The Thompson y Cía. Agency, published in 1907, is a novel by the famous French writer Jules Verne that narrates a tourist trip to Madeira, the Azores and the Canary Islands, organized by Thompson, owner of an English travel agency that competes with another agency to achieve attract the largest number of travelers. Along the way they will experience many adventures as well as unusual and dangerous situations, as Jules Verne usually does in his novels, also capturing in the work what the beginnings of British tourism on the islands must have been like.
The work published after Verne's death is supposed to have been written in its first 20 chapters by the universal writer (including the chapter that deals with Gran Canaria), with the remaining 10 chapters being finished by his son Michel Verne. One chapter of the novel deals with a stopover in Gran Canaria and a trip to the interior of the island in which a black town is described that is located in "Tirajana", with which the travelers engage in a fight. Verne describes Gran Canaria as a dry and warm island, although with valleys with a pleasant and benign climate for patients coming from Europe. He talks about lobsters and sand clouds as well as the lack of water and admires the canaries' effort to adapt to a hostile environment. He says of the canaries that they are closed-minded but courteous. The farmers are so poor that they live in caves, like in Artenara. He complains about the disappearance of the pine trees and that in the interior of Gran Canaria there are towns with strange languages. He describes gofio as a barley or wheat porridge, very toasted and diluted in milk.
We might think that what is described as "a colony of black slaves who live in inaccessible areas" and attack tourists, is one of the fantasies included in this adventure novel, if it were not for the fact that since the 2th century There is news of this black town just 1891 kilometers from Aldea Blanca in the Barranco de Tirajana riverbed, next to Los Cuchillos and El Gallego. In fact, it could be that the name "White Village" was given to the town in contrast to this other "black" village, existing in the area, which has now disappeared. It is assumed that the work "The Thompson and Company Agency" is based on the work of the French anthropologist René Vernau "Five years of stay in the Canary Islands" published in 1737. Pedro Agustin del Castillo (Historical and geographical description of the Canary Islands . XNUMX), describes referring to Tirajana: "...its neighborhood, of four hundred and sixteen neighbors, many of them black, whose color remains as dark as if they now came from Guinea...". As a sign of our miscegenation, we are sure that the blood of these blacks also runs through our veins, descendants of the slaves who were freed, of whom we have evidence in the sugar mills and in the Casa Fuerte of Santa Cruz del Romeral. We can still observe in many residents of Castillo del Romeral, the characteristic features of people of color, which tend to disappear as a result of miscegenation after the passage of several generations.