South America

by W. H. Koebel

No doubt South America has been more widely experimented upon in the colonizing sense than any other Continent. The methods of the Spaniards and Portuguese were by no means similar throughout. Indeed, the principles adopted by the four greatest colonizing nations of the age—the Spanish, the Portuguese, the English, and the Dutch—were all distinguished from each other by various important features.

The British, where they came into contact with dark-skinned races of inferior vigour and individual power, made a point of holding aloof, so far as the more important social points were concerned. Thus in India and in Africa the gulf between the white and the black has continued unbridged. The representatives of the British have remained as a governing race, relying upon the strict justice of their rule for its preservation. They have refrained from interference in the thousand jealousies and caste regulations with which the East Indies were, and are, honeycombed, becoming active only when oppression became barefaced. These officials, that is to say, have made a point of respecting the religions of the various tribes, and have even encouraged them to continue unmolested.

As a result, the Governors, as a body, won the respect, and even the reverence, of a great mass of the populace, but gained comparatively little actual and personal affection. They were subjected to the jealousy of the fakirs in India, of the witch-doctors in Africa, and of other dusky fanatics who had been accustomed to oppress the rank and file of the populace before the advent of the European civilization.

The Dutch pursued a policy very similar to that of the English. They were essentially just in their rule, and they won the wholesale respect of the subject races. Their methods of governing, however, were usually more severe than those of the British, and as a rule the discipline they enforced was considerably stronger. This has been evidenced in Africa and elsewhere.

The Iberian system of colonization was in general totally different. Even the Spaniards, far less spontaneously genial than the Portuguese, encouraged an intimacy between their colonists and the subject races of a kind unknown in the Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic circles. It is true that in the first instance the Spaniards slaughtered hundreds of thousands of natives. But these wholesale killings were on account of no social convictions; they were merely the result of an overpowering greed for gold and of too harsh a method of enforcing labour. The colour question, as between Spaniard and native, scarcely ruffled the social surface of the colonies. This was not altogether to be wondered at when the antecedents of these bold Spanish colonial pioneers are taken into consideration.

A dusky tide from Africa had flooded the half of Spain, and had remained there for centuries, until the southern Spaniard, who lived in the midst of Moorish conquerors, tolerantly treated and allowed almost entire religious freedom, forgot the hostility towards his traditional enemy, and became oblivious of questions of colour. So much so was this the case that the Christian services were wont, after a time, to be conducted in Arabic, a system which evoked horrified protests from Bishops in other parts. Be that as it may, it is certain that the Spaniards had, with the sole exception of the Portuguese, been more concerned with the African races and dark blood than any other nation in Europe. Thus, once in South America, although the actual helplessness of the Indians was immediately remarked and taken advantage of, no question of inferiority from a mere racial point of view arose. The Indian went to the wall, not because he was an Indian, but because his powers were less than those of the European who had invaded his lands.

If this was the case with the Spaniard, it was far more marked in the case of the Portuguese. In some respects, perhaps, no nation colonized with quite the same amount of enthusiasm as this. Its pioneers once definitely settled in the country, whichever it might be, there arose no question of looking upon the new conquest as a place to be resided in for a certain number of years and no more. The Portuguese went to the east and to the south-west to make themselves part and parcel of the soil of the country they had annexed. To this end they mingled from the very start with the natives, and inter-married with an entire want of restraint with the Indian women.

Thus from the very inception of the Portuguese colonial era we are confronted with a race of half-castes, and we see the forces brought about by a mixture of blood and climatic conditions working more powerfully in the Portuguese colonies than in any others. The result was, in one sense, the formation of a new race, and an almost complete absence of rebellion and native unrest in those parts where genuine civilization had been attempted. That the race as a whole lost its European vigour and its northern principles was inevitable. This was the price of peace.

The subject is one into which climatic influence enters largely. Many of the districts of Brazil were not, and are not, in the least suited as a permanent place of residence for the white man. Were an attempt to be made to populate such places as these by Europeans, it could only be done by means of a continual change of inhabitants. That is to say, each resident, having spent a certain number of years in the spot, must be succeeded by another in order to preserve the integrity and vigour of the race.