Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
- Page 110 of 407 - First - Home
A Question Highly Interesting To The History Of The Progressive
Marks Of Organization On The Globe Has Been Very Warmly Discussed
In Our Own Times, That Of Ascertaining Whether The Polymorphous
Plants Are More Common In The Volcanic Islands.
The vegetation of
Teneriffe is unfavourable to the hypothesis that nature in new
countries is but little subject to permanent forms.
M. Broussonnet,
who resided so long at the Canaries, asserts that the variable
plants are not more common there than in the south of Europe. May
it not to be presumed, that the polymorphous species, which are so
abundant in the isle of Bourbon, are assignable to the nature of
the soil and climate rather than to the newness of the vegetation?
Before we take leave of the old world to pass into the new, I must
advert to a subject which is of general interest, because it
belongs to the history of man, and to those fatal revolutions which
have swept off whole tribes from the face of the earth. 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. One Guanche then became the
property of another, who sold him to the Europeans; several, who
preferred death to slavery, killed themselves and their children.
The population of the Canaries had considerably suffered by the
slave trade, by the depredations of pirates, and especially by a
long period of carnage, when Alonzo de Lugo completed the conquest
of the Guanches. The surviving remnants of the race perished mostly
in 1494, in the terrible pestilence called the modorra, which was
attributed to the quantity of dead bodies left exposed in the open
air by the Spaniards after the battle of La Laguna.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 110 of 407
Words from 56766 to 57292
of 211363