Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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The Number Of
Europeans Included In The White Race (Not Comprehending The Troops
Sent From The Mother-Country) Does Not Exceed Twelve Or Fifteen
Thousand.
It certainly is not greater at Mexico than sixty
thousand; and I find by several statements, that, if we estimate
the whole of the Spanish colonies at fourteen or fifteen millions
of inhabitants, there are in that number at most three millions of
Creole whites, and two hundred thousand Europeans.
When Tupac-Amaru, who believed himself to be the legitimate heir to
the empire of the Incas, made the conquest of several provinces of
Upper Peru, in 1781, at the head of forty thousand Indian
mountaineers, all the whites were filled with alarm. The
Hispano-Americans felt, like the Spaniards born in Europe, that the
contest was between the copper-coloured race and the whites;
between barbarism and civilization. Tupac-Amaru, who himself was
not destitute of intellectual cultivation, began with flattering
the creoles and the European clergy; but soon, impelled by events,
and by the spirit of vengeance that inspired his nephew, Andres
Condorcanqui, he changed his plan. A rising for independence became
a cruel war between the different castes; the whites were
victorious, and excited by a feeling of common interest, from that
period they kept watchful attention on the proportions existing in
the different provinces between their numbers and those of the
Indians. It was reserved for our times to see the whites direct
this attention towards themselves; and examine, from motives of
distrust, the elements of which their own caste is composed.
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