Page:A General Sketch of Political History from the Earlist Times.djvu/268

 CHAPTER XVIII THE NEW WORLD ; MEXICO AND PERU The reign of Charles v. is also the real period of the expansion of the Spanish power in America; the period when the ancient native civilisations were annihilated. Mexico was invaded in the year of his accession, and Peru was conquered thirty years later. Columbus and his followers had occupied islands, and had begun to settle on the mainland or Spanish Main as it became afterwards to be called ; but the Pacific was first seen in 1513 and first crossed in 152 1. It is at this point then that America comes in contact with the general current of recorded history. This is therefore a convenient point for sketching the past history of the continent. No satisfactory conclusion can be arrived at as to the origin of the races which peopled it ; whether they sprang up separately in America, or penetrated thither from North-east Asia, spreading 1. The Races on t0 Greenland and southwards to Patagonia. In of America. any case, as philologists have discovered no less than a thousand varieties in the languages spoken there, it is quite certain that the human race must have been in occupation of America for an enormous length of time. With the exception of the Esquimaux in the Arctic regions, all the native peoples are referred to as Indians, simply because the discoverers of America imagined that it was India that they had reached. In North America the bulk of the peoples belonged to f the group of Redskins or Red Indians; the southern peoples vary considerably in colour, some of them being extremely dark ; but they appear to have no connection whatever with the negro races of our own hemisphere. Long 256