1 All things tend naturally towards non-existence. So in the original statutes of Oriel College, Oxford (founded in A.D. 1327).

2 All that comes into being deserves to perish.

3 The trade to the Philippines crossed the Continent at Tehuantepec.

4 The reader will find at the end of the volume a small map which may help him to understand the topography of the region.

5 The highest point of excavation at Gold Hill is 534 feet above sea level and the highest elevation of the original surface of the ground along the centre line of the Canal was 312 feet above sea level. The vertical depth of the cut on the centre line is thus 272 feet, the bottom of the cut being 40 feet above sea level.

6 The unskilled labourers employed are mostly West Indian negroes from Jamaica and Barbadoes, with some Spaniards, but no Chinese. The skilled men are from the United States. Many Chinese were here in the French days and died in great numbers.

7 Among the white population of the Zone, excluding the cities of Panama and Colon, the rate was higher, viz. 16.47 for 1910 and 15.32 for 1911, the part of the population not under official control being less careful to observe health rules.

8 Fascinated by the example of Suez, and not realizing how greatly the problem of construction was affected by the difference between the very wet climate of Panama and the absolutely dry climate of Suez, the French engineers originally planned a sea-level canal. To have carried out that plan would have added enormously to the cost, for the Culebra cutting must have been not only eighty feet deeper, but immensely wider. Few who examine the spot seem now to doubt that the decision to have a lock canal has been a wise one.

9 The last estimate presented puts the amount at $375,000,000. The fortifications are expected to cost about $12,000,000 more.

10 London to Sydney via Suez 11,531 miles, via Panama 12,525; London to Auckland via Suez 12,638 miles, via Panama, 11,404.

11 Since our visit Coropuna has been ascended by my friend Professor Hiram Bingham of Yale University (U.S.A.). The average of his observations gives it a height of 21,700 feet. A very interesting account of his long and difficult snow climb may be found in Harper's Magazine for March, 1912.

12 The Harvard Observatory Report gives it as 7550.

13 Quoted in the learned notes to Mr. Bandelier's valuable book, Islands of Titicaca and Koati, p. 161, from a MS. in the National Archives at Lima. Omate is probably the volcano now usually known as Ubinas.

14 Chapter XVI.

15 Paramo is the name applied to these bleak regions between the valleys.

16 This is the term of respect by which an Indian usually addresses a white man of superior station. The word was in Inca mythology the name of a divine or half-divine hero—it was also the name of one of the Inca sovereigns.

17 Above this valley, nearly a hundred miles away to the northeast, rises the splendid peak of Salcantay, whose height, said to approach 22,000 feet, will some day attract an aspiring mountain climber.

18 It is fair to say that when the conquest was once accomplished, Valverde seems to have protested against the reduction of the Indians to slavery.

19 While these pages are passing through the press (April, 1912), I am informed that a serious effort is about to be made to lay drains in and generally to clean up Cuzco.

20 The name "Inca" properly belongs to the ruling family or clan in the Peruvian monarchy, of whose ethnic relations to its subjects we know very little, but I use it here to denote not only the dynasty, but the epoch of their rule, which apparently covered two centuries (possibly more) before the arrival of Pizarro. The expression "The Inca" means the reigning monarch.

21 A patient archÆologist might be able by examining and photographing specimens of each style to determine their chronological succession and thus throw some light on the history of the city. The oldest type appeared to be that of the Inca Roca wall, very similar to that of the Sacsahuaman walls to be presently described.

22 Good specimens of all these things may be seen in the American Museum of Natural History of New York.

23 Some of the granite blocks in the fortress at Osaka in Japan are even larger, but these belong to the time of Hideoshi, early in the seventeenth century. There is some reason to think that the city or at least the neighbourhood of Cuzco may have been inhabited from very remote times.

24 Such as that at Choqquequirau described by my friend Professor Bingham in his book entitled Across South America. He discovered, in 1911, an Inca building at a place on the river Pampaconas fifteen days' journey north of Cuzco and only two thousand feet above sea-level. It was not previously known that their power had extended so far in that direction.

25 Dr. Sven Hedin gives the height of Tso Mavang as 15,098 feet above sea level.

26 In some parts of Mexico the Indians use the seeds of a species of Chenopodium for food. Civilized man has not yet troubled himself to enquire what possibilities of development there may be in some of the plants which primitive or barbarous man turned to account.

