Martins has seen the Cafusos, the result of the crossing of escaped Negroes with the Brazilian indigenes. Having retired into the woods, where they found a refuge, they have formed a separate race there.
Admiral Jurien de la Gravière informs us that at Manilla the half-breeds of Spaniards, Chinese, and Tagals, are much more numerous than the original stocks. At Mindanao half-breeds of Spaniards and Tagals form the majority of the inhabitants. “The fusion of races,” he adds, “has taken place with marvellous facility in this isolated corner of the earth.”
The Marquesas Islands, suffering the fate of the other Polynesian countries, have been depopulated by that mysterious malady which seems capable of annihilating oceanic populations. M. Jouan informs us that they are repeopled by half-breeds.
Upon the whole of the littoral zone of South America, according to M. Martin de Monosy, mixed peoples are prospering and rapidly on the increase.
We may close this enumeration by a detailed account of a fact which is well known, and which has all the value of a precise experiment.
In 1789, in consequence of a mutiny, nine English sailors went and established themselves upon the small island of Pitcairn, in the Pacific Ocean, accompanied by six Tahitian men and fifteen Tahitian women. In consequence of the Whites becoming tyrannical, the war of race began. In 1793 the population was reduced to four Whites and to ten Tahitian women. Soon war broke out afresh between the four chiefs of the colony, and Adams only was left. But marriages had been fruitful; the first half-breeds grew up, intermarried, and had numerous children. In 1825, Captain Beechey found sixty-six individuals on Pitcairn Island. Towards the end of 1830 the population numbered eighty-seven. In spite of the deplorable conditions of the outset, the mixed Pitcairn race had then almost doubled in twenty-five years, and almost tripled in thirty-three years. Now England, the most favoured country in Europe in this respect, only doubles its population in forty-nine years. Thus the half-breeds of banished English and Polynesians had on Pitcairn Island about double the number of offspring that pure Anglo-Saxons have when placed in their customary conditions of life.
Thus the white race, when crossed with races most different in characters and habit, have given rise to mixed peoples, which have continued to increase since their appearance. No reason can be given why this movement of increase should stop or even slacken.
III. There remains the intercrossing of the White and the Negro. It is with reference to this that some facts have been quoted tending to prove that half-breeds cannot propagate among themselves. Let us examine them rapidly.
Etwick and Long, in their History of Jamaica, have asserted that Mulattoes cease to be reproductive in that island beyond the third generation. Dr. Yvan has pointed out an analogous fact in Java. Dr. Nott has found that in South Carolina, Mulattoes are endowed with low fertility, that they have a shorter life than other human races, and that they frequently die at an early age. Without going so far, Dr. Simonnot attributes to these half-breeds a sort of ethnological neutrality, “which only assures them an ephemeral duration as soon as they are abandoned to themselves.”
Nothing is easier than to oppose contrary facts to the foregoing. I can even invoke the testimony of some of the same authors whom I have just quoted. Nott, after having in a general manner formulated the aphorisms which I have just summed up, admits that they only apply to South Carolina, whilst in Louisiana, Florida, and Alabama, the Mulattoes are robust, fruitful, and energetic. I find that Dr. Yvan himself states that his observations only concern Java, and that he had pointed out the fact as exceptional.