surveyed harbors, or where the surveys are of doubtful accuracy, and sometimes for the improvement of young officers in this branch of service even when further information is not actually needed, British commanders detained long in port are expected to form surveying parties for actual duty. And I am assured by those conversant with such matters, that many an officer is able to trace his promotion, and the subsequent special favor and confidence of his Government, to official records of his competency, activity, industry, perseverance, and accuracy, when engaged on such duty in the early years of his professional life. It is an unfortunate fact that some of our finest specimens of naval architecture, the appearance of which in numerous foreign ports would give to the unreading and ignorant a proper appreciation of our national power, are required to linger ingloriously in harbors that might be named, until the original anchorage, it has been ironically suggested, has undergone a geological change; and a heaving of the anchor embedded in a glassy stratum would have warranted the supposition of a vitrification of the sand bottom by volcanic heat, but for the not irrational intimation that long accumulating ale and champagne bottles had something to do with it. And this naval inactivity has not even the apology of a useful incidental employment to palliate it; which, while it would promote personal health, official efficiency, and professional improvement, would advance also the interests of general commerce, contemplating the development of the natural resources of the Pacific Provinces of Ecuador and New Granada. In Our progress was retarded by head-winds and cross currents. The latter, in particular along the coast of New Granada, our commander thinks are but imperfectly understood. this field of inquiry there is need of the inspiring influence and suggestions of our own Maury to give impulse to investigation, his assiduity in collecting and collating its results, his analytic mind to unfold the secrets of nature, and his comprehensive intelligence to simplify to others her phenomena, and frame rational theories and sound rules of practice. CHAPTER XXII. NEGRO SLAVERY-ITS IN returning to the starting point of my southern tour, mind busies itself with a retrospection of the incidents and observations of the interval. Among other things, the condition of the negro, and the influence he is exercising on the social and political state of the countries visited, having been inquired into, have led to reflections reasonable in one whose own people are interested in that subject. In New Granada, Ecuador, Peru, and Chile, as well as in the other Spanish-American colonies, negro slavery existed and became an inheritance of the ensuing Republics. Indian slavery likewise existed under the Empire, although in a letter of Cortez to the Emperor Charles the Fifth he says: "Considering the capacity of the Mexican Indians it appears a grave thing to compel them to serve the Spaniards." Nevertheless, the pressure of necessities of revenue and importunities of followers, compelled him, as he further says, "to place on deposit to the Spaniards the lords and natives of these provinces." This was the commencement of that system of servitude in Mexico known as the "encomienda,” and which was subsequently extended to the other countries discovered and colonized by the Spaniards. True, the Emperor issued an order that no Indian captive was to be held as a slave "throughout his dominions;" and an historian of that period regards this "a considerable step in the up-hill work of humane legislation," although he withholds all comments on the numberless cruelties, oppressions, and exactions, which placed the Indians in a far less humane relation ** than would have been a wisely and benevolently ordered system of servitude. Subsequently Ponce de Leon was sent to Mexico as residencia, and he was instructed to inquire into the subject of encomiendas, and "in case he should determine that the Indians were to be given in-encomienda, he should then consider whether they should remain as they were, or be given as vassals or by way of fief." In 1533 Charles "authorized the granting of encomiendas in Peru;" and on the appointment of Antonio de Mendoza as Viceroy of Mexico, we are told that the Emperor secretly gave him the power of dealing with the subject, which shows that the question was still open as regarded the inhabitants of New Spain. In 1535 Charles the Fifth undertook an expedition against Tunis. It cannot be proved that that expedition had any influence on the fate of the Indies; but in the next year a law was passed which may have been due to the want of money at home, or to the want of attention to colonial affairs. This was the law of succession proclaimed at Madrid in 1536, which gave encomiendas for a second life, and was applicable to all the Indies. Thus, an actual personal, as well as political enslavement of the millions of natives of these newly-discovered countries was established, subject only to the laws of repartimiento, which assigned the specific service and its duration. The countries thus enslaved embraced among them the two great centres of Indian civilization, Mexico and Peru; not the Peru of our day, but that of the Incas, extending from Quito to the Maulé, nearly two thousand five hundred