As for the mountains of the east, the Appalachians of South America, they consist of the Guiana ridge in the north and the Brazilian highlands in the east, each containing a number of independent Sierras and Serras of its own and forming the remnants of a much vaster range which was gradually cut in two by the valley of the Amazon. The Amazon is not the longest river in the world but the river takes care of more water than any other. It literally has hundreds of branches, of which more than fifteen are as long as the Rhine, while several others, such as the Madeira and the Tapajos, are a great deal longer.
North of the Guiana mountains there is another valley, that of the Orinoco river. The Orinoco, which is actually connected with the Amazon by way of the curious Rio Negro (imagine the Ohio being part of the Mississippi and the Potomac at the same time!) is much better suited to navigation than the Amazon. For it does not have to break its way through the mountains just before it reaches the sea, as the Amazon is obliged to do and its mouth is almost twenty miles wide, while the river itself, a terrific water-carrier, maintains a steady depth of 300 feet for several hundred miles inland, which is of great convenience to sea-going vessels.
As for the Parana, the north-south river of South America, on the way to the sea it picks up the Paraguay and the Uruguay rivers and then becomes the Rio de la Plata on which Montevideo, the capital of the Uruguay, is situated. Like the Orinoco, the Parana is a good inland waterway.
In one respect, South America is much better off than most of the other continents, except Europe. It has practically no deserts. Except for northern Chile, most of her country enjoys a sufficient amount of moisture, while the Amazon region and the whole of the eastern coast of Brazil are drenched by equatorial rains which make the Amazon territory much more densely and evenly wooded than that of the Congo. But as a result of its steady rainfall, the rest of the continent, especially in the southern part, which is not quite so near the equator, is excellently suited for agriculture and the Argentine pampas and the Orinoco llanos and the Brazilian campos are close rivals of our own Great Plains.
As for the countries which we find in South America to-day, few of them grew out of what we might call historical inevitability. They were the unexpected and haphazard results of successful revolutions rather than the products of slow growth and development. The United States of Venezuela with a population of 3,216,000 is a little too near the equator to develop a very energetic race of men. But round the lagoon of Maracaibo in the north oil has been discovered and that has made Maracaibo the most important harbour of Venezuela, a position previously held by La Guaira, the port of Caracas, the capital, which lies rather inconveniently just behind a low mountain ridge that separates it from the sea.
On the west of Venezuela lies Colombia with the capital city of Bogota, which lies so far inland that it was a most inconvenient place to reach until the introduction of a regular airplane service with Barranquilla at the mouth of the Magdalena River. Colombia is fertile and has a great natural wealth and furthermore, like the United States, it is situated on two oceans. But it will need lots of immigrants from northern Europe before it can begin to develop its natural resources.
Ecuador is also a poor country and although the port of Guayaquil, the harbour of Quito, the capital, has done a great deal better since the opening of the Panama Canal, there is nothing to report about this nation except that it used to export a lot of quinine and nowadays exports more cocoa than anything else.
Peru, further south along the coast of the Pacific, was the seat of a very powerful Indian State when the Spaniards first arrived in the New World. It was ruled by a caste of nobles, the Incas, or children of the sun, who elected the supreme ruler or the Inca of the whole country, who thereupon was granted despotic rights. Nevertheless and in spite of or because of their feudal character, the Peruvians had developed a much higher and much more human form of civilization than the Aztecs.
But when Pizarro reached these parts, the Inca empire was more than 400 years old and that is a long time for any particular form of government to last. There were many political parties in the land and there was rivalry between different groups of nobles. Pizarro played one side against the other and then in 1531 conquered the whole country. He imprisoned the reigning Inca and turned the Indians into slaves. Whatever could be stolen or plundered was dragged away and sent to Spain. The ruins of the old Incas, the remnants of roads and castles around Lake Titicaca way up in the Andes (3300 square miles of water 12,875 feet above sea-level) and endless old bits of pottery and other bits of art show us what was lost when a capable and competent race was suddenly transformed into the indolent and miserable natives whose now wander aimlessly through the streets of Cuzco, the old capital, or take part in some revolution.
Lima is the modern capital where the future fate of Peru’s treasures in silver and copper and oil is to be decided, unless the President of the Republic and his foreign banking friends have long since removed the contents of these mines and have deposited them in the vaults of the Banque de France. Such things are possible. They explain why this chapter can be so short.
Bolivia, the poor land-locked state, was not always a land-locked state and La Paz, the capital, once upon a time had direct access to the sea. But during the famous saltpetre war of 1879~1882, when Peru and Chile fought for the Arica district, Bolivia was foolish enough to side against Chile. When Chile won the war, Bolivia lost her coastal region. Bolivia is a very rich country. Among other things it is the third tin-producing country of the world, but a density of population of less than five per square mile, a total population of less than 3,000,000 and most of those Indians who remained behind when the Inca Empire was destroyed no, it will take a great deal of time to do anything with or for that unfortunate land.