FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 61:  Estudio sobre el paludismo en Puerto Rico.]

[Footnote 62:  El campesino Puertoriqueno, sus condiciones, etc.  Revista Puertoriquena, vols. ii, iii, 1887, 1888.]

[Footnote 63:  An Account of the Present State of the Island of Puerto Rico.  London, 1834.]

CHAPTER XXX

ORIGIN AND CHARACTER OF THE MODERN INHABITANTS OF PUERTO
RICO

During the initial period of conquest and colonization, no Spanish females came to this or any other of the conquered territories.  Soldiers, mariners, monks, and adventurers brought no families with them; so that by the side of the aboriginals and the Spaniards “pur sang” there sprang up an indigenous population of mestizos.

The result of the union of two physically, ethically, and intellectually widely differing races is not the transmission to the progeny of any or all of the superior qualities of the progenitor, but rather his own moral degradation.  The mestizos of Spanish America, the Eurasians of the East Indies, the mulattoes of Africa are moral, as well as physical hybrids in whose character, as a rule, the worst qualities of the two races from which they spring predominate.  It is only in subsequent generations, after oft-repeated crossings and recrossings, that atavism takes place, or that the fusion of the two races is finally consummated through the preponderance of the physiological attributes of the ancestor of superior race.

The early introduction of negro slaves, almost exclusively males, the affinity between them and the Indians, the state of common servitude and close, daily contact produced another race.  By the side of the mestizo there grew up the zambo.  Later, when negro women were brought from Santo Domingo or other islands, the mulatto was added.

Considering the class to which the majority of the first Spanish settlers in this island belonged, the social status resulting from these additions to their number could be but little superior to that of the aboriginals themselves.

The necessity of raising that status by the introduction of white married couples was manifest to the king’s officers in the island, who asked the Government in 1534 to send them 50 such couples.  It was not done.  Fifty bachelors came instead, whose arrival lowered the moral standard still further.

It was late in the island’s history before the influx of respectable foreigners and their families began to diffuse a higher ethical tone among the creoles of the better class.  Unfortunately, the daily contact of the lower and middle classes with the soldiers of the garrison did not tend to improve their character and manners, and the effects of this contact are clearly traceable to-day in the manners and language of the common people.