During the war when we learned more geography and in a shorter space of time than we had ever done before (to forget most of it just as rapidly when we were no longer under any necessity of knowing where Kut-el-Amara and the Isonzo might possibly be located) it was quite customary for the younger generation to switch from German (which soon was to be a dead language anyway) to Spanish, on the ground that there was “a great future for that language in South America.” That future did not manifest itself while the actual fighting was going on. Indeed, businesstransactions with that vast continent suffered a very serious slump.
Afterwards we discovered the reason. All the technical details of foreign trade in Peru and Brazil and Ecuador and whatever these other countries might be called had thus far been entrusted to patient little German clerks who were supposed to be familiar with that sort of thing, which was most unfortunately beyond the mental reach of their employers. When South America joined the Allies (for most of them had a few German ships in their harbours and needed loans) these poor Teutonic ink-slingers had been sent to concentration camps and the foreign correspondence of those South American commercial establishments had come to a sudden end, to be resumed as soon as peace had been declared and the Heinies were back at their ledgers.
Gradually the truth then began to dawn upon us. Although South America was a continent of tremendous natural wealth, it is so hopelessly underpopulated and in many respects so far behind the rest of the world that it would take at least another half-century before it would be of the slightest value to any one except the few rich families who retain their possessions from the days of Spanish domination or had gained them afterwards in their quality of uncle or nephew to one of the quick-change South American presidents.
Now if in the present volume I devote only a few pages to South America, do not suspect me of anti-Latin feelings. On the contrary, being of northern descent myself, I am able to appreciate the many virtues of the southern races much better than they are able to do themselves. But at the beginning of this book I told you that I would try to write a “human” geography, being firmly convinced that the importance of any given piece of land depends entirely upon the sum total of the contributions the inhabitants of that particular territory, be it large or small, have made to the sum total of human happiness in the form of science or commerce or religion or one of the arts. From that angle, alas, South America so far has been almost as barren as Australia or Mongolia. Which, I repeat, may be due to the lack of population, which in turn may be due to the fact that a great deal of South America lies beneath the equator and that in the other parts the white man has never been able to replace the native, or is so swamped by half-breeds of different hue (mulattos, who are the descendants of whites and Negroes, Mestizos, who are the children of Indians and whites or Zambos, who are the offspring of Negroes and Indians) that they are never quite able to assert their political or intellectual powers.
South America has been the scene of some strange political experiments. A Brazilian Empire was something quite new under the sun, although it lasted less than a century and that extraordinary Jesuit free state in Paraguay (which lasted much longer than the empire on its eastern front) will probably always receive honourable mention in learned works devoted to applied Utopias. And South America produced at least one man of more than extraordinary ability, the great Bolivar who not merely set his country free but who was directly or indirectly responsible for the successful outcome of most of the revolutionary movements of the entire continent. I do not for a moment doubt that there have been a great many other men who have loomed large in the local histories of Uruguay and Bolivia, but our planet at large has not heard of them and I wonder seriously whether upon close acquaintanceship they would prove to be of the calibre that is necessary to elevate them to the rank of world figures. And so it will be sufficient for the purpose of this book if I present you with a brief catalogue of mountains, rivers and states and promise you faithfully that I will fill in the human details a thousand years hence.
The entire western coast of South America consists of a continuation of our own Rockies and of the Mexican Sierra Madre and it is known as the Cordilleras de los Andes or the Andes for short. The Andes was the Spanish name which the conquerors had given to those irrigation canals which the Indians had built all over the slopes of their native hills. By merely destroying those canals and dams, the Spaniards were afterwards able to let many tribes starve to death and since the Conquistadores had taken the long and dangerous trip across the ocean to get rich quick and not to found a permanent home in a new world, this was as good a way of robbing the natives of their possessions as any other.
When approaching the South Pole, the Andes break off into a number of islands of which Tierra del Fuego is the best known. Between Chile and Tierra del Fuego lies the strait which Magellan navigated with such great difficulty on the white man’s first trip round the world and which is still called after him. The southernmost point of the island is Cape Horn, so called after the native town of the man who discovered it (the little town of Hoorn in Holland). The Strait of Magellan is of course of great strategic importance. Hence the Falkland Islands which guard it are British territory.
The Andes, like the whole of this enormous mountain-range that runs from the Arctic to the Antarctic Circle, are volcanic. The Chimborazo in Ecuador (now extinct) is 20,702 feet high. The Aconcagua in the Argentine beats them all with 22,834 feet While the Cotopaxi with 19,550 feet (also in Ecuador) holds the record for being the highest active volcano of the entire planet.
The South American Andes resemble their North American sisters in two other respects. The high mountain ridges enclose several wide plateaus which form the natural confines for such states as Bolivia or Ecuador. Furthermore there are very few convenient passes so that the railroad between the Argentine and Chile, the only trans-Andean railroad, has to climb to a height which far surpasses that of Swiss mountain passes like the St Bernard or the Gotthard ere it can bore its tunnels.