27 Dr. Uhle has suggested that the so-called seats may have been places on which to set images. Mr. Bingham thinks they were more probably spots on which priests stood to salute the rising sun by wafting kisses with their hands, a Peruvian practice described by Calancha, who compares the book of Job, chap. xxxi, v. 27.

28 Lake Titicaca was originally, it would seem, called the lake of Chucuito, from an ancient town on its western shore.

29 St. Thomas, according to an early legend, preached the Gospel on the coast of Malabar, so the Spanish ecclesiastics when they came to Mexico and Peru and heard tales of a wise deity or semi-divine teacher who had long ago appeared among the natives, concluded this must have been the Apostle, the idea of the connection of Eastern Asia with these new Western lands being still in their minds.

In the ancient city of Tlascala in Mexico I have seen a picture representing St. Thomas preaching to the natives in the guise of the Mexican deity Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Snake. St. Thomas is depicted as half serpent, half bird, but with a human head.

30 Sir M. Conway gives the height of the higher peak Ancohuma (Hanko Uma) at 21,490. The loftiest summits in Peru seem to be Huascaran (some way N.N.E. of Lima), about 22,150 feet, and Coropuna (see p. 57), 21,700 feet. Aconcagua in Chile is the culminating point of the Andes and the whole Western World (see p. 260).

31 Climbing and Exploration in the Bolivian Andes, 1901.

32 See Bandelier, Islands of Titicaca and Koati, ch. I, and notes.

33 They have some likeness to the carved stone found at Chavin in northern Peru, figured in Sir C. Markham's The Incas of Peru, p. 34. There was also found lately in a grave near Lima a textile fabric with a pattern resembling this.

34 The arrow point may however have been brought from the northeastern shores of Titicaca. Mr. Bingham tells me that such obsidian tips are sometimes found in auriferous gravels there.

35 The primitive inhabitants of the Canary Isles, who were apparently of Berber stock, also preserved their dead as mummies.

36 Abundant evidence on this subject may be found in Mr. J.G. Frazer's Golden Bough. In Cornwall and Ireland sacred wells still receive offerings. I once met a French peasant who believed in were-wolves and knew one; and I remember as a boy to have been warned by the peasants in the Glens of Antrim to beware of the water spirit who (under the form of a bull) infested the river in which I was fishing.

37 It is, however, probable that the early Spanish accounts of the excellence of the roads were exaggerated, for few traces of them can be discerned to-day.

38 See note III at end of book.

39 It is not clear how much territory this enumeration covered and it was probably only a rough estimate; still, the fact that the population was far larger in the middle of the sixteenth than it was in the eighteenth century seems beyond doubt.

40 A vast deal still remains to be done both in Mexico and Peru, perhaps even more in the latter than in the former, to examine thoroughly both the accounts given by the early Spanish writers and the existing remains of buildings and graves and the objects found in or near them, so as to lay a foundation for some systematic account of the ancient native civilizations.

41 Its habitual use may have contributed to give the AymarÁs that impassive dulness which characterizes the race.

42 Mr. Bandelier (Islands of Titicaca and Koati) gives an interesting description of such a ceremony.

43 Mountain Spirit.

44 This line has now (December, 1912) been completed.

45 I take these details from Dr. Romero's Los Lagos de los Altiplanos, translated from the French of Dr. Neveu Lemaire.

46 The name Cholo properly means the offspring of a mestizo and an Indian, but it seems to be currently used to describe a peasant with a marked Indian strain.

47 An admirable study of desert scenery may be found in a book by Mr. Van Dyke of Rutgers College (in New Jersey), entitled The Desert.

48 Pronounced Oyawe.

49 It is called Yareta, and reminds one a little (though it is larger and harder) of the Cherleria sedoides of the Scottish Highlands.

50 In the thirty years from 1880 to 1909 the Chilean treasury received £82,637,000 (about $412,000,000) in export duties on nitrates.

51 Buenos Aires, Rio, and SÃo Paulo are the three larger cities.

52 It is sometimes said that one hundred families rule Chile.

53 A distinguished Chilean officer whose presence added greatly to the pleasure of the trip was detailed to accompany us.

