White negroes. Travelers who have been in Africa speak of a kind of negro who, although born to black parents, are for all that as white as Europeans and keep this color all their lives. It is true that all negroes are white when they are born, but a few days after their birth they become black, whereas those of whom we speak always keep their whiteness. It is said that the white negroes are as pale as dead corpses. Their eyes are gray, hardly animated, and seem to be immobile. It is said that they see only in moonlight like owls. Their hair is either blonde, red or white and frizzy. A fairly large number of these white negroes can be found in the kingdom of Loango; the inhabitants of the country call them dondos and the Portuguese albinos . The blacks of Loango hate them and are constantly at war with them. They are careful to put their advantage to their own profit and to fight their opponents in full daylight. But the latter take their revenge during the night. The ordinary negroes of the country call the white negroes mokissos or devils of the woods . However, we are told that the kings of Loango always have a great number of these white negroes at their court; they occupy there the first positions of the state and fulfill the functions of priests or sorcerers to which they are raised from the tenderest childhood. It is said that they recognize a God, but they do not offer him any worship and do not appear to have any idea of his attributes. They address their wishes and prayers only to demons on whom they believe all happy and unfortunate events depend. They invoke and consult them on all undertakings and represent them in human form in different sizes out of crudely worked wood and clay.

Scholars have been at a loss to understand from where the color of white negroes comes. Experiment has made it known that it could not be from the commerce of whites with negresses, since this only produces mulattos. Some have thought that this quirk of nature was due to the stricken imagination of pregnant women. Others have imagined that the color of these negroes came from a kind of leprosy infecting them and their parents, but this is not likely, given that white negroes are depicted to us as very robust men, something incompatible with affliction with an illness like leprosy. The Portuguese have tried to send some of them to their American colonies to make them work in the mines, they have preferred to die of hunger rather than submit to this work.

Some have thought that the white negroes came from monstrous commerce between the large monkeys of the country and negresses, but this belief seems unlikely, given that it is assured that these white negroes are capable of propagating themselves.

Whatever it may be, it appears that we do not know of all the varieties and quirks of nature. Perhaps the interior of Africa, so little known to Europeans, contains numerous peoples of a kind entirely unknown to us.

It has been claimed that white negroes have similarly been found in different parts of the East Indies, on the island of Borneo and in New Guinea. Some years ago a white negro , who probably was of the species of which we have just spoken, was shown in Paris. See The Modern Part of an Universal History, vol. XVI p. 293 of the edition in-8º. In 1740 in Carthage in America, a trustworthy man saw a negro and a negress all of whose children were white with the exception of one who was white and black or piebald; the Jesuits were his owners and they intended him for the Queen of Spain.