April. From the most ancient times, maize has been the principal
food of the inhabitants of the western side of tropical America. On
the coast of Peru, Darwin found heads of it,* along with eighteen
species of marine shells, in a raised beach eighty-five feet above
the level of the sea (* "Geological Observations in South America"
1846 page 49 and "Animals and Plants under Domestication" volume 1
page 320.); and in the same country it has been found in tombs
apparently more ancient than the earliest times of the Incas.*
(*Von Tschudi "Travels in Peru" English edition page 177.) In
Mexico it was known from the earliest times of which we have any
record, in the picture writings of the Toltecs; and that ancient
people carried it with them in all their wanderings. In Central
America the stone grinders, with which they bruised it down, are
almost invariably found in the ancient graves, having been buried
with the ashes of the dead, as an indispensable article for their
outfit for another world. When Florida and Louisiana were first
discovered, the native Indian tribes all cultivated maize as their
staple food; and throughout Yucatan, Mexico, and all the western
side of Central America, and through Peru to Chili, it was, and
still is, the main sustenance of the Indians. The people that
cultivated it were all more or less advanced in civilisation; they
were settled in towns; their traders travelled from one country to
another with their wares; they were of a docile and tractable
disposition, easily frightened into submission. It is likely that
these maize-eating peoples belonged to closely affiliated races. In
the West India Islands they occupied most of Cuba and Hayti; but
from Porto Rico southwards the islands were peopled by the warlike
Caribs, who harassed the more civilised tribes to the north. From
Cape Gracias a Dios southward, the eastern coast of America was
peopled on its first discovery by much ruder tribes, who did not