THE GUANCHES. 
53 
extinct Aboriginal race of this and the neighbouring 
Islands. 
Although there is reason to believe that this beautiful 
Archipelago was not unknown to the ancients, it is only 
in the middle of the fourteenth century that we begin to 
find any precise information relating to them. In 1341, 
an expedition from Portugal under the auspices of Don 
Alphonso IV., visited the islands, after which they were 
again lost sight of until the conquest of them by Bethen- 
court, the chronicles of which were written hy his chap- 
lains, Bontier and le Verrier, in 1402; these, and a 
variety of other authors of the period, or soon after the 
conquest, have furnished Monsieur Sabin Berthelot with 
materials for two very interesting papers,* from which 
we have taken the liberty of abstracting the following 
brief notice. 
“These islands were, doubtless, peopled from the 
adjacent continent ; and the Guanches or aboriginal 
inhabitants have left traces of resemblance. It is, 
therefore, presumable that they were inhabited long 
before our era, by people of Lybian race, who preserved 
until the close of the fifteenth century in their original 
purity, those primitive manners of which we find traces 
in the most remote antiquity.” 
All the authors who have written on the subject of 
the Guanches about the time of the conquest, give a 
romantic description of their chivalrous character ; of the 
* Memoires de la Societe Ethnologique de Paris. 
