234 



humboldt's cuba. 



Spain, that " the 200,000 Indians now in the island 

 of Cuba, will perish, victims to the cruelty of the 

 Europeans," we must conclude that between the 

 years 1555 and 1567, the indigenous race was far 

 from being exterminated. Yet, according to Gomara 

 (such is the confusion of the historians of that time), 

 there was not one Indian in Cuba after 1553. 



That we may form some idea of the vague char- 

 acter of the estimates made by the early Spanish 

 voyagers, at a time when no knowledge existed of 

 the population of a single province in Spain, we 

 need only recur to the fact that the number of 

 inhabitants which Captain Cook and other naviga- 

 tors estimated for Tahiti and . the Sandwich Islands, 

 varies from one to five, and that, too, at a period 

 when statistics afforded exact means of comparison. 

 It is easily perceived that Cuba, surrounded with 

 banks abounding in fish, and having an extremely 

 fertile soil, might have maintained many millions of 

 those Indians, who were so abstemious that they did 

 not taste of flesh, and cultivated only corn, yuca, 

 and other alimentary roots. But had the population 

 been so great, would it not have evinced a more 

 advanced civilization than is revealed in the narra- 

 tive of Columbus? Were the inhabitants of Cuba 

 less civilized than those of the Lucayo Islands ? 



However active we may suppose the destructive 



