they introduced has been productive of much evil and very little good. While, on the one hand, the native industry and trade have been stimulated by increased demand and by the freedom enjoyed in the English ports, they have, on the other hand, been subjected by the Portuguese, English and Dutch, to a series of despotic restraints, extending over a period of three hundred years: and, within the range of the last nation’s influence, continued, however modified, to this hour: which far more than counterbalance all the advantages that can be placed in the opposite scale.
The effect of the successive immigrations, revolutions and admixtures which we have indicated or alluded to, has been, that there are now in the Archipelago an extraordinary number of races, differing in colour, habits, civilization, and language, and living under forms of government and laws, or customs, exhibiting the greatest variety. The same cause which isolated the aborigenes into numerous distinct tribes and kept them separate,—the exuberant vegetation of the islands,—has resisted the influence, so far as it was originally amalgamating, of every successive foreign civilization that has dominated; and the aboriginal nomades of the jungle and the sea, in their unchanged habits and mode of life, reveal to their European contemporary, the condition of their race at a time when his own fore-fathers were as rude and far more savage. The more civilized races, after attaining a certain measure of advancement, have been separated by their acquired habits from the unaltered races, and have too often turned their superiority into the means of oppressing, and thereby more completely imprisoning in the barbarism of the jungles, such of them as lived in their proximity. So great is the diversity of tribes, that if a dry catalogue of names suited the purpose of this sketch, we could not afford space to enumerate them. But, viewing human life in the Archipelago as a general contemplation, we may recall a few of the broader peculiarities which would be most likely to dwell on the memory after leaving the region.
In the hearts of the forests we meet man scantily covered with the bark of a free, and living on wild fruits, which he seeks with the agility of the monkey, and wild animals, which he tracks with the keen eye and scent of a beast of prey, and slays with a poisoned arrow projected from a hollow bambú by bis breath.
