CHAPTER V.THE SPANIARDS IN HISPANIOLA AND CUBA.

The gathering signs of a long night of woe.—Rogers.

Theterms of the treaty between the Spanish monarchs and Columbus, on his being engaged as a discoverer, signed by the parties on the 17th of April, 1492, are sufficiently indicative of the firm possession which the doctrines of popery had upon their minds. The sovereigns constituted Columbus high-admiral of all the seas, islands, and continents which should be discovered by him, as a perpetual inheritance for himand his heirs. He was to betheir viceroyin those countries, with a tenth of the free profits upon all the productions and the commerce of those realms. This was pretty well for monarchs professing to be Christians, and who ought to have been taught—“thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house; thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his man-servant, nor his maid-servant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s.” But they had been brought up in another faith: the Pope had exclaimed—

Creation’s heir! the world, the world is mine!

and they took him literally and really at his word. And it will soon be seen that Columbus, though naturally of an honorable nature, was not the less the dupe of this fearful system. He proceeded on his voyage, discovered a portion of the West Indies, and speedily plunged into atrocities against the natives that would have been pronounced shocking in Timour or Attila. James Montgomery, in his beautiful poem, the West Indies, has strongly contrasted the character of Columbus and that of his successors.

The winds were prosperous, and the billows boreThe brave adventurer to the promised shore;Far in the west, arrayed in purple light,Dawned the New World on his enraptured sight.Not Adam, loosened from the encumbering earth,Waked by the breath of God to instant birth,With sweeter, wilder wonder gazed around,When life within, and light without he found;When all creation rushing o’er his soul,He seemed to live and breathe throughout the whole.So felt Columbus, when divinely fairAt the last look of resolute despair,The Hesperian isles, from distance dimly blue,With gradual beauty opened on his view.In that proud moment, his transported mindThe morning and the evening worlds combined;And made the sea, that sundered them before,A bond of peace, uniting shore to shore.Vain, visionary hope! rapacious SpainFollowed her hero’s triumph o’er the main;Her hardy sons in fields of battle tried,Where Moor and Christian desperately died;—A rabid race, fanatically bold,And steeled to cruelty by lust of gold,Traversed the waves, the unknown world explored;The cross their standard, but their faith the sword;Their steps were graves; o’er prostrate realms they trod;They worshipped Mammon, while they vowed to God.

The winds were prosperous, and the billows bore

The brave adventurer to the promised shore;

Far in the west, arrayed in purple light,

Dawned the New World on his enraptured sight.

Not Adam, loosened from the encumbering earth,

Waked by the breath of God to instant birth,

With sweeter, wilder wonder gazed around,

When life within, and light without he found;

When all creation rushing o’er his soul,

He seemed to live and breathe throughout the whole.

So felt Columbus, when divinely fair

At the last look of resolute despair,

The Hesperian isles, from distance dimly blue,

With gradual beauty opened on his view.

In that proud moment, his transported mind

The morning and the evening worlds combined;

And made the sea, that sundered them before,

A bond of peace, uniting shore to shore.

Vain, visionary hope! rapacious Spain

Followed her hero’s triumph o’er the main;

Her hardy sons in fields of battle tried,

Where Moor and Christian desperately died;—

A rabid race, fanatically bold,

And steeled to cruelty by lust of gold,

Traversed the waves, the unknown world explored;

The cross their standard, but their faith the sword;

Their steps were graves; o’er prostrate realms they trod;

They worshipped Mammon, while they vowed to God.

To estimate the effect of his theological education on such a man as Columbus, we have only to pause a moment, to witness the manner of his first landing in the new world, and his reception there. On discovering the island of Guanahani, one of the Bahamas, the Spaniards raised the hymn ofTe Deum. At sunrise they rowed towards land with colours flying, and the sound of martial music; and amid the crowds of wondering natives assembled on the shores and hills around, Columbus, like another Mahomet, set foot on the beach,sword in hand, andfollowed by a crucifix, which his followers planted in the earth, and then prostrating themselves before it,took possession of the countryin the name of his sovereign. The inhabitants gazed in silent wonder on ceremonies so pregnant with calamity to them, but without any suspicion of their real nature. Living in a delightful climate, hidden through all the ages of their world from the other world of labour and commerce, of art and artifice, of avarice and cruelty, they appeared in the primitiveand unclad simplicity of nature. The Spaniards, says Peter Martyr,—“Dryades formossissimas, aut nativas fontium nymphas de quibus fabulatur antiquitas, se vidisse arbitrati sunt:”—they seemed to behold the most beautiful dryads, or native nymphs of the fountains, of whom antiquity fabled. Their forms were light and graceful, though dusky with the warm hues of the sun; their hair hung in long raven tresses on their shoulders, unlike the frizzly wool of the Africans, or was tastefully braided. Some were painted, and armed with a light bow, or a fishing spear; but their countenances were full of gentleness and kindness. Columbus himself, in one of his letters to Ferdinand and Isabella, describes the Americans and their country thus:—“This country excels all others, as far as the day surpasses the night in splendour: the natives love their neighbour as themselves; their conversation is the sweetest imaginable; their faces always smiling, and so gentle, so affectionate are they, that I swear to your highnesses there is not a better people in the world.” The Spaniards indeed looked with as much amazement on the simple people, and the paradise in which they lived, as the natives did on the wonderful spectacle of European forms, faces, dress, arts, arms, and ships.—Such sweet and flowing streams; such sunny dales, scattered with flowers as gorgeous and beautiful as they were novel; trees covered with a profusion of glorious and aromatic blossoms, and beneath their shade the huts of the natives, of simple reeds or palm-leaves; the stately palms themselves, rearing their lofty heads on the hill sides; the canoes skimming over the blue waters, and birds of most resplendent plumage flying from tree to tree. They walked

