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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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. 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.
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