4 MEXICO, CENTRAL AMERICA, WEST INDIES. 



nortli to south, from tlie banks of the Colorado aud Rio Bravo to the valleys of 

 the Sierra Mad re, the Anahuac tablelands and southern isthmuses. But the same 

 records speak of the formidable obstacles encountered by those peoples, obstacles 

 by which thev were- often arrested for decades and even centuries, and at times 

 compelled to retrace their steps to their original homes. To the difficulties created 

 by the resisting tribes were added those of the rough routes over the crests of 

 transverse ranges, and the changes of climate on their passage through the forests, 

 or on the descent towards the hot regions of the seaboard and isthmuses. Some 

 of those northern invaders were arrested in the various depressions of the Mexican 

 plateaux ; others continued their march as far as Tehuantepec and Guatemala ; while 

 others penetrated southwards to the plains of Salvador and the Nicaragua volcanoes. 



There can be no doubt that at various epochs other hordes from the north 

 pushed even still farther south. But no documents dating from the American 

 mediaeval period make any mention of such migrations on the mainland. In fact 

 in the narrow neck of land some 600 miles long, which bends round to the north- 

 west corner of the state of Columbia, the natural obstacles become almost insur- 

 mountable. Here nothing could be attempted except slow maritime expeditions 

 continued from age to age ; but of such migrations all memory has perished. 

 The movements of the native populations must have been prevented or indefinitely 

 arrested by the rugged highlands stretching from sea to sea, by the impenetrable 

 tangle of tropical forests, the sudden freshets caused by tremendous downpours, 

 or the flooded tracts skirting the banks of the Atrato. 



The numerous islands of all sizes stretching in chains between the basins of 

 the American Mediterranean, or along the borders of the Atlantic, were destined 

 by their very isolation to become the homes of communities either differing in 

 origin or else slowly differentiated by long seclusion. During the course of 

 centuries their common descent was necessarily forgotten even by kindred sea- 

 faring peoples, whose knowledge of navigation was rudimentary, although some 

 of their craft hoisted sails and were large enough to carry as many as fifty Indians. 

 The great diversity of languages formerly spoken in the Antilles and still current 

 in Mexico and the isthmuses is sufficient evidence of long isolation and dispersion 

 in the fragmentary world lying between the northern and southern continents. 



For this region a certain unity, at least in a political sense, seemed to be 

 prepared by the discovery of the archipelagoes and adjacent mainland at the end 

 of the fifteenth and beginnino' of the sixteenth century. When thev landed on 

 this new territory" the S^Daniards acquired definite possession' of the islands and 

 isthmuses, if not, as they supposed, for the dynasty of Charles Y., at all events 

 as an inheritance of the Old "World. The Antilles and Mexico never faded from 

 the memory of Eurojjeans, as had. been the fate of the earlier Norse discoveries 

 in Greenland, Helluland and Yin eland. 



In virtue of Pope Alexander YI.'s Bull awarding to the Castillans and Portu- 

 guese all present and prospective discoveries, all those white settlers had to become 

 Spanish subjects. The vast continental amphitheatre sweeping round the double 

 basin of the inland sea, as well as its numerous chains of islands, was consequently 