54 Except when Spanish ships of war bombarded Valparaiso in 1866.

55 The word roto seems originally to have been a term of disparagement; it meant 'a broken man.' Now it merely denotes one of the poorer class, and is opposed to pelucon, one of the upper class (literally a wig wearer).

56 The Yaquis of Sonora in Northwestern Mexico have never been subdued, but they are a small tribe dwelling in mountain fastnesses difficult of access.

57 This is the form of the name that was given to me at Temuco. Others call them Moluche or Maluche.

58 First part written in Chile, where he was fighting, in 1558, and published in 1569.

59

60 Thuja gigantea.

61 Many cattle are exported from Argentine to Chile, but these can here, as in the passes of southern Chile, be driven over the top of the ridge, though many now go by rail.

62 An account of the ascent and of all this region will be found in Mr. E.A. Fitzgerald's High Andes, the author of which was prevented by illness from reaching the summit.

63 This name is in the Andes usually applied to the sharp little peaks of ice that stand up, like the pyramidal points of seracs, on the surface of Andean glaciers, and it suits them better, because penitents wear white garments. The similarity of form has however caused it to be applied to these black towers also.

64 It was first ascended by Mr. Vines in 1897. The measurements of Aconcagua vary from 23,200 to 22,425 feet. Mercedario is given at 22,300 and Tupungato at 22,015.

65 The finest representation I have ever seen is a twelfth-century mosaic figure of Christ in the apse of the Norman cathedral at Cefalu in Sicily.

66 The distant view of BadrinÁth and Trisul from the heights above Naini Tal in Kumaon is also quite as imposing as anything we saw in the Andes.

67 Whether the discovery of India was his original aim, a point recently brought into question, there is no doubt that he thought after his first voyage that he had found some part of eastern Asia.

68 Unless Magellan had got farther to the west than the rest of the narrative would imply, three days seems a short time for the boats to proceed to the western opening and back again.

69 Cape Horn was discovered in 1616 by Van Schouten and Le Maire sailing from the East.

70 Notes of a Naturalist in South America.

71 It is hardly necessary to refer for information regarding the Fuegians to the classic book of Charles Darwin, the Voyage of the Beagle, in which the genius for observation and speculation of that great man was first made known to the world.

72 Fagus (or Nothofagus) betuloides, or Fagus antarctica.

73 He is called Settaboth in the record of Sir Francis Drake's voyage (The World Encompassed, p. 487, Hakluyt Society Edition). (I take this reference from Robertson's edition of Pigafetta.) "Sycorax my dam," "the foul witch Sycorax," does not appear in Pigafetta, and comes from somewhere else: the name sounds Greek. As to Caliban and the Patagonians, see the notes to Dr. H.H. Furness's monumental edition of the Tempest, p. 379. Every one remembers Robert Browning's Caliban upon Setebos, or Natural Theology in the Island. The Settaboth mentioned in Drake's voyage is probably a mere repetition from Eden, for the Indians to whom Fletcher (in narrating that voyage) refers were encountered on the Chilean coast in lat. 38° S., a different set of people altogether. Fletcher's account is in many points hardly credible. See Barrow's Life of Sir Francis Drake, p. 121.

74 The guanaco is the only large wild quadruped of these regions. He belongs to the same genus (Auchenia) as the llama, alpaca, and vicuÑa, but is bigger than any of them. Pigafetta describes him as having "the head of a mule, the body of a camel, the feet of a stag, and the tail of a horse."

75 The steamers of the Pacific Steam Navigation Company began to run through the Straits about 1840.

76 The enormous herds of fur seals which existed a century ago in the islands of South Georgia, the South Orkneys, and the South Shetlands have vanished. 300,000 are said to have been killed within five years in the South Shetlands alone.

77 I reckon Oakland and Berkeley as, for this purpose, parts of San Francisco.

78 The population of the Republic is about 7,000,000, and that of Buenos Aires 1,300,000.

79 The English, adopting this term, talk of the rural parts of Argentina as "the Camp," an expression which at first puzzles the visitor.

80 There were, in 1911, 30,000,000 cattle, 68,000,000 sheep, and 7,500,000 horses.

81 The total amount of British capital invested in Argentine railroads, tramways, banks, and land was, in 1910, £295,000,000. In writing about a country which attracts the world chiefly by its material development it is impossible to avoid figures, but I wish to give the reader no more than are absolutely needed.

