196 



humboldt ? s cuba. 



The census of 1817 gives a population of 572,363, 

 and this should be considered only as a minimum, 

 corresponding with the results obtained by me, in 

 1804, and which have since been cited in many sta- 

 tistical works. The returns of the custom-houses 

 alone show that more than 78,500 negroes were 

 imported between 1804 and 1816. 



The most valuable documents which we possess 

 up to the present time (1825), relative to the 

 population of the island, were published on the 

 occasion of a celebrated motion made in the Spanish 

 Cortes, on the 26th March 1811, by Senores Alcocer 

 and Arguelles, against the African slave-trade in 



estimated by the rolls of the militia, of which, in 1804, there were 

 2,680 disciplined, and 27,000 rural, notwithstanding the great 

 facilities for avoiding the service, and the innumerable exemptions 

 granted to lawyers, physicians, apothecaries, notaries, clergy and 

 church servants, schoolmasters, overseers, traders, and all who are 

 styled noble. See Reflections of an Habanero upon the Indepen- 

 dence of the Island, 1823, p. 17. The number of men capable of 

 bearing arms, between the ages of 15 and 60, was estimated, in 1817, 

 as follows : 1st free class ; whites, 71,047, mulattoes, 17,862, blacks, 

 17,246, total, 106,155 ; 2d slaves, 85,899, in all, 192,054. Taking as 

 a basis, the estimate of the military enrolment of the population of 

 France, (Peuchat stat. p. 243 and 247), we find that the number of 

 192,054 corresponds to a population somewhat less than six hundred 

 thousand. The quota of the three classes, whites, free colored, and 

 slaves, are as 37 : 18 : 45 ; while the relative proportions of the 

 population are very nearly 46 : 18 : 36. — H. 



