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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The Nation Of
The Guanches Was Extinct At The Beginning Of The Seventeenth
Century; A Few Old Men Only Were Found At Candelaria And Guimar.
It is, however, consoling to find that the whites have not always
disdained to intermarry with the natives; but
The Canarians of the
present day, whom the Spaniards familiarly call Islenos
(Islanders), have very powerful motives for denying this mixture.
In a long series of generations time effaces the characteristic
marks of a race; and as the descendants of the Andalusians settled
at Teneriffe are themselves of dark complexion, we may conceive
that intermarriages cannot have produced a perceptible change in
the colour of the whites. It is very certain that no native of pure
race exists in the whole island. It is true that a few Canarian
families boast of their relationship to the last shepherd-king of
Guimar, but these pretensions do not rest on very solid
foundations, and are only renewed from time to time when some
Canarian of more dusky hue than his countrymen is prompted to
solicit a commission in the service of the king of Spain.
A short time after the discovery of America, when Spain was at the
highest pinnacle of her glory, the gentle character of the Guanches
was the fashionable topic, as we in our times laud the Arcadian
innocence of the inhabitants of Otaheite. In both these pictures
the colouring is more vivid than true. When nations, wearied with
mental enjoyments, behold nothing in the refinement of manners but
the germ of depravity, they are pleased with the idea, that in some
distant region, in the first dawn of civilization, infant society
enjoys pure and perpetual felicity. To this sentiment Tacitus owed
a part of his success, when he sketched for the Romans, subjects of
the Caesars, a picture of the manners of the inhabitants of
Germany. The same sentiment gives an ineffable charm to the
narrative of those travellers who, at the close of the last
century, visited the South Sea Islands.
The inhabitants of those islands, too much vaunted (and previously
anthropophagi), resemble, under more than one point of view, the
Guanches of Teneriffe. Both nations were under the yoke of feudal
government. Among the Guanches, this institution, which facilitates
and renders a state of warfare perpetual, was sanctioned by
religion. The priests declared to the people: "The great Spirit,
Achaman, created first the nobles, the achimenceys, to whom he
distributed all the goats that exist on the face of the earth.
After the nobles, Achaman created the plebeians, achicaxnas. This
younger race had the boldness to petition also for goats; but the
supreme Spirit answered, that this race was destined to serve the
nobles, and that they had need of no property." This tradition was
made, no doubt, to please the rich vassals of the shepherd-kings.
The faycan, or high priest, also exercised the right of conferring
nobility; and the law of the Guanches expressed that every
achimencey who degraded himself by milking a goat with his own
hands, lost his claim to nobility.
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