ritOPOKTION OF ItACEB. 
399 
province of Venezuela than in any other place. A short 
time before we visited the fertile valleys of Aragua and 
the lake of Valencia, a lady who inhabited the great village 
of Victoria, ordered her children, on her death-bed, to give 
liberty to all her slaves, thirty in number. I feel pleasure 
in recording facts that do honour to the character of a 
people from whom M. Bonplaud and myself received so 
many marks of kindness. 
If we compare the seven united provinces of Venezuela 
with the kingdom of Mexico and the island of Cuba, we 
shall succeed in finding the approximate number of white 
Creoles, and even of Europeans. The white Creoles, whom 
I may call Hispano- Americans,* form in Mexico nearly a 
fifth, and in the island of Cuba, according to the very accu- 
rate enumeration of 1801, a third of the whole population. 
When we reflect that the kingdom of Mexico contains two 
millions and a half of natives of the eopper-coloured race ; 
when we consider the state of the coasts bordering on the 
Pacific, and the small number of whites in the intenden- 
cias of Puebla and Oaxaca, compared with the natives, we 
cannot doubt that the province of Venezuela at least, if not 
the eapitania-general, has a greater proportion than that of 
one to five. The island of Cuba,! in which the whites are 
even more numerous than in Chile, may furnish us with a 
limiting number, that is to say, the maximum which may be 
supposed in the eapitania-general of Caracas. I believe we 
must stop at at two hundred, or two hundred and ten thou- 
sand Hispano- Americans, in a total population of nine hun- 
dred thousand souls. The number of Europeans included 
in the white race (not comprehending the troops sent from 
the mother-country) does not exceed twelve or fifteen thou- 
sand. It certainly is not greater at Mexico than sixty 
thousand ; and I find by several statements, that, if we 
estimate the whole of the Spanish colonies at fourteen or 
* In imitation of the word Anglo-American, adapted in all the lan- 
guages of Europe. In the Spanish colonies, the whites born in America 
are called Spaniards ; and the real Spaniards, those born in the mother- 
country, are called Europeans, Gackupinx, or Chapetom. 
t I do not mention the kingdom of Buenos Ayres, where, among a 
million of inhabitants, the whites are extremely numerous in parts 
near the coast; while the table-lands, or provinces of the sierra ars 
ilrnost entirely peopled with natives. 
