Manuscript COL MAN 1, written between the 17th and 18th centuries and preserved at the Casa de Colón in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, contains an expanded version of Fray José de Sosa's *Topography of the Fortunate Island of Gran Canaria*, which reproduces what may be a new phrase in the indigenous language: "Hita manira cura," an invocation to rainwater.
The discovery was announced by Antonio M. López, promoter of the Tarha Project for the dissemination of ancient Canarian history, who explains in an interview with EFE that the aforementioned manuscript also refers to a Conquest of the Canary Islands that is unknown to historians.
The COL MAN 1 manuscript was acquired from an anonymous private individual in 2020 by the Cabildo of Gran Canaria, and presented to the public the following year, details Antonio M. López, who humorously comments that "some friends tell me that as soon as the new phrase was published, the blessed rain started to fall," brought by Storm Emilia.
The volume contains an expanded version by its author, friar José de Sosa (1646-p. 1730?), of his Topography of the Fortunate Island of Gran Canaria, and the first of these novelties the manuscript contributes is the reference to what appears to be one of the lost chronicles or histories of the archipelago.
The assault of Morat Rais on Lanzarote
He appears in a fragment about the assault by Morat Rais – Hispanized as Morato Arráez – on Lanzarote in 1586, supposedly in retaliation for the incursions on Barbary orchestrated by the island's marquis, don Agustín de Herrera y Rojas, and Sosa points out that the Ottoman corsair captured more than 160 people, including the marchioness Catalina Benítez de las Cuevas and her daughter, and refers to the "Conquist[a] de Canar[ias], cap. 9, fol. 496".
"We are not aware of any Conquest of the Canaries contemporary to the Franciscan historian who speaks of the matter, nor one that contains at least 496 folios or, even, pages, given that in that era the former term was also used interchangeably with the latter," adds Antonio M. López.Therefore, it can be assumed that Sosa refers to a now-lost source, perhaps one attributed to Antonio de Troya, Alonso Fiesco, or Gonzalo Argote de Molina, all of which are currently unaccounted for.The popularizer also adds that, despite the undeniable abundance of words from the ancient Canarian language – generically called Guanchisms – present in the archipelago's toponymy, the secular forgetting of their meanings, coupled with the scarcity of complete common phrases or expressions translated and the lack of contemporary lexicons and other monographs that clarify them semantically and grammatically, make the scientific recovery of this cultural heritage very difficult.However, he continues, the hope is not lost of one day finding a Rosetta Stone that helps "to unearth and resurrect the voices that dozens of past Canarian generations used and shaped for at least a millennium and a half in their daily lives to give form and meaning to the universe they inhabited, in the earthly and the spiritual."
Therefore, he congratulates himself on the discovery of "a small gem, one of these hopeful remnants" in the third book of the same Topography of Sola, in which the author reproduces a text describing a custom of the ancient Gran Canarians, already known from other documentary sources.
Invocation in Times of Drought
This refers to the invocation, in times of water scarcity, that was performed in high places, one of them on the cliff of TirmaBut in a marginal note, Sosa indicates that these petitions were also sometimes made by the sea, with several people saying "Hita manira cura," which the author translates as "Lord, give us water.""It is evident that Sosa, a Franciscan friar, here attempts to bolster the argument that the ancient Canarians were not idolaters, but gentiles – pagans – interpreting the ancient ritual as a supplication to a supreme being," López addsUnfortunately, Father Sosa does not specify the source of his information, which makes it difficult to ascertain the accuracy of his testimony.
Some philologists and linguists specializing in the ancient Canarian language have confirmed the consistency of the expression, as it includes the words "aman," water in Tamazight, and "aqquran," which in historical sources refers to the name the ancient Canarians gave to the deified sky, the disseminator specifies.
