ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the Western world’s earliest overseas settler colonial conquest, which resulted in the extinction of the Indigenous population of the Canary Islands, situated off the coast of southern Morocco. Indigenous Canarians were derived from the Berber societies of northwest Africa. Canarians were agro-pastoralists. The Canaries came to the attention of European mariners for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire when the Genoese navigator Lancelotto Malocello landed on the easternmost isle, Lanzarote, in 1336. There were numerous slave raids on the Canaries during the latter half of the fourteenth century that continued throughout the period of conquest. From pillaging and slave raiding in the fourteenth century, the emphasis of European activity in the archipelago swung towards conquest in the fifteenth. In the first phase of conquest, Lanzarote, Fuerteventura and Hierro were subjugated between 1402 and 1405. Their flatter, more open and drier terrains made Lanzarote and Fuerteventura easier targets.