Through citron-groves and fields of yellow maize,Through plantain-walks where not a sunbeam plays.Here blue savannas fade into the sky;There forests frown in midnight majesty;Ceiba, and Indian fig, and plane sublime,Nature’s first-born, and reverenced by time!There sits the bird that speaks! there quivering riseWings that reflect the glow of evening skies!Half bird, half fly, the fairy king of flowers,Reigns there, and revels through the fragrant bowers;Gem full of life, and joy, and song divine,Soon in the virgin’s graceful ear to shine.The poet sung, if ancient Fame speaks truth,“Come! follow, follow to the Fount of Youth!I quaff the ambrosial mists that round it rise,Dissolved and lost in dreams of Paradise!”And there called forth, to bless a happier hour,It met the sun in many a rainbow-shower!Murmuring delight, its living waters rolled’Mid branching palms, and amaranths of gold!Rogers.

Through citron-groves and fields of yellow maize,

Through plantain-walks where not a sunbeam plays.

Here blue savannas fade into the sky;

There forests frown in midnight majesty;

Ceiba, and Indian fig, and plane sublime,

Nature’s first-born, and reverenced by time!

There sits the bird that speaks! there quivering rise

Wings that reflect the glow of evening skies!

Half bird, half fly, the fairy king of flowers,

Reigns there, and revels through the fragrant bowers;

Gem full of life, and joy, and song divine,

Soon in the virgin’s graceful ear to shine.

The poet sung, if ancient Fame speaks truth,

“Come! follow, follow to the Fount of Youth!

I quaff the ambrosial mists that round it rise,

Dissolved and lost in dreams of Paradise!”

And there called forth, to bless a happier hour,

It met the sun in many a rainbow-shower!

Murmuring delight, its living waters rolled

’Mid branching palms, and amaranths of gold!

Rogers.

It were an absurdity to say that they wereChristianswho broke in upon this Elysian scene like malignant spirits, and made that vast continent one wide theatre of such havoc, insult, murder, and misery as never were before witnessed on earth. But it was not exactly in this island that this disgraceful career commenced. Lured by the rumour of gold, which he received from the natives, Columbus sailed southward first to Cuba, and thence to Hispaniola. Here he was visited by the cazique, Guacanahari, who was doomed first to experience the villany of the Spaniards. This excellent and kind man sent by the messengers which Columbus had despatched to wait on him, a curious mask of beaten gold, and when the vessel of Columbus was immediately afterwards wrecked in standing in to the coast, he appeared with all his people on thestrand,—for the purpose of plundering and destroying them, as we might expect fromsavages, and as the Cazique would have been served had he been wrecked himself on the Spanish, or on our own coast at that time? No! but better Christian than most of those who bore that name, he came eagerly to do the very deed enjoined by Christ and his followers,—to succour and to save. “The prince,” says Herrera, their own historian, “appeared all zeal and activity at the head of his people. He placed armed guards to keep off the press of the natives, and to keep clear a space for the depositing of the goods as they came to land: he sent out as many as were needful in their canoes to put themselves under the guidance of the Spaniards, and to assist them all in their power in the saving of their goods from the wreck. As they brought them to land, he and his nobles received them, and set sentinels over them, not suffering the people even to gratify that curiosity which at such a crisis must have been very great, to examine and inspect the curious articles of a new people; and his subjects participating in all his feelings, wept tears of sincere distress for the sufferers, and condoled with them in their misfortune. But as if this was not enough, the next morning, when Columbus had removed to one of his other vessels, the good Guacanahari appeared on board to comfort him, and to offer all that he had to repair his loss!”

This beautiful circumstance is moreover still more particularly related by Columbus himself, in his letter to his sovereigns; and it was on this occasion that he gave that character of the country and the people to which I have just referred. Truly had he a greatright to say that “they loved their neighbour as themselves.” Let us see how the Spaniards and Columbus himself followed up this sublime lesson.

Columbus being now left on the coast of the new world with but one crazy vessel,—for Pinzon the commander of the other, had with true Spanish treachery, set off on his way homewards to forestall the glory of being the first bearer of the tidings of this great discovery to Europe,—he resolved to leave the number of men which were now inconvenient in one small crowded vessel, on the island. To this Guacanahari consented with his usual good nature and good faith. Columbus erected a sort of fort for them; gave them good advice for their conduct during his absence, and sailed for Spain. In less than eleven months he again appeared before this new settlement, and found it levelled with the earth, and every man destroyed. Scarcely had he left the island when these men had broken out in all those acts of insult, rapacity, and oppression on the natives which only too soon became the uniform conduct of theChristians! They laid violent hands on the women, the gold, the food of the very people who had even kindly received them; traversed the island in the commission of every species of rapacity and villany, till the astonished and outraged inhabitants now finding them fiends incarnate instead of the superior beings which they had deemed them, rose in wrath, and exterminated them.

