civilization.

The Indians, or copper-coloured race, are rarely to be found in the north of New Spain, and are hardly to be met with in the provincias internas.

History gives us several causes for this phenomenon.

When the Spaniards made the conquest of Mexico, they found very few inhabitants in the countries situated beyond the parallel of 20°.

These provinces were the abode of the Chichimecks and Otomites, two pastoral nations, of whom thin hordes were scattered over a vast territory.

Agriculture and civilization, as we have already observed, were concentrated in the plains south of the river of Santiago, especially between the valley of Mexico and the province of Oaxaca.

From the 7th to the 13th century, population seems in general to have continually flowed towards the south.

From the regions situated to the north of the Rio Gila issued forth those warlike nations who successively inundated the country of Anahuac.

We are ignorant whether that was their primitive country, or whether they came originally from Asia or the north-west coast of America, and traversed the savannas of Nabajoa and Moqui, to arrive at the Rio Gila.

The hieroglyphical tables of the Aztecs have transmitted to us the memory of the principal epochs of the great migrations among the Americans.

This migration bears some analogy to that which, in the fifth century, plunged Europe in a state of barbarism, of which we yet feel the fatal effects in many of our social institutions.

However, the people who traversed Mexico left behind them traces of cultivation and civilization.

The Toultecs appeared, first, in the year 648, the Chichimecks in 1170, the Nahualtecs in 1178, the Acolhues and Aztecs in 1196.

The Toultecs introduced the cultivation of maize and cotton; they built cities, made roads, and constructed those great pyramids which are yet admired, and of which the faces are very accurately laid out.

They knew the use of hieroglyphical paintings; they could found metals, and cut the hardest stones; and they had a solar year more perfect than that of the Greeks and Romans.

The form of their government indicated that they were the descendants of a people who had experienced great vicissitudes in their social state.

But where is the source of that cultivation? where is the country from which the Toultecs and Mexicans issued?

Tradition and historical hieroglyphics name Huehuetlapallan, Tollan, and Aztlan, as the first residence of these wandering nations.

There are no remains at this day of any ancient civilization of the human species to the north of the Rio Gila, or in the northern regions travelled through by Hearne, Fiedler, and Mackenzie.

But on the north-west coast, between Nootka and Cook river, especially under the 57° of north latitude, in Norfolk Bay and Cox Canal, the natives display a decided taste for hieroglyphical paintings. M. Fleurieu, a man of distinguished learning, supposes that these people might be the descendants of some Mexican colony, which, at the period of the conquest, took refuge in those northern regions.

This ingenious opinion will appear less probable if we consider the great distance which these colonists would have to travel, and reflect that the Mexican, cultivation did not extend beyond the 20° of latitude.

I am rather inclined to believe, that, on the migration of the Toultecs and Aztecs to the south, some tribes remained on the coasts of New Norfolk and New Cornwall, while the rest continued their course southwards.

We can conceive how people, travelling en masse, for example, the Ostrogoths and Alani, were able to pass from the Black Sea into Spain; but how could we believe that a portion of these people were able to return from west to east, at an epoqua when other hordes had already occupied their first abodes on the banks of the Don or the Boristhenes?

Voyage de Marchand, tom. I. p. 258, 261, 375. Dixon, p. 332. A harp represented in the hieroglyphical paintings of the inhabitants of the northwest coast of America, is an object at least as remarkable as the famous harp on the tombs of the kings of Thebes.

This is not the place to discuss the great problem of the Asiatic origin of the Toultecs or Aztecs.

The general question of the first origin of the inhabitants of the continent is beyond the limits prescribed to history; and is not, perhaps, even a philosophical question.

There undoubtedly existed other people in Mexico at the time when the Toultecs arrived there in the course of their migration, and therefore to assert that the Toultecs are an Asiatic race is not maintaining that all the Americans came originally from Thibet or oriental Siberia.

De Guignes attempted to prove by the Chinese annals that they visited America posterior to 458; and Horn, in his ingenious work de Originibus Americanis, published in 1699, M. Scherer, in his historical researches respecting the new world, and more recent writers, have made it appear extremely probable that old relations existed between Asia and America.

I have elsewhere advanced that the Toultecs, or Aztecs, might be a part of those Hiongnoux, who, according to the Chinese historians, emigrated under their leader Punon, and were lost in the north parts of Siberia.

This nation of warrior-shepherds has more than once changed the face of oriental Asia, and desolated, under the name of Huns, the finest parts of civilized Europe.

All these conjectures will acquire more probability when a marked analogy shall be discovered between the languages of Tartary and those of the new continent; an analogy, which, according to the latest researches of M.

Barton Smith, extends only to a very small number of words.

The want of wheat, oats, barley, rye, and all those nutritive gramina which go under the general name of cereal, seems to prove, that if Asiatic tribes passed into America, they must have descended from pastoral people.

We see in the old continent that the cultivation of cereal gramina, and the use of milk, were introduced as far back as we have any historical records.

The inhabitants of the new continent cultivated no other gramina than maize, (Zea.) They fed on no species of milk, though the lamas, alpacas, and in the north of Mexico and Canada two kinds of indigenous oxen, would have afforded them milk in abundance.

These are striking contrasts between the Mongol and American race.

Tableaux de la Nature, vol. I. p. 53.

Without losing ourselves in suppositions as to the first country of the Toultecs and the Aztecs, and without attempting to fix the geographical position of those ancient kingdoms of Huehuetlapallan and Aztlan, we shall confine ourselves to the accounts of the Spanish historians.

The northern provinces, New Biscay, Sonora, and New Mexico, were very thinly inhabited in the 16th century.

The natives were hunters and shepherds; and they withdrew as the European conquerors advanced towards the north.

Agriculture alone attaches man to the soil, and developes the love of country.

Thus we see that in the southern parts of Anahuac, in the cultivated region adjacent to Tenochtitlan, the Aztec colonists patiently endured the cruel vexations exercised towards them by their conquerors, and suffered every thing rather than quit the soil which their fathers had cultivated.

But in the northern provinces, the natives yielded to the conquerors their uncultivated savannas, which served for pasturage to the buffaloes.

The Indians took refuge beyond the Rio Gila, towards the Rio Zaguanas and the mountains de las Grullas.

The Indian tribes who formerly occupied the territory of the United States and Canada followed the same policy; and chose rather to withdraw, first, behind the Alleghany mountains, then behind the Ohio, and lastly behind the Missouri, to avoid being forced to live among the Europeans.

From the same cause we find the copper-coloured race neither in the provincias internas of New Spain, nor in the cultivated parts of the U. States.

The migrations of the American tribes having been constantly carried on from north to south, at least between the sixth and twelfth centuries, it is certain that the Indian population of New Spain must be composed of very heterogeneous elements.

In proportion as the population flowed towards the south, some tribes would stop in their progress, and mingle with the tribes which followed them.

The great variety of languages still spoken in the kingdom of Mexico proves a great variety of races and origin.

The number of these languages exceeds twenty, of which fourteen have grammars and dictionaries tolerably complete.

The following are their names: the Mexican or Aztec language; the Otomite; the Tarasc; the Zapotec; the Mistec; the Maye or Yucatan; the Totonac; the Popolouc; the Matlazing; the Huastec; the Mixed; the Caquiquel; the Taraumar; the Tepehuan; and the Cora.

It appears that the most part of these languages, far from being dialects of the same, (as some authors have falsely advanced,) are at least as different from one another as the Greek and the German, or the French and Polish.

This is the case at least with the seven languages of New Spain, of which I possess the vocabularies.

The variety of idioms spoken by the people of the new continent, and which, without the least exaggeration, may be stated at some hundreds, offers a very striking phenomenon, particularly when we compare it with the few languages spoken in Asia and Europe.

The Mexican language, that of the Aztecs, is the most widely diffused, and extends at present from the 37° to the lake of Nicaragua, for a length of 400 leagues.

The Abbe Clavigero has proved that the Toultecs, the Chichimecks, (from whom the inhabitants of Tlascala are descended,) the Acolhues, and the Nahuatlacs, all spoke the same language as the Mexicans.

This language is not so sonorous, but almost as diffused and as rich as that of the Incas.

After the Mexican or Aztec language, of which there exists eleven printed grammars, the most general language of New Spain is that of the Otomites.

Clavigero, t. I. p. 153.

The word Notlazomahuiztespixcatatzin signifies venerable priest whom I cherish as my father.

The Mexicans use this word of 27 letters when speaking to the priests, (cures.)

I could not fail to interest the reader by a minute description of the manners, character, and physical and intellectual state of those indigenous inhabitants of Mexico, which the Spanish laws designate by the name of Indians.

The general interest displayed in Europe for the remains of the primitive population of the new continent has its origin in a moral cause, which does honour to humanity.

The history of the conquest of America and Hindostan presents the picture of an unequal struggle between nations far advanced in arts, and others in the very lowest degree of civilization.

The unfortunate race of Aztecs escaped from the carnage appeared destined to annihilation under an oppression of several centuries.

We have difficulty in believing that nearly two millions and a half of aborigines could survive such lengthened calamities.

The inhabitant of Mexico and Peru, and the Indian of the Ganges, attract in a very different manner from the Chinese or Japanese the attention of an observer endowed with sensibility.

Such is the interest which the misfortune of a vanquished people inspires, that it renders us frequently unjust towards the descendants of the conquerors.

To give an accurate idea of the indigenous inhabitants of New Spain, it is not enough to paint them in their actual state of degradation and misery; we must go back to a remote period, when governed by its own laws, the nation could display its proper energy; and we must consult the hieroglyphical paintings, buildings of hewn stone, and works of sculpture still in preservation, which, though they attest the infancy of the arts, bear, however, a striking analogy to several monuments of the most civilized people.

These researches are reserved for the historical account of our expedition to the tropics.

The nature of this work does not permit us to enter into such details, however interesting they may be, both for the history, and the psychological study of our species.

We shall merely point out here a few of the most prominent features of the immense picture of American indigenous population.

The Indians of New Spain bear a general resemblance to those who inhabit Canada, Florida, Peru, and Brasil.

They have the same swarthy and copper colour, flat and smooth hair, small beard, squat body, long eye with the corner directed upwards towards the temples, prominent cheek bones, thick lips, and an expression of gentleness in the mouth, strongly contrasted with a gloomy and severe look.

The American race, after the hyperborean race, is the least numerous; but it occupies the greatest space on the globe.

Over a million and a half of square leagues, from the Terra del Fuego islands to the river St. Laurence and Baring’s Straits, we are struck at the first glance with the general resemblance in the features of the inhabitants.

We think we perceive that they all descend from the same stock, notwithstanding the enormous diversity of language which separates them from one another.

However, when we reflect more seriously on this family likeness, after living longer among the indigenous Americans, we discover that celebrated travellers, who could only observe a few individuals on the coasts, have singularly exaggerated the analogy of form among the Americans.

Intellectual cultivation is what contributes the most to diversify the features.

In barbarous nations there is rather a physiognomy peculiar to the tribe or horde than to any individual.

When we compare our domestic animals with those which inhabit our forests we make the same observation.

But a European, when he decides on the great resemblance among the copper-coloured races, is subject to a particular illusion.

He is struck with a complexion so different from our own, and the uniformity of this complexion conceals for a long time from him the diversity of individual features.

The new colonist can hardly at first distinguish the indigenous, because his eyes are less fixed on the gentle melancholic or ferocious expression of the countenance than on the red coppery colour and dark luminous and coarse and glossy hair, so glossy indeed that we should believe it to be in a constant state of humectation.

In the faithful portrait which an excellent observer, M. Volney, has drawn of the Canada Indians, we undoubtedly recognise the tribes scattered in the meadows of the Rio Apure and the Carony.

The same style of feature exists no doubt in both Americas; but those Europeans who have sailed on the great rivers Orinoco and Amazons, and have had occasion to see a great number of tribes assembled under the monastical hierarchy in the missions, must have observed that the American race contains nations whose features differ as essentially from one another, as the numerous varieties of the race of Caucasus, the Circassians, Moors, and Persians differ from one another.

The tall form of the Pantagonians, who inhabit the southern extremity of the new continent, is again found by us, as it were, among the Caribs who dwell in the plains from the Delta of the Orinoco to the sources of the Rio Blanco.

What a difference between the figure, physiognomy, and physical constitution of these Caribs, who ought to be accounted one of the most robust nations on the face of the earth, and are not to be confounded with the degenerate Zambos, formerly called Caribs in the island St. Vincent, and the squat bodies of the Chayma Indians of the province of Cumana!

What a difference of form between the Indians of Tlascala and the Lipans and Chichimecks of the northern part of Mexico!

The great nation of the Caribs, or Caraibs, who, after having exterminated the Cabres, conquered a considerable part of South America, extended in the 16th century from the equator to the Virgin islands.

The few families who existed in our times in the Caribbee islands, recently transported by the English, were a mixture of true Caribs and negroes.

The Indians of New Spain have a more swarthy complexion than the inhabitants of the warmest climates of South America.

This fact is so much the more remarkable, as in the race of Caucasus, which may be also called the European Arab race, the people of the south have not so fair a skin as those of the north.

Though many of the Asiatic nations who inundated Europe in the sixth century had a very dark complexion, it appears, however, that the shades of colour observable among the white race are less owing to their origin or mixture than to the local influence of the climate.

This influence appears to have almost no effect on the Americans and negroes.

These races, in which there is an abundant deposition of carburetted hydrogen in the corpus mucosum or reticulatum of Malpighi, resist in a singular manner the impressions of the ambient air.

The negroes of the mountains of Upper Guinea are not less black than those who live on the coast.

There are, no doubt, tribes of colour by no means deep among the Indians of the new continent, whose complexion approaches to that of the Arabs or Moors.

We found the people of the Rio Negro swarthier than those of the Lower Orinoco, and yet the banks of the first of these rivers enjoy a much cooler climate than the more northern regions.

In the forests of Guiana, especially near the sources of the Orinoco, are several tribes of a whitish complexion, the Guaicas, Guajaribs, and Arigues, of whom, several robust individuals, exhibiting no symptom of the asthenical malady which characterises albinos, have the appearance of true Mestizoes.

Yet these tribes have never mingled with Europeans, and are surrounded with other tribes of dark brown hue.

The Indians in the torrid zone who inhabit the most elevated plains of the Cordillera of the Andes, and those who under the 45° of south latitude live by fishing among the islands of the archipelago of Chonos, have as coppery a complexion as those who under a burning climate cultivate bananas in the narrowest and deepest valleys of the equinoxial region.

We must add, that the Indians of the mountains are clothed, and were so long before the conquest, while the aborigines who wander over the plains go quite naked, and are consequently always exposed to the perpendicular rays of the sun. I could never observe that in the same individual those parts of the body which were covered were less dark than those in contact with a warm and humid air.

We everywhere perceive that the colour of the American depends very little on the local position in which we see him.

The Mexicans, as we have already observed, are more swarthy than the Indians of Quito and New Granada, who inhabit a climate completely analogous; and we even see that the tribes dispersed to the north of the Rio Gila are less brown than those in the neighbourhood of the kingdom of Guatimala.

This deep colour continues to the coast nearest to Asia.

But under the 54° 10 minutes of north latitude, at Cloak-bay, in the midst of coppercoloured Indians with small long eyes, there is a tribe with large eyes, European features, and a skin less dark than that of our peasantry.

All these facts tend to prove that notwithstanding the variety of climates and elevations inhabited by the different races of men, nature never deviates from the model of which she made selection thousands of years ago.

My observations on the innate colour of the aborigines differ in part from the assertions of Michikinakoua, the celebrated chief of the Miamis, called by the Anglo-Americans Little Crook-back, (Petite Tortue,) who communicated so much valuable information to M. Volney.

He asserted “that the children of the Canada Indians were born as white as Europeans; that the adults are darkened by the sun, and the grease and the juices of herbs with which they rub their skin; and that that part of the waist of the females which is perpetually covered is always white.” I have never seen the Canada nations of which the chief of the Miamis speaks; but I can affirm that in Peru, Quito, on the coast of Caraccas, the banks of the Orinoco, and in Mexico, the children are never born white, and that the Indian Caciques, who enjoy a certain degree of ease in their circumstances, and who remain clothed in the interior of their houses, have all the parts of their body (with the exception of the hollow of their hand and the sole of their foot) of the same brownish-red or coppery colour.

Volney, Tableau du Climat et du Sol des Etats-Unis, vol ii. p. 435.

This account of Little Crook-back is partly confirmed by Father Gumilla, who says that the Indians remain white for several days after they are born, with the exception of a small spot, acia la parte posterior de la cintura, of an obscure colour.

I have seen and examined that spot, says he, repeatedly.

“Al nacer aquellos ninos son blancos por algunos dias.

Nacen los Indiecillos con una mancha acia la parte posterior de la cintura, de color obscuro, con viso de entre morado y pardo, la qual se va desvaneciendo, al passo que le criatura va perdiendo el color blanco, y adquiriendo el suyo natural.

Esta sena ó mancha es cierta, y cosa que tengo vista, y examinada repetidas veces: su tamano es poco mas, ó menos del espacio que occupa un peso duro de nueva fabrica.”

Gumilla, Orinoco illustrado.

Vol. i. p. 82. Trans.

The Mexicans, particularly those of the Aztec and Otomite race, have more beard than I ever saw in any other Indians of South America.

Almost all the Indians in the neighbourhood of the capital wear small mustaches; and this is even a mark of the tributary cast. These mustaches, which modern travellers have also found among the inhabitants of the north-west coast of America, are so much the more curious, as celebrated naturalists have left the question undetermined, whether the Americans have naturally no beard and no hair on the rest of their bodies, or whether they pluck them carefully out.

Without entering here into physiological details, I can affirm that the Indians who inhabit the torrid zone of South America have generally some beard; and that this beard increases when they shave themselves, of which we have seen examples in the missions of the capuchins of Caribe, where the Indian sextons wish to resemble the monks their masters.

But many individuals are born entirely without beard or hair on their bodies. M. de Galeano, in the account of the last Spanish expedition to the straits of Magellan, informs us, that there are many old men among the Patagonians with beards, though they are short and by no means bushy.

On comparing this assertion with the facts collected by Marchand, Mears, and especially M. Volney, in the northern temperate zone, we are tempted to believe that the Indians have more and more beard in proportion to their distance from the equator.

However, this apparent want of beard is by no means peculiar to the American race, for many hordes of Eastern Asia, and especially several tribes of African negroes, have so little beard that we should be almost tempted to deny entirely its existence.

The negroes of Congo and the Caribs, two eminently robust races, and frequently of a colossal stature, prove that to look upon a beardless chin as a sure sign of the degeneration and physical weakness of the human species, is a mere physiological dream.

We forget that all which has been observed in the Caucasian race does not equally apply to the Mongol or American race, or to the African negroes.

Viaje al Estrecho de Magellanes, p. 331.

The Indians of New Spain, those at least subject to the European domination, generally attain a pretty advanced age— Peaceable cultivators, and collected these six hundred years in villages, they are not exposed to the accidents of the wandering life of the hunters and warriors of the Mississippi and the savannas of the Rio Gila.

Accustomed to uniform nourishment of an almost entirely vegetable nature, that of their maize and cereal gramina, the Indians would undoubtedly attain a very great longevity if their constitutions were not weakened by drunkenness.

Their intoxicating liquors are rum, a fermentation of maize and the root of the jatropha, and especially the wine of the country, made of the juice of the agave americana, called pulque.

This last liquor, of which we shall have occasion to speak in the following book, is even nutritive, on account of the undecomposed sugar which it contains.

Many Indians addicted to pulque take for a long time very little solid nourishment.

When taken with moderation it is very salutary, and by fortifying the stomach, assists the functions of ths gastric system.

The vice of drunkenness is, however, less general among the Indians than is generally believed.

Those Europeans who have travelled to the east of the Alleghany mountains, between the Ohio and Missouri, will with difficulty believe that, in the forests of Guiana and on the banks of the Orinoco, we saw Indians who showed an aversion for the brandy which we made them taste.

There are several Indian tribes, very sober, whose fermented beverages are too weak to intoxicate.

In New Spain drunkenness is most common among the Indians who inhabit the valley of Mexico, and the environs of Puebla and Tlascala, wherever the maguey or agave are cultivated on a great scale.

The police in the city of Mexico sends round tumbrels, to collect the drunkards to be found stretched out in the streets.

These Indians, who are treated like dead bodies, are carried to the principal guardhouse.

In the morning an iron ring is put round their ancles, and they are made to clear the streets for three days.

On letting them go on the fourth day, they are sure to find several of them in the course of the week.

The excess of liquors is also very injurious to the health of the lower people in the warm countries on the coast which grow sugar cane.

It is to be hoped that this evil will diminish, as civilization makes more progress among a cast of men whose bestiality is not much different from that of the brutes.

Travellers who merely judge from the physiognomy of the Indians are tempted to believe that it is rare to see old men among them.

In fact, without consulting parish registers, which in warm regions are devoured by the termites every twenty or thirty years, it is very difficult to form any idea of the age of Indians: they themselves (I allude to the poor labouring Indian) are completely ignorant of it.

