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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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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