Columbus formed a fresh settlement for his newcomers, and having defended it with mounds and ramparts of earth, went on a short voyage of discovery among the West Indian isles, and came back to find that the same scene of lust and rapine had been actedover again by his colony, and that the natives were all in arms for their destruction. It is curious to read the relation of the conduct of Columbus on this discovery, as given by Robertson, aChristianandProtestanthistorian. He tells us, on the authority of Herrera, and of the son of Columbus himself, that the Spaniards had outraged every human and sacred feeling of these their kind and hospitable entertainers. That in the voracity of their appetites, enormous as compared with the simple temperance of the natives, they had devoured up the maize and cassado-root, the chief sustenance of these poor people; that their rapacity threatened a famine; that the natives saw them building forts and locating themselves as permanent settlers where they had apparently come merely as guests; and that from their lawless violence as well as their voracity, they must soon suffer destruction in one shape or another from their oppressors. Self preservation prompted them to take arms for the expulsion of such formidable foes. “It was now,” adds Robertson, “necessary to have recourse to arms; the employing of which against the Indians, Columbus had hitherto avoided with the greatest solicitude.” Why necessary? Necessary for what? is the inquiry which must spring indignantly in every rightly-constituted mind. Because the Spaniards had been received with unexampled kindness, and returned it with the blackest ingratitude; because they had by their debauched and horrible outrages roused the people into defiance, those innocent and abused people must be massacred? That is a logic which might do for men who had been educated in the law of anti-Christ instead of Christ, and who went out with the Pope’s bull as a title toseize on the property of other people, wherever the abused and degraded cross had not been erected; but it could never have been so coolly echoed by aProtestanthistorian, if it had not been for the spurious morality with which the Papal hierarchy had corrupted the world, till it became as established as gospel truth. Hear Robertson’s relation of the manner in which Columbus repaid theChristianreception of these poor islanders.

“The body which took the field consisted only of two hundred foot, twenty horse, and twenty large dogs; and how strange soever it may seem to mention the last as composing part of a military force, they were not perhaps the least formidable and destructive on the whole, when employed against naked and timid Indians. All the caziques in the island, Guacanahari excepted, who retained an inviolable attachment to the Spaniards, were in arms, with forces amounting—if we may believe the Spanish historians—to a hundred thousand men. Instead of attempting to draw the Spaniards into the fastnesses of the woods and mountains, they were so improvident as to take their station in the Vega Real, the most open plain in the country. Columbus did not allow them to perceive their error, or to alter their position. He attacked them during the night, when undisciplined troops are least capable of acting with union and concert, and obtainedan easy and bloodless victory. The consternation with which the Indians were filled by the noise and havoc made by the fire-arms, by the impetuous force of the cavalry, and the fierce onset of the dogs, was so great, that they threw down their weapons, and fled without attempting resistance.Many were slain; more were taken prisoners and reducedto servitude; and so thoroughly were the rest intimidated, that, from that moment, they abandoned themselves to despair, relinquishing all thoughts of contending with aggressors whom they deemed invincible.

“Columbus employed several monthsin marching through the island,and in subjecting it to the Spanish government, without meeting with any opposition. He imposed a tribute upon all the inhabitants above the age of fourteen. Every person who lived in those districts where gold was found, was obliged to pay quarterly as much gold-dust as filled a hawk’s bell; from those in other parts of the country, twenty-five pounds of cotton were demanded. This was the first regular taxation of the Indians, and served as a precedent for exactions still more intolerable.”

This is a most extraordinary example of the Christian mode of repaying benefits! These were the very people thus treated, that a little time before had received with tears, and every act of the most admirable charity, Columbus and his people from the wreck. And a Protestant historian says that this was necessary! Again we ask, necessary for what? To shew that Christianity was hitherto but a name, and an excuse for the violation of every human right! There was no necessity for Columbus to repay good with evil; no necessity for him to add the crime of Jezebel, “to kill and take possession.” If he really wanted to erect the cross in the new world, and to draw every legitimate benefit for his own country from it he had seen that all that might be effected by legitimate means. Kindness and faith were only wanted to lay open the whole of the new world, and bring all its treasures to the feet of his countrymen. The goldand gems might be purchased even with the toys of European children; and commerce and civilization, if permitted to go on hand in hand, presented prospects of wealth and glory, such as never yet had been revealed to the world. But Columbus, though he believed himself to have been inspired by the Holy Ghost to discover America,—thus commencing his will, “In the name of the most Holy Trinity, who inspired me with the idea, and who afterwards made it clear to me, that by traversing the ocean westwardly, etc.;” though Herrera calls him a man “ever trusting in God;” and though his son, in his history of his life, thus speaks of him:—“I believe that he was chosen for this great service; and that becausehe was to be so truly an apostle, as in effect he proved to be, therefore was his origin obscure; that therein he might the more resemble those who were called to make known the name of the Lord from seas and rivers, and from courts and palaces. And I believe also, thatin most of his doings he was guarded by somespecial providence; his very name was not without some mystery; for in it is expressed the wonder he performed, inasmuch ashe conveyed to the new worldthe grace of the Holy Ghost.” Notwithstanding these opinions—Columbus had been educated in the spurious Christianity, which had blinded his naturally honest mind to every truly Christian sentiment. It must be allowed that he was an apostle of another kind to those whom Christ sent out; and that this was a novel way of conveying the Holy Ghost to the new world. But he had got the Pope’s bull in his pocket, and that not only gave him a right to half the world, but made all means for its subjection, howeverdiabolical, sacred in his eyes. We see him in this transaction, notwithstanding the superiority of his character to that of his followers, establishing himself as the apostle and founder of that system of destruction and enslavement of the Americans, which the Spaniards followed up to so horrible an extent. We see him here as the first to attack them, in their own rightful possessions, with arms—the first to pursue them with those ferocious dogs, which became so infamously celebrated in the Spanish outrages on the Americans, that some of them, as the dog Berezillo, received the full pay of soldiers; the first to exact gold from the natives; and to reduce them to slavery. Thus, from the first moment of modern discovery, and by the first discoverer himself, commenced that apostleship of misery which has been so zealously exercised towards the natives of all newly discovered countries up to this hour!