82 There is, however, a small population of mixed Indian and colonial stock in the plateau of the Andean northwest adjoining Bolivia.

83 844,000 were from Italy, 424,000 from Spain.

84 Some remarks upon this obscure question will be found in Chapter XCII of the author's American Commonwealth (edition of 1910). The problem is rather simpler here than in the United States because the recently injected elements are here less various.

85 I was told that many of the street police are Indians from the north of the country.

86 They have a mass of readers near at hand and a revenue from advertisements comparable to those which are found in the United States and Australia, but are not found in Spanish America outside Buenos Aires.

Mr. F. Seebey states that, in 1903, 212 periodicals were published in Buenos Aires in various languages or dialects, including Basque, Catalan, and Genoese.

87 The account of the origin of the red shirt given by Mr. G.M. Trevelyan in his interesting book, Garibaldi and the Defence of Rome, is not quite the same as that which I heard in Uruguay, but not incompatible therewith.

88 Such legal or quasi-legal questions have arisen several times in Central America.

89 This question is involved with that relating to the voyages, real or alleged, of Americus Vespuccius in 1497, and is too intricate to be discussed here.

90 See Chapter XVI, post.

91 Opposite the Montanvert at Chamouni.

92 See page 368.

93 The tops range from 4500 to 7000 feet.

94 Sequoia gigantea of the Mariposa and Calaveras groves.

95 Sequoia sempervirens.

96 John White.

97 Chapter XVI.

98 How many Indians there are nobody knows, but the common (probably exaggerated) estimate puts them at nearly 2,000,000, half of these pagans in the Amazonian forests, while the mixed race is calculated at 1,700,000.

99 Sir H. H. Johnson (The Negro in the New World) conjectures the pure blacks at about 2,720,000 and the mulattoes and quadroons at about 5,600,000. The rest of the population, that which may be described as white because it bears no conspicuous marks of any infusion of color, may approach 8,000,000. The Indians and half-breeds (Indian and white) would make up the rest of the non-European population. Of the pure blacks, from 20,000 to 30,000, living on the northeast coast, are either Mussulmans or heathen fetichists.

100 M. Georges ClÉmenceau in his South America of To-day.

101 Brazil would make a seventeenth, but it was in 1808 a possession of Portugal. The three island republics, Cuba, Hayti, and Santo Domingo, bring up the total number of independent Latin-American states to twenty.

102 Whether the same can be said of some of the Central American republics may be doubted.

103 See above, Chapter IX.

104 Though, no doubt, there is between the inhabitants of southern Mexico and their neighbours, the men of Guatemala and Honduras, no marked difference, just as there is not much between the men of Northern Peru and their neighbours in Ecuador.

105 However, a North American friend tells me that he can usually tell a Venezuelan from a Colombian.

106 Steps have recently been taken for smoothing down this controversy, and diplomatic relations between Chile and Peru seem likely to be now resumed. (Note to edition of February, 1913.)

107 Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, the United States, Belgium, Holland, and Portugal.

108 The more usual estimates (e.g. that in the Statesman's Year Book for 1912) give 19 per cent of pure Spaniards, 43 per cent mestizos, and 38 per cent Indians, but enquiries made from many well-informed people in Mexico led me to believe that the proportion of Indians is much larger, and probably about that stated in the text.

109 Brazil is believed to have nearly two millions of aborigines, most of them savages, Argentina perhaps fifty thousand, Chile one hundred twenty thousand (including the Fuegians). For the four northern republics and for the five of Central America no figures exist, but the bulk of their population, which may be roughly taken at nine millions, is Indian, and pure whites constitute a small minority, which is probably largest in Costa Rica, Colombia, and Panama.

110 There are also eight or nine millions of negroes and mulattoes (nearly all in Brazil).

111 Chapters III–V.

112 See Chapter V, p. 180.

113 Noticias Secretas de America, p. 353. This remarkable book, published by David Barry in 1826, quarto (Taylor, London), from a manuscript which he obtained in Madrid, gives a frightful description of the cruelties and oppressions practised on the Indians. It does not, however, seem to have led to any efforts at reform. It is accepted as authentic by good authorities. I owe the reference to the book of Professor Bernard Moses, South America on the Eve of Emancipation, The Southern Colonies.

