The New World.
America is broken by the Caribbean Sea into a double continent, both parts being of colossal magnitude, although the southern portion is about 2,000,000 square miles less in area than the northern. North America contains 9,055,146 square miles. South America contains 7,073,875 square miles; and both contain 16,129,021. The connecting link is found in the tapering isthmus of Central America, with its 302,443 square miles of surface.
But closely connected as is the northern part of the continent with the southern, in a physical sense, in real connection, so far as man is concerned, they are widely separated. During the three centuries which have elapsed since the discovery of America, the Spanish and the Americans have thought of breaking the connection—of sundering the isthmus. All communication between North and South America takes place by water, absolutely none by land. Even before the navigation of the historical period, there seems to have been no land road opened along the isthmus. The old race of the Caribs passed in boats from the Appalachian mountain land of North America to South America and the West Indies. The Toltecs and Aztecs—the oldest tribes which wandered southward—seemed to have ended their march on the high plateau of Mexico and the vale of Anahuac. The legends of the Incas give us no tidings of their traversing the isthmus and reaching Peru on foot, and it is probable that they reached that land otherwise. The isthmus seems never to have been a bridge, but always a barrier. The great Antilles group of islands appears to have served far more as a means of communication between North and South America.
In respect of contour, both divisions have an unmistakable analogy, which appears at first view. Both exhibit a triangular form, with the base at the north and the apex at the south. Toward the south, too, rather than toward the west, speaking in general terms, the gradual conquests of man advance, and therefore there cannot be in the New World, as in the Old, a striking contrast between the Orient and the Occident. East and west, in the New World, are less dependent on each other; they have more individuality, but with a great preponderance of importance in the east over the west side, by reason of the more favorable situation in relation to the sea, less sharpness and boldness of physical features, and a more scanty population. The west side of America has by no means kept up with the advance of its eastern side. Nor could the more southern shores of America compete with those on the northeast, and supply an analogy to the occident of the Old World; for North America stands related to Europe by ties of the closest nature, by wind systems, currents, a not dissimilar climate, and is far more nearly connected with it than with South America: nor could the latter derive any real advantage from its opposite neighbor, rude and undeveloped Africa; nor has the Caribbean Sea performed any such service for America as the Mediterranean has for Europe, being twice as large in area and far more unfavorably situated to advance the interests of civilization. It is only within a recent period that the Caribbean has become a valuable auxiliary to the culture of the world.
South America is only a colossal right-angled triangle of land, with very little articulation in its shores. The northwest and the eastern angles are sharply defined, and the southern one is very acute, the continent running out in the shape of a thin wedge. With some modifications, it has the same form with its neighbor Africa, and is just as unvarying in its want of a serrated coast, its sea-line being but 16,000 miles in length, almost the same as that of Africa. Like Africa, too, South America is destitute of peninsulas and adjacent islands; its coast is as unindented as that of Africa and Australia, all three of these continents of the southern hemisphere being in strict conformity. Yet South America is capable of great progress: its conditions are very plastic; it is characterized by the size and number of the great rivers which pass through its very center; its flora and fauna are extremely rich. In the fruitfulness of its soil, its division by mountains, and its water system, it holds great pre-eminence over Africa. An effort to connect its great rivers, and thus to make its immense natural advantages of mutual service, seems to promise a far more prosperous future for South America than can be predicted for Central Africa; yet the native population of the country stand on a very low plane of manhood.
The wedge-shaped plateau of Patagonia is not at all benefited, as previous analysis would lead us to expect, by its long coast and by the nearness of the islands of Terra del Fuego. The fruitful island of Tasmania is far more valuable to Australia than is this island to Patagonia, and even Iceland is a more productive neighbor to Norway. The Terra del Fuego group, embracing a territory of 29,000 square miles, although hard by the South American coast, only injures it instead of blessing it, for it imperils shipping and harbors a population so degraded that they have no wants which can stimulate the rudest civilization. With a precipitous, craggy coast, without trees and without grass, covered only with moss, and belonging strictly to the polar world, it must give a habitation to the very lowest and most degraded of the human race, isolated from the world, and only casually visited when winds and storms throw mariners upon its shores.
Not every island is to be considered, therefore, as a gain to the adjacent main land. If Terra del Fuego lay at the mouth of the La Plata River, it would have become a valuable auxiliary to Brazil. The worth of an island is relative, not absolute.
The Antilles group is the great insular formation contiguous to Central America. Its area, though comprising 94,700 square miles, is not one-tenth as great as that of the great Sunda group. By situation and physical conditions, it is much more closely connected with North than with South America. The Caribbean Sea is twice as large as the Mediterranean, the one having 801,800 square miles, and the other 1,675,800 square miles. It has been, therefore, more difficult to make the larger tributary to the advance of civilization than the smaller.
North America has entirely taken the palm from South America in the progress of its culture, just as has uniformly been the case with all the continents of the northern hemisphere compared with the southern; and yet the tropical southern continent is far more profusely endowed with the gifts of nature than the temperate northern one. The northern half, on the other hand, enjoys a far greater advantage in its broken coast-line, numerous bays, gulfs, islands, peninsulas, harbors, as well as by reason of its greater want of conformity to a rigid triangular form.
Enlarging, as it does, toward its southern extremity, North America approaches a trapezoidal shape, like Asia, and, as in Asia also, the size of the main body preponderates greatly over that of the extremities. Several of these extremities, too, extend toward the east and south, and only a few toward the west. To the North American peninsulas and islands belong the northeasterly island group of Greenland, (which for centuries was considered to be a peninsula, but which, since Parry’s discoveries in 1820, has been known to be a group of independent islands,) Bank’s Land, Boothia Felix, Cockburn, Melville’s Peninsula, Labrador, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Florida, the latter 59,000 square miles in area.