The immediate consequences of these acts of Columbus were these: the natives were driven to despair by the labours and exactions imposed upon them. They had never till then known what labour, or the curse of avarice was; and they formed a scheme to drive out their oppressors by famine. They destroyed the crops in the fields, and fled into the mountains. But there, without food themselves, they soon perished, and that so rapidly and miserably, that in a few months one-third of the inhabitants of the whole island had disappeared! Fresh succours arrived from Spain, and soon after, as if to realize to the afflicted natives all the horrors of the infernal regions, Spain, and at the suggestions of Columbus too, emptied all her gaols, and vomited all her malefactors on their devotedshores! A piece of policy so much admired in Europe, that it has been imitated by all other colonizing nations, and by none so much as by England! The consequences of this abominable system soon became conspicuous in the distractions, contentions, and disorders of the colony; and in order to soothe and appease these, Columbus resorted to fresh injuries on the natives, dividing their lands amongst his mutinous followers, and giving away the inhabitants—the real possessors—along with them as slaves! Thus he was the originator of thoseRepartimentos, or distribution of the Indians that became the source of such universal calamities to them, and of the extinction of more than fifty millions of their race.

Though Providence permitted these things, it did not leave them unavenged. If ever there was a history of the divine retribution written in characters of light, it is that of Spain and the Spaniards in America. On Spain itself the wrath of God seemed to fall with a blasting and enduring curse. From being one of the most powerful and distinguished nations of Europe, it began from the moment that the gold of America, gathered amidst the tears and groans, and dyed with the blood of the miserable and perishing natives, flowed in a full stream into it, to shrink and dwindle, till at once poor and proud, indolent and superstitious, it has fallen a prey to distractions that make it the most melancholy spectacle in Europe. On one occasion Columbus witnessed a circumstance so singular that it struck not only him but every one to whom the knowledge of it came. After he himself had been disgraced and sent home in chains, being then on another voyage of discovery,—and refusedentrance into the port of St. Domingo by the governor—he saw the approach of a tempest, and warned the governor of it, as the royal fleet was on the point of setting sail for Spain. His warning was disregarded; the fleet set sail, having on board Bovadillo, the ex-governor, Roldan, and other officers, men who had been not only the fiercest enemies of Columbus, but the most rapacious plunderers and oppressors of the natives. The tempest came; and these men, with sixteen vessels laden with an immense amount of guilty wealth, were all swallowed up in the ocean—leaving only two ships afloat, one of which contained the property of Columbus!

But the fortunes of Columbus were no less disastrous. Much, and perhaps deservedly as he has been pitied for the treatment which he received from an ungrateful nation, it has always struck me that, from the period that he departed from the noble integrity of his character; butchered the naked Indians on their own soil, instead of resenting and redressing their injuries; from the hour that he set the fatal example of hunting them with dogs, of exacting painful labours and taxes, that he had no right to impose,—from the moment that he annihilated their ancient peace and liberty, the hand of God’s prosperity went from him. His whole life was one continued scene of disasters, vexations, and mortifications. Swarms of lawless and rebellious spirits, as if to punish him for letting loose on this fair continent the pestilent brood of the Spanish prisons, ceased not to harass, and oppose him. Maligned by these enemies, and sent to Europe in chains; there seeking restoration in vain, he set out on fresh discoveries. But wherever he went misfortune pursued him. Denied entrance into the very countries he had discovered; defeated by the natives that his men unrighteously attacked; shipwrecked in Jamaica, before it possessed a single European colony, he was there left for above twelve months, suffering incredible hardships, and amongst his mutinous Spaniards that threatened his life on the one hand, and Indians weary of their presence on the other. Having seen his authority usurped in the new world, he returned to the old,—there the death of Isabella, the only soul that retained a human feeling, extinguished all hope of redress of his wrongs; and after a weary waiting for justice on Ferdinand, he died, worn out with grief and disappointment. He had denied justice to the inhabitants of the world he had found, and justice was denied him; he had condemned them to slavery, and he was sent home in chains; he had given over the Indians to that thraldom of despair which broke the hearts of millions, and he himself died broken-hearted.

Her princes in the midst thereof are like wolves ravening for the prey; to shed blood, and to destroy souls, and to get dishonest gain.

Ezekiel xxii. 27.

Butwhether Columbus or others were in power, the miseries of the Indians went on. Bovadillo, the governor who superseded Columbus, and loaded him with irons, only bestowed allotments of Indians with a more liberal hand, to ingratiate himself with the fierce adventurers who filled the island. Raging with the quenchless thirst of gold, these wretches drove the poor Indians in crowds to the mountains, and compelled them to labour so mercilessly in the mines, that they melted away as rapidly as snow in the sun. It is true that the atrocities thus committed reaching the ears of Isabella, instructions were from time to time sent out, declaring the Indians free subjects, and enjoining mercy towards them; but like all instructions of the sort sent so far from home, they were resisted and set aside. The Indians, ever and anon, stung with despair, rose against their oppressors, but it was only to perish by the sword instead of the mine—they werepursued as rebels, their dwellings razed from the earth, and their caziques, when taken, hanged as malefactors.