Their head never becomes gray.

It is infinitely more rare to find an Indian than a negro with gray hairs, and the want of beard gives the former a continual air of youth.

The skin of the Indians is also less subject to wrinkles.

It is by no means uncommon to see in Mexico, in the temperate zone half way up the Cordillera, natives, and especially women, reach a hundred years of age.

This old age is generally comfortable; for the Mexican and Peruvian Indians preserve their muscular strength to the last.

While I was at Lima, the Indian Hilario Pari died at the village of Chiguata, four leagues distant from the town of Arequipa, at the age of 143.

He remained united in marriage for 90 years to an Indian of the name of Andrea Alea Zar, who attained the age of 117. This old Peruvian went, at the age of 130, from three to four leagues daily on foot.

He became blind 13 years before his death, and left behind him of 12 children but one daughter, of 77 years of age.

This account differs from that of Ulloa, who says expressly that the symptoms of old age among the Indians are gray hairs and a beard: pero hay dos senales que manifiestan quando son de edad muy abanzada:

la una las canas, y la otra las barbas.

The whole passage runs thus, “Son per le general de larga vida, aunque dificil de averiguar el numero de sus anos; pero hay dos senales que manifiestan quando son de edad muy abanzada:

la una las canas, y la otra las barbas: aquellas no empiezcan a parecer hasta que estan en 70 anos o cerca de ellas: estas otras hasta que passan de 60, y siempre son pocas; y asi quando se ven del todo encanecidos, y que las pocas barbas le estan igualmente, se jusga que pasan de un siglo.” (Noticias Americanas, p. 323.)

The accuracy of Ulloa, and the opportunities which he had of observing every variety of Indian race, are very universally known.

Father Gumilla gives an account somewhat similar to Ulloa’s: Trans.

The copper-coloured Indians enjoy one great physical advantage, which is undoubtedly owing to the great simplicity in which their ancestors lived for thousands of years.

They are subject to almost no deformity.

I never saw a hunchbacked Indian; and it is extremely rare to see any of them who squint, or are lame in the arm or leg.

In the countries where the inhabitants suffer from the goitre, this affection of the thyroid gland is never observed among the Indians, and seldom among the Mestizoes.

Martin Salmeron, the famous Mexican giant, belongs to the last class, though erroneously said to be an Indian, whose height is 2,224 metres or six feet ten inches, and 2 2-3 lines of Paris.

He is the son of a Mestizo, who married an Indian woman of the village of Chilapa el Grande, near Chilpansingo.

87,521 inches, or 7 feet 3 1-2 inches. Trans.

Such is the real size of this giant, the best proportioned whom I have ever seen.

He is an inch taller than the giant of Torneo, seen at Paris in 1735.

The American gazettes make Salmeron 7 feet 1 inch of Paris measure.

Gazetta de Goatimala, 1800.

Agosto, Annales de Madrid, t. iv. No. 12. The human species appears to vary from 2 feet 4 inches to 7 feet 8 inches, or from Om. 757 to 2m. 489. (Schreber Mamm. t. I, p. 27.)

When we examine savage hunters or warriors we are tempted to believe that they are all well made, because those who have any natural deformity either perish from fatigue or are exposed by their parents, but the Mexican and Peruvian Indians, those of Quito and New Granada, are agriculturists, who can only be compared with the class of European peasantry.

We can have no doubt then that the absence of natural deformities among them is the effect of their mode of life, and of the constitution peculiar to their race.

All the men of very swarthy complexion, those of Mongol and American origin, and especially the negroes, participate in the same advantage.

We are inclined to believe that the Arab-European race possesses a greater flexibility of organisation, and that it is easier modified by a great number of exterior causes, such as variety of aliments, climates, and habits, and consequently has a greater tendency to deviate from its original model.

What we have been stating as to the exterior form of the indigenous Americans confirms the accounts of other travellers of the striking analogy between the Americans and the Mongol race.

This analogy is particularly evident in the colour of the skin and hair, in the defective beard, high cheek bones, and in the direction of the eyes.

We cannot refuse to admit that the human species does not contain races resembling one another more than the Americans, Mongols, Mantcheoux, and Malays.

But the resemblance of some features does not constitute an identity of race.

If the hieroglyphical paintings and traditions of the inhabitants of Anahuac, collected by the first conquerors, appear to indicate that a swarm of wandering tribes spread from the north-west towards the south, we must not therefore conclude that all the Indians of the new continent are of Asiatic origin.

In fact, osteology teaches us that the cranium of the American, differs essentially from that of the Mongol: the former exhibits a facial line, more inclined, though straighter, than that of the negro: and there is no race on the globe in which the frontal bone is more depressed backwards, or which has a less projecting forehead.

The cheek bones of the American are almost as prominent as those of the Mongol; but the contours are more rounded, and the angles not so sharp.

The under jaw is larger than the negroes, and its branches are less dispersed than the Mongols.

The occipital bone is less curved, (bombee) and the protuberances which correspond to the cerebellum, to which the system of M.

Gall attaches great importance, are scarcely sensible.

Perhaps this race of copper-coloured men, comprehended under the general name of American Indians, is a mixture of Asiatic tribes and the aborigines of this vast continent; and it is not unlikely also that the figures with enormous aquiline noses, observed in the hieroglyphical Mexican paintings preserved at Vienna, Veletri, and at Rome, as in my historical fragments, indicated the physiognomy of some races now extinct.

The Canadian savages call themselves Metoktheniakes, born of the sun, without allowing themselves to be persuaded of the contrary by the black robes, a name which they give to the missionaries.

This extraordinary flatness is to be found among nations to whom the means of producing artificial deformity are totally unknown, as is proved by the crania of Mexican Indians, Peruvians, and Atures, brought over by M.

Bonpland and myself, of which several were deposited in the museum of natural history at Paris.

I am inclined to believe that the barbarous custom which prevails among several hordes of pressing the heads of children between two boards, had its origin in the idea that beauty consists in such a form of the frontal bone as to characterise the race in a decided manner.

The negroes give the preference to the thickest and most prominent lips; the Calmucks to turned-up noses; and the Greeks in the statues of heroes have raised the facial line from 85 to 100 degrees beyond nature.

(Cuvier, Anat. Comparee, t. II. p. 6.)

The Aztecs, who never disfigure the heads of their children, represent their principal divinities, as their hieroglyphical manuscripts prove, with a head much more flattened than any I have ever seen among the Caribs.

Volney, t. II. p. 438.

As to the moral faculties of the Indians, it is difficult to appreciate them with justice, if we only consider this long oppressed cast in their present state of degradation.

The better sort of Indians, among whom a certain degree of intellectual culture might be supposed, perished in great part at the commencement of the Spanish conquest, the victims of European ferocity.

The Christian fanaticism broke out in a particular manner against the Aztec priests; and the Teopixqui, or ministers of the divinity, and all those who inhabited the Teocalli, or houses of God, who might be considered as the depositories of the historical, mythological, and astronomical knowlege of the country, were exterminated; for the priests observed the meridian shade in the gnomons, and regulated the calendar.

The monks burned the hieroglyphical paintings, by which every kind of knowlege was transmitted from generation to generation.

The people, deprived of these means of instruction, were plunged in an ignorance so much the deeper as the missionaries were unskilled in the Mexican languages, and could substitute few new ideas in the place of the old.

The Indian women who had preserved any share of fortune chose rather to ally with the conquerors than to share the contempt in which the Indians were held.

The Spanish soldiers were so much the more eager for these alliances, as very few European women had followed the army.

The remaining natives then consisted only of the most indigent race, poor cultivators, artisans, among whom were a great number of weavers, porters, who were used like beasts of burden, and especially of those dregs of the people, those crowds of beggars, who bore witness to the imperfection of the social institutions, and the existence of feudal oppression, and who filled, in the time of Cortez, the streets of all the great cities of the Mexican empire.

How shall we judge, then, from these miserable remains of a powerful people, of the degree of cultivation to which it had risen from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, and of the intellectual developement of which it is susceptible?

If all that remained of the French or German nation were a few poor agriculturists, could we read in their features that they belonged to nations which had produced a Descartes and Clairaut, a Kepler and a Leibnitz?

From Teotl. God.

We observe that even in Europe the lower people, for whole centuries, make very slow progress in civilization.

The peasant of Brittany or Normandy, and the inhabitant of the North of Scotland, differ very little at this day from what they were in the time of Henry the Fourth and James the First.

When we consider attentively what is related in the letters of Cortez, the memoirs of Bernal Diaz, written with admirable naivete, and other cotemporary historians, as to the state of the inhabitants of Mexico, Tezcuco, Cholollan, and Tlascala, in the time of Montezuma the Second, we think we perceive the portrait of the Indians of our own time.

We see the same nudity in the warm regions, the same form of dress in the central table-land, and the same habits in domestic life.

How can any great change take place in the Indians when they are kept insulated in villages in which the whites dare not settle, when the difference of language places an almost insurmountable barrier between them and the Europeans, when they are oppressed by magistrates chosen through political considerations from their own number, and, in short, when they can only expect moral and civil improvement from a man who talks to them of mysteries, dogmas, and ceremonies, of the end of which they are ignorant.

What is here asserted of the highlands of Scotland might have had more foundation fifty years ago.

A barren and mountainous country must ever oppose great obstacles to improvement and civilization; but it is believed that these obstacles have seldom been more successfully overcome than in the highlands.

Of this abundant proof might be found in the statistical account of Scotland, did not the high moral character observable in the highland regiments establish it beyond a doubt.

Trans.

I do not mean to discuss here what the Mexicans were before the Spanish conquest; this interesting subject has been already entered upon in the commencement of this chapter.

When we consider that they had an almost exact knowledge of the duration of the year, that they intercalated at the end of their great cycle of 104 years with more accuracy than the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians, we are tempted to believe that this progress is not the effect of the intellectual developement of the Americans themselves, but that they were indebted for it to their communication with some very cultivated nations of central Asia.

The Toultecs appeared in New Spain in the 7th, and the Aztecs in the 12th century; and they immediately drew up the geographical map of the country traversed by them, constructed cities, highways, dikes, canals, and immense pyramids very accurately designed, of a base of 438 metres in length.

Their feudal system, their civil and military hierarchy, were already so complicated, that we must suppose a long succession of political events before the establishment of the singular concatenation of authorities of the nobility and clergy, and before a small portion of the people, themselves the slaves of the Mexican sultan, could have subjugated the great mass of the nation.

We have examples of theocratical forms of government in South America; for such were those of the Zac of Bogota, (the ancient Cundinamarca,) and of the Inca of Peru, two extensive empires, in which despotism was concealed under the appearance of a gentle and patriarchal government.

But in Mexico, small colonies, wearied of tyranny, gave themselves republican constitutions.

Now it is only after long popular struggles that these free constitutions can be formed.

The existence of republics does not indicate a very recent civilization.

How is it possible to doubt that a part of the Mexican nation had arrived at a certain degree of cultivation, when we reflect on the care with which their hieroglyphical books were composed, and when we recollect that a citizen of Tlascala, in the midst of the tumults of war, took advantage of the facility offered him by our Roman alphabet to write in his own language five large volumes on the history of a country of which he deplored the subjection?

M. Laplace discovered in the Mexican intercalation, for which I furnished him materials collected by Gama, that the duration of the tropical year of the Mexicans is almost the identical duration found by the astronomers of Almamon.

For this observation, of such importance in the history of the origin of the Aztecs, see Exposition du Systeme du Monde, troisieme edition, p. 554.

1,436 feet.

Trans.

The empire of the Zac, which comprehended the kingdom of New Granada, was founded by Idacanzas or Bochica, a mysterious personage, who, according to the traditions of Mozcas, lived in the temple of the sun at Sogamozo during two thousand years.

The Aztec manuscripts are written either on agave paper, or on stag skins; they are frequently from 20 to 22 metres (65 to 71 English feet) in length; and each page contains from 7 to 10 centimetres, or from 100 to 150 square inches (French) of surface.

These manuscripts are folded here and there in the form of a rhomb, and thin wooden boards fastened to the extremities form their binding, and give them a resemblance to our books in quarto.

No nation of the old continent ever made such an extensive use of hieroglyphical writing; and in none of them do we see real books bound in the way I have been describing.

We must not confound with these books other Aztec paintings, composed of the same signs, but in the form of tapestries of 63 decimetres, or 60 square feet, (French.)

I have seen some of them in the archives of the viceroyalty of Mexico; and I myself possess fragments of them, which I have caused to be engraved in the picturesque atlas which accompanies the historical account of my travels. Author.

The numbers in the above note are totally irreconcileable with one another.

A centimetre is equal to .36941 of a French inch, consequently 7 and 10 centimetres are only .9552 and 1.3645 French square inches, and nothing like 100 and 150 square inches.

In the same way a decimetre being only as 3.24835: 12 of a French foot, 63 decimetres make 5.97 and not 60 square feet French.

Some mistake must therefore be either in the metrical or common measures here assigned, or in both.

Trans.

We shall not here attempt to resolve the problem, however important it may be for history, whether the Mexicans of the 15th century were more civilized than the Peruvians, or whether, if both had been abandoned to themselves, they would have made more rapid advances towards intellectual cultivation than they have done under the domination of the Spanish clergy.

Neither shall we examine whether, notwithstanding the despotism of the Aztec princes, the improvement of the individual found fewer obstacles in Mexico than in the empire of the Incas.

In the latter the legislator wished only to influence the people en masse; and by subjecting them to a monastic obedience, and treating them like machines, he compelled them to undertake works, the regularity and magnitude of which astonish us as much as the perseverance of those who directed them.

If we analyse the mechanism of this Peruvian theocracy, generally too much exalted in Europe, we shall find that wherever people are divided into casts, of which each can only follow a certain species of labour, and wherever the inhabitants possess no particular property, and labour merely for the benefit of the community, canals, roads, aqueducts, pyramids, and immense constructions will also be found; but that the people preserving for thousands of years, the same appearance of external comfort make almost no advances in moral cultivation, which is the result of individual liberty alone.

In the portrait which we draw of the different races of men composing the population of New Spain, we shall merely consider the Mexican Indian in his actual state.

We perceive in him neither that mobility of sensation, gesture, or feature, nor that activity of mind for which several nations of the equinoxial regions ofAfricaare so advantageously distinguished.

There cannot exist a more marked contrast than that between the impetuous vivacity of the Congo negro, and the apparent phlegm of the Indian.

From a feeling of this contrast, the Indian women not only prefer the negroes to the men of their own race, but also to the Europeans.

The Mexican Indian is grave, melancholic, and silent, so long as he is not under the influence of intoxicating liquors.

This gravity is particularly remarkable in Indian children, who, at the age of four or five, display much more intelligence and maturity than white children.

The Mexican loves to throw a mysterious air over the most indifferent actions.

The most violent passions are never painted in his features; and there is something frightful in seeing him pass all at once from absolute repose to a state of violent and unrestrained agitation.

The Peruvian Indian possesses more gentleness of manners; the energy of the Mexican degenerates into harshness.

These differences may have their origin in the different religions and the different governments of the two countries in former times.

This energy is displayed particularly by the inhabitants of Tlascala.

In the midst of their present degradation, the descendants of those republicans are still to be distinguished by a certain haughtiness of character, inspired by the memory of their former grandeur.

It is difficult to reconcile altogether this account of the Indian taciturnity with that given by Ulloa in his Noticias Americanas.

He first describes the savage Indians as “largos en los discursos, repitiendo muchas vezes la misma cosa, y durarian el dia entero sin anadir nada a lo que dixeron al principio, si no les procurasse cortar.”

“En este modo de perorar con presuncion,” he continues, “fundan tambien su ciencia, y la habilidad con que sobresalen a las otras personas Europeas con quienes tratan, persuadendose a que los inducen a franquearles lo que desean con su grande eloquencia.”

This may be thought only to apply to the savage Indians; but he adds.

“Los Indios reducidos son lo mismo en sus discursos, largos, cansados, e importunos hasta el extremo; y si el lenguage no fuese distinto, podria creerse que un Indio del Peru hablaba en el Norte o al contrario.” (p. 334.) Trans.

The Americans; like the Hindoos and other nations who have long groaned under a civil and military despotism, adhere to their customs, manners, and opinions, with extraordinary obstinacy.

I say opinions, for the introduction of christianity has produced almost no other effect on the Indians of Mexico than to substitute new ceremonies, the symbols of a gentle and humane religion, to the ceremonies of a sanguinary worship.

This change from old to new rites was the effect of constraint and not of persuasion, and was produced by political events alone.

In the new continent, as well as in the old, half civilized nations were accustomed to receive from the hands of the conqueror new laws and new divinities; and the vanquished Indian gods appeared to them to yield to the gods of the strangers.

In such a complicated mythology as that of the Mexicans, it was easy to find out an affinity between the divinities of Aztlan and the divinity of the east.

Cortez even very artfully took advantage of a popular tradition, according to which the Spaniards were merely the descendants of king Quitzalcoatl, who left Mexico for countries situated in the east, to carry among them civilization and laws.

The ritual books composed by the Indians in hieroglyphics at the beginning of the conquest, of which I possess several fragments, evidently show that at that period christianity was confounded with the Mexican mythology: the Holy Ghost is identified with the sacred eagle of the Aztecs.

The missionaries not only tolerated, they even favoured to a certain extent, this amalgamation of ideas, by means of which the christian worship was more easily introduced among the natives.

They persuaded them that the gospel had, in very remote times, been already preached in America; and they investigated its traces in the Aztec ritual with the same ardour which the learned, who in our days engage in the study of the Sanscrit, display in discussing the analogy between the Greek mythology and that of the Ganges and the Barampooter.

The Indians appear to have been not at all contented with their gods, and to have wished only to get well rid of them at the arrival of the Spaniards.

Such at least were the sentiments of the principal Indians in New Spain, if we may believe Acosta.

When an old Indian chief was asked by a reverend father why they had thrown up their own religion without either proof or investigation, or dispute, and adopted that of Christ in its place?

“We did not act so inconsiderately,” he replied, “as you seem to imagine, for we were so wearied and discontented with our gods that we had deliberated about leaving them in good earnest, and adopting others” (porque te hago saber, que estavamos ya tan cansados y descontentos, con las cosas que los ídolos nos mandavan, que aviamos tratado de dexarlos y tomar otra ley.) Acosta, p. 357. Trans.

The missionaries do not seem to have concerned themselves much about the motives from which the Indians became christians.

Their great object was to get as many baptized as possible, after which all was safe; and they were very much concerned when a parting soul could not be snatched from hell for want of a drop of water in the place at the critical moment. (Ay! no una gota en el rancho, Gumilla, II. 21.) They were indefatigable in scenting out dying people, para lograr sus almas.

An old woman (anciana) on the point of death, who, from seeing baptism and death generally follow so close upon one another, had very naturally associated them in her mind as inseparable, long resisted all the attempts of a holy father to baptize her.

When asked her reason, she said it was for fear of death.

“O!” replies the father, “I want to baptize you to secure you a life that will never end.” (Para assegurarle una vida que no se accabe.)

“If that be the case,” cries the old woman, “baptize me immediately.” (Yo tambien quiero que me bautices.)

“I praised God,” says father Gumilla, “on seeing that nobody likes to die, however troublesome life may be, and I admired the stubbornness of that heart which could still flatter itself with such motives; but I immediately baptized her.” (Luego la bauticé.)

Gumilla, vol. II. p. 25. Nothing can be more entertaining than the accounts given by the missionaries themselves of the arts and finesse to which they were compelled to have recourse to gain over those unfortunate sons of Adam, para obrar la eterna dicha de aquellos infelices hijos de Adan.

Father Gumilla, in his instructions to young missionaries, lays them open with more naiveté than prudence, as we might think; but the father very piously considered that the end justified the means.

It must be owned that the missionaries displayed great knowledge of human nature.

Not a word of religion for a long time.

Presents and kind offices, and long endeavours to obtain the Indian’s confidence by anticipating his wants, and entering into his views; but above all, the acquisition of the influence which their females naturally possessed over them, were the prelude to the grand attack.

“The females, one of them observes, “have every where a great capacity for piety, and must be first attended to.”

This battery was to be concealed, for if the drift was to be perceived in the least all was lost.

(Todo esta primera bateria ha de ser oculta de parte del Missionero; porque si se aclara, pierde el viage.)

(Gumilla, vol. I. p. 355.)

After giving a summary of the labours and innumerable shifts of these indefatigable soul-hunters, (Cazadores de Almas,) overpowered with the retrospect, the missionary feelingly exclaims, O! quien podra explicar las ganas, que tienen aquellos Cazadores de Almas, de que se compongan bien las cosas, y se legue la hora de poder bautizar aquellos innocentes sin peligro!

One of the greatest difficulties in which the holy fathers were placed, was how to reject the offer of a female companion, which was generally made them, without giving offence al Cacique y a los principales gentiles.

When the father modestly blushed, (con la mayor modestia bien sonroseado el rostro,) and answered that all his love was in heaven, it is impossible to tell the fright and consternation it occasioned.

(No sabré decir quanta novedad, y espanto causa esta o semejante respuesta.)