The northeast of North America is everywhere much cut up by inlets of the ocean, larger bays, gulfs, and sounds. This is the main characteristic of the shore of the northern United States and Canada. As all these open toward Europe, the situation of this whole region has been especially adapted to the most speedy advance in civilization. The pride of the American can no more plume itself on an independent progress than can that of the European; to the former, Europe is the Orient from which he receives, in an already advanced stage, what the European receives from Asia, his own Orient.
The less important peninsulas of North America, and the side most destitute of them, are turned toward the northern Pacific. To this region belong the Russian possessions, the desolate wastes of Aliaska, and, farther to the south, the peninsula of Old California, which has begun, within the last ten years, to play an active part in the world’s affairs. But all three of these are capable at present of little independent advance. They must wait till they feel the impulse of the civilization of the older American States, before they take that place to which the newly-organized commercial relations with China and Japan seem to be leading the way.
North America enjoys a great advantage over Europe in the possession of large inland lakes or seas. The prevalence of articulation and of the adjacent islands is not toward the south, but toward the polar and sub-polar regions, (from 40° to 50° N. lat.,) as in Europe. And although many of these islands and peninsulas are as yet but little known, still the progress of discovery has been so rapid within the past few years, that it would seem, by European analogies, that an important history is yet in store for them. For there is a great kinship between these northern regions of America and the Scandinavian and North Russian domains of Europe. And we know well that no degree of cold has ever intimidated civilization from penetrating in the latter to the very confines of the polar world.
As the White Sea, (48,500 square miles in area,) the Baltic, (167,000 square miles,) and the yet greater North Sea, have broken through the northern regions of Europe, so on a far more gigantic scale have the inroads of the ocean rifted and sundered North America. This we have learned in our recent frequent voyages to the Esquimaux regions. Baffin’s Bay, Lancaster Sound, Smith’s Sound, Jones’ Sound, Barrow Strait, Fox’s Channel with its uncounted islands, Hudson’s Bay with its 499,000 square miles of surface, Boothia Gulf, Victoria and Georgia Seas, Wellington’s Channel, Melville Sound, Prince of Wales Straits, and very many other water passages and basins divide those northern districts into a vast mesh of islands and peninsulas. The superficial area of all these tracts is on a colossal scale; even the Greenland group is estimated to include 766,500 square miles. Within the past few years this whole Arctic Sea has been the scene of numerous expeditions of discovery, some of them on a princely scale.
All this shows that North America is fashioned much more after the analogy of Europe than of South America. The analogy would be much more close, if North America were as favorably affected by climatic conditions as Europe. Both continents are washed at the south as well as at the north by great inland seas, and divided up by them in a manner peculiar to them among all the continents. Of this articulation, America, less favored by climate, has much the larger share. By its admirable harbors, and by the action of the Gulf Stream crossing the Atlantic in two directions, America has been specially fitted to receive the population and civilization of the Old World, and to stand in the closest relations with it. In this, united with the arrangement of its mountain chains and the happy characteristics of its river systems, America bears the palm completely away from Asia. In that continent the colossal rivers of the north have no connection at their sources with the head-waters of the great Chinese, Indian, and West Asiatic rivers. It is entirely different in North America, where the St. Lawrence, Mackenzie, Columbia, Colorado, Mississippi, and Missouri flow from the same region, as from a common center, not separated at their sources by an immense plateau, but forming a single river system, from the mouth of one to that of another, flowing in just the contrary direction. We find, therefore, that there, as in North Europe, civilization has followed the water-courses, and has planted colonies as far north as 70° on the coast of Greenland; while in Asia human habitations cease with 65° N. lat.
America seems to be appointed, by its physical conditions, to plant the banner of human progress at the most northern parts of the globe, and to do for the northern hemisphere what Great Britain, through her colonies in Tasmania and South Australia, with their admirable harbors, is doing for the southern.
Northern Asia seems to have no future indicated for her beyond the sources and upper courses of her great rivers; she seems to depend upon Central Asia and upon Russian Europe for all the scanty culture which she may possess. In its south and east it seems to have within its Chinese and Indian populations the seeds of an independent development, whose results, like those of Arabia, have been transferred to Europe to become improved there, and then to be given to the world. The form of the three great peninsulas, which were the home of Asiatic culture, has been repeated in Europe,—but with how great a difference! The three European peninsulas are not in the tropical zone and near the equator, but are 1400 miles farther north. The two groups—the eastern one in South Asia, the western one in South Europe—each consisting of three peninsulas, are the most valuable auxiliaries the world’s civilization ever had. Through their agency Asia in the torrid zone and Europe in the temperate have become what America and Australia are yet to be to the extreme north and the extreme south. The former were for the past, the latter for the present and the future. South America, and yet much more Africa and Australia, seem to be held in reserve for the need of a home where the civilization of centuries yet to come shall expand into perfection. They now are in their infancy; the day only begins to break in them. Furnished as they have been with the most liberal gifts of nature, they must receive a culture of which we as yet have little conception. In what way this can be done, the history of the past reveals. The art of navigation has, within the past three centuries, given to islands and to continents a new life, and developed relations unknown till then. The very touch of European civilization has already wakened the world to new life; and the oceans, which were once the most impassable of barriers, have become the closest of bonds to draw the earth together, and to further its progress toward the consummation of all history.
THE END.