In vain the simple raceKneeled to the iron sceptre of their grace,Or with weak arms their fiery vengeance braved;They came, they saw, they conquered, they enslaved,And they destroyed! The generous heart they broke;They crushed the timid neck beneath the yoke;Where’er to battle marched their fell array,The sword of conquest ploughed resistless way;Where’er from cruel toil they sought repose,Around the fires of devastation rose.The Indian as he turned his head in flight,Beheld his cottage flaming through the night,And, mid the shrieks of murder on the wind,Heard the mute bloodhound’s death-step close behind.The conquest o’er, the valiant in their graves,The wretched remnant dwindled into slaves;Condemned in pestilential cells to pine,Delving for gold amidst the gloomy mine.The sufferer, sick of life-protracting breath,Inhaled with joy the fire-damp blast of death,—Condemned to fell the mountain palm on high,That cast its shadow to the evening sky,Ere the tree trembled to his feeble stroke,The woodman languished, and his heart-strings broke;Condemned in torrid noon, with palsied hand,To urge the slow plough o’er the obdurate land,The labourer, smitten by the sun’s fierce ray,A corpse along the unfinished furrow lay.O’erwhelmed at length with ignominious toil,Mingling their barren ashes with the soil,Down to the dust the Charib people past,Like autumn foliage withering in the blast;The whole race sunk beneath the oppressor’s rod,And left a blank amongst the works of God.Montgomery.

In vain the simple race

Kneeled to the iron sceptre of their grace,

Or with weak arms their fiery vengeance braved;

They came, they saw, they conquered, they enslaved,

And they destroyed! The generous heart they broke;

They crushed the timid neck beneath the yoke;

Where’er to battle marched their fell array,

The sword of conquest ploughed resistless way;

Where’er from cruel toil they sought repose,

Around the fires of devastation rose.

The Indian as he turned his head in flight,

Beheld his cottage flaming through the night,

And, mid the shrieks of murder on the wind,

Heard the mute bloodhound’s death-step close behind.

The conquest o’er, the valiant in their graves,

The wretched remnant dwindled into slaves;

Condemned in pestilential cells to pine,

Delving for gold amidst the gloomy mine.

The sufferer, sick of life-protracting breath,

Inhaled with joy the fire-damp blast of death,—

Condemned to fell the mountain palm on high,

That cast its shadow to the evening sky,

Ere the tree trembled to his feeble stroke,

The woodman languished, and his heart-strings broke;

Condemned in torrid noon, with palsied hand,

To urge the slow plough o’er the obdurate land,

The labourer, smitten by the sun’s fierce ray,

A corpse along the unfinished furrow lay.

O’erwhelmed at length with ignominious toil,

Mingling their barren ashes with the soil,

Down to the dust the Charib people past,

Like autumn foliage withering in the blast;

The whole race sunk beneath the oppressor’s rod,

And left a blank amongst the works of God.

Montgomery.

In all the atrocities and indignities practised on these poor islanders, there were none which excite astronger indignation than the treatment of the generous female cazique, Anacoana. This is the narrative of Robertson, drawn from Ovieda, Herrera, and Las Casas. “The province anciently named Zaragua, which extends from the fertile plain where Leogane is now situated, to the western extremity of the island, was subject to a female cazique, named Anacoana, highly respected by the natives. She, from the partial fondness with which the women of America were attached to the Europeans, had always courted the friendship of the Spaniards, and loaded them with benefits. But some of the adherents of Roldan having settled in her country, were so much exasperated at her endeavouring to restrain their excesses, that they accused her of having formed a plan to throw off the yoke, and to exterminate the Spaniards. Ovando, though he well knew what little credit was due to such profligate men, marched without further inquiry towards Zaragua, with three hundred foot, and seventy horsemen. To prevent the Indians from taking alarm at this hostile appearance, he gave out that his sole intention was to visit Anacoana, to whom his countrymen had been so much indebted, in the most respectful manner, and to regulate with her the mode of levying the tribute payable to the king of Spain.

“Anacoana, in order to receive this illustrious guest with due honour, assembled the principal men in her dominions, to the number of three hundred, and advancing at the head of these, accompanied by a great crowd of persons of inferior rank, she welcomed Ovando with songs and dances, according to the mode of the country, and conducted him to the place of her residence. There he was feasted for some days,with all the kindness of simple hospitality, and amused with the games and spectacles usual among the Americans upon occasions of mirth and festivity. But amid the security which this inspired, Ovando was meditating the destruction of his unsuspicious entertainer and her subjects; and the mean perfidy with which he executed this scheme, equalled his barbarity in forming it.

“Under colour of exhibiting to the Indians the parade of an European tournament, he advanced with his troops in battle array towards the house in which Anacoana and the chiefs who attended her were assembled. The infantry took possession of all the avenues which led to the village. The horsemen encompassed the house. These movements were the objects of admiration without any mixture of fear, until upon a signal which had been concerted, the Spaniards suddenly drew their swords and rushed upon the Indians, defenceless, and astonished at an act of treachery which exceeded the conception of undesigning men. In a moment, Anacoana was secured; all her attendants were seized and bound; fire was set to the house; and without examination or conviction, all these unhappy persons, the most illustrious in their country, were consumed in the flames. Anacoana was reserved for a more ignominious fate. She was carried in chains to St. Domingo, and after the formality of a trial before Spanish judges, was condemned upon the evidence of those very men who had betrayed her,to be publicly hanged!”

It is impossible for human treachery, ingratitude, and cruelty to go beyond that. All that we could relate of the deeds of the Spaniards in Hispaniola, would bebut the continuance of this system of demon oppression. The people, totally confounded with this instance of unparalleled villany and butchery, sunk into the inanition of despair, and were regularly ground away by the unremitted action of excessive labour and brutal abuse. In fifteen years they sunk from one million to sixty thousand!—a consumption ofupwards of sixty thousand souls a-year in one island! Calamities, instead of decreasing, only accumulated on their heads. Isabella of Spain died; and the greedy adventurers feeling that the only person at the head of the government that had any real sympathy with the sufferings of the natives was gone, gave themselves now boundless license. Ferdinand conferred grants of Indians on his courtiers, as the least expensive mode of getting rid of their importunities. Ovando, the governor, gave to his own friends and creatures similar gifts of living men, to be worked or crushed to death at their mercy—to perish of famine, or by the suicidal hand of despair. The avarice and rapacity of the adventurers became perfectly rabid. Nobles at home, farmed out these Indians given by Ferdinand to those who were going out to take part in the nefarious deeds—

They sate at home, and turned an easy wheel,That set sharp racks at work to pinch and peel.

