

240 DIMINISHED POPULATION OF CUBA. 



if, for instance, it contained as many inhabitants as wen. 

 found there by the English in 1762. The first travellers 

 were easily deceived by the crowds which the appearance cf 

 European vessels brought together on some points ot the 

 coast. Now, the island of Cuba, with the same ciudades and 

 villas which it possesses at present, had not in 1762 more 

 than 200,000 inhabitants ; and yet, among a people treated 

 like slaves, exposed to the violence and brutality of their 

 masters, to excess of labour, want of nourishment, and the 

 ravages of the small-pox, forty-two years would not suffice 

 to obliterate all but the remembrance of their misfortunes 

 on the earth. In several of the Lesser Antilles, the popu- 

 lation diminishes under English domination five and six pel 

 cent, annually; at Cuba, more than eight per cent. ; but tho 

 annihilation of 200,000 in forty-two years, supposes an 

 annual loss of twenty-six per cent., a loss scarcely credible, 

 although we may suppose that the mortality of the natives 

 of Cuba was much greater than that of negroes bought at a 

 very high price. 



In studying the history of the island, we observe that the 



Balboa discovered this black tribe in the Isthmus of Darien. " That 

 conquistador," says Gomara, " entered the province of Quareca : he found 

 no gold, but some blacks, who were slaves of the lord of the place. He 

 asked this lord whence he had received them ; who replied, that men of 

 that colour lived near the place, with whom they were constantly at 



war These negroes," adds Gomara, " exactly resemble 



those of Guinea ; and no others have since been seen in America (en las 

 Indias yo pienso que no se ban visto negros despues.") The passage is 

 very remarkable. Hypotheses were formed in the sixteenth century, as 

 now ; and Petrus Martyr imagined that these men seen by Balboa, (tae 

 Quarecas), were Ethiopian blacks who, as pirates, infested the seas, and 

 had been shipwrecked on the coast of America. But the negroes of Sou 

 dan are not pirates ; and it is easier to conceive that Esquimaux, in their 

 boats of skins, may ha^e gone to Europe, than the Africans to Darien. 

 Those learned speculators who believe in a mixture of the Polynesians with 

 the Americans, rather consider the Quarecas as of the race of Papuans, 

 Similar to the negritos ot the Philippines. Tropical migrations from west 

 to east, from the most western part of Polynesia to the Isthmus of Darien, 

 present great difficulties, although the winds blow during whole weeks 

 from the west. Above all, it is essential to know whether the Quarecas 

 were really like the negroes of Soudan, as Gomara asserts, or whether they 

 were only a race of very dark Indians (with smooth and glossy hair), who 

 from time to time, before 1492, infested the coasts of the island of 

 wmch has become in our days the domain of Ethiopians. 



