Pioneers in Tropical America

pes, peopled with strange nations,savage tribes, dangerous beasts, or wonderful birds.These bocks would again and again illustrate thefirst coming of the white race into regions inhabitedby people of a different type, with brown, black, oryellow skins how the European was received, andhow he treated these races of the soil which gradually came under His rule owing to his superiorknowledge, weapons, wealth, or powers of persuasion. The bookswere to tell the plain truth,even if here and there they showed the white manto have behaved badly, or if they revealed the factthat the American Indian, the Negro, the Malay,the black Australian was sometimes cruel andtreacherous.request thus framed was almost equivalentto asking me to write stories of those pioneers whofounded the British Empire in any case, the firstvolumes of this series do relate the adventures ofthose who created the greater part of the BritishDominions beyond the Seas, by their perilous explorations of unknown lands and waters In manyinstances the travellers were all unconscious of theirdestinies, of the results which would arise fromtheir actions. In some cases they would havebitterly railed at Fate had they known that theresult of their splendid efforts was to be the enlargement of an empire under the British flag.Perhaps if they could know by now that we arestriving under that flag to be just and generous toall types of men, and not to use our empire solelyfor the benefit of English speaking men and women,the French who founded the Canadian nation, theGermans and Dutch who helped to create BritishAfrica, Malaysia, and Australia, the Spaniards whopreceded us in the West Indies, and the Portuguesein West, Central, and East Africa, in Newfoundlandand Ceylon, mightif they have any consciousnessor care for things in this worldbe not so sorryafter all that we are reaping where they sowed.It is as you will see impossible to tell the taleof these early days in the British Dominions beyondthe Seas, without describing here and there theadventures of men of enterprise and daring whowere not of our own nationality. The majority,nevertheless, were of British stock that is to say,they were English, Welsh, Scots, Irish, perhapshere and there a Channel Islander and a Manxmanor Nova Scotians, Canadians, and New Englanders.The bulk of them were good fellows, a few weresaints, a few were ruffians with redeeming features.