They sate at home, and turned an easy wheel,

That set sharp racks at work to pinch and peel.

The small and almost nominal sum which had been allowed to the natives for their labour was now denied them; they were made absolute and unconditional slaves, and groaned and wasted away in mines and gold-dust streams, rapidly as those streams themselves flowed. The quantity of wealth drawn from their very vitals was enormous. Though Ovando had reducedthe royal portion to one-fifth, yet it now amounted to above a hundred thousand pounds sterling annually—making the whole annual produce of gold in that island, five hundred thousand pounds sterling; and considering the embezzlement and waste that must take place amongst a tribe of adventurers on fire with the love of gold, and fearing neither God nor man in their pursuit of it, probably nearer a million. Enormous fortunes sprung up with mushroom rapidity; luxury and splendour broke out with proportionate violence at home, and legions of fresh tormentors flocked like harpies to this strange scene of misery and aggrandizement. To add to all this, the sugar-cane—that source of a thousand crimes and calamities—was introduced! It flourished; and like another upas-tree, breathed fresh destruction upon this doomed people. Plantations and sugar-works were established, and became general; and the last and faintest glimmer of hope for the islanders was extinguished! Goldmightpossibly become exhausted, worked as the mines were with such reckless voracity; but the cane would spring afresh from year to year, and the accursed juice would flow for ever.

The destruction of human life now went on with such velocity, that some means were necessarily devised to obtain a fresh supply of victims, or the Spaniards must quit the island, and seek to establish their inferno somewhere else. But having perfected themselves in that part of Satan’s business which consisted in tormenting, they now very characteristically assumed the other part of the fiend’s trade—that of alluring and inveigling the unsuspicious into their snares. Were this not a portion of unquestionable history, related by the Spanish historians themselves, it is so completely an assumption of the art of the “father of lies,” and betrays such a consciousness of the real nature of the business they were engaged in, that it would be looked upon as a happy burlesque of some waggish wit upon them. The fact however stands on the authority of Gomera, Herrera, Oviedo, and others. Ovando, the governor, seeing the rapidly wasting numbers of the natives, and hearing the complaints of the adventurers, began to cast about for a remedy, and at length this most felicitous scheme, worthy of Satan in the brightest moment of his existence, burst upon him.—There were the inhabitants of the Lucayo Isles, living in heathen idleness, and ignorant alike ofChristianmines andChristiansugar-works. It was fitting that they should not be left in such criminal and damnable neglect any longer. He proposed, therefore, that these benighted creatures should be brought to the elysium of Hispaniola, andcivilizedin the gold mines, andinstructed in the Christian religionin the sugar-mills! The idea was too happy, and too full of the milk ofChristiankindness to be lost. At once, all the amiable gold-hunters clapped their hands with ecstasy at the prospect of somany new martyrs to the Christian faith; and Ferdinand, the benevolent andmost CatholicFerdinand, assented to it with the zeal of a royal nursing father of the church! A fleet was speedily fitted out for the benighted Lucayos; and the poor inhabitants there, wasting their existence in merely cultivating their maize, plucking their oranges, or fishing in their streams, just as their need or their inclination prompted them, were told by the Spaniards that they came from the heaven of theirancestors—isles of elysian beauty and fertility; where all pain and death were unknown, and where their friends and relations, living in heavenly felicity, needed only their society to render that felicity perfect!—that these beatified relatives had prayed them to hasten and bring them to their own scene of enjoyment—now waited impatiently for their arrival—and that they were ready to convey them thither, to the fields of heaven, in fact, without the black transit of death! The simple creatures, hearing a story which chimed in so exactly with their fondest belief, flocked on board with a blind credulity, not even to be exceeded by the Bubble-dupes of modern England, and soon found themselves in the grasp of fiends, and added to the remaining numbers of the Hispaniolan wretches in the mines and plantations. Forty thousand of these poor people were decoyed by this hellish artifice; and Satan himself, on witnessing this Spanishchef d’œuvre, must have felt ashamed of his inferiority of tact in his own profession!3

But the climax yet remained to be put to the inflictions on these islanders:—and that was found in the pearl fishery of Cubagua. Columbus had discovered this little wretched island—Columbus had suggested and commenced the slavery of the Indians,—and it seemed as though a Columbus was to complete the fabric of their misery. Don Diego, Columbus’s son, had compelled an acknowledgment of his claims in the vice-royalty of the New World. He had enrolled himself by his marriage with the daughter of Don Ferdinand de Toledo, brother of the Duke of Alva, and a relative of the king, amongst the highest nobility of the land. Coming over to assume his hereditary station, he brought a new swarm of these proud and avaricious hidalgoes with him. He seized upon and distributed amongst them whatever portions of Indians remained unconsumed; and casting his eyes on this sand-bank of Cubagua, he established a colony of pearl-fishers upon it—where the Indians, and especially the wretched ones decoyed from the Lucayos, were compelled to find in diving the last extremity of their sufferings.