Gumilla, vol. I. p. 356. Trans.

These circumstances, which will be detailed in another work, explain why the Mexican Indians, notwithstanding the obstinacy with which they adhere to whatever is derived from their fathers, have so easily forgotten their ancient rites.

Dogma has not succeeded to dogma, but ceremony to ceremony.

The natives know nothing of religion but the exterior forms of worship.

Fond of whatever is connected with a prescribed order of ceremonies, they find in the Christian religion particular enjoyments.

The festivals of the church, the fireworks with which they are accompanied, the processions mingled with dances and whimsical disguises, are a most fertile source of amusement for the lower Indians.

In these festivals the national character is displayed in all its individuality.

Every where the christian rites have assumed the shades of the country where they have been transplanted.

In the Philippine and Mariana islands, the natives of the Malay race have incorporated them with the ceremonies which are peculiar to themselves; and in the province of Pasto, on the ridge of the Cordillera of the Andes, I have seen Indians, masked and adorned with small tinkling bells, perform savage dances around the altar, while a monk of St. Francis elevated the host.

From this singular description we may discover more plainly the impolicy with which conversions have been hitherto attempted in foreign parts by our missionary societies.

Had they sent away instead of the anabaptists, methodists, and presbyterians which they picked up in Sweden, the north of Germany, both parts of this island, and the Lord knows where, an equal number of our more volatile catholic brethren in Ireland, the conversion might already, perhaps, have made a great progress.

The people of Otaheité very feelingly exclaimed, “These missionaries give us still plenty of the word of God, but they give us no more hatchets;” but they would have been probably just as well contented with singing, and dancing, and fireworks.

This is a much more economical method of keeping these people assembled together than the distribution of hatchets.

The catholics went better to work.

They, too, knew the power of this sort of hatchet bribery.

“Se deba Ilevar avalorios, cuentas de vidrio, cuchillos, anzuelos, y otras buxerias, que para los Gentiles son de mucho aprecio.” (Gumilla, I. 349.)

But they knew that this source must soon dry up; and the holy fathers set all their natural gallantry to work to gain over the women, who seem to be equally susceptible in that quarter, whether savage, or civilized, as the men they were aware would soon follow them.

They said kind things to the women, praised the beauty of their children took them up in their arms and caressed them.

The women are very fond of that, says a father, Quando va a ver a los Indios en sus casas, tome en sus brazos alguno de aquellos parvulos, le accaricie y haga fiestas a su modo: esto apprecian grandement las Indias.

How are we to be astonished then at the very different results of the endeavours of these two classes of missionaries.

Trans.

Accustomed to a long slavery, as well under the domination of their own severeigns as under that of the first conquerors, the natives of Mexico patiently suffer the vexations to which they are frequently exposed from the whites.

They oppose to them only a cunning, veiled under the most deceitful appearances of apathy and stupidity.

As the Indian can very rarely revenge himself on the Spaniards, he delights in making a common cause with them for the oppression of his own fellow-citizens.

Harassed for ages, and compelled to a blind obedience, he wishes to tyrannize in his turn.

The Indian villages are governed by magistrates of the copper-coloured race; and an Indian alcalde exercises his power with so much the greater severity because he is sure of being supported by the priest, or the Spanish subdelegado.

Oppression produces every where the same effects, it every where corrupts the morals.

The present state of the world unfortunately affords too good an illustration of this maxim.

The West-Indian slave when he becomes a master is the most cruel of all masters; and the life of a negro’s cat, or dog, is synonymous there with a life not worth having.

The Greeks, who are much employed in collecting the revenue in Turkey, are infinitely more persecuting than the Turks.

And the Hindoo has his most grievous calamities to apprehend from his own brethren, armed with foreign authority.

Every where cunning and cruelty spring from tyranny and oppression. Trans.

As the Indians almost all of them belong to the class of peasantry and low people, it is not so easy to judge of their aptitude for the arts which embellish life.

I know no race of men who appear more destitute of imagination.

When an Indian attains a certain degree of civilization, he displays a great facility of apprehension, a judicious mind, a natural logic, and a particular disposition to subtilize or seize the finest differences in the comparison of objects.

He reasons coolly and orderly, but he never manifests that versatility of imagination, that glow of sentiment, and that creative and animating art which characterise the nations of the south of Europe, and several tribes of African negroes.

I deliver this opinion, however, with great reserve.

We ought to be infinitely circumspect in pronouncing on the moral or intellectual dispositions of nations from which we are separated by the multiplied obstacles which result from a difference in language, and a difference of manners and customs.

A philosophical observer finds what has been printed in the centre of Europe on the national character of the French, Italians, and Germans, inaccurate.

How, then, should a traveller, after merely landing in an island, or remaining only a short time in a distant country, arrogate to himself the right of deciding on the different faculties of the soul, on the preponderance of reason, wit, or imagination among nations?

What must our brethren of the northern part of this island, who have attained no small reputation for a pragmatical and metaphysical disposition, and who are so much disposed to give metaphysical superiority a precedence over all the other human faculties, feel, when they find that, most probably, their future rivals are not to spring up in any of the rival colleges of the south, or even in any of the great German universities, but among the beardless tribes of the Mexican mountains, and the banks of the Orinoco.

Trans.

The music and dancing of the natives partake of this want of gaiety which characterizes them. M.

Bonpland and myself observed the same thing in all South America.

Their songs are terrific and melancholic.

The Indian women show more vivacity than the men; but they share the usual misfortunes of the servitude to which the sex is condemned among nations where civilization is in its infancy.

The women take no share in the dancing; but they remain present to offer fermented draughts to the dancers, prepared by their own hands.

The Mexicans have preserved a particular relish for painting, and for the art of carving in wood or stone.

We are astonished at what they are able to execute with a bad knife on the hardest wood.

They are particularly fond of painting images, and carving statues of saints.

They have been servilely imitating for these three hundred years, the models which the Europeans imported with them at the conquest.

This imitation is derived from a religious principle of a very remote origin.

In Mexico, as in Hindostan, it was not allowable in the faithful to change the figure of their idols in the smallest degree.

Whatever made a part of the Aztec or Hindoo ritual was subjected to immutable laws.

For this reason we shall form a very imperfect judgment of the state of the arts, and the natural taste of these nations, if we merely consider the monstrous figures under which they represent their divinities.

The christian images have preserved in Mexico a part of that stiffness and that harshness of feature which characterize the hieroglyphical pictures of the age of Montezuma.

Many Indian children educated in the college of the capital, or instructed at the academy of painting founded by the king, have no doubt distinguished themselves; but it is much less by their genius than their application.

Without ever leaving the beaten track, they display great aptitude in the exercise of the arts of imitation; and they display a much greater still for the purely mechanical arts.

This aptitude cannot fail of becoming some day very valuable, when the manufactures shall take their flight to a country where a regenerating government remains yet to be created.

The Mexican Indians have preserved the same taste for flowers which Cortez found in his time.

A nosegay was the most valuable treat which could be made to the ambassadors who visited the court of Montezuma.

This monarch and his predecessors had collected a great number of rare plants in the gardens of Istapalapan.

The famous hand-tree, the cheirostemon, described by M. Cervantes, of which for a long time only a single individual was known of very high antiquity, appears to indicate that the kings of Toluca cultivated also trees strangers to that part of Mexico.

Cortez, in his letters to the emperor Charles the Fifth, frequently boasts of the industry which the Mexicans displayed in gardening; and he complains that they did not send him the seeds of ornamental flowers and useful plants which he demanded for his friends of Seville and Madrid.

The taste for flowers undoubtedly indicates a relish for the beautiful; and we are astonished at finding it in a nation in which a sanguinary worship and the frequency of sacrifices appeared to have extinguished whatever related to the sensibility of the soul, and kindness of affection.

In the great market place of Mexico the native sells no peaches, nor ananas, nor roots, nor pulque, (the fermented juice of the agave,) without having his shop ornamented with flowers, which are every day renewed.

The Indian merchant appears seated in an entrenchment of verdure.

A hedge of a metre in height, formed of fresh herbs, particularly of gramina with delicate leaves, surrounds like a semicircular wall the fruits offered to public sale.

The bottom of a smooth green, is divided by garlands of flowers which run parallel to one another.

Small nosegays placed symmetrically between the festoons give this enclosure the appearance of a carpet strewn with flowers.

The European who delights in studying the customs of the lower people, cannot help being struck with the care and elegance the natives display in distributing the fruits which they sell in small cages of very light wood.

The Sapotilles, (achras,) the mammea, pears, and raisins, occupy the bottom while the top is ornamented with odoriferous flowers.

This art of entwining fruits and flowers had its origin, perhaps, in that happy period when, long before the introduction of inhuman rites, the first inhabitants of Anahuac, like the Peruvians, offered up to the great spirit Teotl the first fruits of their harvest.

M. Bonpland has given a drawing of it in our Plantes Equinoxiales, vol. i. p. 75. pl. 24.

For some little time past, roots of the Arbol de las manitas have been in the gardens of Montpellier and Paris.

The cheirostemon is as remarkable for the form of its corolla as the Mexican gyrocarpus which we have introduced into the European gardens, and of which the celebrated Jacquin could not discover the flower, is for the form of its fruits.

3 1.4 feet.

These scattered features, characteristic of the natives of Mexico, belong to the Indian peasant, whose civilization, as we have already stated, is somewhat akin to that of the Chinese and Japanese. I am able only to portray still more imperfectly the manners of the pastoral Indians, whom the Spaniards include under the denomination of Indios Bravos, and of whom I have merely seen a few individuals, brought to the capital as prisoners of war.

The Mecos (a tribe of the Chichimecks,) the Apaches, the Lipans, are hordes of hunters, who, in their incursions, for the most part, nocturnal, infest the frontiers of New Biscay, Sonora, and New Mexico.

These savages, as well as those of South America, display more nobility of mind and more force of character than the agricultural Indians.

Some tribes of them possess even languages of which the mechanism proves an ancient civilization.

They experience great difficulty in learning our European idioms, while they express themselves in their own with great facility.

These very Indian chiefs, whose solemn taciturnity astonishes the observer, hold discourses for hours when any great interest excites them to break their natural silence.

We observed the same volubility of tongue in the missions of Spanish Guiana, and among the Caribs of the lower Orinoco, of which the language is singularly rich and sonorous.

Gilij, an Italian missionary, who resided eighteen years among the nations of the Orinoco, and became master of their languages, published three octavo volumes at Rome, in 1780-1-2, which he entitled Saggio di Storia Americana.

In these volumes there is much information with regard to the Indians, particularly those of Orinoco.

From the samples which he gives of their languages, some of them would seem to be remarkably expressive, as well as sonorous, and form in the latter respect a singular contrast to those of Mexico.

All the words of the Orinochese languages, he says, constantly end in vowels, and none of these languages are difficult to pronounce.

But though they end in vowels, they have nothing of the inarticulate appearance of the vowel languages of the South Sea.

What wilt thou eat to-morrow? is thus expressed in the Maipurese language:

Nunaunari iti pare peccari upie?

The following will serve to show the expressiveness of the Maipurese language:

one who has no father, one who has no mother, one who has no wife, one who has no children:

Macchivacaneteni, matuteni, maanituteni, maaniteni.

Here are a few vocables from the Tamanic and Maipurese languages, with the corresponding ones in English.

Gilij describes the nations of the Orinoco as libidinous, which sounds rather singularly, applied to Indians; and he gives a very amusing account of their powers of mimickry, and the manner in which they counterfeit the language and gestures of the missionaries, for the purpose of turning them into ridicule.

One would think, almost, that the French nation had sitten for the following portrait of the Maipurese.

“Generalmente adunque parlando, son gli Orinochesi di genio allegro; ma sopra ogni altra nazione spiccano i Maipuri per l’affabilita e l’amorevolezza con cui trattono i forestieri.

Quindi e l’amore che portan loro gli Europei tutti, che li conoscano.

Non v’ ha forse Indiani, che piu si affaciano all umore di ognuno.

Fanno delle amicizie con tutti, ed appena trovasi in Orinoco una nazione in cui non siavi qualche Maipure.

La loro lingua siccome facilissima ad imparare, e divenuta tra gli Orinochesi una lingua di moda; e chi poco, chi molto, chi mediocremente, chi bene, la parlano quasi tutti.

I Maipuri nondimeno (il che toglie loro un gran pregio) sono inconstanti, poco schietti; e non tanto internamente buoni, quanto per l’innata loro civilta compajono agli altri. Vol. ii. p. 43. Father Gumilla speaks highly of the state of music among the tribes of the Orinoco. Trans.

After examining the physical constitution and intellectual faculties of the Indians, it remains for us to give a rapid survey of their social state.

The history of the lower classes of a people is the relation of the events which, in creating at the same time a great inequality of fortune, enjoyment, and individual happiness, have gradually placed a part of the nation under the tutory and control of the other.

We shall seek in vain this relation in the annals of history.

They transmit to us the memory of the great political revolutions, wars, conquests, and the other scourges which have inflicted humanity; but they inform us nothing of the more or less deplorable lot of the poorest and most numerous class of society.

The cultivator enjoys freely, only in a very small part of Europe, the fruits of his labour; and we are forced to own that this civil liberty is not so much the result of an advanced civilization, as to the effect of those violent crises during which one class or one state has taken advantage of the dissensions of the other.

The true perfection of social institutions depends no doubt on information and intellectual cultivation; but the concatenation of the springs which move a state is such, that in one part of the nation this cultivation may make a very remarkable progress without the situation of the lower orders becoming more improved.

Almost the whole north of Europe confirms this sad experience.

There are countries there, where, notwithstanding the boasted civilization of the higher classes of society, the peasant still lives in the same degradation under which he groaned three or four centuries ago.

We should think higher, perhaps of the situation of the Indians were we to compare it with that of the peasants of Courland, Russia, and a great part of the north of Germany.

English.

Tamanic.

Maip.

Earth Noni Peni Heaven Capu Eno Water Tuno Veni Father Papa Nape Sun Veju Chie Fire Vaplo Catti Bread Ute Ussi

The Indians whom we see scattered throughout the cities, and spread especially over the plains of Mexico, whose number (without including those of mixed blood) amounts to two millions and a half, are either descendants of the old peasantry, or the remains of a few great Indian families, who, disdaining alliance with the Spanish conquerors, preferred rather to cultivate with their hands the fields which were formerly cultivated for them by their vassals.

This diversity has a sensible influence on the political state of the natives, and divides them into tributary and noble or cacique Indians.

The latter, by the Spanish laws, ought to participate in the privileges of the Castilian nobility.

But in their present situation this is merely an illusory advantage.

It is now difficult to distinguish, from their exterior, the caciques from these Indians whose ancestors in the time of Montezuma II. constituted the lower cast of the Mexican nation.

The noble, from the simplicity of his dress and mode of living, and from the aspect of misery which he loves to exhibit, is easily confounded with the tributary Indian.

The latter shows to the former a respect which indicates the distance prescribed by the ancient constitutions of the Aztec hierarchy.

The families who enjoy the hereditary rights of Cacicasgo, far from protecting the tributary cast of the natives, more frequently abuse their power and their influence.

Exercising the magistracy in the Indian villages, they levy the capitation tax: they not only delight in becoming the instruments of the oppressions of the whites; but they also make use of their power and authority to extort small sums for their own advantage.

Well informed intendants, who have bestowed much attention for a long time to the detail of this Indian administration, assured me that the oppressions of the caciques bore very heavy on the tributary Indians.

In the same manner, in many parts of Europe where the Jews are still deprived of the rights of naturalization, the rabbins oppress the members of the community confided to them.

Moreover, the Aztec nobility display the same vulgarity of manners, and the same want of civilization with the lower Indians.

They remain, as it were, in the same state of insulation; and examples of native Mexicans, enjoying the Cacicasgo, following the sword or the law are infinitely rare.

We find more Indians in ecclesiastical functions, particularly in that of parish priests: the solitude of the convent appears only to have attractions for the young Indian girls.

When the Spaniards made the conquest of Mexico, they found the people in that state of abject submission and poverty which everywhere accompanies despotism and feudality.

The emperor, princes, nobility, and clergy, (the teopixqui,) alone possessed the most fertile lands; the governors of provinces indulged with impunity in the most severe exactions; and the cultivator was everywhere degraded.

The highways, as we have already observed, swarmed with mendicants; and the want of large quadrupeds forced thousands of Indians to perform the functions of beasts of burden, and to transport the maize, cotton, hides, and other commodities, which the more remote provinces sent by way of tribute to the capital.

The conquest rendered the state of the lower people still more deplorable.

The cultivator was torn from the soil, and dragged to the mountains, where the working of the mines commenced; and a great number of Indians were obliged to follow the armies, and to carry, without sufficient nourishment or repose, through mountainous woods, burdens which exceeded their strength.

All Indian property, whether in land or goods, was conceived to belong to the conqueror.

This atrocious principle was even sanctioned by a law, which assigns to the Indians a small portion of ground around the newly constructed churches.

The court of Spain seeing that the new continent was depopulating very rapidly, took measures, beneficial in appearance, but which the avarice and cunning of the conquerors (conquistadores) contrived to direct against the very people whom they were intended to relieve.

The system of encomiendas was introduced.

The Indians, whose liberty had in vain been proclaimed by queen Isabella, were till then slaves of the whites, who appropriated them to themselves indiscriminately.

By the establishment of the encomiendas, slavery assumed a more regular form. To terminate the quarrels among the conquistadores, the remains of the conquered people were shared out; and the Indians, divided into tribes of several hundreds of families, had masters named to them in Spain from among the soldiers who had acquired distinction during the conquest, and from among the people of the law, sent out by the court as a counterpoise to the usurping power of the generals.

These powerful men frequently bore only the simple title of licenciados, from the degree which they had taken in their faculties.

A great number of the finest encomiendas were distributed among the monks; and religion, which from its principles ought to favour liberty, was itself degraded in profiting by the servitude of the people.

This partition of the Indians attached them to the soil; and their work became the property of the encomenderos.

The slave frequently took the family name of his master.

Hence many Indian families bear Spanish names, without their blood having been in the least degree mingled with the European.

The court of Madrid imagined that it had bestowed protectors on the Indians: it only made the evil worse, and gave a more systematical form to oppression.

And yet the priests could not conceive why the people run off like children from school, as one of them emphatically has it!

Su ruda ignorancia les hace proceder (aunque viejos) con las modales proprios de ninos, y con tan leve motivo, como un nino se huye de la Escuela, se huye un cacique con todos sus vasailos de un Pueblo, y queda solo el missionero: tal es su inconstancia!!

Gumilla, vol. i. p. 117. Trans.

Such was the state of the Mexican cultivators in the 16th and 17th centuries.

In the 18th their situation assumed progressively a better appearance.

The families of the conquistadores are partly extinguished; and the encomiendas, considered as fiefs, were not redistributed.

The viceroys, and especially the audiencias, watched over the interests of the Indians; and their liberty, and, in some provinces, their ease of circumstances even, have been gradually augmenting.

It was king Charles the third especially who, by measures equally wise and energetic, became the benefactor of the Indians. He annulled the encomiendas; and he prohibited the repartimientos, by which the corregidors arbitrarily constituted themselves the creditors, and consequently the masters, of the industry of the natives, by furnishing them, at extravagant prices, with horses, mules and clothes, (ropa.)

The establishment of intendancies, during the ministry of the count de Galvez, was a memorable epoqua for Indian prosperity.

The minute vexations to which the cultivator was incessantly exposed from the subaltern Spanish and Indian magistracy, have singularly diminished under the active superintendance of the intendants; and the Indians begin to enjoy advantages which laws, gentle and humane in general, afforded them, but of which they were deprived in ages of barbarity and oppression.

The first choice of the persons to whom the count confided the important places of intendant or governor of a province was extremely fortunate.

Among the twelve who shared the administration of the country in 1804, there was not one whom the public accused of corruption or want of integrity.

Mexico is the country of inequality.

No where does there exist such a fearful difference in the distribution of fortune, civilization, cultivation of the soil, and population.

The interior of the country contains four cities, which are not more than one or two days journey distant from one another, and possess a population of 35,000, 67,000, 70,000, and 135,000.

The central table-land from La Puebla to Mexico, and from thence to Salamanca and Zelaya, is covered with villages and hamlets like the most cultivated parts of Lombardy.

To the east and west of this narrow stripe, succeed tracts of uncultivated ground, on which cannot be found ten or twelve persons to the square league.

The capital and several other cities have scientific establishments, which will bear a comparison with those of Europe.

The architecture of the public and private edifices, the elegance of the furniture, the equipages, the luxury and dress of the women, the tone of society, all announce a refinement to which the nakedness, ignorance, and vulgarity of the lower people form the most striking contrast.

This immense inequality of fortune does not only exist among the cast of whites, (Europeans or Creoles,) it is even discoverable among the Indians.

The Mexican Indians, when we consider them en masse, offer a picture of extreme misery.

Banished into the most barren districts, and indolent from nature, and more still from their political situation, the natives live only from hand to mouth.

We should seek almost in vain among them for individuals who enjoy any thing like a certain mediocrity of fortune.

