Before we leave the Old World to cross over into the New there is a subject I must speak about because it belongs to the history of man, and to those fatal revolutions that have made whole tribes disappear from the earth. We ask in Cuba, in Santo Domingo and in Jamaica, where are the primitive inhabitants of these countries? We ask at Tenerife, what has become of the Guanches whose mummies alone, buried in caves, have escaped destruction? In the fifteenth century almost all the mercantile nations, especially the Spaniards and the Portuguese, sought slaves on the Canary Islands, as later they did on the Guinea coast. Christianity, which originally favored the freedom of mankind, served later as a pretext for European cupidity.