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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To Form An Idea Of The Vagueness Of The
Estimates Made By The First Spanish Travellers, At A Period When
The
population of no province of the peninsula was ascertained, we have
but to recollect that the number of inhabitants
Which Captain Cook and
other navigators assigned to Otaheite and the Sandwich Islands, at a
time when statistics furnished the most exact comparisons, varied from
one to five. We may conceive that the island of Cuba, surrounded with
coasts adapted for fishing, might, from the great fertility of its
soil, afford sustenance for several millions of those Indians who have
no desire for animal food, and who cultivate maize, manioc, and other
nourishing roots; but had there been that amount of population, would
it not have been manifest by a more advanced degree of civilization
than the narrative of Columbus describes? Would the people of Cuba
have remained more backward in civilization than the inhabitants of
the Lucayes Islands? Whatever activity may be attributed to causes of
destruction, such as the tyranny of the conquistadores, the faults of
governors, the too severe labours of the gold-washings, the small-pox
and the frequency of suicides,* it would be difficult to conceive how
in thirty or forty years three or four hundred thousand Indians could
entirely disappear. (* The rage of hanging themselves by whole
families, in huts and caverns, as related by Garcilasso, was no doubt
the effect of despair; yet instead of lamenting the barbarism of the
sixteenth century, it was attempted to exculpate the conquistadores,
by attributing the disappearance of the natives to their taste for
suicide.
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