Instead, however, of a comfortable independency, we find a few families whose fortune appears so much the more colossal, as we least expect it among the lowest class of the people.

In the intendancies of Oaxaca and Valladolid, in the valley of Toluca, and especially in the environs of the great city of la Puebla de los Angeles, we find several Indians, who under an appearance of poverty conceal considerable wealth.

When I visited the small city of Cholula, an old Indian woman was buried there, who left to her children plantations of maguey (agave) worth more than 360,000 francs.

These plantations are the vineyards and sole wealth of the country.

However, there are no caciques at Cholula; and the Indians there are all tributary, and distinguished for their great sobriety, and their gentle and peaceable manners.

The manners of the Cholulans exhibit a singular contrast to those of their neighbours of Tlascala, of whom a great number pretend to be the descendants of the highest titled nobility, and who increase their poverty by a litigious disposition and a restless and turbulent turn of mind.

Among the most wealthy Indian families at Cholula are the Axcotlan, the Sarmientos and Romeros; at Guaxocingo, the Sochipiltecatl; and especially the Tecuanouegues in the village de los Reyes.

Each of these families possesses a capital of from 800,000 to 1,000,000 of livres.

They enjoy, as we have already stated, great consideration among the tributary Indians; but they generally go barefooted, and covered with a Mexican tunic of coarse texture and a brown colour, approaching to black, in the same way as the very lowest of the Indians are usually dressed.

15,0001. sterling. Trans.

From 33,336l. to 41,670l. sterling. Trans.

The Indians are exempted from every sort of indirect impost.

They pay no alcavala; and the law allows them full liberty for the sale of their productions.

The supreme council of finances of Mexico, called the junta superior de Real Hacienda, endeavoured from time to time, especially within these last five or six years, to subject the Indians to the alcavala.

We must hope that the court of Madrid, which in all times has endeavoured to protect this unfortunate race, will preserve to them their immunity so long as they shall continue subject to the direct impost of the tributos.

This impost is a real capitation tax, paid by the male Indians between the ages of ten and fifty.

The tribute is not the same in all the provinces of New Spain; and it has been diminished within the last two hundred years.

In 1601, the Indian paid yearly 32 reals of plata of tributo, and 4 reals of servicio real, in all nearly 23 franks.

It was gradually reduced in some intendancies to 15 and even to five franks.

In the bishopric of Mechoacan, and in the greatest part of Mexico, the capitation amounts at present to 11 francs.

Besides, the Indians pay a parochial duty (derechos parroquialos) of 10 franks for baptism, 20 franks for a certificate of marriage, and 20 franks for interment.

We must also add to these 61 franks, which the church levies as an impost on every individual, from 25 to 30 franks for offerings which are called voluntary, and which go under the names of cargos de cofradias, responsos, and misas para sacar animas.

19s.

2d. Trans.

12s.

6d. and 4s.

2d. Trans.

Compendio de la historia de la Real Hacienda de Nueva Espana, a manuscript work presented by Don Joacquin Maniau, in 1793, to the secretary of state Don Diego de Gardoqui, of which there is a copy in the archives of the viceroyalty.

9s.

2d. Trans.

The Spanish clergy seem to have been perfectly disposed to make the Indians pay pretty well beforehand in earthly treasure for the heavenly felicity (eterna dicha) they communicated to them.

But what were these trifles when weighed in the balance with the immensity of the benefits imported by the catholic arms into these provinces?

“El feliz tiempo,” exclaims the reverend Father Gumilla, “para tantos millones de Indios, como ya, por la Bondad de Dios, se han salvado, y salvan (aunque infeliz para los que aun estan en su ciega ignorancia, o ciegamente resisten a la luz evangelica) empezo desde que las armas catholicas tomaron possession de las principales provincias de aquellos dos vastos imperios, y prosiegue hasta ahora, creciendo siempre en todos angulos del Nuevo mundo la luz de la Santa Fe, para eterna dicha de aquellos infelices hijos d’Adan, (vol. i. p 74.) Trans.

If the legislation of queen Isabella and the emperor Charles V. appears to favour the Indians with regard to imposts, it has deprived them, on the other hand, of the most important rights enjoyed by the other citizens.

In an age when it was formally discussed if the Indians were rational beings, it was conceived granting them a benefit to treat them like minors, to put them under the perpetual tutory of the whites, and to declare null every act signed by a native of the copper-coloured race, and every obligation which he contracted beyond the value of 15 francs.

These laws are maintained in full vigor; and they place insurmountable barriers between the Indians and the other casts, with whom all intercourse is almost prohibited.

Thousands of inhabitants can enter into no contract which is binding; (no pueden tratar y contratar;) and condemned to a perpetual minority, they become a charge to themselves and the state in which they live.

I cannot better finish the political view of the Indians of New Spain than by laying before the reader an extract from a memoir presented by the bishop and chapter of Mechoacan to the king, in 1799, which breathes the wisest views, and the most liberal ideas.

Informe del Obispo y cabildo ecclesiastico de Valladolid de Mechoacan al Rey sobre Jurisdiction y Ymunidades del Clero Americano.

This report, which I possess in manuscript, containing more than 10 sheets, was drawn up on the occasion of the famous Cedula real of the 25th October, 1795, which permitted the secular judge to try the delittos enormes of the clergy.

The Sala del crimen, persuaded of their right, treated the priests with severity, and cast them into the same prisons with the lowest classes of the people.

In this struggle, the audiencia ranged themselves on the side of the clergy.

Disputes of jurisdiction are very common in distant countries.

They are pursued with so much the greater keenness, as the European policy, from the first discovery of the new world, has always considered the disunion of casts, of families, and constituted authorities, the surest means of preserving the colonies in a dependence on the mother country.

This respectable bishop, whom I had the advantage of knowing personally, and who terminated his useful and laborious life at the advanced age of 80, represents to the monarch, that in the actual state of things the moral improvement of the Indian is impossible, if the obstacles are not removed which oppose the progress of national industry.

He confirms the principles which he lays down by several passages from the works of Montesquieu and Bernardin de St. Pierre.

These citations can hardly fail to surprise us from the pen of a prelate belonging to the regular clergy, who passed a part of his life in convents, and who filled an episcopal chair on the shores of the South Sea.

“The population of New Spain,” says the bishop, towards the end of his memoir, “is composed of three classes of men, whites or Spaniards, Indians and castes.

I suppose the Spaniards to compose the tenth part of the whole mass.

In their hands almost all the property and all the wealth of the kingdom are centered.

The Indians and the castes cultivate the soil; they are in the service of the better sort of people; and they live by the work of their hands.

Hence there results between the Indians and the whites that opposition of interests, and that mutual hatred, which universally takes place between those who possess all and those who possess nothing, between masters and those who live in servitude.

Thus we see, on the one hand, the effects of envy and discord, deception, theft, and the inclination to prejudice the interests of the rich; and on the other, arrogance, severity, and the desire of taking every moment advantage of the helplessness of the Indian. I am not ignorant that these evils everywhere spring from a great inequality of condition.

But in America they are rendered still more terrific, because there exists no intermediate state; we are rich or miserable, noble or degraded, by the laws or the force of opinion, (infame de derecho y hecho.)

Fray Antonio de San Miguel, monk of St.

Jerome de Corvan, native of the Montanas de Santander.

“In fact, the Indians and the races of mixed blood (castas) are in a state of extreme humiliation.

The colour peculiar to the Indians, their ignorance, and especially their poverty, remove them to an infinite distance from the whites, who occupy the first rank in the population of New Spain.

The privileges which the laws seem to concede to the Indians are of small advantage to them, perhaps they are rather hurtful.

Shut up in a narrow space of 600 varas (500 metres) of radius, assigned by an ancient law to the Indian villages, the natives may be said to have no individual property, and are bound to cultivate the common property, (bienes de communidad.)

This cultivation is a load so much the more insupportable to them, as they have now for several years back lost all hopes of ever being able to enjoy the fruit of their labour.

The new arrangement of intendancies bears, that the natives can receive no assistance from the funds of the communalty without a special permission of the board of finances of Mexico, (junta superior de la Real Hacienda.”)

The communal property has been farmed out by the intendants; and the produce of the labour of the natives is poured into the royal treasury, where the officiales reales keep an account, under special heads, of what they call the property of each village.

I say what they call the property, for this property is nothing more than a fiction for these last twenty years.

The intendant even cannot dispose of it in favour of the natives, who are wearied of demanding assistance from the communalty funds.

The junta de Real Hacienda demands informes from the fiscal and the asesor of the viceroy.

Whole years pass in accumulating documents, but the Indians remain without any answer.

The money of the caxas de communidades is so habitually considered as having no fixed destination, that the intendant of Valladolid sent in 1798 more than a million of franks to Madrid, which had been accumulating for twelve years.

The king was told that it was a gratuitous and patriotic gift from the Indians of Mechoacan to the sovereign, to aid in the prosecution of the war against England!

1,640 feet. Trans.

41,670l. sterling. Trans.

“The law prohibits the mixture of casts; it prohibits the whites from taking up their residence in Indian villages; and it prevents the natives from establishing themselves among the Spaniards.

This state of insulation opposes obstacles to civilization.

The Indians are governed by themselves; all their subaltern magistrates are of the copper-coloured race.

In every village we find eight or ten old Indians who live at the expense of the rest, in the most complete idleness, whose authority is founded either on a pretended elevation of birth, or on a cunning policy transmitted from father to son.

These chiefs, generally the only inhabitants of the village who speak Spanish, have the greatest interest in maintaining their fellow-citizens in the most profound ignorance; and they contribute the most to perpetuate prejudices, ignorance, and the ancient barbarity of manners.

“Incapable, from the Indian laws, of entering into any contract, or running in debt to the extent of more than five piastres, the natives can only attain to an amelioration of their lot, and enjoy some sort of comfort as common labourers, or as artisans.

Solorzano, Fraso, and other Spanish authors, have in vain endeavoured to investigate the secret cause why the privileges conceded to the Indians have constantly produced the most unfavourable effects to them. I am astonished that these celebrated jurisconsults never conceived that what they call a secret cause springs from the very nature of these privileges.

They are arms which never have served for the protection of those which they were destined to detend, and which the citizens of the other casts could not fail to employ against the Indian race.

Such an union of deplorable circumstances has produced in them an indolence of mind, and that state of indifference and apathy in which man is neither affected by hope nor fear.

“The casts, descendants of negro slaves, are branded with infamy by the law, and are subjected to tribute.

This direct impost imprints on them an indelible stain; they consider it as a mark of slavery transmissible to the latest generations.

Among the mixed race, among the mestizoes and mulattoes, there are many families, who, from their colour, their physiognomy, and their cultivation, might be confounded with the Spaniards; but the law keeps them in a state of degradation and contempt.

Endowed with an energetic and ardent character, these men of colour live in a constant state of irritation against the whites; and we must be astonished that their resentment does not more frequently dispose them to acts of vengeance.

“The Indians and the casts are in the hands of the magistrates of districts (justicias territoriales) whose immorality has not a little contributed to their misery.

So long as the alcaldias mayores subsisted in Mexico, the alcaldes considered themselves as merchants who had acquired an exclusive privilege of buying and selling in their provinces, and who could draw from this privilege, in some sort or other, from 30,000 to 200,000 piastres, from 150,000 to 1,000,000 francs, and what is more, in the short space of five years.

These usurious magistrates compelled the Indians to purchase, at arbitrary prices, a certain number of cattle.

By this means the natives became their debtors.

Under the pretext of recovering the capital and usury, the alcalde mayor disposed of the Indians, the whole year around, as true slaves.

The individual happiness of these unfortunate wretches was not certainly increased by the sacrifice of their liberty, for a horse or a mule to work for their master’s profit.

But yet in the midst of this state of things, brought on by abuses, agriculture and industry were seen to increase.

From 6,250l. to 41,670l. sterling. Trans.

“On the establishment of intendancies, the government wished to put an end to the oppressions which arose from the repartimientos.

In place of alcaldes mayores, they named subdelegados, subaltern magistrates, to whom every sort of traffic was prohibited.

As no salaries were assigned to them, or any sort of fixed emolument, the evil has become worse.

The alcaldes mayores administered justice with impartiality whenever their own interests were not concerned.

The subdelegates of the intendants having no other revenues but casualties, believed themselves authorised to employ illicit means to procure themselves a comfortable subsistence.

Hence the perpetual oppressions and the abuses of authority to which the poor were subject; and hence the indulgence towards the rich, and the shameful traffic of justice.

The intendants find the greatest difficulties in the choice of the subdelegados, from whom, in the actual state of things, the Indians can neither expect support nor protection.

That support and that protection they seek from the clergy; and hence the constant opposition in which the clergy and subdelegates usually live.

However the natives place more confidence in the clergy and magistrates of a superior rank, the intendants and the oidores, (members of the audiencia.)

Now, Sire, what attachment can the Indian have to the government, despised and degraded as he is, and almost without property and without the hope of ameliorating his existence?

He is merely attached to social life by a tie which affords him no advantage.

Let not your majesty believe, that the dread of punishment alone is sufficient to preserve tranquillity in this country: there must be other motives, there must be more powerful motives.

If the new legislation which Spain expects with impatience do not occupy itself with the situation of the Indians and people of colour, the influence which the clergy possess over the hearts of these unfortunate people, however great it may be, will not be sufficient to contain them in the submission and respect due to their sovereign.

“Let the odious personal impost of the tributo be abolished; and let the infamy (infamia de derecho) which unjust laws have attempted to stamp on the people of colour be at an end; let them be declared capable of filling every civil employment which does not require a special title of nobility; let a portion of the demesnes of the crown, (tierras realenguas,) which are generally uncultivated, be granted to the Indians and the casts; let an agrarian law be passed for Mexico similar to that of the Asturias and Gallicia, by which the poor cultivator is permitted to bring in under certain conditions the land which the great proprietors have left so many ages uncultivated to the detriment of the national industry; let full liberty be granted to the Indians, the casts, and the whites to settle in villages which at present belong only to one of these classes; let salaries be appointed for all judges and all magistrates of districts; these, Sire, are the six principal points on which the felicity of the Mexican people depends.

“It appears strange, no doubt, that, in a juncture when the finances of the state are in a deplorable situation, we presume to propose to your majesty the abolition of the tribute.

A very simple calculation will prove, however, that the adoption of the measures above indicated, and the conceding to the Indian all the rights of denizens, will increase considerably instead of diminishing the revenues of the state (Real Hacienda.”)

The bishop supposes 810,000 families of Indians and men of colour in the whole extent of New Spain.

Several of these families, especially those of mixed blood, are clothed and enjoy some degree of comfort.

They live nearly in the manner of the lower people of the peninsula; and their number is a third of the whole mass.

The annual consumption of this third part may be estimated at 300 piastres per family.

Reckoning for the other thirds only 60 piastres, and supposing the Indians to pay the alcavala of 14 per cent. like the whites, an annual revenue would be raised of 5,000,000 of piastres, a much greater revenue than the quadruple of the present value of the tributes.

We will not guaranty the accuracy of the numbers on which this calculation is founded; but a simple sketch may suffice to prove, that on establishing an equality of duties and imposts among the different classes of people, not only the abolition of the capitation would create no deficit in the crown revenues, but that these revenues would necessarily increase with the increase of comfort and prosperity among the natives.

67l. 12s.

6d. sterling. Trans.

13l. 2s.

6d. sterling.

Trans.

It is computed that in the warm region of Mexico, a day labourer requires annually for himself and family, in nourishment and clothes, 72 piastres.

The luxury is nearly 20 piastres less in the cold region of the country.

1,093,750l. sterling.

We might have hoped that the administrations of three enlightened viceroys, animated with the most noble zeal for the public good, the marquis de Croix, the count de Revillagigedo, and the chevalier d’Asanza, would have produced some happy changes in the political state of the Indians; but these hopes have been frustrated.

The power of the viceroys has been singularly diminished of late: they are fettered in all their measures, not only by the junta of finances, (de Real Hacienda,) and by the high court of justice, (audiencia,) but also by the government in the mother country, which possesses the mania of wishing to govern in the greatest detail, provinces at the distance of two thousand leagues, the physical and moral state of which are equally unknown to them.

The philanthropists affirm, that it is happy for the Indians that they are neglected in Europe, because sad experience has proved that the most part of the measures adopted for their relief have produced an opposite effect.

The lawyers, who detest innovations, and the Creole proprietors, who frequently find their interest in keeping the cultivator in degradation and misery, maintain that we must not interfere with the natives, because, on granting them more liberty, the whites would have every thing to fear from the vindictive spirit and arrogance of the Indian race.

The language is always the same whenever it is proposed to allow the peasant to participate in the rights of a free man and a citizen.

I have heard the same arguments repeated in Mexico, Peru, and the kingdom of New Granada, which, in several parts of Germany, Poland, Livonia, and Russia, are opposed to the abolition of slavery among the peasants.

Recent examples ought to teach us how dangerous it is to allow the Indians to form a status in statu, to perpetuate their insulation, barbarity of manners, misery, and consequently motives of hatred against the other casts.

These very stupid indolent Indians, who suffer themselves patiently to be lashed at the church doors, appear cunning, active, impetuous, and cruel, whenever they act in a body in popular disturbances.

It may be useful to relate a proof of this assertion.

The great revolt in 1781 very nearly deprived the king of Spain of all the mountainous parts of Peru, at the period when Great Britain lost nearly all her colonies in the continent of America.

Jose Gabriel Condorcanqui, known by the name of the Inca Tupac- Amaru, appeared at the head of an Indian army before the walls of Cusco.

He was the son of the cacique of Tongasuca, a village of the province of Tinta, or rather the son of the cacique’s wife; for it is certain that the pretended Inca was a Mestizo, and that his true father was a monk.

The Condorcanqui family traces its origin up to the Inca Sayri-Tupac, who disappeared in the thick forests to the east of Villcapampa, and to the Inca Tupac- Amaru, who, contrary to the orders of Philip the Second, was decapitated in 1578 under the viceroy Don Francisco de Toledo.

Jose Gabriel was carefully educated at Lima; and he returned to the mountains, after having in vain solicited from the court of Spain the title of marquis d’Oropesa, which belongs to the family of the Inca Sayri-Tupac.

His spirit of vengeance drove him to excite the highland Indians, irritated against the corregidor Arriaga, to insurrection.

The people acknowledged him as a descendant of their true sovereigns, and as one of the children of the sun.

The young man took advantage of the popular enthusiasm which he had excited by the symbols of the ancient grandeur of the empire of Cusco; he frequently bound round his forehead the imperial fillet of the Incas; and he artfully mingled christian ideas with the memorials of the worship of the sun.

In the commencement of his campaigns he protected ecclesiastics and Americans of all colours. -

As he only broke out against Europeans, he made a party even among the Meztizoes and the Creoles; but the Indians, distrusting the sincerity of their new allies, soon began a war of extermination against every one not of their own race.

Jose Gabriel Tupac-Amaru, of whom I possess letters in which he styles himself Inca of Peru, was not so cruel as his brother Diego, and especially his nephew Andres Condorcanqui, who, at the age of 17, displayed great talents but a sanguinary character.

This insurrection, which appears to be very little known in Europe, lasted nearly two years.

I shall give more minute information with regard to it in the historical account of my travels.

Tupac- Amaru had made himself master of the provinces of Quispicanchi, Tinta, Lampa, Azangara, Caravaja and Chumbivilcas, when the Spaniards made him and his family prisoners.

They were all quartered in the city of Cusco.

The respect with which the pretended Inca had inspired the natives was so great, that, notwithstanding their fear of the Spaniards, and though they were surrounded by the soldiers of the victorious army, they prostrated themselves at the sight of the last of the children of the sun, as he passed along the streets to the place of execution.

The brother of Jose Gabriel Condorcanqui, known by the name of Diego Christobal Tupac-Amaru, was executed long after the termination of this revolutionary movement of the Peruvian Indians.

When the chief fell into the hands of the Spaniards, Diego surrendered himself voluntarily, to profit by the pardon promised him in the name of the king.

A formal convention was signed between him and the Spanish general, on the 26th January, 1782, at the Indian village of Siquani, situated in the province of Tinta.

He lived tranquilly in his family, till, through an insidious and distrustful policy, he was arrested on pretext of a new conspiracy.

The horrors exercised by the natives of Peru towards the whites in 1781, and 1782, in the Cordillera of the Andes were repeated in part, twenty years after, in the trifling insurrections which took place in the plain of Riobamba. It is therefore of the greatest importance, even for the security of the European families established for ages in the continent of the new world, that they should interest themselves in the Indians, and rescue them from their present barbarous, abject, and miserable condition.

The market of Mexico is richly supplied with eatables, particularly with roots and fruits of every sort.

It is a most interesting spectacle, which may be enjoyed every morning at sun rise, to see these provisions, and a great quantity of flowers, brought in by Indians in boats, descending the canals of Istacalco and Chalco.

The greater part of these roots is cultivated on the chinampas, called by the Europeans floating gardens.

There are two sorts of them, of which the one is moveable, and driven about by the winds, and the other fixed and attached to the shore.

The first alone merit the denomination of floating gardens, but their number is daily diminishing.

