Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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We Inquire
At The Isle Of Cuba, At St. Domingo, And In Jamaica, Where Is The
Abode Of The Primitive Inhabitants Of Those Countries?
We ask at
Teneriffe what is become of the Guanches, whose mummies alone,
buried in caverns, have escaped destruction?
In the fifteenth
century almost all mercantile nations, especially the Spaniards and
the Portuguese, sought for slaves at the Canary Islands, as in
later times they have been sought on the coast of Guinea.* (* The
Spanish historians speak of expeditions made by the Huguenots of
Rochelle to carry off Guanche slaves. I have some doubt respecting
these expeditions, which are said to have taken place subsequently
to the year 1530.) The Christian religion, which in its origin was
so highly favourable to the liberty of mankind, served afterwards
as a pretext to the cupidity of Europeans. Every individual, made
prisoner before he received the rite of baptism, became a slave. At
that period no attempt had yet been made to prove that the blacks
were an intermediate race between man and animals. The swarthy
Guanche and the African negro were simultaneously sold in the
market of Seville, without a question whether slavery should be the
doom only of men with black skins and woolly hair.
The archipelago of the Canaries was divided into several small
states hostile to each other, and in many instances the same island
was subject to two independent princes. The trading nations,
influenced by the hideous policy still exercised on the coast of
Africa, kept up intestine warfare.
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