miles. Both inhabited by races whose intelligence, customs, social and political institutions, by their general advancement and adaptation to the wants of the people, surprised their discoverers. It was a usurpation of dominion in the West, and a subordination to its own selfish purposes by Spain of teeming millions of people, having no parallel except in the aggressive and appropriating policy of Great Britain in the East. Although conquered and controlled by Spanish hardihood, prowess, and superior agencies of war, yet from approximative physical and moral equality of the Indians to their conquerors, intercourse by marriage and otherwise was not insuperably repugnant to the instincts of the higher race, and thus resulted in great part that extensive mongrelism which is the most striking characteristic of the present population, and which, from the interest of neutralization and accumulation of power and influence, has overthrown the system of servitude founded in the first instance upon the greater diversity of race. 66 Owing to the rapid disappearance of the Indians in some of the Spanish colonies, particularly in the West India Islands, from depressing influences and harsh treatment, a royal grant allowed the importation of negro slaves to supply necessary labor. Many of these in time found their way to the continent, and thus another element of mongrelism was introduced on the great theatre of Spanish-American practical amalgamation. For although the gap between the extremes of the human racesthe Caucasian and the Negro-could not readily be filled; not merely because of instinctive repugnance, but because of the operations of natural law, which counteract the violations of the ordinances of God, who determined the distinctions, relations, and purposes of His beings, in the development of plan has created every thing after his kind," and has also provided to preserve them thus; yet the existence of the intermediate Indian facilitated the temporary closure of it. The Indian's approximation to the White on the one hand, gave to their hybrid offspring a higher vitality than could be possessed by the mulatto; and his corresponding approximation to the Negro on the other hand, gave to that hybrid offspring also a higher vitality than that possessed by the mulatto. And taken in connection with the greatly preponderating aboriginal element in the populations of the Spanish-American countries, the imperious self-preservative law of nature, if European and African immigration should be arrested or greatly restricted, will surely assert its power and restore the native blood to its original state, and surrender again to its representative man the control of his own destiny. This event appears likely to be hastened by the abolition of negro slavery since the achievement of the independence of the Spanish-American colonies. For his emancipation, by freeing him from the control of a master capable of regulating his actions for their mutual good, handed him over to the debasing mastery of his own passions, which, by the universal testimony of the intelligent and candid citizens of these countries, are precipitating his extinction. Successful in its effort to shake off the political oppression of the mother-country, the Caucasian race, which originated and was the chief agent in executing the scheme of colonial independence, has in its organization of government and modification of law, merged the question of domestic bondage, as applied to an inferior race, in the general proposition of political slavery considered in its relation to equals in creation. In the SpanishAmerican republics some apology may be found for this in the wide-spread mongrelism already referred to, which shaded away the marked differences of original race, temporarily elevating the lower at the cost of the higher organization; and where but few were left untainted by deterioration, scrutiny was deprived of a motive for activity. And if, by some, distinctions were readily observed, the policy of interest, or aspirations for place and power, taught them silence and submission to the many; who, however degenerate, had become through numbers the controlling element of the State in its new form. It is not surprising that mongrels should overlook the inferiority of one of the elements of their own ancestry. Their ignorance of natural laws governing the physiological relations of races blinded them to evils which could not fail to become aggravated by the social equality necessarily resulting from the exercise of equal political rights by the Negro. The intensity of their new-born zeal for freedom made them reckless of acts destined to deprive invested capital and useful enterprise of necessary labor, and in its stead to increase the burdens of society by idleness, poverty, debasement, and consequent disease. They failed to foresee the additional corruptions, social convulsions, and perpetually recurring political disturbances, certain to follow an equal grant of civil rights to those who, from inherent defects, know not how to use them for the general good, and hence become ready instruments of evil, of usurpation, oppression, persecution, and revenge, in the hands of the designing and wicked. Deterioration and its inherent prejudice, and the want of means of knowledge, made them ignorant of the causes of the human deg |