The ingenious invention of chinampas appears to go back to the end of the 14th century.

It had its origin in the extraordinary situation of a people surrounded with enemies, and compelled to live in the midst of a lake little abounding in fish, who were forced to fall upon every means of procuring subsistence.

It is even probable that nature herself suggested to the Aztecs the first idea of floating gardens.

On the marshy banks of the lakes of Xochimilco and Chalco, the agitated water in the time of the great rises carries away pieces of earth covered with herbs, and bound together by roots.

These, floating about for a long time as they are driven by the wind, sometimes unite into small islands.

A tribe of men, too weak to defend themselves on the continent, would take advantage of these portions of ground which accident put within their reach, and of which no enemy disputed the property.

The oldest chinampas were merely bits of ground joined together artificially, and dug and sown upon by the Aztecs.

These floating islands are to be met with in all the zones.

I have seen them in the kingdom of Quito, on the river Guayaquil, of eight or nine metres in length, floating in the midst of the current, and bearing young shoots of bambusa, pistia stratiotes, pontederia, and a number of other vegetables, of which the roots are easily interlaced.

I have found also in Italy, in the small lago di aqua solfa of Tivoli, near the hot baths of Agrippa, small islands formed of sulphur, carbonate of lime, and the leaves of the ulva thermalis, which change their place with the smallest breath of wind.

26 or 29 feet. Trans.

Floating gardens are, as is well known, also to be met with in the rivers and canals of China, where an excessive population compels the inhabitants to have recourse to every shift for increasing the means of subsistence. Trans.

Simple lumps of earth, carried away from the banks, have given rise to the invention of chinampas; but the industry of the Aztec nation gradually carried this system of cultivation to perfection.

The floating gardens, of which very many were found by the Spaniards, and of which many still exist in the lake of Chalco, were rafts formed of reeds, (totora,) rushes, roots, and branches of brushwood.

The Indians cover these light and well connected materials with black mould, naturally impregnated with muriate of soda.

The soil is gradually purified from this salt by washing it with the water of the lake; and the ground becomes so much the more fertile as this lixiviation is annually repeated.

This process succeeds even with the salt water of the lake of Tezcuco, because this water, by no means at the point of its saturation, is still capable of dissolving salt as it filtrates through the mould.

The chinampas sometimes contain even the cottage of the Indian who acts as guard for a group of floating gardens.

They are towed or pushed with long poles when wished to be removed from one side of the banks to the other.

In proportion as the fresh water lake has become more distant from the salt water lake, the moveable chinampas have become fixed.

We see this last class all along the canal de la Viga, in the marshy ground between the lake of Chalco and the lake of Tezcuco.

Every chinampa forms a parallelogram of 100 metres in length, and from five to six metres in breadth.

Narrow ditches, communicating symmetrically between them, separate these squares.

The mould fit for cultivation, purified from salt by frequent irrigations, rises nearly a metre above the surface of the surrounding water.

On these chinampas are cultivated beans, small pease, pimento, (chile, capsicum,) potatoes, artichokes, cauliflowers, and a great variety of other vegetables.

The edges of these squares are generally ornamented with flowers, and sometimes even with a hedge of rose bushes.

The promenade in boats around the chinampas of Istacalco, is one of the most agreeable that can be enjoyed in the environs of Mexico.

The vegetation is extremely vigorous on a soil continually refreshed with water.

328 by 16 or 19 feet.

Trans.

3.28 feet.

Trans.

The valley of Tenochtitlan offers to the examination of naturalists two sources of mineral water, that of Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe, and that of the Penon de los Banos.

These sources contain carbonic acid, sulphate of lime and soda, and muriate of Soda.

Baths have been established there in a manner equally salutary and convenient.

The Indians manufacture their salt near the Penon de los Banos.

They wash clayey lands full of muriate of soda, and concentrate water which have only 12 or 13 to the 100 of salt.

Their caldrons, which are very ill constructed, have only six square feet of surface, and from two to three inches of depth.

No other combustible is employed but mule and cow dung.

The fire is so ill managed, that to produce twelve pounds of salt, which sells at 35 sous, they consume 12 sousworth of combustibles.

This salt pit existed in the time of Montezuma, and no change has taken place in the technical process but the substitution of caldrons of beaten copper to the old earthen vats.

1s. 5 1-2d. Trans.

5 3-4d. Trans.

The hill of Chapoltepec was chosen by the young viceroy Galvez as the site of a villa (Chateau de Plaisance) for himself and his successors.

The castle has been finished externally, but the apartments are not yet furnished.

This building cost the king nearly a million and a half of livres.

The court of Madrid disapproved of the expense, but, as usual, after it was laid out.

The plan of this edifice is very singular.

It is fortified on the side of the city of Mexico.

We perceive salient walls and parapets adapted for cannon, though these parts have all the appearance of mere architectural ornaments.

Towards the north there are fosses and vast vaults capable of containing provisions for several months.

The common opinion at Mexico is, that the house of the viceroy at Chapoltepec is a disguised fortress.

Count Bernardo de Galvez was accused of having conceived the project of rendering New Spain independent of the peninsula; and it was supposed that the rock of Chapoltepec was destined for an asylum and defence to him in case of attack from the European troops.

I have seen men of respectability in the first situations who entertained this suspicion against the young viceroy.

It is the duty of an historian, however, not to yield too easy an acquiescence to accusations of so grave a nature.

The count de Galvez belonged to a family that king Charles the third had suddenly raised to an extraordinary degree of wealth and power.

Young, amiable, and addicted to pleasures and magnificence, he had obtained from the munificence of his sovereign one of the first places to which an individual could be exalted; and, consequently, it could not be becoming in him to break the ties which, for three centuries, had united the colonies to the mother country.

The count de Galvez, notwithstanding his conduct was well calculated to gain the favour of the populace of Mexico, and notwithstanding the influence of the countess de Galvez, as beautiful as she was generally beloved, would have experienced the fate of every European viceroy who aims at independence.

In a great revolutionary commotion, it would never have been forgiven him that he was not born an American.

62,505l. sterling. Trans.

What the intentions of Galvez were is another affair, but can the author seriously believe that these circumstances really do away the suspicions which he has mentioned?

No person was so likely to conceive a project of the sort, as a man dazzled with the suddenness of his elevation; fond of magnificence, and popularity.

Alas! gratitude is but a small obstacle in the way of ambition.

Trans.

Of the fifty viceroys who have governed Mexico from 1535 to 1808, one alone was born in America, the Peruvian Don Juan de Acuna, marquis de Casa Fuerte, (1722-1734,) a disinterested man and good administrator.

Some of my readers will, perhaps, be interested in knowing that a descendant of Christopher Columbus, and a descendant of king Montezuma, were among the viceroys of New Spain.

Don Pedro Nuno Colon, duke de Veraguas, made his entry at Mexico in 1673, and died six days afterwards.

The viceroy Don Joseph Sarmiento Valladares, count de Montezuma, governed from 1697 to 1701.

The castle of Chapoltepec should be sold for the advantage of the government.

As in every country it is difficult to find individuals fond of purchasing strong places, several of the ministers of the Real Hacionda have begun, by selling to the highest bidder the glass and sashes of the windows.

This vandalism, which passes by the name of economy, has already much contributed to degrade an edifice on an elevation of 2,325 metres, and which, in a climate so rude, is exposed to all the impetuosity of the winds.

It would, perhaps, be prudent to preserve this castle as the only place in which the archives, bars of silver, and coin, could be placed, and the person of the viceroy could be in safety in the first moments of a popular commotion The commotions (motinos) of the 12th February, 1608, 15th January, 1624, and 1692, are still in remembrance at Mexico.

In the last of these, the Indians, from want of maize, burned the palace of the viceroy Don Gaspar de Sandoval, count of Galvez, who took refuge in the garden of the convent of St. Francis.

But it was only in those times that the protection of the monks was equivalent to the security of a fortified castle .

7,626 feet.

The reader need not be told, that this is to be understood as the elevation above the level of the sea, and not the height of the hill of Chapoltepec.

Trans.

To terminate the description of the valley of Mexico, it remains for us to give a rapid hydrographical view of this country so intersected with lakes and small rivers.

This view, I flatter myself, will be equally interesting to the naturalist and the civil engineer.

We have already said, that the surface of the four principal lakes occupies nearly a tenth of the valley, or 22 square leagues.

The lake of Xochimilco (and Cholco) contains 6 1-2, the lake of Tezcuco 10 1-10, San Christobal 3 6-10, and Zumpango 1 3-10 square leagues (of 25 to the equatorial degree.)

The valley of Tenochtitlan, or Mexico, is a basin surrounded by a circular wall of porphyry mountains of great elevation.

This basin, of which the bottom is elevated 2,277 metres above the level of the sea, resembles, on a small scale, the vast basin of Bohemia, and (if the comparison is not too bold) the valleys of the mountains of the moon, described by MM. Herschel and Schroeter.

All the humidity furnished by the Cordilleras which surround the plain of Tenochtitlan, is collected in the valley.

No river issues out of it, if we except the small brook (aroyo) of Tequisquiac, which, in a ravine of small breadth, traverses the northern chain of the mountains, to throw itself into the Rio de Tula, or Moteuczoma.

7,468 feet. Trans.

The principal supplies of the lakes of the valley of Tenochtitlan are, 1. The rivers of Papalotla, Tezcuco, Teotihuacan, and Tepeyacac, (Guadalupe,) which pour their waters into the lake of Tezcuco; 2. The rivers of Pachuca and Guautitlan, (Quauhtitlan,) which flow into the lake of Zumpango.

The latter of these rivers (the Rio de Gauautitlan) has the longest course; and its volume of water is more considerable than that of all the other supplies put together.

The Mexican lakes, which are so many natural recipients, in which the torrents deposit the waters of the surrounding mountains, rise by stages, in proportion to their distance from the centre of the valley, or the site of the capital.

After the lake of Tezcuco, the city of Mexico is the least elevated point of the whole valley.

According to the very accurate survey of MM. Velasquez and Castera, the Plaza Mayor of Mexico, at the south corner of the viceroy’s palace, is one Mexican vara, one foot and one inch higher than the mean level of the lake of Tezcuco, which again is four varas and four inches lower than the lake of San Christobal, whereof the northern part is called the lake of Xaltocan.

In this northern part, on two small islands, the villages of Xaltocan and Tonanitla are situated.

The lake of San Christobal, properly so called, is separated from that of Xaltocan by a very ancient dike which leads to the villages of San Pablo and San Tomas, de Chiconautla.

The most northern lake of the valley of Mexico, Zumpango (Tzompango) is 10 varas, 1 foot 6 inches higher than the mean level of the lake of Tezcuco.

A dike (la calzada de la cruz del Rey) divide the lakes of Zumpango into two basins, of which the most western bears the name of Laguna de Zitlaltepec, and the most eastern the name of Laguna de Coyotepec.

The lake of Chalco is at the southern extremity of the valley.

It contains the pretty little village of Xico, founded on a small island; and it is separated from the lake of Xochimilco by the Calzada de San Pedro de Tlahua, a narrow dike which runs from Tuliagualca to San Francisco Tlaltengo.

The level of the fresh water lakes of Chalco and Xochimilco is only 1 vara 11 inches higher than the Plaza Mayor of the capital.

I thought that these details might be interesting to civil engineers wishing to form an exact idea of the great canal (Desague) of Huehuetoca.

According to the classical work of M. Ciscar, (sobre los nuevos pesos y medidas decimales,) the Castilian vara is to the toise=0.5130: 1.1963 and a toise=2.3316 varas.

Don Jorge Juan estimated a Castilian vara at three feet of Burgos, and every foot of Burgos contains 123 lines, twothirds of the pied du roi.

The court of Madrid ordered in 1783 the corps of sea artillery to make use of the measure of varas, and the corps of land artillery the French toise, a difference of which it would be difficult to point out the utility.

Compendio de mathematicas de Don Francisco Xavier Rovira, tom. iv. p. 57 and 63. The Mexican vara is equal to Om, 839.

The manuscript materials of which I have availed myself in the compilation of this notice are, 1. The minute plans drawn up in 1802, by orders of the dean of the high court of Justice, (Decano de la Real Audiencia de Mexico,) Don Cosme de Mier y Trespalacoios; 2. The memoir presented by Don Juan Diaz de la Calle, second secretary of state at Madrid in 1646, to king Philip IV.; 3. The instructions transmitted by the venerable Palafox, bishop of La Puebla and viceroy of New Spain in 1642, to his successor the viceroy Count de Salvatierra; (Marques de Sobroso;) 4. A memoir which cardinal de Lorenzana, then archbishop of Mexico, presented to the viceroy Buccarelli; 5. A notice drawn up by the tribunal de Cuentas of Mexico; 6. A memoir drawn up by orders of the count de Revillagigedo; and 7. The informe de Velasquez. I ought also to mention here the curious work of Zepeda, Historia del Desague, printed at Mexico. I have twice myself examined the canal of Huehuetoca, once in August, 1803, and the second time from the 9th to the 12th January, 1804, in the company of the viceroy Don Jose de Iturrigaray, whose kindness and frankness of procedure towards me I cannot speak in too high terms of.

The elevation of the Plaza Mayor, therefore, above Tezcuco is 47.245 inches, and that of San Christobal 11 feet 8.863 inches. Trans.

29 feet 1 inch 888. Trans.

3 feet 9 inches. Trans.

The difference of elevation of the four great reservoirs of water of the valley of Tenochtitlan was sensibly felt in the great inundations to which the city of Mexico for a long series of ages has been exposed.

In all of them the sequence of the phenomena has been uniformly the same.

The lake of Zumpango, swelled by the extraordinary increases of the Rio de Guautitlan, and the influxes from Pachuca, flows over into the lake of San Christobal, with which the Cienegas of Tepejuelo and Tlapanahuiloya communicate.

The lake of San Christobal bursts the dike which separates it from the lake of Tezcuco.

Lastly, the water of this last basin rises in level from the accumulated influx more than a metre, and traversing the saline grounds of San Lazaro, flows with impetuosity into the streets of Mexico.

Such is the general progress of the inundations: they proceed from the north and the north-west.

The drain or canal called the Desague Real de Huehuetoca is destined to prevent any danger from them; but it is certain, however, that from a coincidence of several circumstances, the inundations of the south, (avenidas del Sur,) on which, unfortunately, the Desague has no influence, may be equally disastrous to the capital.

The lakes of Chalco and Xochimilco would overflow, if in a strong eruption of the volcano Popocatepetl, this colossal mountain should suddenly be stripped of its snows.

While I was at Guayaquil, on the coast of the province of Quito, in 1802, the cone of Cotopaxi was heated to such a degree by the effect of the volcanic fire, that almost in one night it lost the enormous mass of snow with which it was covered.

In the new continent eruptions and great earthquakes are often followed with heavy showers, which last for whole months.

With what dangers would not the capital be threatened were these phenomena to take place in the valley of Mexico, under a zone, where, in years by no means humid, the rain which falls, amounts to 15 decimetres.

39,371 inches. Trans.

59 inches. Trans.

The inhabitants of New Spain think that they can perceive something like a constant period in the number of years which intervene between the great inundations.

Experience has proved that the extraordinary inundations in the valley of Mexico have followed nearly at intervals of 25 years.

Since the arrival of the Spaniards the city has experienced five great inundations, viz. in 1553, under the viceroy Don Luis de Velasco, (el Viejo,) constable of Castile; in 1580, under the viceroy Don Martin Enrequez de Alamanza; in 1604, under the viceroy Montesclaros; in 1607, under the viceroy Don Luis Velasco, (el Segundo,) Marquis de Salinas; and 1629, under the viceroy Marquis de Ceralvo.

This last inundation is the only one which has taken place since the opening of the canal of Huehuetoca; and we shall see hereafter what were the circumstances which produced it.

Since the year 1629 there have still been, however, several very alarming swellings of the waters, but the city was preserved by the desague.

These seven very rainy years were 1648, 1675, 1707, 1732, 1748, 1772, 1795.

Comparing together the foregoing eleven epoquas, we shall find for the period of the fatal recurrence, the numbers of 27, 24, 3, 26, 19, 27, 32, 25, 16, 24, and 23; a series which undoubtedly denotes somewhat more regularity than what is observed at Lima in the return of the great earthquakes.

Toaldo pretends to be able to deduce from a great number of observations, that the very rainy years, and consequently the great inundations, return, every 19 years, according to the terms of the cycle of Saros.

Rozier, journal de physique, 1783.

The situation of the capital of Mexico is so much the more dangerous, that the difference of level between the surface of the lake of Tezcuco and the ground on which the houses are built is every year diminishing.

This ground is a fixed plane, particularly since all the streets of Mexico were paved under the government of the count de Revillagigedo; but the bed of the lake of Tezcuco is progressively rising from the mud brought down by the small torrents, which is deposited in the reservoirs into which they flow.

To avoid a similar inconvenience, the Venetians turned from their Lagunas the Brenta, the Piave, the Livenza, and other rivers, which formed deposits in them.

If we could rely on the results of a survey executed in the 16th century, we should no doubt find that the Plaza Mayor of Mexico was formerly more than eleven decimetres elevated above the level of the lake of Tezcuco, and that the mean level of the lake varies from year to year.

If, on the one hand, the humidity of the atmosphere and the sources have diminished in the mountains surrounding the valley, from the destruction of the forests; on the other hand, the cultivation of the land has increased the depositions and the rapidity of the inundations.

General Andreossy, in his excellent work on the canal of Languedoc, has insisted a great deal on these causes, which are common to all climates.

Waters which glide over declivities, covered with sward, carry much less of the soil along with them than those which run over loose soil.

Now the sward, whether formed from gramina, as in Europe, or small alpine plants, as in Mexico, is only to be preserved in the shade of a forest.

The shrubs and underwood oppose also powerful obstacles to the melted snow which runs down the declivities of the mountains.

When these declivities are stripped of their vegetation, the streams are less opposed, and more easily unite with the torrents which swell the lakes in the neighbourhood of Mexico.

Andreossy on the canal of the South, p. 19

43 3-10. Trans.

It is natural enough, that in the order of hydraulical operations undertaken to preserve the capital from the danger of inundation, the system of dikes preceded that of evacuating canals or drains.

When the city of Tenochtitlan was inundated to such a degree in 1446 that none of its streets remained dry, Motezuma I. (Huehue Monteuczoma,) by advice of Nezahualcojotl, king of Tezcuco, ordered a dike to be constructed of more than 12,000 metres in length, and 20 in breadth.

This dike, partly constructed in the lake, consisted of a wall of stones and clay, supported on each side by a range of palisadoes, of which considerable remains are yet to be seen in the plains of San Lazaro.

This dike of Motezuma I. was enlarged and repaired after the great inundation in 1498, occasioned by the imprudence of king Ahuitzotl.

This prince, as we have already observed, ordered the abundant sources of Huitzilopochco to be conducted into the lake of Tezcuco.

He forgot that the lake of Tezcuco, however destitute of water in time of drought, becomes so much the more dangerous in the rainy season, as the number of its supplies is increased.

Ahuitzotl ordered Tzotzomatzin, citizen of Coyohuacan, to be put to death, because he had courage enough to predict the danger to which the new aqueduct of Huitzilopochco would expose the capital.

Shortly afterwards the young Mexican king very narrowly escaped drowning in his palace.

The water increased with such rapidity, that the prince was grievously wounded in the head, while saving himself by a door which led from the lower apartments to the street.

395,369 by 65,6 feet. Trans.

The Aztecs had thus constructed the dikes (calzadas) of Tlahua and Mexicaltzingo, and l’Albaradon, which extends from Iztapalapan to Tepeyacac, (Guadalupe,) and of which the ruins at present are still very useful to the city of Mexico.

This system of dikes, which the Spaniards continued to follow till the commencement of the 17th century, afforded means of defence, which, if not quite secure, were at least nearly adequate at a period when the inhabitants of Tenochtitlan sailing in canoes were more indifferent to the effects of the more trifling inundations.

The abundance of forests and plantations afforded them great facilities for constructions on piles.

The produce of the floating gardens (chinampas) was adequate to the wants of a frugal nation.

A very small portion of ground fit for cultivation was all that the people required.

The overflow of the lake of Tezcuco was less alarming to men who lived in houses, many of which could be traversed by canoes.

When the new city, rebuilt by Hernan Cortez, experienced the first inundation in 1553, the viceroy Velasco I. caused the Albaradon de San Lazaro to be constructed.

This work, executed after the model of the Indian dikes, suffered a great deal from the second inundation of 1580.

In the third of 1604 it had to be wholly rebuilt.

The viceroy Montesclaros then added, for the safety of the capital, the Presa d’Oculma, and the three calzadas of Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe, San Christobal, and San Antonio Abad.

These great constructions were scarcely finished, when, from a concurrence of extraordinary circumstances, the capital was again inundated in 1607.

Two inundations had never before followed so closely upon one another; and the fatal cycle of these calamities has never since been shorter than sixteen or seventeen years.

Tired of constructing dikes, (albaradones,) which the water periodically destroyed, they discovered at last that it was time to abandon the old hydraulical system of the Indians, and to adopt that of canals of evacuation.

