Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 3 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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In No Part Of The World Where Slavery Prevails Is Emancipation So
Frequent As In The Island Of Cuba.
The Spanish legislature favours
liberty, instead of opposing it, like the English and French
legislatures.
The right of every slave to choose his own master, or
set himself free, if he can pay the purchase-money, the religious
feeling which disposes many masters in easy circumstances to liberate
some of their slaves, the habit of keeping a multitude of blacks for
domestic service, the attachments which arise from this intercourse
with the whites, the facility with which slaves who are mechanics
accumulate money, and pay their masters a certain sum daily, in order
to work on their own account - such are the principal causes which in
the towns convert so many slaves into free men of colour. I might add
the chances of the lottery, and games of hazard, but that too much
confidence in those means often produces the most fatal effects.
The primitive population of the West India Islands having entirely
disappeared (the Zambo Caribs, a mixture of natives and negroes,
having been transported in 1796, from St. Vincent to the island of
Ratan), the present population of the islands (2,850,000) must be
considered as composed of European and African blood. The negroes of
pure race form nearly two-thirds; the whites one-fifth; and the mixed
race one-seventh. In the Spanish colonies of the continent, we find
the descendants of the Indians who disappear among the mestizos and
zambos, a mixture of Indians with whites and negroes. The archipelago
of the West Indies suggests no such consolatory idea. The state of
society was there such, at the beginning of the sixteenth century,
that, with some rare exceptions, the new planters paid as little
attention to the natives as the English now do in Canada. The Indians
of Cuba have disappeared like the Guanches of the Canaries, although
at Guanabacoa and Teneriffe false pretensions were renewed forty years
ago, by several families, who obtained small pensions from the
government on pretext of having in their veins some drops of Indian or
Guanche blood. It is impossible now to form an accurate judgment of
the population of Cuba or Hayti in the time of Columbus. How can we
admit, with some, that the island of Cuba, at its conquest in 1511,
had a million of inhabitants, and that there remained of that million,
in 1517, only 14,000! The statistic statements in the writings of the
bishop of Chiapa are full of contradictions. It is related that the
Dominican monk, Fray Luys Bertram, who was persecuted* by the
encomenderos, as the Methodists now are by some English planters,
predicted that the 200,000 Indians which Cuba contained, would perish
the victims of the cruelty of Europeans. (* See the curious
revelations in Juan de Marieta, Hist. de todos los Santos de Espana
libro 7 page 174.) If this be true, we may at least conclude that the
native race was far from being extinct between the years 1555 and
1569; but according to Gomara (such is the confusion among the
historians of those times) there were no longer any Indians on the
island of Cuba in 1553.
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