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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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. 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. This law does not remind us of
the simplicity of the Homeric age. We are astonished to see the
useful labours of agriculture, and of pastoral life, exposed to
contempt at the very dawn of civilization.
The Guanches, famed for their tall stature, were the Patagonians of
the old world. Historians exaggerated the muscular strength of the
Guanches, as, previous to the voyage of Bougainville and Cordoba,
colossal proportions were attributed to the tribe that inhabited
the southern extremity of America. I never saw Guanche mummies but
in the cabinets of Europe. At the time I visited the Canaries they
were very scarce; a considerable number, however, might be found if
miners were employed to open the sepulchral caverns which are cut
in the rock on the eastern slope of the Peak, between Arico and
Guimar. These mummies are in a state of desiccation so singular,
that whole bodies, with their integuments, frequently do not weigh
above six or seven pounds; or a third less than the skeleton of an
individual of the same size, recently stripped of the muscular
flesh. The conformation of the skull has some slight resemblance to
that of the white race of the ancient Egyptians; and the incisive
teeth of the Guanches are blunted, like those of the mummies found
on the banks of the Nile. But this form of teeth is the result of
art; and on examining more carefully the physiognomy of the ancient
Canarians, Blumenbach and other able anatomists have recognized in
the cheek bones and the lower jaw perceptible differences from the
Egyptian mummies.
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