This change appeared so much the more necessary, as the city inhabited by the Spaniards had no resemblance in the least to the capital of the Aztec empire.

The lower part of the houses was now inhabited; few streets could be passed through in boats; and the inconveniencies and real losses occasioned by the inundations were consequently much greater than what they had been in the time of Motezuma.

The extraordinary rise of the river Guautitlan and its tributary streams being looked upon as the principal cause of the inundations, the idea naturally occurred of preventing this river foom discharging itself into the lake of Zumpango, the mean level of the surface of which is 7 ½ metres higher than the Plaza Mayor of Mexico.

In a valley circularly surrounded by high mountains, it was only possible to find a vent for the Rio de Guautitlan through a subterraneous gallery, or an open canal through these very mountains.

In fact, in 1580, at the epoch of the great inundation, two intelligent men, the licenciado Obregon, and the maestro Arciniega, proposed to government to have a gallery pierced between the Cerro de Sincoque, and the Loma of Nochistongo.

This was the point which more than any other was likely to fix the attention of those who had studied the configuration of the Mexican ground.

It was nearest to the Rio de Guautitlan, justly considered the most dangerous enemy of the capital.

Nowhere the mountains surrounding the valley are less elevated, and present a smaller mass than to the N. N. W. of Huehuetoca, near the hills of Nochistongo.

One would say on examining attentively the marly soil of which the horizontal strata fill a porphyritical defile, that the valley of Tenochtitlan formerly communicated at that place with the valley of Tula.

24 6-10 feet. Trans.

INTENDANCY OF NEW CALIFOR- NIA.

The progress of agriculture, in this peaceful conquest of industry is so much the more interesting, as the natives of this coast, very different from those of Nootka and Norfolk bay, were only thirty years ago a wandering tribe, subsisting on fishing and hunting, and cultivating no sort of vegetables.

The Indians of the bay of S.

Francisco were equally wretched at that time with the inhabitants of Van Diemen’s Land.

The natives were found somewhat more advanced in civilization in 1769 only in the canal of Santa Barbara.

They constructed large houses of a pyramidal form close to one another.

They appeared benevolent and hospitable; and they presented the Spaniards with vases very curiously wrought of stalks of rushes. M. Bonpland possesses several of these vases in his collections, which are covered with in with a very thin layer of asphaltus, that renders them impenetrable to water, or the strong liquors which they may happen to contain.

The northern part of California is inhabited by the two nations of the Rumsen and Escelen.

They speak languages totaily different from one another, and they form the population of the presidio and the village of Monterey.

In the bay of San Francisco the language of the different tribes of the Matalans, Salsen, and Quirotes, are derived from a common root.

I have heard several travellers speak of the analogy between the Mexican or Aztec language, and the idioms of the north-west coast of North America. It appeared to me, however, that they exaggerated the resemblance between these American languages.

On examining carefully the vocabularies formed at Nootka and Monterey, I was struck with the similiarty of tone and termination to those of Mexico in several words, as, for example, in the language of the Nootkians; apquixitl (to embrace,) temextixitl (to kiss,) cocotl (otter,) hitlzitl (to sigh,) tzitzimitz (earth,) and imcoatzimitl (the name of a month.) However, the languages of New California and the island of Quadra differ in general essentially from the Aztec, as may be seen in the cardinal numbers brought together in the following table.

Manuscript of Father Lasuen. M. de Galiano calls them Rumsien and Eslen.

Mexican.

Escelen.

Rumsen. Nootka. 1. Ce Pek Enjala Sahuac 2. Ome Ulhai Ultis Atla 3. Jei Julep Kappes Catza 4. Nahui Jamajus Ultitzim Nu 5. Macuilli Pamajala Haliizu Sutcha 6. Chicuace Pegualanai Halishakem Nupu 7. Chicome Julajualanai Kapkamaishakem Atlipu 8. Chicuei Julepjualanai Ultumaishakem Atlcual 9. Chiucnahui Jamajusjualanai Pakke Tzahuacuatl 10. Matlactli Tomoila Tamchaigt Ayo

The Nootka words are taken from a manuscript of M. Mozino, and not from Cook’s vocabulary, in which ayo is confounded with haecoo, nu with mo, &c. &c.

Father Lasuen observed that on an extent of 180 leagues of the coast of California from San Diego to San Francisco, no fewer than 17 languages are spoken, which can hardly be considered as dialects of a small number of mother-languages.

This assertion will not astonish those who know the curious researches of MM.

Jefferson, Volney, Barton, Hervas, William de Humboldt, Vater, and Frederic Schlegel, on the subject of the American languages.

See the classical work of M. Schlegel, on the language, philosophy, and poetry of the Hindoos, in which are to be found very enlarged views relative to the mechanism, I may say the organization, of the languages of the two continents.

The population of New California would have augmented still more rapidly if the laws by which the Spanish presidios have been governed for ages were not directly opposite to the true interests of both mother country and colonies.

By these laws the soldiers stationed at Monterey are not permitted to live out of their barracks and to settle as colonists.

The monks are generally averse to the settlement of colonists of the white cast, because being people who reason, (gente de razon.) they do not submit so easily to a blind obedience as the Indians.

“It is truly distressing,” (says a well informed and enlightened Spanish navigator,) “that the military who pass a painful and laborious life, cannot in their old age settle in the country and employ themselves in agriculture.

The prohibition of building houses in the neighbourhood of the presidio is contrary to all the dictates of sound policy.

If the whites were permitted to employ themselves in the cultivation of the soil and the rearing of cattle, and if the military, by establishing their wives and children in cottages, could prepare an asylum against the indigence to which they are too frequently exposed in their old age, New California would soon become a flourishing colony, a resting place of the greatest utility for the Spanish navigators who trade between Peru, Mexico, and the Philippine islands.”

On removing the obstacles which we have pointed out, the Malouine islands, the missions of the Rio Negro, and the coasts of San Francisco and Monterey, would soon be peopled with a great number of whites.

But what a striking contrast between the principles of colonization followed by the Spaniards, and those by which Great Britain has created in a few years villages on the eastern coast of New Holland!

In the Indian villages the natives are distinguished from the gente de razon.

The whites, mulattoes, negroes, and all the casts which are not Indians go under the designation of gente de razon; a humiliating expression for the natives, which had its origin in ages of barbarism.

Journal of Don Dionisio Galiano.

The Rumsen and Escelen Indians share with the nations of the Aztec race, and several of the tribes of northern Asia, a strong inclination for warm baths.

The temazcalli, still found at Mexico, of which the Abbe Clavigero has given an exact representation, are true vapour baths.

The Aztec Indian remains stretched out in a hot oven, of which the flags are continually watered; but the natives of New California use the bath formerly recommended by the celebrated Franklin, under the name of warm air bath.

We accordingly find in the missions beside each cottage a small vaulted edifice in the form of a temazcalli.

Returning from their labour, the Indians enter the oven, in which a few moments before, the fire has been extinguished; and they remain there for a quarter of an hour.

When they feel themselves covered over with perspiration, they plunge into the cold water of a neighbouring stream, or wallow about in the sand.

This rapid transition from heat to cold, and the sudden suppression of the cutaneous transpiration which a European would justly dread, causes the most agreeable sensations to the savage, who enjoys whatever strongly agitates him or acts with violence on his nervous system.

Clavigero, II. p. 214.

Most readers probably know that this transition from hot to cold bathing is practised also in Russia.

Trans.

The Indians who inhabit the villages of New California have been for some years employed in spinning coarse woollen stuffs, called frisadas.

But their principal occupation, of which the produce might become a very considerable branch of commerce, is the dressing of stag skins. It appears to me that it may not be uninteresting to relate here what I could collect from the manuscript journals of colonel Costanzo, relative to the animals which live in the mountains between San Diego and Monterey, and the particular address with which the Indians got possession of the stags.

In the cordillera of small elevation which runs along the coast, as well as in the neighbouring savannas, there are neither buffaloes nor elks; and on the crest of the mountains which are covered with snow in the month of November, the berendos, with small chamois horns, of which we have already spoken, feed by themselves. But all the forest and all the plains covered with gramina are filled with flocks of stags of a most gigantic size, the branches of which are round and extremely large.

Forty or fifty of them are frequently seen at a time: they are of a brown colour, smooth, and without spot.

Their branches, of which the seats of the antlers are not flat, are nearly 15 decimetres (4 ½ feet) in length.

It is affirmed by every traveller, that this great stag of New California is one of the most beautiful animals of Spanish America. It probably differs from the wewakish of M. Hearne, or the elk of the United States, of which naturalists have very improperly made the two species of cervus canadensis, and cervus strongyloceros.

These stags of New California, not to be found in Old California, formerly struck the navigator Sebastian Viscaino, when he put into the port of Monterey on the 15th December, 1602.

He asserts “that he saw some, of which the branches were three metres (nearly nine feet) in length.”

These venados run with extraordinary rapidity, throwing their head back, and supporting their branches on their backs.

The horses of New Biscay, which are famed for running, are incapable of keeping up with them; and they only reach them at the moment when the animal, who very seldom drinks, comes to quench his thirst.

He is then too heavy to display all the energy of his muscular force, and is easily come up with.

The hunter who pursues him gets the better of him by means of a noose, in the same way as they manage wild horses and cattle in the Spanish colonies.

The Indians make use, however, of another very ingenious artifice to approach the stags and kill them.

They cut off the head of a venado, the branches of which are very long; and they empty the neck, and place it on their own head.

Masked in this manner, but armed also with bows and arrows, they conceal themselves in the brushwood, or among the high and thick herbage.

By imitating the motion of a stag when it feeds, they draw round them the flock, which becomes the victim of the deception.

This extraordinary hunt was seen by M.

Costanzo on the coast of the channel of Santa Barbara; and it was seen twenty four years afterwards in the savannas in the neighbourhood of Monterey by the officers embarked in the galetas Sutil and Mexicana.

The enormous stag-branches which Montezuma displayed as objects of curiosity to the companions of Cortez belonged, perhaps, to the venados of New California. I saw two of them, which were found in the old monument of Xoachicalco, still preserved in the palace of the viceroy.

Notwithstanding the want of interior communication in the fifteenth century, in the kingdom of Anahuac, it would not have been extraordinary if these stags had come from hand to hand from the 35° to the 20° of latitude, in the same manner as we see the beautiful piedras de Mahagua of Brazil among the Caribs, near the mouth of the Orinoco.

4 feet 11 inches English. Trans.

There still prevails a good deal of uncertainty as to the specific characters of the great and small stags (venados) of the new continent.

See the interesting researches of M. Cuvier, contained in his Memoire sur les os fossiles des ruminans.

Annales du Museum, An. VI. p. 353.

Viage a Fuca, p. 164.

The Spanish and Russian establishments being hitherto the only ones which exist on the northwest coast of America, it may not be useless here to enumerate all the missions of New California which have been founded up to 1803.

This detail is more interesting at this period than ever, as the United States have shown a desire to advance towards the west, towards the shores of the great ocean, which, opposite to China, abound with beautiful furs of sea otters.

The missions of New California run from south to north in the order here indicated:

San Diego, a village founded in 1769, fifteen leagues distant from the most northern mission of Old California.

Population in 1802, 1,560.

San Luis Rey de Francia, a village founded in 1798, 600.

San Juan Capistrano, a village founded in 1776, 1,000.

San Gabriel, a village founded in 1771, 1,050.

San Fernando, a village founded in 1797, 600.

San Buenaventura, a village founded in 1782, 950.

Santa Barbara, a village founded in 1786, 1,100.

La Purissima Concepcion, a village founded in 1787, 1,000.

San Luis Obispo, a village founded in 1772, 700.

San Miguel, a village founded in 1797, 600.

Soledad, a village founded in 1791, 570.

San Antonio de Padua, a village founded in 1771, 1,050.

San Carlos de Monterey, capital of New California, founded in 1770, at the foot of the Cordillera of Santa Lucia, which is covered with oaks, pines, (foliis ternis,) and rose bushes.

The village is two leagues distant from the presidio of the same name.

It appears that the bay of Monterey had already been discovered by Cabrillo on the 15th November, 1542, and that he gave it the name of Bahia de los Pinos, on account of the beautiful pines with which the neighbouring mountains are covered.

It received its present name sixty years afterwards from Viscaino, in honour of the viceroy of Mexico, Gaspar de Zunega count de Monterey, an active man, to whom we are indebted for considerable maritime expeditions, and who engaged Juan de Onate in the conquest of New Mexico.

The coasts in the vicinity of San Carlos produce the famous aurum merum (ormier) of Monterey, in request by the inhabitants of Nootka, and which is employed in the trade of otter skins.

The population of San Carlos is 700.

San Juan Bautista, a village founded in 1797, 960.

Santa Cruz, a village founded in 1794, 440.

Santa Clara, a village founded in 1777, 1,300.

San Jose, a village founded in 1797, 630.

San Francisco, a village founded in 1776, with a fine port.

This port is frequently confounded by geographers with the port of Drake further north, under the 38th degree 10th minute of latitude, called by the Spaniards the puerto de Bodega.

Population of San Francisco, 820.

We are ignorant of the number of whites, mestizoes, and mulattoes, who live in New California, either in the presidios or in the service of the monks of St. Francis. I believe their number may be about 1,300; for in the two years of 1801 and 1802, there were in the cast of whites and mixed blood 32 marriages, 182 baptisms, and 82 deaths.

It is only on this part of the population that the government can reckon for the defence of the coast, in case of any military attack by the maritime powers of Europe!

Recapitulation of the total population of New Spain.

Indigenous, or Indians 2,500,000 Whites or Spaniards Creoles 1,025,000 Europeans 75,000 1,100,000 African Negroes 6,100 Casts of mixed blood 1,231,000 Total, 5,837,100

These numbers are only the result of a calculation by approximation.

We have judged proper to adopt the sum total already mentioned.

The reader will perceive on summing up the above table that the amount is only 4,837,100, consequently there is a million of deficiency somewhere. M. de Humboldt elsewhere states the Indians at two-fifths of the whole population of New Spain, so they are not underrated here.

In the commencement of the 7th chapter the author observes that the whites would occupy the second place, considered only in the relation of number.

In the above table, however, they are inferior in number to the casts of mixed blood.

In the second paragraph of the 7th chapter the author states the amount of the whites at 1,200,000.

We are tempted to think that the two first figures of this number ought to change place with one another, which would then make 2,100,000.

This would give us the additional million wanting in the above table.

However, the author adds that nearly a fourth part of the white population of 1,200,000 inhabit the provincias internas.

Now the whole population of the provincias internas, including whatever Indians or other races there may be in them, amounts only to 423,300.

So that deducting the Indians, &c. this number would approach nearer perhaps to a fourth of 1,200,000 than of 2,100,000.

Amidst these difficulties the reader must decide for himself. Trans.

After this view of the provinces of which the vast empire of Mexico is composed, it remains for us to bestow a rapid glance on the coast of the Great Ocean, which extends from the port of San Francisco, and from cape Mendocino to the Russian establishments in Prince William’s Sound.

The whole of this coast has been visited since the end of the 16th century by Spanish navigators; but they have only been carefully examined by order of the viceroys of New Spain since 1774.

Numerous expeditions of discovery have followed one another up to 1792.

The colony attempted to be established by the Spaniards at Nootka fixed for some time the attention of all the maritime powers of Europe.

A few sheds erected on the coast, and a miserable bastion defended by swivel guns, and a few cabbages planted within an enclosure, were very near exciting a bloody war between Spain and England; and it was only by the destruction of the establishment founded at the island of Quadra and of Vancouver that Macuina, the tays or prince of Nootka was enabled to preserve his independence.

Several nations of Europe have frequented this latitude since 1786, for the sake of the trade in sea otter skins; but their rivalry has had the most disadvantageous consequences both for themselves and the natives of the country.

The price of the skins as they rose on the coast of America fell enormously in China.

Corruption of manners has increased among the Indians; and by following the same policy by which the African coasts have been laid waste, the Europeans endeavoured to take advantage of the discord among the Tays.

Several of the most debauched sailors deserted their ships to settle among the natives of the country.

At Nootka, as well as at the Sandwich islands, the most fearful mixture of primitive barbarity with the vices of polished Europe is to be observed.

It is difficult to conceive that the few species of roots of the old continent transplanted into these fertile regions by voyagers, which figure in the list of benefits that the Europeans boast of having bestowed on the inhabitants of the South Sea islands, have proved any thing like a compensation for the real evils which they introduced among them.

At the glorious epoqua in the 16th century, when the Spanish nation, favoured by a combination of singular circumstances, freely displayed the resources of their genius and the force of their character, the problem of a passage to the north-west, and a direct road to the East-Indies, occupied the minds of the Castilians with the same ardour displayed by some other nations within these thirty or forty years. We do not allude to the apocryphal voyages of Ferrer Maldonado, Juan de Fuca and Bartolome Fonte, to which for a long time only too much importance was given.

The most part of the impostures published under the names of these three navigators were destroyed by the laborious and learned discussions of several officers of the Spanish marine.

In place of bringing forward names nearly fabulous, and losing ourselves in the uncertainty of hypotheses, we shall confine ourselves to indicate here what is incontestibly proved by historical documents.

The following notices partly drawn from the manuscript memoirs of Don Antonio Bonilla and M. Casasola, preserved in the archives of the viceroyalty of Mexico, present facts which, combined together, deserve the attention of the reader.

These notices displaying, as it were, the varying picture of the national activity, sometimes excited and sometimes palsied, will even be interesting to those who do not believe that a country inhabited by freemen belongs to the European nation who first saw it.

Memoirs of Don Ciriaco Cevallos.

Researches into the archives of Seville, by Don Augustin Cean.

Historical introduction to the voyage of Galiano and Valdez, p. xlix, lvi, and lxxvi, lxxxiii. Notwithstanding all my inquiries, I could never discover in New Spain a single document in which the pilot Fuca or the admiral Fonte were named.

The names of Cabrillo and Gali are less celebrated than Fuca and Fonte.

The true recital of a modest navigator has neither the charm nor the power which accompany deception.

Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo visited the coast of New California to the 37th degree 10th minute, or the Punta del Ano Nuevo, to the north of Monterey.

He perished (on the 3d January, 1543) at the island of San Bernardo, near the channel of Santa Barbara.

But Bartolome Ferrelo, his pilot, continued his discoveries northwards to the 43d degree of latitude, when he saw the coast of Cape Blanc, called by Vancouver Cape Orford.

According to the manuscript preserved in the archivo general de Indias at Madrid.

Francisco Gali, in his voyage from Macao to Acapulco, discovered in 1582 the north west coast of America under the 57th degree 30th minute.

He admired, like all those who since his time have visited New Cornwall, the beauty of those colossal mountains, of which the summit is covered with perpetual snow, while their bottom is covered with the most beautiful vegetation.

On correcting the old observations by the new in places of which the identity is ascertained, we find that Gali coasted part of the Archipelago of the prince of Wales, or that of king George.

Sir Francis Drake only went as far as the 48th degree of latitude to the north of cape Grenville in New Georgia.

These corrections have been already made in this work wherever the latitudes of the old navigators are cited.

Viage de la Sutil, p. xxxi.

Of the two expeditions undertaken by Sebastian Viscaino in 1596 and 1602, the last only was directed to the coast of New California.

Thirty two maps, drawn up at Mexico, by the cosmographer Henry Martinez, prove that Viscaino surveyed these coasts with more care and more intelligence than was ever done by any pilot before him.

The diseases of his crew, the want of provision, and the extreme rigour of the season, prevented him, however, from ascending higher than cape S. Sebastian, situated under the 42d degree of latitude, a little to the north of the bay of the Trinity.

One vessel of Viscaino’s expedition, the frigate commanded by Antonio Florez, alone passed cape Mendocino.

This frigate reached the mouth of a river in the 43d degree of latitude, which appears to have been already discovered by Cabrillo in 1543, and which was believed by Martin de Aguilar to be the western extremity of the straits of Anian.

We must not confound this entry or river of Aguilar, which could not be found again in our times, with the mouth of the Rio Columbia (latitude 46th degree 15th minute) celebrated from the voyages of Vancouver, Gray, and captain Lewis.

The same of whom we have already spoken in the history of the Desague Real de Huehuetoca.

The straits of Anian, confounded by many geographers with Beering’s straits, meant in the 16th century Hudson’s straits.

It took its name from one of the two brothers embarked on board the vessel of Gasper de Cortereal.

See the learned researches of M. de Fleurieu in the historical introduction to the voyage de Marchand, t. i. p. v.

The brilliant epoqua of the discoveries made anciently by the Spaniards on the north-west coast of America ended with Gali and Viscaino.

The history of the navigations of the 17th century, and the first half of the 18th, offers us no expedition directed from the coast of Mexico to the immense shore from cape Mendocino to the confines of eastern Asia.

In place of the Spanish the Russian flag was alone seen to float in these latitudes, waving on the vessels commanded by two intrepid navigators, Beering and Tschiricow.

At length, after an interruption of nearly 170 years, the court of Madrid again turned its attention to the coast of the Great Ocean.