114 Noticias Secretas, ut supra, p. 343.

115 Half the population of Paraguay perished in the war of the younger Lopez, the third of the line of dictators that ruled the country from 1818 to 1870.

116 Islands of Titicaca and Koati, quoted in Chapter IV.

117 Travels in Peru, p. 305 sqq.

118 Islands of Titicaca and Koati, p. 40 sqq. This learned student of Indian customs thinks that the drinking may have originated in the ceremonial offerings of chicha to the spirits. Its continuance needs no explanation.

119 There has been formed in Lima a society for the protection of the Indians, but I could not learn that it has been able to do much in the parts of Peru that lie far from the capital.

120 The sense of membership in a concrete community (a Visible Church) consisting of persons of whatever race who participate in the same sacraments is stronger in the Roman than in the Protestant churches; and as a member of a lower race who has been ordained a priest is thereby raised to a position which is in a sense above that of any layman, the race itself is raised in his person.

121 An infusion of negro blood, sometimes met with in the coast towns of Peru, is regarded with less favour than a like infusion of Indian blood, for while the first negro ancestor must have been a slave, the Indian ancestor may have been an Inca.

122 A few years ago in northern Mexico a truck carrying a load of dynamite for use at a mine was suddenly discovered to be on fire at a village station. The risk was imminent, so the driver of a locomotive engine picked the truck up and ran it away into the country at all the speed he could put on. He bade the brakeman jump off and save himself, adding, "I go to my death." When he had got a mile away, the dynamite exploded. Every window in the village was broken, and he was blown to atoms, but the inhabitants were saved. He was a pure-blooded Indian.

123 Some of these now come south to work on Argentine farms.

124 Though doubt has lately been thrown upon the letter of Toscanelli and upon the received belief that it was India that Columbus was seeking, he clearly believed on his return to Spain that it was India he had found.

125 The question as to the truth of Amerigo Vespucci's account of his voyages, and especially of the first one (1497) in which he claimed to have discovered a new land 1000 leagues west southwest of the Canary Islands is still the subject of controversy among learned men, but the prevalent opinion seems to be that the account is unworthy of credence. The letters were translated into Latin and ran through several editions.

The name "Americus, Amerigo" is an Italianized form of Amalrich, a name borne by some of the Gothic kings mentioned by Jordanes, and also by two of the Latin kings of Jerusalem in the twelfth century. It is the German Emeric and the French Amaury.

126 Each has, moreover, other currents of somewhat less climatic importance: the Japan current on the Pacific and the Arctic current on the Atlantic coast of North America, as well as the equatorial current on a part of the east coast of South America.

127 Teutonic may appear to be no satisfactory term, considering not only the French-speaking population of eastern Canada, but also the large Celtic, Italic, and Slavonic elements within the United States. Nevertheless, the general social type of that country and of Canada is Teutonic, as are also their institutions and their language.

128 Although one-fifth of the produce was, as a rule, transmitted to the government at home.

129 See as to Peru, which was only the central part of that Empire, the figure of 8,000,000, given for 1575, after the great slaughter of the Spanish Conquest (pp. 162–163).

130 Had the Slave States succeeded in dissociating themselves from the northern and western Free States in the Civil War of 1861–1865, there would have been at least three. It may be suggested that if there had been neither steamships nor railroads, the Pacific slope of North America (California, Oregon, and Washington) might possibly have become the home of yet another independent nation.

131 Chapter XII.

132 There are no titles of nobility in use in Latin America, except in Brazil, where a very few families still have the titles of Viscount and Baron.

133 One question exists which might possibly create friction between Argentina and Brazil, but there is reason to believe that any collision will be avoided.

134 One is told, but I had no means of verifying the statement, that Scotchmen and Irishmen and Germans get on rather better with the Latin Americans.

135 In a remarkable speech made in New York in 1909, a speech which shewed his comprehension of the good points of Spanish-American character, Mr. Root deplored the fact that the North American press was apt to indulge in criticisms of Spanish Americans displeasing to the latter, the effect of which their authors, accustomed to criticise their own fellow-countrymen freely, did not realize.

136 In some of the colonies the revolt was at first rather on behalf of the Spanish king against the Napoleonic government in Spain, but the movement everywhere soon passed into one for independence.

