1772.
August.
Verd islands. This isle is divided into eleven parishes, and the most populous of these contains about four thousand houses, so that it is but very thinly inhabited.
Porto-Praya stands on a steep rock, to which we climbed by a serpentine path. Its fortifications are old decayed walls on the sea side, and fences, scarce breast-high, made of loose stones, towards the land. A small church is inclosed within these walls, towards the sea; but, besides it, there are only a few cottages. A tolerable building, at a little distance from the fort, belongs to a company of merchants at Lisbon, who have the exclusive right to trade to all the Cape-Verd islands, and keep an agent here for that purpose. When we made application to this indolent Don, by the Governor's direction, to be supplied with live cattle, he indeed promised to furnish as many as we wanted, but we never got more than a single lean bullock. The company perfectly tyrannizes over the inhabitants, and sells them wretched merchandize at exorbitant prices.
The natives of St. Jago are few in number, of a middle stature, ugly, and almost perfectly black, with frizzled woolly hair, and thick lips, like the most ill-looking kind of negroes. The ingenious and very learned Canon Pauw; at Xanten, in his Recherches Philosophiques sur les Americains, vol. I. p. 186. seems to take it for granted, that they are the descendants of the first Portuguese settlers, gradually degenerated through nine generations (three