And was there no voice raised against these dreadful enormities? Yes—and with the success which always attends the attempt to defend the weak against the powerful and rapacious in distant colonies. The Dominican monks, much to their honour, inveighed, from time to time, against them; but the Franciscans, on the other hand, sanctioned them, on the old plea of policy and necessity. It wasnecessarythat the Spaniards should compel the Indians to labour, or they must abandon their grand source of wealth. That was conclusive. Where are the people that carry their religion or their humanity beyond their interest? The thing was not to be expected. One man, indeed, roused by the oppressions of Diego Columbus, and his notorious successor, Albuquerque, a needy man, actually appointed by Ferdinand to the office of Distributor of the Indians!—one man, Bartholomew de Las Casas, dared to stand forward as their champion, and through years of unremitting toil to endeavour to arrest from the government some mitigation of their condition. Once or twice he appeared on the eve of success. At one time Ferdinand declared the Indians free subjects, and to be treated as such; but the furious opposition which arose in the colony on this decision, soon drew from the king another declaration, to wit, that the Pope’s bull gave a clear and satisfactory right to the Indians—that no man must trouble his conscience on account of their treatment, for the king and council would take all that on their own responsibility, and that the monks must cease to trouble the colony with their scruples. Yet the persevering Las Casas, by personal importunity at the court of Spain, painting the miseries and destructionof the Indians, now reduced from a million—not to sixty thousand as before,[4]but tofourteen thousand—again succeeded in obtaining a deputation of three monks of St. Jerome, as superintendents of all the colonies, empowered to relieve the Indians from their heavy yoke; and returned thither himself, in his official character of Protector of the Indians. But all his efforts ended in smoke. His coadjutors, on reaching Hispaniola, were speedily convinced by the violence and other persuasives of the colonies, that it wasnecessarythat the Indians should be slaves; and the only resource of the benevolent Las Casas was to endeavour to found a new colony where he might employ the Indians as free men, and civilize and Christianize them. But this was as vain a project as the other. His countrymen were now prowling along every shore of the New World that they were acquainted with, kidnapping and carrying off the inhabitants as slaves, to supply the loss of those they had worked to death. The dreadful atrocities committed in these kidnapping cruizes, had made the name of the Spaniards terrible wherever they had been; and as the inhabitants could no longer anywhere bedecoyed, he found the Spanish admiral on the point of laying waste with fire and sword, so as to seize on all its people in their flight, the very territory granted him in which to try his new experiment of humanity. The villany was accomplished; and amid the desolation of Cumana—thebulk of whose people were carried off as slaves to Hispaniola, and the rest having fled from their burning houses to the hills—the sanguine Las Casas still attempted to found his colony. It need not be said that it failed; the Protector of the Indians retired to a monastery, and the work of Indian misery went on unrestrained. To their oppression, a new and more lasting one had been added; from their destruction, indeed, had now sprung that sorest curse of both blacks and whites—that foulest stain on the Christian name—the Slave Trade. Charles V. of Spain, with that perfect freedom to do as they pleased with all heathen nations which the Papal church had given to Spain and Portugal, had granted a patent to one of his Flemish favourites, for the importation of negroes into America. This patent he had sold to the Genoese, and these worthy merchants were now busily employed in that traffic in men which is socongenialtoChristianmaxims, that it has from that time been the favourite pursuit of theChristiannations; has been defended by all the arguments of the most civilized assemblies in the world, and by the authority of Holy Writ, and is going on at this hour with undiminished horrors.

It has been charged on Las Casas, that with singular inconsistency he himself suggested this diabolical trade; but of that, and of this trade, we shall say more anon. We will now conclude this chapter with the brief announcement, that Diego Columbus had now conquered Cuba, by the agency of Diego Velasquez, one of his father’s captains, and thus added another grand field for the consumption of natives, and the importation of slaves. We are informed that the Cubaans were so unwarlike that no difficulty wasfound in overrunning this fine island, except from a chief called Hatuey, who had fled from Hispaniola, and knew enough of the Spaniards not to desire their further acquaintance. His obstinacy furnishes this characteristic anecdote on the authority of Las Casas. “He stood upon the defensive at their first landing, and endeavoured to drive them back to their ships. His feeble troops, however, were soon broken and dispersed; and he himself being taken prison, Velasquez, according to the barbarous maxim of the Spaniards, considered him as a slave who had taken arms against his master, and condemned him to the flames.”

When Hatuey was fastened to the stake, a Franciscan friar,labouring to convert him, promised him immediate admission into the joys of heaven, if he could embrace the Christian faith. “Are there any Spaniards,” says he, after some pause, “in that region of bliss which you describe?” “Yes,” replied the monk, “but such only as are worthy and good.” “The best of them,” returned the indignant Cazique, “have neither worth nor goodness! I will not go to a place where I may meet with that accursed race!”5

The torch was clapped to the pile—Hatuey perished—and the Spaniards added Cuba to the crown without the loss of a man on their own part.

Thestory of one West India Island, is the story of all. Whether Spaniards, French, or English took possession, the slaughter and oppression of the natives followed. I shall, therefore, quit these fair islands for the present, with a mere passing glance at a few characteristic facts.

