170 
SLAVES AT CUMATTA. 
bodies, to give their skin a black polish. The persons who 
came to purchase examined the teeth of these slaves, to 
judge of their age and health ; forcing open their mouths as 
we do those of horses in a market. This odious custom dates 
from Africa, as is proved by the faithful pictures drawn by 
the inimitable Cervantes,* who after his long captivity 
among the Moors, described the sale of Christian slaves at 
Algiers. It is distressing to think that even at this day 
there exist European colonists in the West Indies who mark 
their slaves with a hot iron, to know them again if they 
escape. This is the treatment bestowed on those “who 
save other men the labour of sowing, tilling, and reaping.”! 
In 1800 the number of slaves did not exceed six thousand 
in the two provinces of Cumana and Barcelona, when at the 
same period the whole population was estimated at one 
hundred and ten thousand inhabitants. The trade in African 
slaves, which the laws of the Spaniards have never favoured, 
is almost as nothing on these coasts where the trade in Ameri- 
can slaves was carried on in the sixteenth century with desola- 
ting activity. Maearapan, anciently called Amaracapana, Cu- 
mana, Araya, and particularly New Cadiz, built on the islet of 
Cubagua, might then be considered as commercial establish- 
ments for facilitating the slave trade. Girolamo Benzoni of 
Milan, who at the age of twenty-two visited Terra Firma, took 
part in some expeditions in 1542 to the coasts of Bordones, 
Cariaco, and Paria, to carry off the unfortunate natives. He 
relates with simplicity, and often with a sensibility not com- 
mon in the historians of that time, the examples of cruelty 
of which he was a witness. He saw the slaves dragged to 
New Cadiz, to be marked on the forehead and on the arms, 
and for the payment of the quint to the officers of the crown. 
From this port the Indians were sent to the island of Hayti 
or St. Domingo, after having often changed masters, not by 
* El Trato de Argel. Jorn. II. Viage al Parnasso (1781), p. 316. 
t I.a Bruyere, Caracteres, chap. xi. (ed. 1765), p. 300. I will here 
cite a passage strongly characteristic of La Bruyere’s benevolent feeling 
for his fellow-creatures. “ We find (under the torrid zone) certain 
wild animals, male and female, scattered through the country, black, 
livid, and all over scorched by the sun, bent to the earth which they dig 
and turn up with invincible perseverance. They have something like 
articulate utterance; and when they stand up on their feet, they exhibit • 
human face, and in fact these creatures are men.” 
