172 



NATURE 



[DECEMBEii 8', igio 



THE NEGRO IN THE NEW WORLD.' 



WHEN, more than four centuries ago, the Portu- 

 guese obtained the sanction of the Roman 

 Pontiff to engage in the African slave trade, and, 

 some years later (Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494), Pope 

 Alexander VI. assigned to Portugal the west coast of 

 Africa and to Spain the New World (of which Portu- 

 gal claimed Brazil, in accordance with the terms of 

 the treaty), it could not have been foreseen that these 

 acts were the first steps in the vastest anthropological 

 experiment the world has ever witnessed, the effects 

 of which for manv ages to come are likely to confound 

 and confuse the politics of the Americas. In Portugal 

 itself the population has been transformed into 

 Africanised mongrels, who at the present moment are 

 busily engaged in casting out the repre- 

 sentatives of the church that permitted 

 them to begin the process of wholesale 

 racial admixture four hundred years ago. 



Negro slavery and the breeding of a 

 mulatto population were by no means 

 novel phenomena in 1494, for even then 

 Egypt had been familiar with them for 

 forty-five centuries; and, in less remote 

 times, Arabia and western Asia, Greece, 

 and Rome, Tunis and Morocco were only 

 too familiar with the black slave and the 

 half-caste. But the coincidence of the in- 

 troduction of negro slaves into Portugal 

 and the opening up of the New World by 

 the two peninsular kingdoms makes the 

 beginning of the sixteenth century — for 

 the experiment of sending negroes to the 

 West Indies began in 15 16 — a landmark 

 in the history of the world. 



Sir Harry Johnston has given a very 

 complete history, without sparing us any 

 of its appalling horrors, of the iniquitous 

 traffic in black slaves, which ultimately 

 led to the transference from one side of 

 the globe to the other, and that a new con- 

 tinent, of a population (whose descendants 

 now number twenty-five millions), which 

 had grown up in the seclusion of the heart 

 of Africa and had there become divergently 

 specialised from the rest of mankind in 

 bodily structure and mental and moral 

 qualities. He has drawn a most graphic 

 picture of how these negro people behaved 

 in their new home, as they came into con- 

 tact successively with the aboriginal 

 Americans, and also the Iberians and the 

 northern Europeans, who had settled in 

 the New World. 



Nothing has surprised the "lay" re- 

 viewers of this book in the newspaper 

 press more than the revelation of the gross 

 inhumanity of the representatives of the 

 north European race (the English and 

 the Dutch) towards the negro slave, when 

 contrasted with the more generous behaviour 

 of the Iberian and other Mediterranean peoples. 

 Lamentable and indisputable as is the fact, the ex- 

 planation is simple enough. The Mediterranean race 

 was evolved and fashioned in an environment sirnilar 

 to, and perhaps in the same continent as, the African 

 negro, and not only developed mental and moral quali^ 

 ties in many respects closely resembling those^ of the 

 negro, which explains their mutual understanding the 

 one of the other; but also the black and the brunet 

 race had been in contact for many ages, had inter- 



1 " The Negro in the New World." 'By Sir Harry H. Johnston, 

 G.C.M.G., K.C.B. Pp. xxix+499. (London : Methuen and Co., Ltd., 

 1910.) Price 21s. net. 



bred, and had come to give equal rights to the off- 

 spring of mixed unions. 



The blond people of the north, the representatives 

 of a more austere civilisation, had nothing in common 

 with the lazy, lascivious negro, and had no knowledge 

 of or sympathy with him. Thus they came to treat 

 him and his offspring, whether pure or mixed, as an 

 inferior being of low intelligence and dirty habits. 



When Mr. Roosevelt (at the time President of the 

 United States) invited Sir Harry Johnston to under- 

 take an investigation of the problems of the negro 

 in the New World, he could not have chosen anyone 

 to accomplish this task better fitted by personal know- 

 ledge and exceptionally wide experience of the negro 

 in his native haunts. 



Others may possibly have had equal opportunities 



Fig. I. — Type of the Virginian Negro of Slavery Days.. From " The Negro in the New 



World." 



of Studying the negro in Africa, but certainly no one 

 has made such excellent use of them as Sir Harry 

 Johnston, who has already written eleven volumes on 

 the subject. 



With such an intimate knowledge of the essential 

 negro, Sir Harry Johnston was well equipped for the 

 examination of his behaviour under the influence of 

 his altered surroundings in the New World. 



In this book he has given us a detailed account, 

 illustrated by maps and hundreds of excellent photo- 

 graphs, of the nature of each territory in the New 

 World occupied by negroes or negroids, its commer- 

 cial resources and social conditions, the place occupied 

 in it by the black man, and especially the half-caste, 

 and the degree of success and the possibilities for the 



NO. 2145, VOL. 85] 