But it was not alone the desire of discoveries useful to science which roused the government from its lethargy.

It was rather the fear of being attacked in its most northern possessions of New Spain; it was the dread of seeing European establishments in the neighbourhood of those of California.

Of all the Spanish expeditions undertaken between 1774 and 1792 the two last alone bear the true character of expeditions of discovery.

They were commanded by officers whose labours display an intimate acquaintance with nautical astronomy.

The names of Alexander Malaspina, Galiano, Espinosa, Valdez, and Vernaci, will ever hold an honourable place in the list of the intelligent and intrepid navigators to whom we owe an exact knowledge of the northwest coast of the new continent.

If their predecessors could not give the same perfection to their operations, it was because, setting out from San Blas or Monterey, they were unprovided with instruments and the other means furnished by civilized Europe.

The first important expedition made after the voyage of Viscaino was that of Juan Perez, who commanded the corvette Santiago, formerly called la Nueva Galicia.

As neither Cook nor Barrington, nor M. de Fleurieu, appear to have had any knowledge of this important voyage, I shall here extract several facts from a manuscript journal, for which I am indebted to the kindness of M.

Don Guillermo Aguirre, a member of the audiencia of Mexico.

Perez and his pilot, Estevan Jose Martinez, left the port of San Blas on the 24th January, 1774.

They were ordered to examine all the coast from the port of San Carlos de Monterey to the 60th degree of latitude.

After touching at Monterey they set sail again on the 7th of June.

They discovered on the 20th July the island de la Marguerite, (which is the north-west point of Queen Charlotte’s island,) and the strait which separates this island from that of the Prince of Wales.

On the 9th of August they anchored, the first of all the European navigators, in Nootka road, which they called the port of San Lorenzo, and which the illustrious Cook four years afterwards called King George’s Sound.

They carried on barter with the natives, among whom they saw iron and copper.

They gave them axes and knives for skins and otter furs.

Perez could not land on account of the rough weather and high seas.

His sloop was even on the point of being lost in attempting to land; and the corvette was obliged to cut its cables and to abandon its anchors to get into the open sea.

The Indians stole several articles belonging to M.

Perez and his crew; and this circumstance, related in the journal of Father Crespi, may serve to resolve the famous difficulty attending the European silver spoons found there by captain Cook in 1778 in the possession of the Indians of Nootka.

The corvette Santiago returned to Monterey on the 27th August, 1774, after a cruise of eight months.

This journal was kept by two monks, Fray Juan Crespi, and Fray Tomas de la Pena, embarked on board the Santiago.

By these details may be completed what was published in the voyage of La Sutil, p. xcii.

The entrada de Perez of the Spanish maps.

In the following year a second expedition set out from San Blas, under the command of Don Bruno Heceta, Don Juan de Ayala, and Don Juan de la Bodega y Quadra.

This voyage, which singularly advanced the discovery of the north-west coast, is known from the journal of the pilot Maurelle, published by M. Barrington, and joined to the instructions of the unfortunate La Perouse.

Quadra discovered the mouth of the Rio Columbia, called entrada de Heceta, the pic of San Jacinto, (Mount Edgecumbe,) near Norfolk Bay, and the fine port of Bucareli (latitude 55 degrees 24 minutes) which from the researches of Vancouver we know to belong to the west coast of the great island of the archipelago of the Prince of Wales.

This port is surrounded by seven volcanoes, of which the summits, covered with perpetual snow, throw up flames and ashes. M.

Quadra found there a great number of dogs which the Indians use for hunting.

I possess two very curious small maps engraved in 1788, in the city of Mexico, which give the bearings of the coast from the 17° to the 58° of latitude, as they were discovered in the expedition of Quadra.

Carta geografica de la costa occidental de la California, situada al Norte de la linea sobre el mar Asiatico que se discubrio en los anos de 1769 y 1775, por el Teniente de Navio, Don Juan Francisco de Bodega y Quadra y por el Alferez de Fragata, Don Jose Canizares, desde los 17 hasta los 58 grados.

On this map the coast appears almost without entradas and without islands.

We remark l’ensenada de Ezeta (Rio Colombia) and l’entrada de Juan Perez, but under the name of the port of San Lorenzo, (Nootka,) seen by the same Perez in 1774.

Plan del gran puerto de San Francisco discubierto por Don Jose de Canizares en el mar Asiatico.

Vancouver distinguishes the ports of St. Francis, Sir Francis Drake, and Bodega, as three different ports. M. de Fleurieu considers them as identical.

Voyage de Marchand, vol. i. p. liv.

Quadra believes, as we have already observed, that Drake anchored at the port de la Bodega.

The court of Madrid gave orders in 1776 to the viceroy of Mexico, to prepare a new expedition to examine the coast of America to the 70° of north latitude.

For this purpose two corvettes were built, la Princesa and la Favorita; but this building experienced such delay, that the expedition commanded by Quadra and Don Ignacio Arteaga, could not set sail from the port of San Blas till the 11th February, 1779.

During this interval Cook visited the same coast.

Quadra and the pilot Don Francisco Maurelle carefully examined the port de Bucareli, the Mont-Sant Elie, and the island de la Magdalena, called by Vancouver Hinchinbrook island, (latitude 60° 25 minutes,) situated at the entry of prince William’s bay and the island of Regla, one of the most sterile islands in Cook river.

The expedition returned to San Blas on the twenty first November, 1779. I find from a manuscript procured at Mexico, that the schistous rocks in the vicinity of the port of Bucareli in prince of Wales’s island contain metalliferous seams.

The memorable war which gave liberty to a great part of North America prevented the viceroys of Mexico from pursuing expeditions of discovery to the north of Mendocino.

The court of Madrid gave orders to suspend the expeditions so long as the hostilities should endure between Spain and England.

This interruption continued even long after the peace of Versailles; and it was not till 1788 that two Spanish vessels, the frigate la Princesa and the packet-boat San Carlos, commanded by Don Esteban Martinez and Don Gonsalo Lopez de Haro, left the port of San Blas with a design of examining the position and state of the Russian establishments on the north-west coast of America.

The existence of these establishments, of which it appears that the court of Madrid had no knowledge till after the publication of the third voyage of the illustrious Cook, gave the greatest uneasiness to the Spanish government.

It saw with chagrin that the fur trade drew numerous English, French, and American vessels towards a coast which, before the return of lieutenant King to London, had been as little frequented by Europeans as the land of the Nuyts, or that of Endracht in New Holland.

The expedition of Martinez and Haro lasted from the 8th of March to the 5th of December, 1788.

These navigators made the direct route from San Blas to the entry of prince William, called by the Russians the gulf Tschugatskaja.

They visited Cook river, the Kichtak (Kodiak) islands, Schumagin, Unimak, and Unalaschka, (Onalaska.) They were very friendly treated in the different factories which they found established in Cook river and Unalaschka, and they even received communication of several maps drawn up by the Russians of these latitudes.

I found in the archives of the viceroyalty of Mexico a large volume in folio, bearing the title of Riconocimiento de los quatros establecimientos Russos al Norte de la California, hecho en 1788.

The historical account of the voyage of Martinez contained in this manuscript furnishes, however, very few data relative to the Russian colonies in the new continent.

No person in the crew understanding a word of the Russian language, they could only make themselves understood by signs.

They forgot, before undertaking this distant expedition, to bring an interpreter from Europe.

The evil was without remedy.

However, M. Martinez would have had as great difficulty in finding a Russian in the whole extent of Spanish America as Sir George Staunton had to discover a Chinese in England or France.

Since the voyages of Cook, Dixon, Portlock, Mears, and Duncan, the Europeans began to consider the port of Nootka as the principal fur market of the north-west coast of North America.

This consideration induced the court of Madrid to do in 1789 what it could easier have done 15 years sooner, immediately after the voyage of Juan Perez. M. Martinez, who had been visiting the Russian factories, received orders to make a solid establishment at Nootka, and to examine carefully that part of the coast comprised bethe 50° and the 55° of latitude, which captain Cook could not survey in the course of his navigation.

The port of Nootka is on the eastern coast of an island, which, according to the survey in 1791 by MM. Espinosa and Cevallos, is twenty marine miles in breadth, and which is separated by the channel of Tasis from the great island, now called the island of Quadra and Vancouver. It is therefore equally false to assert that the port of Nootka, called by the natives Yucuatl, belongs to the great island of Quadra, as it is inaccurate to say that Cape Horn is the extremity of Terra del Fuego.

We cannot conceive by what misconception the illustrious Cook could convert the name of Yucuatl into Nootka, this last word being unknown to the natives of the country, and having no analogy to any of the words of their language excepting Noutchi, which signifies mountain.

There does not seem to be any difficulty in the matter.

It is very easy for any one at all acquainted with the embarrassment experienced by the ear in catching, and, as it were, disentangling the sounds of a foreign language, to conceive that when the common standard of writing cannot be resorted to, hardly two persons will report the same word alike.

In languages even already familiar to us by writing, it requires a long experience before we can follow the conversation of the natives; what must it therefore be in languages affording no such assistance, and of which many of the sounds are new to European ears.

Thus captain Cook and Mr. Anderson, a surgeon in his expedition, hardly agree in the representation of any one word.

It would appear, however, from what is said of captain Cook by Mr. King, that his ear was by no means very accurate in distinguishing sounds. Trans.

Memoirs de Don Francisco Mozino.

The worthy author was one of the botanists of the expedition of M. Sesse, and remained at Nootka with M. Quadra in 1792.

Wishing to procure every possible information with regard to the north-west coast of North America, I made extracts in 1803 from the manuscript of M. Mozino, for which I was indebted to the friendship of professor Cervantes, director of the botanical garden at Mexico. I have since discovered that the same memoir furnished materials to the learned compiler of the Viage de la Sutil, p. 123. Notwithstanding the accurate information which we owe to the English and French navigators, it would be still interesting to publish the observations of M.

Mozino on the manners of the Indians of Nootka.

These observations embrace a great number of curious subjects, viz. the union of the civil and ecclesiastical power in the persons of the princes or tays; the struggle between Quauz and Matlox, the good and bad principle by which the world is governed; the origin of the human species at an epoqua when stags were without horns, birds without wings, and dogs without tails; the Eve of the Nootkians, who lived solitary in a flowery grove of Yucuatl, when the god Quautz visited her in a fine copper canoe; the education of the first man, who, as he grew up, past from one small shell to a greater; the genealogy of the nobility of Nootka, who descend from the oldest son of the man brought up in a shell, while the rest of the people (who even in the other world have a separate paradise called Pinpula) dare not trace their origin farther back than to younger branches; the calendar of the Nootkians, in which the year begins with the summer solstice, and is divided into fourteen months of 20 days, and a great number of intercalated days added to the end of several months, &c. &c.

Don Esteban Martinez, commanding the frigate La Princesa, and the packet-boat San Carlos, anchored in the port of Nootka on the 5th May, 1789.

He was received in a very friendly manner by the chief Macuina, who recollected very well having seen him with M. Perez in 1774, and who even showed the beautiful Monterey shells which were then presented to him.

Macuina, the tays of the island of Yucuatl, has an absolute authority; he is the Montezuma of these countries; and his name has become celebrated among all the nations who carry on the sea-otter skin trade.

I know not if Macuina yet lives; but we learned at Mexico in the end of 1803, by letters from Monterey, that more jealous of his independence than the king of the Sandwich Islands, who has declared himself the vassal of England, he was endeavouring to procure fire-arms and powder to protect himself from the insults to which he was frequently exposed by European navigators.

The port of Santa Cruz of Nootka (called Puerto de San Lorenzo by Perez, and Friendly cove by Cook) is from seven to eight fathoms in depth.

It is almost shut in on the southeast by small islands, on one of which Martinez erected the battery of San Miguel.

The mountains in the interior of the island appear to be composed of thonschiefer, and other primitive rocks. M.

Mozino discovered among them seams of copper and sulphuretted lead. He thought he discovered near a lake at about a quarter of a league’s distance from the port the effects of volcanic fire in some porous amygdaloid.

The climate of Nootka is so mild, that under a more northern latitude than that of Quebec and Paris the smallest streams are not frozen till the month of January.

This curious phenomenon confirms the observation of Mackenzie, who asserts that the north-west coast of the new continent has a much higher temperature than the eastern coasts of America and Asia situated under the same parallels.

The inhabitants of Nootka, like those of the northern coast of Norway, are almost strangers to the noise of thunder.

Electrical explosions are there exceedingly rare.

The hills are covered with pine, oak, cypress, rose bushes, vaccinium, and andromedes.

The beautiful shrub which bears the name of Linneus was only discovered by the gardeners in Vancouver’s expedition in higher latitudes.

John Mears, and a Spanish officer in particular, Don Pedro Alberoni, succeeded at Nootka in the cultivation of all the European vegetables; but the maize and wheat, however, never yielded ripe grain.

A too great luxuriance of vegetation appears to be the cause of this phenomenon.

The true humming-bird has been observed in the islands of Quadra and Vancouver.

This important fact in the geography of animals must strike those who are ignorant that Mackenzie saw humming birds at the sources of the river of Peace under the 54th degree 24th minute of north latitude, and that M. Galiano saw them nearly under the same southern parallel in the straits of Magellan.

From nearly 7 1-2 to 8 1-2 fathoms English. Trans.

Voyage de Mackenzie, traduit par Castera, vol. III. p. 339. It is even believed by the Indians in the vicinity of the north-west coast that the winters are becoming milder yearly.

This mildness of climate appears to be produced by the north-west winds, which pass over a considerable extent of sea. M. Mackenzie, as well as myself, believes, that the change of climate observable throughout all North America cannot be attributed to petty local causes, to the destruction of forests for example.

Martinez did not carry his researches beyond the 50° of latitude.

Two months after his entry into the port of Nootka he saw the arrival of an English vessel, the Argonaut, commanded by James Collnett, known by his observations at the Galapagos islands.

Collnett showed the Spanish navigator the orders which he had received from his government to establish a factory at Nootka, to construct a frigate and a cutter, and to prevent every other European nation from interfering with the fur trade.

It was in vain Martinez replied, that, long before Cook, Juan Perez had anchored on the same coast.

The dispute which arose between the commanders of the Argonaut and the Princesa was on the point of occasioning a rupture between the courts of London and Madrid.

Martinez, to establish the priority of his rights made use of a violent and very illegal measure: he arrested Collnett, and sent him by San Blas to the city of Mexico.

The true proprietor of the Nootka country, the Tays Macuina, declared himself prudently for the vanquishing party; but the viceroy, who deemed it proper to hasten the recall of Martinez, sent out three other armed vessels in the commencement of the year 1790 to the north-west coast of America.

There had been formed in England in 1785 a Nootka company; under the name of the King George’s Sound Company; and a project was even entertained of forming at Nootka an English colony similar to that of New Holland.

Don Francisco Elisa and Don Salvador Fidalgo, the brother of the astronomer who surveyed the coast of South America from the mouth of the Dragon to Portobello, commanded this new expedition. M.

Fidalgo visited Cook creek and Prince William’s Sound, and he completed the examination of that coast, which was only afterwards examined by the intrepid Vancouver.

Under the 60 degrees 54 minutes of latitude, at the northern extremity of Prince William’s Sound, M. Fidalgo was witness of a phenomenon, probably volcanic, of a most extraordinary nature.

The Indians conducted him into a plain covered with snow, where he saw great masses of ice and stone thrown up to prodigious heights in the air with a dreadful noise.

Don Francisco Elisa remained at Nootka to enlarge and fortify the establishment founded by Martinez in the preceding year.

It was not yet known in this part of the world, that by a treaty signed at the Escurial on the 28th October, 1790, Spain had desisted from her pretensions to Nootka and Cox channel in favour of the court of London.

The frigate Dedalus, which brought orders to Vancouver to watch over the execution of this treaty, only arrived at the port of Nootka in the month of August, 1792, at an epoqua when Fidalgo was employed in forming a second Spanish establishment to the south-east of the island of Quadra on the continent, at the port of Nunez Gaona, or Quinicamet, situated under the 48 degrees 20 minutes of latitude, at the creek of Juan de Fuca.

See my Recueil d’Observations Astronomiques, vol. i. liv. i.

The expedition of captain Elisa was followed by two others, which, for the importance of their astronomical operations, and the excellence of the instruments with which they were provided, may be compared with the expeditions of Cook, Laperouse, and Vancouver. I mean the voyage of the illustrious Malaspina, in 1791, and that of Galiano and Valdes, in 1792.

The operations of Malaspina and the officers under him, embrace an immense extent of coast from the mouth of the Rio de la Plata to Prince William’s Sound.

But this able navigator is still more celebrated for his misfortunes than his discoveries.

After examining both hemispheres, and escaping all the dangers of the ocean, he had still greater to suffer from his court; and he dragged out six years in a dungeon, the victim of a political intrigue.

He obtained his liberty from the French government, and returned to his native country; and he enjoys in solitude on the banks of the Arno the profound impressions which the contemplations of nature and the study of man under so many different climates have left on a mind of great sensibility, tried in the school of adversity.

The labours of Malaspina remain buried in the archives, not because the government dreaded the disclosure of secrets, the concealment of which might be deemed useful, but that the name of this intrepid navigator might be doomed to eternal oblivion.

Fortunately, the directors of the Deposito Hydrografico of Madrid have communicated to the public the principal results of the astronomical observations of Malaspina’s expedition.

The charts which have appeared at Madrid since 1799, are founded in a great measure on those important results; but instead of the name of the chief, we merely find the names of the corvettes la Descubierta and l’Atrevida, which were commanded by Malaspina.

This deposito was established by a royal order on the 6th of August 1797.

His expedition, which set out from Cadiz on the 30th July, 1789, only arrived at the port of Acapulco, on the 2d February, 1791.

At this period the court of Madrid again turned its attention to a subject which had been under dispute in the beginning of the 17th century, the pretended straits by which Lorenzo Ferrer Maldonado passed in 1588 from the Labrador coast to the Great Ocean.

A memoir read by M.

Buache at the Academy of Sciences revived the hope of the existence of such a passage; and the corvettes la Descubierta and l’Atrevida, received orders to ascend to high latitudes on the north-west coast of America, and to examine all the passages and creeks which interrupt the continuity of the shore between the 53d and 60th degree of latitude.

Malaspina, accompanied by the botanists Haenke and Nee, set sail from Acapulco on the 1st of May, 1791.

After a navigation of three weeks, he reached Cape S. Bartholomew, which had already been ascertained by Quadra in 1775, by Cook in 1778, and in 1786 by Dixon. He surveyed the coast, from the mountain of San Jacinto, near Cape Edgecumbe, (Cabo Engano,) latitude 57 degrees 1 minute 30 seconds to Montagu Island, opposite the entrance of Prince William’s Sound.

During the course of this expedition, the length of the pendulum and the inclination and declination of the magnetic needle were determined on several points of the coast.

The elevation of S. Elie and Mount Fairweather, (or Cerro de buen Tempo) which are the principal summits of the Cordillera of New Norfolk, were very carefully measured.

The knowledge of their height and position may be of great assistance to navigators when they are prevented by unfavourable weather from seeing the sun for whole weeks; for by seeing these pics at a distance of eighty or a hundred miles, they may ascertain the position of their vessel by simple elevations and angles of altitude.

Extract from a journal kept on board the Atrevida, a manuscript preserved in the archives of Mexico.

Viage de la Sutil, p. cxiii.—cxxiii.

Before the expedition in 1789, M. Malaspina had already been round the globe in the frigate l’Astré, destined for Manilla.

The expedition of Malaspina found the height of Mount Elie 5,441 metres, (6507.6 varas,) and the height of Mount Fair-weather 4,489, (5368.3 varas,) consequently the elevation of the former of these mountains is nearly the same as that of Cotopaxi; and the elevation of the second is equal to that of Mont-Rose. See vol. i. p. 48, and my géographie des plantes, p. 153. Author.

The height of the first of these mountains is 17,850, and of the second, 14,992 feet English.

Trans.

After a vain attempt to discover the straits mentioned in the account of the apocryphal voyage of Maldonado, and after remaining some time at Port Mulgrave, in Beering’s Bay, (latitude 59 degrees 34 minutes 20 seconds,) Alexander Malaspina directed his course southwards.

He anchored at the port of Nootka on the 13th August, sounded the channels round the island of Yucuatl, and determined by observations purely celestial the positions of Nootka, Monterey, and the island of Guadaloupe, at which the galleon of the Philippines (la Nao de China) generally stops, and Cape San Lucas.

The corvette l’Atrevida entered Acapulco, and the corvette la Descubierta entered San Blas in the month of October, 1791.

A voyage of six months was no doubt by no means sufficient for discovering and surveying an extensive coast with that minute care which we admire in the voyage of Vancouver, which lasted three years.

However, the expedition of Malaspina has one particular merit, which consists not only in the number of astronomical observations, but also in the judicious method employed for attaining certain results.

The longitude and latitude of four points of the coast, Cape San Lucas, Monterey, Nootka, and Port Mulgrave, were ascertained in an absolute manner.

The intermediate points were connected with these fixed points by means of four sea watches of Arnold.

This method, employed by the officers of Malaspina’s expedition, MM.

