PRIMITIVE WEST INDIAN POPULATION. 237 



Erg^ish 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 Itatan), the present po- 

 pulation 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 dis- 

 appear 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 lorm 

 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, onlv 14,000 ! The statistic statements in 

 the writings of the bishop of Chiapa are full oi contradio 



