He would not, however, consent to have them carried away from the beautiful island; they and it, belonged, said he, to the King and Queen, Ferdinand and Isabella. But he said these darkly and terribly significant words—"They are timid and well fitted for obedience. They will do whatever they are ordered to do; a thousand of them would retreat before three or four of ours. If your Highnesses give me the order to carry them off or to enslave them here, there is nothing to hinder it; fifty men will suffice to do it." Thus wrote he in his Journal, or Despatch, of 14 and 16, December.
Presently came from Europe the wholesale sentence of that whole poor innocent people. They were ordered to be the slaves of gold—all subjected to compulsory labor, some to seek gold, and others to feed the goldseekers.
Columbus confesses that in twelve years, six sevenths of that once happy population had perished; and Herrera adds that in twenty-five years, that population had fallen from a million of souls to fourteen thousand.
What followed, is only too well known. The gold seeker and the planter exterminated the natives and incessantly replaced them at the expense of the negroes. And what has been the consequence? That in the low, hot, immensely fecund countries, the black race alone, are permanent. America will belong to that race; Europe has achieved precisely the opposite of that which it intended.
Every where, in all directions, the colonizing impotency of Europe has displayed itself in America. The French adventurer has not survived; he took thither no family, and did take thither all the worst vices of his native land. As a natural consequence, instead of civilizing the barbarians, he added their vices to his own, and sank to their barbarous level. With the exception of two temperate countries into which they went en masse, and in families, the English have not been much more successful than the French in planting their race permanently and healthily in transmarine colonies. In another century, India will scarcely know that the Englishmen once lived there. Have the Missionaries, whether Catholic or Protestant, made any converts? Dumont, the thoroughly well-informed Dumont, tells me—"not one!"
Between them and us, there are thirty centuries and thirty religions. Try to force their intellect, and the result will be that which the truly great Humboldt observed in those American villages which are to this day called "Missions;" that, having lost their own native energies and traditions, without acquiring ours, they will sink into a sort of stupefaction, become merely so many children of a larger growth, alive in body, but dead in mind,—all but idiots, useless alike to themselves and to others.
Our voyages, upon which we moderns, and more especially the learned, so plume ourselves, have they been really, or at all, servicable to the savages? I really cannot see it. While, on the one hand, the heroic races of North America have perished of hunger and wretchedness, the soft, effeminate, gentle races of the South, perish, too, to the great shame of our seamen, who, in that distant part of the world, have thrown off even the very mask of decency. Population at once kindly and weak, in whom Bourgainville discerned such excess of complaisance, among whom the English Missionaries have gained much profit, but not a single soul,—kindly and weak people, they are perishing miserably beneath the double scourge of the worst vices and the most loathsome diseases of the old world.
Formerly, the long coast of Siberia was well peopled. Under that terribly hard climate, the nomadic natives hunted the richly, the preciously, furred animals which at once fed and clothed them. The Russian despotism, at once strong and senseless, compelled them to adopt the settled life of agriculturists, in a climate, and upon a soil, where agriculture is an absurdity, an impossibility. The consequence is that these peoples have gradually died off. On the other hand, the trading spirit, that greedy and insatiable devourer, has refused to spare the brutes in their breeding seasons, and as a necessary consequence, the brutes have disappeared with the men; and now, for a thousand miles along that coast, you have a terrible solitude, where man hunts not, and where the brutes are not. The winds may whistle shrilly, the frost may be bitter and biting as ever, but there is neither man nor beast to listen to the one or to shudder beneath the other.
Had our voyagers to the North been truly wise, their very first care should have been to form a good, firm friendship with the Esquimaux, to mitigate their miseries, to adopt some of their children and have them well instructed in Europe, and thus lay the foundation of a great indigenous race of discoverers. We learn from Captain John Ross, and from not a few others, that they are very intelligent, and very readily acquire the knowledge and the arts of Europe. Marriages would have been contracted between European sailors and the native women; a mixed population would thus have sprung up, to which all that northern portion of the American continent would have been "native and to the manor born." And that would have been the, at once, safe and sure way of discovering the much coveted North-western passage. Thirty years—a single generation—would have done it effectually—and in three hundred years it has been done only uselessly because you have terrified those poor savages; because you have destroyed alike the man of the soil and the Genius Loci. What is the use of merely seeing that desert, when, in the very act of seeing it you make it either depopulated or hostile?