"In the fifteenth century almost all the mercantile nations sought for slaves at the Canary Islands, as we seek them at present on the Coast of Guinea. Every individual made prisoner before he received the rite of baptism was a slave. At this period no attempt had yet been made to prove that the blacks were an intermediary race between men and animals. The swarthy Guanche and the African negro were sold simultaneously in the market of Seville, without a question whether slavery ought to weigh only on men with a black skin and frizzled hair. The archipelago of the Canaries was divided into several small states hostile to each other. The trading nations kept up intestine warfare; one Guanche then became the property of another, who sold him to the Europeans; several, who preferred death to slavery, killed themselves and their children. What remained of the Guanches perished mostly in 1494, in the terrible pestilence called the _modorra_, which was attributed to the quantity of dead bodies left exposed to the air by the Spaniards after the battle of La Laguna. The nation of the Guanches was therefore extinct at the beginning of the seventeenth century. It is very certain that no native of pure race exists in the whole island; and some travelers, who may otherwise be relied upon, are mistaken when they assert that their guides to the Peak were some of those slender and nimble-footed Guanches. (It is asserted that they could seize the rabbit or wild goat in its course.) It is true that a few Canarian families boast of their relationship to the last shepherd king of Guimar; but these pretensions do not rest on very solid foundations, and are renewed from time to time, when some Canarian of a more dusky hue than his countrymen is prompted to solicit a commission in the service of the King of Spain.