Finally, it is perhaps worth observing that America affords a field of truly unique profit for all of these interests. The long isolation of its inhabitants from the balance of mankind, the variety of the forms and levels of their native achievement, the intrinsic value to humanity at large of what they did achieve, both in material and ideal modes, all unite to give to the races of the New Hemisphere an almost other-world distinction from the Old World peoples from whose midst (in some remote day) they doubtless sprang. It is true that the resemblances between the modes of life and the bent of thought in the two Worlds are as striking and numerous as their divergences; but this fact is in itself of the highest significance in that it emphasizes that fundamental unity, spiritual as well as physical, which is of the whole human brotherhood.
It is surely apparent that one book cannot satisfy all the interests which have been here defined. It is possible, however, that a description which should show what, in the main, are the materials to be found and how they are distributed with reference to accessible sources of study might well contribute to all. Nothing more ambitious than this is in the plan of the present work.
[CHAPTER I]
THE ANTILLES
I. THE ISLANDERS[6]
A glance at a map of the Western Hemisphere reveals two great continents, North and South America, somewhat tenuously united by the Isthmus and the Antilles. The Isthmus is solid, mountainous land, forming a part of that backbone of the hemisphere which extends along its western border, continuous from Alaska to the Land of Fire. The Antilles are an archipelago, or rather a group of archipelagos, extending without gap from the tip of Florida to Trinidad and the mouths of the Orinoco. Both connexions have a certain weight, or leaning, toward North America. The Isthmus narrows southward almost to the point of its attachment to South America, while to the north it broadens out into Central America, the peninsula of Yucatan, and the plateau of Mexico. Similarly, the southern division of the archipelago, the Lesser Antilles, forms an arc of islets, mere stepping-stones, as it were, from the southern continent to the large islands of the Greater Antilles—Porto Rico, Hispaniola or Haiti, Jamaica, Cuba—which are natural outliers of the continent to the north. Cuba, indeed, almost unites Yucatan and Florida; while breasting Cuba and Florida, toward the open sea, is a third island group, the Bahamas, still further emphasizing the northern predominance.