LITMIR.BIZ

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etc., Vol. 1, p. 108 (Chap. 4).

      ²⁰ The Turkish equivalent of this, as quoted by Volney, is, “A white woman to please the eye; and an Egyptian and a black one for sexual pleasure.” The Orientals make less distinction between mulattoes and blacks than Europeans.

       Chapter Two

       VENEZUELA

      MISCEGENATION in Venezuela proceeded along the lines described in the last chapter, namely, concubinage with first, the Indian, and then the Negro, women, with some few marriages. Laws were made for the protection of the very young Negro girls but their luscious flesh proved too tempting for the white men and the girls were ordered locked up each night when they reached the age of ten until they were married. This, also, did not work as the guardians, themselves, became seducers according to F. de Pons, French Consul in Venezuela in the 1800’s. He wrote, “Very frequently are they seduced and supported in the vicious course by those very persons whose duty it is to be guardians of their morals. How many wives united to their husbands in the sacred bonds of matrimony daily see the nuptial bed polluted by their own slaves without being able to revenge themselves upon the caprice by which they are injured, but by indulging inclinations equally guilty, which they have not an equal opportunity of gratifying.”¹

      As regards mixed marriages, Venezuela was very liberal at first. Legitimate mulatto children had the same rights as white ones; and illegitimate white children the disadvantages of an illegitimate mulatto one. But as the number of Negroes, and especially of mulattoes, increased, laws were passed lowering the status of the people of color. No Negro, even if free, could hold public office or serve in the royal troops, but only in a colored militia, officered by whites. Free mulattoes could be doctors and surgeons; by dispensation of the king, they could enter holy orders or be candidates for public office, but a full-blooded Negro could not aspire to such favors though he “were a nonpareil of science and a pattern of virtue.”²

      Mixed marriages, some of which were with distinguished Spanish families, continued, however, until 1785, when the plantation owners succeeded in getting the king’s consent to a decree making the consent of parents necessary to marriage, and providing that a difference of “race” could constitute a parental objection.

      One reason for this law was that more European women of the upper class had been coming to the colony thus permitting the upper class to take firmer root and thereby relegating the mixed blood women more to concubinage. Still another, and probably the stronger reason, was that the Negroid population—mulattoes, free blacks, and slaves—had become so numerous that they threatened to dominate the colony. The slaves alone numbered 208,000, while in Caracas, the capital, the total Negroid population was three-fourths of the whole. As for the Indian, he had practically disappeared either by extermination or absorption.

      Gil Fortoul, Venezuelan historian, estimates that at the founding of the republic in 1811 the mulattoes and the blacks were nearly double the number of Spanish and creole whites. He gives 12,000 whites, 200,000 creoles, and 406,000 people of color. Again and again in Venezuela, as in other Latin-American countries, certain leaders by winning over the mulattoes and blacks were able to seize power. Boves, Paez, and Guzman Blanco, were among those who did this in Venezuela.

      During the revolution of 1811, the lower classes of Negroes, zambos, and mulattoes attained such ascendancy that they “publicly insulted” even the European Spaniards on the streets and forced the white men to acknowledge Negro women as the equal of the white ones. G. D. Flinter, an English colonel and interpreter, resident in Caracas, says, “The Negroes and the mulattoes had the privilege of greeting any person be his rank or situation in life what it might, with the familiar appellation of citizen. No public balls or dinners were given to which they were not invited with marks of particular preference; and to such a height did this levelling distinction arrive in a country like Caracas where it was, previous to the revolution, considered a mark of infamy to have any connection, or even acquaintances of color, they used to take out the ladies to dance at the public halls. On one occasion some ladies indignant at an insult of this nature refused to dance when an immense multitude of people of color gathered round the doors of the assembly room threatening to put every white person to death if they should again refuse their sable companions for partners.”³

      Of these mixed-bloods and Negroes, the most powerful single group was the llaneros, or cowboys, the offspring of runaway slaves, Indians, and fugitive whites. Flinter, who describes them at length, said that “by intermarrying with the Indians, they soon became very numerous, and the children proceeding from a mixture of the Indian and Negro blood form that race of men distinguished by the name of zambo.”

      These impetuous horsemen swept down on the captal in 1814 and uniting with the lower classes of Negroes and mulattoes wreaked terrible vengeance on the whites, near-whites, and whites-by-law, for their past contempt and treatment of them. Flinter, who witnessed the massacre, says, “Men, women, and children, who had the slightest tinge of European blood fell indiscriminate victims to their fury.”

      DAUGHTERS OF AFRICA.

      VI. African women, like these were, with the Indians, the first mothers of Latin-America. They were eagerly sought by the European colonists.

      AFRICAN BELLES.

      VII. Women like these were, with the Indians, the first mothers of those born in the New World. (Collection, Count de Bearn.)

      TYPES OF THE FIRST MOTHERS OF LATIN AMERICA.

      VIII. Slave women with the African markings still on their face dressed in Portuguese style (Debret).

      TYPES OF THE FIRST MOTHERS OF LATIN AMERICA.

      IX. African slave girls dressed in Portuguese style. Note the filed teeth. (Debret).

      MIXING OF WHITE AND INDIAN IN LATIN AMERICA.

      X(a). Mestizoes. (See Notes on the Illustrations.)

      MIXING OF WHITES AND NEGROES IN LATIN AMERICA

      X(b). Mulatto, Quadroon, and Octoroon. (See Notes on the Illustrations.)

      WHITE-NEGRO-INDIAN INTERMIXTURE IN LATIN AMERICA.

      X(c). Mixed Castes. (See Notes on the Illustrations.)

      WHITE-NEGRO-INDIAN INTERMIXTURE IN LATIN AMERICA.

      X(d). Mixed Castes. (See Notes on the Illustrations.)

      As regards the marriage law making parental consent necessary, this slowed up mixed marriages but did not stop them entirely. Marriage of dark Negroes and white girls continued, the white girls being usually foundlings, whose mothers had abandoned them chiefly because they were illegitimate, or the result of adultery. Such children were usually left “at the entrance of some house, before the gate of some church, or in the open street,” says Pons.

      “It is observed,” he adds, “that these new-born infants when exposed are generally picked up by women of color, sometimes black women.” If the child was a boy it was received by the monks, when it grew older, but the girls were left “to share the poverty of their foster-parents, till they get married; and one need not be informed that when bred by persons of color,

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