Espinosa, Cevallos, and Vernaci, is much better than the partial corrections usually made in chronometrical longitudes by the results of lunar distances.

The celebrated Malaspina had scarcely returned to the coast of Mexico, when discontented with not having seen at a sufficient nearness the extent of coast from the island of Nootka to Cape Mendocino, he engaged count de Revillagigedo, the viceroy, to prepare a new expedition of discovery towards the north-west coast of America.

The viceroy, who was of an active and enterprising disposition, yielded with so much the greater facility to this desire, as new information, received from the officers stationed at Nootka, seemed to give probability to the existence of a channel, of which the discovery was attributed to the Greek pilot, Juan de Fuca, in the end of the 16th century.

Martinez had indeed, in 1774, perceived a very broad opening under the 48th degree 20th minute of latitude.

This opening was successively visited by the pilot of the Gertrudis, by ensign Don Manuel Quimper, who commanded the Bilander la Princesa Real, and in 1791 by captain Elisa.

They even discovered secure and spacious ports in it.

It was to complete this survey that the galeras Sutil and Mexicana left Acapulco on the 8th of March 1792, under the command of Don Dionisio Galiano and Don Cayetano Valdes.

These able and experienced astronomers, accompanied by MM. Salamanca and Vernaci, sailed round the large island which now bears the name of Quadra and Vancouver, and they employed four months in this laborious and dangerous navigation.

After passing the straits of Fuca and Haro, they fell in with, in the channel del Rosario, called by the English the gulf of Georgia, the English navigators Vancouver and Broughton, employed in the same researches with themselves.

The two expeditions made a mutual and unreserved communication of their labours; they assisted one another in their operations; and there subsisted among them till the moment of their separation, a good intelligence and complete harmony, of which, at another epoqua, an example had not been set by the astronomers on the ridge of the Cordilleras.

Galiano, and Valdes, on their return from Nootka to Monterey, again examined the mouth of the Ascencion which Don Bruno Eceta discovered on the 17th of August, 1775, and which was called the river of Columbia by the celebrated American navigator Gray, from the name of the sloop under his command.

This examination was of so much the greater importance, as Vancouver, who had already kept very close to this coast, was unable to perceive any entrance from the 45th degree of latitude to the channel of Fuca; and as this learned navigator began then to doubt of the existence of the Rio de Columbia, or the Entrada de Eceta.

I have already spoken of the facility which the fertile banks of the Colombia affords to Europeans for the founding a colony, and of the doubts started against the identity of this river and the Tacoutche-Tesse, or Oregan of Mackenzie, I know not whether this Oregan enters into one of the great salt-water lakes, which, according to the information afforded by Father Escalante, I have represented under the 39th and 41st degree of latitude.

I do not decide whether or not the Oregan, like many great rivers of South America, does not force a passage through a chain of elevated mountains, and whether or not its mouth is to be found in one of the creeks between the port de la Bodega and Cape Orford; but I could have wished that a geographer, in other respects both learned and judicious, had not attempted to recognise the name of Oregan in that of Origen, which he believes to designate a river in the map of Mexico, published by Don Antonio Alzate.

(Géographie Mathematique, Physique, et Politique, vol. xv. p. 116, and 117.)

He has confounded the Spanish word Origen, the source or origin of a thing, with the Indian word Origan.

The map of Alzate only marks the Rio Colorado, which receives its waters from the Rio Gila.

Near the junction we read the following words:

Rio Colorado ó del Norte, cuyo origen se ignora, of which the origin is unknown.

The negligence with which these Spanish words are divided (they have engraved Nortecuio and Seignora) is undoubtedly the cause of this extraordinary mistake.

In 1797 the Spanish government gave orders that the charts drawn up in the course of the expedition of MM. Galiano and Valdes should be published, “in order that they might be in the hands of the public before those of Vancouver.”

However, the publication did not take place till 1802; and geographers now possess the advantage of being able to compare together the charts of Vancouver, those of the Spanish navigators published by the Deposito Hydrografico of Madrid, and the Russian chart published at Petersburgh in 1802, in the depot of the maps of the charts of the emperor.

This comparison is so much the more necessary, as the same capes, the same passages, and the same islands, frequently bear three or four different names; and geographical synonymy has by that means become as confused as the synonymy of cryptogameous plants has become from an analogous cause.

At the same epoqua at which the vessels Sutil and Mexicana were employed in examining in the greatest detail, the shores between the parallels of 45 and 51 degrees, the count de Revillagigedo destined another expedition for higher latitudes.

The mouth of the river of Martin de Aquilar had been unsuccessfully sought for in the vicinity of Cape Orford and Cape Gregory.

Alexander Malaspina, in place of the famous channel de Maldonado, had only formed openings without any outlet.

Galiano and Valdes had ascertained that the strait of Fuca was merely an arm of the sea, which separates an island of more than 1,700 square leagues, that of Quadra and Vancouver from the mountainous coast of New Georgia.

There still remained doubts as to the existence of the straits, of which the discovery was attributed to the admiral Fuentes or Fonte, which was supposed to be under the 53d degree of latitude.

Cook regretted his want of ability to examine this part of the continent of New Hanover; and the assertions of captain Collnett, an able navigator, rendered it extremely probable that the continuity of the coast was interrupted in these latitudes.

To resolve a problem of such importance, the viceroy of New Spain gave orders to lieutenant Don Jacinto Caamano, commander of the frigate Aranzazu, to examine with the greatest care the shore from the 51st to the 56th degree of north latitude. M.

Caamano, whom I had the pleasure of seeing at Mexico, set sail from the port of San Blas on the 20th March, 1792; and he made a voyage of six months.

He carefully surveyed the northern part of Queen Charlotte’s island, the southern coast of the prince of Wales’s island, which he called Isla de Ulloa, the islands of Revillagigedo, of Banks, (or de la Calamidad,) and of Aristizabal, and the great inlet of Monino, the mouth of which is opposite the archipelago of Pitt.

The considerable number of Spanish denominations preserved by Vancouver in his charts proves that the expeditions, of which we have given a summary account, contributed in no small degree to our knowledge of a coast, which, from the 45 degrees of latitude to cape Douglas to the east of Cook’s creek, is now more accurately surveyed than the most part of the coasts of Europe.

The extent of the island of Quadra and Vancouver, calculated according to the maps of Vancouver, is 1,730 square leagues of 25 to the sexagesimal degree.

It is the largest island to be found on this west coast of America.

I have confined myself to the bringing together at the end of this chapter all the information which I could procure with regard to the voyages undertaken by the Spaniards, from 1553 to our own times, towards the western coast of New Spain to the north of New California.

The assemblage of these materials appeared to me to be necessary in a work embracing whatever concerns the political and commercial relations of Mexico.

The geographers who are eager to divide the world for the sake of facilitating the study of their science, distinguish on the north-west coast an English part, a Spanish part, and a Russian part. These divisions have been made without consulting the chiefs of the different tribes who inhabit these countries!

If the puerile ceremonies which the Europeans call taking possession, and if astronomical observations made on a recently discovered coast could give rights of property, this portion of the new continent would be singularly pieced out and divided among the Spaniards, English, Russians, French, and Americans.

One small island would sometimes be shared by two or three nations at once, because each might have discovered a different cape of it.

The great sinuosity of the coast between the parallels of 55 degrees and 60 degrees embrace the successive discoveries of Gali, Beering, and Tschiricow, Quadra, Cook, Laperouse, Malaspina, and Vancouver!

No European nation has yet formed a solid establishment on the immense extent of coast from cape Mendocino to the 59 degrees of latitude.

Beyond this limit the Russian factories commence, the most part of which are scattered and distant from one another, like the factories established by European nations for these last three hundred years on the coast of Africa.

The most part of these small Russian colonies have no communication with one another but by sea; and the new denominations of Russian America, or Russian possessions in the new continent, ought not to induce us to believe that the coast of the basin of Beering, the peninsula Alaska, or the country of the Tschugatschi have become Russian provinces, in the sense which we give to this word speaking of the Spanish provinces of Sonora or New Biscay.

The western coast of America affords the only example of a shore of 1,900 leagues in length, inhabited by one European nation.

The Spaniards, as we have already indicated in the commencement of this work, have formed establishments from fort Maulin in Chili to S. Francis in New California.

To the north of the parallel of 38 degrees succeed independent Indian tribes.

It is probable that these tribes will be gradually subdued by the Russian colonists, who, towards the end of the last century, passed over from the eastern extremity of Asia to the continent of America.

The progress of these Russian Siberians towards the south ought naturally to be more rapid than that of the Spanish Mexicans towards the north.

A people of hunters, accustomed to live in a foggy, and excessively cold climate, find the temperature of the coast of New Cornwall very agreeable; but this coast appears an uninhabitable country, a polar region to colonists from a temperate climate, from the fertile and delicious plains of Sonora and New California.

See vol. I. p. 6.

The Spanish government since 1788 has begun to testify uneasiness at the appearance of the Russians on the north-west coast of the new continent.

Considering every European nation in the light of a dangerous neighbour, they examined the situation of the Russian factories.

The fear ceased on its being known at Madrid that these factories did not extend eastwards beyond Cook’s Inlet.

When the emperor Paul, in 1799, declared war against Spain, it was some time in agitation at Mexico to prepare a maritime expedition in the ports of San Blas and Monterey against the Russian colonies in America.

If this project had been carried into execution we should have seen at hostilities two nations who, occupying the opposite extremities of Europe, approach each other in the other hemisphere on the eastern and western limits of their vast empires.

The interval which separates these limits becomes progressively smaller; and it is for the political interest of N.

Spain to know accurately the parallel to which the Russian nation has already advanced towards the east and south.

A manuscript which exists in the archives of the viceroyalty of Mexico, already cited by me, gave me only vague and incomplete notions.

It describes the state of the Russian establishments as they were twenty years ago. M.

Malte Brun, in his universal geography, gives an interesting article on the northwest coast of America.

He was the first who made known the account of the voyage of Billings, published by M. Sarytschew, which is preferable to that of M. Sauer. I flatter myself that I am able to give from very recent data, drawn from an official production, the position of the Russian factories, which are merely collections of sheds and huts, that serve, however, as emporiums for the fur trade.

Account of the geographical and astronomical expedition, undertaken for exploring the coast of the Icy sea, the land of the Tshutski, and the islands between Asia and America, under the command of captain Billings, between the years 1785 and 1794, by Martin Sauer, secretary to the expedition.

Putetchestwie flota-kapitana Sarytschewa po severowostochnoi tschasti sibiri, ledowitawa mora, i wostochnogo okeana, 1804.

Carte des decouvertes faites successivement par des navigateurs Russes dans l’Ocean Pacifique, et dans la mer glaciale, corrigee d’apres les observations astronomiques les plus recentes de plusieurs navigateurs, etrangers, gravee au depot des Cartes de sa Majeste l’Empereur de toutes les Russies, en 1802.

This beautiful chart, for which I am indebted to the kindness of M. de St. Aignan, is 1m, 231 (4.037 feet) in length, and 0m, 722 (2.367 feet) in breadth, and embraces the extent of coast and sea between the 40 degrees and 72 degrees of latitude, and the 125 degrees and 224 degrees of west longitude from Paris.

The names are in Russian characters.

On the coast nearest to Asia, along Beering’s straits, between the 67 degrees and 64 degrees 10 minutes of latitude, under the parallels of Lapland and Iceland, we find a great number of huts frequented by the Siberian hunters.

The principal posts, reckoning from north to south, are, Kigiltach, Leglelachtok, Tuguten, Netschich, Tchinegriun, Chibalech, Topar, Pintepata, Agulichan, Chavani, and Nugran, near cape Rodney, (Cap du Parent.)

These habitations of the natives of Russian America are only from thirty to forty leagues distant from the huts of the Tchoutskis of Asiatic Russia.

The straits of Beering, which separates them, is filled with desert islands, of which the most northern is called Imaglin.

The north-east extremity of Asia forms a peninsula, which is only connected with the great mass of the continent by a narrow isthmus between the two gulfs of Mitschigmen and Kaltschin.

The Asiatic coast which borders the straits of Beering, is peopled by great numbers of cetaceous mammiferi.

On this coast the Tchoutskis, who live in perpetual war with the Americans, have collected together their habitations.

Their small villages are called Nukan, Tugulan, and Tschigin.

As it is more than probable that Asiatic and American tribes have crossed the ocean, it may be curious to examine the breadth of the arm of the sea which separates the two continents under the 65 degrees 50 minutes of north latitude.

According to the most recent discoveries by the Russian navigators, America is nearest to Siberia on a line which crosses Beering’s Straits in a direction from the south-east to the north-west, from prince of Wales’s cape to cape Tschoukotskoy.

The distance between these two capes is 44 minutes, or 18 3-10 leagues of 25 to the degree.

The island of Imaglin is almost in the middle of the channel, being one-fifth nearer the Asiatic cape.

However, it is not necessary for our conceiving that Asiatic tribes established on the table-land of Chinese Tartary should pass from the old to the new continent, to have recourse to a transmigration at such high latitudes.

A chain of small islands in the vicinity of one another, stretches from Corea and Japan to the southern cape of the peninsula of Kamtschatka, between the 33 degrees and the 51 degrees of latitude.

The great island of Tchoka, connected with the continent by an immense sand-bank, (under the 52 degrees of latitude,) facilitates communication between the mouths of l’Amour and the Kurile islands.

Another archipelago of islands, by which the great basin of Beering is terminated on the south, advances from the peninsula of Alaska 400 leagues towards the west.

The most western of the Aleutian islands is only 144 leagues distant from the eastern coast of Kamtschatka, and this distance is also divided into two nearly equal parts, the Beering and Mednoi islands, situated under the 55 degrees of latitude.

This rapid view sufficiently proves that Asiatic tribes might have gone by means of these islands from one continent to the other without going higher on the continent of Asia than the parallel of fifty five degrees, without turning the sea of Ochotsk to the west, and without a passage of more than twenty-four or thirty-six hours.

The north-west winds which, during a great part of the year blow in these latitudes, favour the navigation from Asia to America between the 50 and 60 degrees of latitude.

It is not wished in this note to establish new historical hypotheses, or to discuss those which have been hackneyed these forty years:

we merely wish to afford exact notions as to the proximity of the two continents.

Following the coast of the continent of America from cape Rodney and Norton creek to cape Mallowodan, cape Littlewater, we find no Russian establishment; but the natives have a great number of huts collected together on the shore between the 63 degrees 20 minutes and 60 degrees 5 minutes of latitude.

The most northern of their habitations are Agibaniach and Chalmiagmi, and the most southern Kuynegach and Kuymin.

The bay of Bristol, to the north of the peninsula Alaska, (or Aliaska,) is called by the Russians the gulf Kamischezkaia.

They in general preserve none of the English names given by captain Cook, and captain Vancouver, in their charts, to the north of the 55 degrees of latitude.

They choose rather to give no names to the two great islands which contain the Pic Trubizin, (the mount Edgecumbe of Vancouver, and Cerro de San Jacinto of Quadra,) and cape Tschiricof, (cape San Bartholome,) than adopt the denomination of King George’s Archipelago and prince of Wales’s Archipelago.

The coast from the gulf Kamischezkaia to New Cornwall, is inhabited by five tribes, who form as many great territorial divisions on the colonies of Russian America.

Their names are Kaniagi, Kenayzi, Tschugatschi, Ugalachmiuti, and Koliugi.

The most northern part of Alaska, and the island of Kodiak, vulgarly called by the Russians Kichtak, though Kightak, in the language of the natives in general means only an island, belongs to the Kaniagi division.

A great interior lake of more than 26 leagues in length, and 12 in breadth, communicates by the river Igtschiagick with the bay of Bristol.

There are two forts and several factories on the Kodiak island, (Kadiak,) and the small adjacent islands.

The forts established by Schelikoff bear the name of Karluk and the three Sanctifiers. M.

Malte Brun says that, according to the latest information, the Kicktak archipelago was destined to contain the head place of all the Russian settlements.

Sarytschew asserts, that there are a bishop and Russian monastery in the island of Umanak, (Umnak.)

I do not know whether there has been any similar establishment elsewhere; for the chart published in 1802 indicates no factory either at Umnak, Unimak, or Unalaschka. I read, however, at Mexico, in the manuscript journal of Martinez’s voyage, that the Spaniards found several Russian houses, and about a hundred small barks, at the island of Unalaschka in 1788.

The natives of the peninsula Alaska call themselves the men of the east, (Kagataya-Koung’ns.)

The Kenayzi inhabit the western coast of Cook creek, or the gulph Kenayskia.

The Rada factory, visited by Vancouver, is situated there under the 61 degrees 8 minutes.

The governor of the island of Kodiak, a Greek named Ivanitsch Delareff, assured M. Sauer, that notwithstanding the rigour of the climate, grain would thrive well on the banks of Cook river. He introduced the cultivation of cabbages and potatoes into the gardens at Kodiak.

The Tschugatschi occupy the country between the northern extremity of Cook Inlet and the east of prince William’s bay, (Tschugatskaia gulf.)

There are several factories and three small forts in this district:

Fort Alexander, near the mouth of Port Chatham, and the forts of the Tuk islands, (Green island of Vancouver,) and Tchalca, (Hinchinbrook island.)

The Ugalachmiuti extend from the gulf of prince William to the bay of Jakutal, called by Vancouver Beering’s bay.

The factory of St.

Simon is near cape Suckling, (cape Elie of the Russians.)

It appears that the central chain of the Cordilleras of New Norfolk is considerably distant from the coast at the Pic of St. Elie; for the natives informed M. Barrow, who ascended the river Mednaja (copper river) for a length of 500 werst, (120 leagues,) that it would require two day’s journey northwards to reach the high chain of the mountains.

We must not confound the bay of Beering of Vancouver, situated at the foot of Mount St. Elie, with the Beering’s bay of the Spanish maps, near Mount Fairweather (Nevado de Buentiempo.)

Without an accurate acquaintance with geographical synonymy, the Spanish, English, Russian and French works on the north-west coast of America are almost unintelligible; and it is only by a minute comparison of the maps that this synonymy can be fixed.

The Koliugi inhabit the mountainous country of New Norfolk, and the northern part of New Cornwall.

The Russians mark Burrough bay on their charts (latitude 55 degrees, 50 minutes,) opposite the Revillagigedo island of Vancouver, (Isla de Gravina of the Spanish maps,) as the most southern and eastern boundaries of the extent of country of which they claim the property.

It appears that the great island of the king George archipelago has, in fact, been examined with more care and more minutely by the Russian navigators than by Vancouver.

Of this we may easily convince ourselves by comparing attentively the western coast of this island, especially the environs of cape Trubizin, (cape Edgecumbe,) and of the port of the Archangel St. Michel, in Sitka bay, (the Norfolk sound of the English, and Tchinkitane bay of Marchand,) on the charts published at Petersburgh in the imperial depot in 1802, and on the charts of Vancouver.

The most southern Russian establishment of this district of the Koliugi is a small fortress (crapost) in the bay of Jakutal, at the foot of the Cordillera which connects mount Fairweather with mont St.

Elie near port Mulgrave, under the 59 degrees 27 minutes of latitude.

The proximity of mountains covered with eternal snow, and the great breadth of the continent from the 58 degrees of latitude, render the climate of this coast of New Norfolk, and the country of the Ugalachmiuti, excessively cold and inimical to the progress of vegetation.

When the sloops of the expedition of Malaspina penetrated into the interior of the bay of Jakutal as far as the port of Desengano, they found the northern extremity of the port under the 59 degrees of latitude covered in the month of July with a solid mass of ice.

We might be inclined to believe that this mass belonged to a glacier which terminated in high maritime alps; but Mackenzie relates, that on examining the banks of the Slave lake, 250 leagues to the east, under 61 degrees of latitude, he found the lake wholly frozen over in the month of June.

The difference of temperature observable in general on the eastern and western coast of the new continent, of which we have already spoken, appears only to be very sensible to the south of the parallel of 53 degrees, which passes through New Hanover, and the great island of Queen Charlotte.

Vancouver, t. v. p. 67.

There is nearly the same absolute distance from Petersburgh to the most eastern Russian factory on the continent of America, as from Madrid to the port of San Francisco in New California.

The breadth of the Russian empire embraces under the 60 degrees of latitude an extent of country of nearly 2,400 leagues; but the small fort of the bay of Jakutal is still more than 600 leagues distant from the most northern limits of the Mexican possessions.

The natives of these northern regions have, for a long time, been cruelly harassed by the Siberian hunters.

Women and children were retained as hostages in the Russian factories.

The instructions given by the empress Catharine to Cap. Billings, drawn up by the illustrious Pallas, breathe the spirit of philanthropy, and the most noble sensibility.

The present government is seriously occupied in diminishing the abuses, and repressing the vexations; but it is difficult to prevent these evils at the extremities of a vast empire; and the American is doomed to feel every instant his distance from the capital.

Moreover, it appears more than probable that before the Russians shall clear the interval which separates them from the Spaniards, some other enterprising power will attempt to establish colonies either on the coast of New Georgia, or on the fertile islands in it’s vicinity.