Address to the Ethnological Society of London : delivered at the anniversary meeting on the 25th May, 1844 / [Richard King].

  • King, Richard, 1811?-1876
Date:
1844
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Address to the Ethnological Society of London : delivered at the anniversary meeting on the 25th May, 1844 / [Richard King]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    10/42 (page 12)
    numerous pastoral nations of Hottentots, a peaceful and in¬ offensive race, who wandered about with numerous flocks in a state of primitive simplicity, and whose descendants are now found in the destitute Bushmen, who have become vermin and reptile feeders. It would be endless to recount the names of tribes and whole nations in America who have been extirpated by the Spanish conqueror of that country. When the Spanish and Portuguese took possession of the islands in the Gulf of Mexico and the territories on the main-land, little regard was paid to human life. In the course of half a century twenty millions of the inhabitants were swept away. In the islands of Cuba and Jamaica, twenty-five years were sufficient to destroy the entire ab¬ original race; and to exterminate the Seminoles, 40,000,000 of dollars have been spent by the American Government. And disease has done its part. It is stated by Humboldt that a plague prevailed among the Indian race in Mexico, in 1545, which carried off 800,000, and, in 1576,2,000,000. In 1637, Morton, in his English Canaan, states, that “ the hand of God fell heavily upon the natives with such a mortall stroake that they died on heaps as they lay in their houses ; and the living that were able to shift for themselves would runne away, and let them dy, and let their carkases ly above the ground without buriall. For in a place where many inhabited, there hath been but one left alive to tell wdiat became of the rest, the living being not able to bury the dead, they were left for crowes, kites, and vermine to prey upon, and the bones and skulls upon the several places of their habitations made such a spectacle, that, as one travelled in the forest, near Massachusetts, it seemed to be a newr-found Golgotha.” According to the census of 1689, just sixty-two years after the settlement of Virginia, the natives of that colony were reduced, by small-pox, to one-third of their former num¬ bers. Vicount St. Leopoldos, in his Annals of the Pro¬ vince of Rio Grande, published in 1840, states, that of the 30,000 natives existing at the time the Jesuit Missionaries were broken up, there existed, according to the statistical maps of the province, made in 1835, only 237, of whom 107