Canary Islands

A group of seven islands off the coast of northwest Africa, the Canary Islands became an early testing ground for European expansion.

The Canary Islands consist of seven islands off the coast of modern-day Morocco. The closest to the African shoreline are Fuerteventura and Lanzarote, and the others, from east to west, are Gran Canaria, Tenerife, Gomera, Palma, and Hierro. Europeans had at least a dim knowledge of the islands from the time of Pliny, but sustained contact did not begin until the late 13th or early 14th century. The Italian navigator Lancelotto Malocello sailed in 1336 to the region and named Lanzarote after himself, an early example of the European tendency to rename any lands they discovered, even if they were, as in the case of the Canary Islands, already inhabited. In 1341 the Portuguese sent a military expedition that included Niccoloso da Recco, who left an account of the journey. When they arrived, de Recco wrote, they found a “mass of uncultivated stony land, but full of goats and other beasts, and inhabited by naked men and women” who looked like “savages.” When four of the Natives swam out to the ships, the Portuguese captured and enslaved them, an act, as the historian John Mercer put it, that constituted “the first recorded example of the trust and treachery henceforth to become commonplace in the Canaries.”

During the 15th century the French and then the Spanish each colonized the Canaries. Claiming, as Europeans routinely did during this age of exploration, that they were motivated by the desire to spread Christianity to heathens, the newcomers attempted to justify their conquest of the islands and the indigenous peoples who already lived there. One European who witnessed the colonization of Fuerteventura wrote that it was “difficult to catch [the Natives] alive; and they are so built that, if one turns on his captors, they have no choice but to kill him.” Because the islands offered abundant supplies of goats and salt, two useful commodities that became even more vital over time when the Canary Islands became an important destination for transatlantic voyages, Europeans did not back down in the face of any opposition they encountered. Thus the Spanish carried out a long and difficult campaign from 1478 to 1483 to conquer Gran Canaria despite the indigenous peoples’ sustained resistance. The conquest was worth the cost to the Spanish, which recognized the value of the islands. They were not alone. The Portuguese Prince Henry the Navigator had great interest in the Canaries, and Christopher Columbus made them his first destination on his world-changing journey of 1492.

After the Spanish laid claim to the Canaries they engaged in a campaign of destruction that was almost unmatched. Their enslavement of the indigenous peoples, appropriation of their land, and attempts to eradicate Native culture and substitute European ways and Christianity were sufficiently brutal to summon a response from Bartolome de Las Casas, who became a champion of the rights of indigenous peoples in New Spain. Yet despite protests, the Spanish nonetheless continued to plunder the islands. As early as 1480 they shipped captured islanders to Seville as slaves, and the slave trade in the Canaries increased dramatically in the following decades. Once sugar cultivation became the dominant form of enterprise, indigenous people from the Canaries arrived in Madeira and the Azores as slaves, and African slaves landed on the shores of the Canary Islands. The population of the islands grew as a result, although it was mostly composed of slaves and masters; very few of the indigenous people survived the horrors of European expansion and colonization.

Further reading: John Mercer, The Canary Islanders: Their Prehistory, Conquest, and Survival (London: Rex Collings, 1980); Eduardo Aznar Vallejo, “The Conquests of the Canary Islands,” in Stuart B. Schwartz, ed., Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters Between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 134-156.