The human species

by A. de Quatrefages

When, however, we examine the table of mortality taken by districts, we arrive at very different conclusions. These districts number thirty-one. Now, in fifteen the number of births is greater than that of deaths. In the little island of Marie-Galante this is the case in two districts out of three. Thus, the terrible calculations of the mean mortality are due entirely to the exaggeration of mortality in certain districts, while the European has become acclimatised in the others.

The tables of mortality drawn up in Algeria by M. Boudin present analogous facts. Out of sixty-nine localities, fifty-five have shown, since 1857, an excess of births over deaths.

The general result obtained by M. Walther may be thus explained. The French race is acclimatised in Guadeloupe in fifteen localities, but not in the remaining sixteen. Of these two statements, the first should be considered as definitely proved; the second requires confirmation, for a closer examination of the populations of the most unhealthy districts, and a study of them in classes, is still required.

However this may be, every unprejudiced person will acknowledge that we can no longer question the fact of acclimatisation in Guadeloupe as a whole. It should now only be a question of acclimatisation at Basse terra, at Pointe-à-Pitre, at Pointe-Noire, etc.

VI. The French Antilles, as also the greater number of the sister islands, are the scene of valuable experiments upon the aptitude of different human races to stand this exceptional climate, which is one of the most difficult to overcome. The Negro was carried there by force very shortly after the occupation of the islands by the Whites, and has lived there in a state of slavery till within the last few years. As the condition of the parents was inherited by the children, there is little room for doubt, but that after a given time the local multiplication of the Blacks would have sufficed for all the wants of agriculture and industry, if the race had become acclimatised. The incessant activity of the slave trade, seems to show that the number of deaths must have greatly exceeded that of births. There appears to be no doubt as to the truth of the fact for the island of Cuba or for Jamaica. General Tulloch, struck by the mortality of the Negroes in the English Antilles, has not hesitated to declare that if the trade were once suppressed, the whole race would disappear in these islands before the close of a century. The researches of M. Boudin justify us in regarding this assertion as an exaggeration, at least as regards the French possessions.

Neither the English nor the French author has, however, taken into consideration a circumstance, the importance of which cannot be denied. I allude to the conditions imposed upon the Negro by slavery. It is clear that the character and conduct of the master played an important part in the probability of the life or death of the slave. Without feeling himself to be, and without being inhuman, the master might demand more labour from him than his nature could support, or violate those instincts, the free play of which is necessary to health. This was certainly the case in Cuba, where it was the general practice to get as much out of the slaves as possible, thus creating the necessity for more frequent renewal. We have here, doubtless, one of those causes by which the mortality of a race, better fitted than ours for intertropical climates, is so immoderately increased. Facts seem to justify these conjectures. “Since the abolition of slavery,” says M. Elisée Reclus, “the Negro population has been on the increase in the English islands.”

However singular this fact may appear to some anthropologists, it is only a repetition of what took place in Brazil. There again, it was said, that the slave trade alone maintained a black population, which was destined to diminish and disappear as soon as this enforced immigration should cease. Authentic documents show that the opposite has taken place. The slave trade was abolished long before slavery in this great Empire. For many years the proprietors, being unable to purchase fresh slaves, took care of those in their possession, and from that time the Negroes have multiplied. Thus it was that during the period in which the missionaries of the Jesuits flourished, that portion of the black race in which they were interested was observed to increase in an extraordinary manner, whilst in the rich haciendas, where it was uncared for and overworked, it dwindled away.

By the side of the Negro Creole, there are now in the French Antilles labourers engaged more or less voluntarily from the same coasts of Africa, representatives of the Semitic white race from Madeira, Chinese of yellow race, and Indian coolies, who are almost all dravidian, and consequently a cross between the black and the yellow. It will be interesting at some future time, to show what resistance each of these nations has offered to the terrible climate they are confronting. The experiment is, at present, only begun. Nevertheless M. Walther has already obtained some interesting data at Guadeloupe. The mean annual mortality of the Creoles is 3·28 per 100; that of immigrants, 9·66 for the Chinese; 7·68 for Negroes; 7·12 for Hindoos; and 5·80 for the natives of Madeira. Unfortunately, the statistics are doubtful, and differ from those which M. Du Hailly has given for Martinique. They must, however, both be recorded as the starting point for new study. There is, moreover, no cause for despair. It is clear, for example, that the natives of Madeira will very quickly become acclimatised in Guadeloupe, as is already the case in Cuba, and the much more serious mortality of the Negro, Chinese, and Hindoo races does not prove the impossibility of their ever inhabiting these islands.

VII. The conditions of life and the nature of the race are not all in the numerous problems raised by acclimatisation. Man, even individually, brings his special elements to bear upon it. The savage and the modern European are placed, by the mere fact of the social differences which separate them, in conditions often opposite, and not always in favour of the latter.