137 Mr. Hiram Bingham in Across South America, published in 1911. Mr. Bingham adds in the same connection: "The number of 'North Americans' in Buenos Aires is very small. While we have been slowly waking up to the fact that South America is something more than 'a land of revolutions and fevers,' our German cousins have entered the field on all sides. The Germans in southern Brazil are a negligible factor in international affairs, but the well-educated young German who is being sent out to capture South America commercially is a power to be reckoned with. He is going to damage England more truly than dreadnoughts or airships." See also the judicious remarks of Mr. Albert Hale in his book, The South Americans, pp. 303–309.

138 The idea of bringing all American republics together in congresses to discuss matters of common interest, was started by Bolivar with the view of organizing joint resistance to any action by the Holy Alliance against the new republics. At his instance such a gathering met at Panama in 1826. Delegates met again in 1883 at Caracas and Buenos Aires, but accomplished nothing. In 1899 a more largely attended gathering assembled at Washington, the chief result of which was the establishment there of an institution, now called the Pan-American Union, which under its zealous and energetic director collects, publishes, and distributes information, chiefly statistical and commercial, regarding the various republics. Similar congresses have been subsequently held at Mexico, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires, at which friendly sentiments have been interchanged, but no encouragement has been given to suggestions proceeding from the United States for reciprocal "Pan-American" trade preferences.

139 In the days when Louis Napoleon was trying to establish for France a hegemony over the Romance-speaking peoples of Europe, the days when his Life of Julius CÆsar was published and his expedition to Mexico despatched, this term first came into common use. It was the fashion for his literary court to represent the French people as the heirs of ancient Rome, the modern perpetuator of her spirit and her greatness. Yet in reality the character and the conduct of the English government during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries bear a closer resemblance than ever did the French, both in their strong and in their weak points, to the government of the Roman republic.

140 Cortes tortured him to compel the disclosure of treasure.

141 Though Francia had been created dictator for life.

142 The wild tribal Indians, Indios bravos, have, of course, no votes.

143 The Magyars of Hungary, the Finns of Finland, and the Basques of the western Pyrenees.

144 Dr. Palacios in his interesting book Raza Chilena.

145 Remembering Switzerland with its three languages, one cannot make the proposition absolute. But in Switzerland the three races are, as respects intelligence and education, practically on a level, whereas in South America the Indians stand far below.

146 This was ceasing, under the rule of Diaz, to be true of Mexico.

147 Though much more ought to have been done towards the solution of land questions and for the promotion of education. [Mexico seems to have now relapsed into a condition as bad as that from which Juarez and Diaz rescued her. Note to edition of 1914.]

148 There would seem to have been more in Europe within the last fifty years than in any preceding period of equal length since the seventeenth century.

149 The small cultivator in Argentina is under this disadvantage that a severe drought or a swarm of locusts may ruin him, whereas the large farmer with more capital can bear the loss of one season's crop.

150 This is Manaos in Brazilian territory. Higher up, in Peruvian, is the smaller town of Iquitos. Ocean-going steamers ply as far as Manaos.

151 See ante, p. 76. The evil is widespread and horrible.

152 I include English, Dutch, and French Guiana.

153 In Victoria the annual rate of increase per cent of population which in 1871 was 3.07 per cent was in 1901 only .48 per cent. In New South Wales it was in 1871, 3.7 per cent, in 1901, 1.8 per cent.

154 The Italians are chiefly in Argentina, Uruguay, and southern Brazil.

155 There are also some East Indian coolies in Guiana, perhaps 100,000.

156 The negroes are almost all in Brazil, but a few exist on the coasts of Peru, Colombia, Panama, and Venezuela.

157 The United States census returns do not attempt to discriminate between mulattoes, quadroons, and octoroons; all are reckoned as coloured; and no doubt a certain number of quadroons and octoroons pass as white.

158 The country which has of late years produced most good poetry is, I believe, Colombia. Argentine writers have distinguished themselves chiefly in the sphere of theoretical jurisprudence and international law.

159 One is told that the European books most popular among the few who approach abstract subjects are those of Mr. Herbert Spencer, whose influence was always greater in the South European countries and in Russia than in England or the United States. Those few are unwilling to believe that he is not deemed in his own country to be a great philosopher.