Note 487 — Chapter VIII · —Coast Peoples

If we turn to South America, we find that warlike Tupi, at the time of the discovery, occupied the whole Brazilian coast from the southern tropic north to eastern Guiana, while the highlands of eastern Brazil immediately in their rear were populated by tribes of Ges, who had been displaced by the coastwise expansion of the Tupi canoemen.487 [See map page 101.] And to-day this same belt of coastland has been appropriated by a foreign population of Europeans and Negroes, while the vast interior of Brazil shows a predominance of native Indian stocks, only broken here and there by a lonely enclave of Portuguese settlement. The early English and French territories in America presented this same contrast of coast and inland people—the colonists planting themselves on the hem of the continent to preserve maritime connection with the home countries, the aborigines forced back beyond reach of the tide.