Herrera says that Jamaica was settled prosperously, because Juan de Esquival having brought the natives to submissionwithout any effusion of blood, they laboured in planting cotton, and raising other commodities, which yielded great profit. But Esquival in a very few years died in his office, and was buried in Sevilla Nueva, a town which he had built and destined for the seat of government. There is a dark tradition connected with the destruction of this town, which would make us infer that the mildness of Esquival’s government was not imitated by his successors. The Spanish planters assert that the place was destroyed by a vast army of ants, but the popular tradition still triumphs over this tradition of the planters. It maintains, that the injured and oppressed natives rose in theirdespair and cut off every one of their tyrants, and laid the place in such utter and awful ruin that it never was rebuilt, but avoided as a spot of horror. The city must have been planned with great magnificence, and laid out in great extent, for Sloane, who visited it in 1688, could discover the traces or remains of a fort, a splendid cathedral and monastery, the one inhabited by Peter Martyr, who was abbot and chief missionary of the island. He found a pavement at two miles distance from the church, an indication of the extent of the place, and also many materials for grand arches and noble buildings that had never been erected. The ruins of this city were now overgrown with wood, and turned black with age. Sloane saw timber trees growing within the walls of the cathedral upwards of sixty feet in height; and General Venables in his dispatches to Cromwell, preserved in Thurlow’s State Papers, vol. iii., speaks of Seville as a town that had existedin times past.

Both ancient tradition, and recent discoveries, says Bryan Edwards, in his History of the West Indies, give too much room to believe that the work of destruction proceeded not less rapidly in this island, after Esquival’s death, than in Hispaniola; for to this day caves are frequently discovered in the mountains, wherein the ground is covered almost entirely with human bones; the miserable remains, without all doubt, of some of the unfortunate aborigines, who, immured in those recesses, were probably reduced to the sad alternative of perishing with hunger or bleeding under the swords of their merciless invaders. That these are the skeletons of Indians is sufficiently attested by the skulls, which are preternaturally compressed. “When, therefore,” says Edwards, “we are told of the fate of the Spanish inhabitants of Seville, it is impossible to feel any other emotion than an indignant wish that the story were better authenticated, and that heaven, in mercy, had permitted the poor Indians in the same moment to have extirpated their oppressors altogether! But unhappily this faint glimmering of returning light to the wretched natives, was soon lost in everlasting darkness, since it pleased the Almighty, for reasons inscrutable to finite wisdom, to permit the total destruction of this devoted people; who, to the number of 60,000, on the most moderate estimate, were at length wholly cut off and exterminated by the Spaniards—not a single descendant of either sex being alive when the English took the island in 1655, nor I believe for a century before.”

The French historian, Du Tertre, informs us that his countrymen made alawful purchaseof the island of Grenada from the natives forsome glass beads, knives and hatchets, and a couple of bottles of brandy for the chief himself. The nature of the bargain may be pretty well understood by the introduction of the brandy for the chief, and by the general massacre which followed, when Du Tertre himself informs us that Du Parquet, the very general who made this bargain, gave orders for extirpating the natives altogether, which was done with circumstances of the most savage barbarity, even to the women and children. The same historian assures us that St. Christopher’s, the principal of the Caribbee Isles, was won by the joint exertions of Thomas Warner, an Englishman, and D’Esnambuc, the captain of a French privateer, who both seem to have entered with heartygood-will into the business of massacre and extermination; by which means, and by excessive labour, the total aboriginal population of the West Indian islands were speedily reduced from six millions, at which Las Casas estimated them, to nothing.

Let any one read the following account from Herrera and Peter Martyr, of the manner in which the Spaniards were received in these islands:—“When any of the Spaniards came near to a village, the most ancient and venerable of the Indians, or the cazique himself, if present, came out to meet them, and gently conducting them into their habitations, seated them on stools of ebony curiously ornamented. These benches seemed to be seats of honour reserved for their guests, for the Indians threw themselves on the ground, and kissing the hands and feet of the Spaniards, offered them fruits and the choicest of their viands, entreating them to prolong their stay with such solicitude and reverence as demonstrated that they considered them as beings of a superior nature, whose presence consecrated their dwellings, and brought a blessing with it. One old man, a native of Cuba, approaching Columbus with great reverence, and presenting a basket of fruit, thus addressed him:—‘Whether you are divinities or mortal men we know not. You come into these countries with a force, against which, were we inclined to resist it, resistance would be a folly. We are all therefore at your mercy: but if you are men subject to mortality like ourselves, you cannot be unapprised that after this life there is another, wherein a very different portion is allotted to good and bad men. If, therefore, you expect to die, and believe with us that every one is to be rewardedin a future state according to his conduct in the present, you will do no hurt to those who do none to you.’”

Let the reader also, after listening to these exalted sentiments addressed by asavage, as we are pleased to term him, to aChristian, a term likewise used with as little propriety, read this account of the reception of Bartholomew Columbus by Behechio, a powerful cazique of Hispaniola. “As they approached the king’s dwelling, they were met by his wives to the number of thirty, carrying branches of the palm-tree in their hands, who first saluted the Spaniards with a solemn dance, accompanied with a song. These matrons were succeeded by a train of virgins, distinguished as such by their appearance; the former wearing aprons of cotton cloth, while the latter were arrayed only in the innocence of pure nature. Their hair was tied simply with a fillet over their foreheads, or suffered to flow gracefully on their shoulders and bosoms. Their limbs were finely proportioned, and their complexions though brown, were smooth, shining and lovely. The Spaniards were struck with admiration, believing that they beheld the dryads of the woods, and the nymphs of the fountains realizing ancient fable. The branches which they bore in their hands, they now delivered with lowly obeisance to the lieutenant, who, entering the palace, found a plentiful, and according to the Indian mode of living, a splendid repast already provided. As night approached, the Spaniards were conducted to separate cottages, wherein each was accommodated with a cotton hammock, and the next morning they were again entertained with dancing and singing. This was followed by matches of wrestling and running for prizes; after which two great bodies of armed Indians suddenly appeared, and a mock engagement ensued, exhibiting their modes of warfare with the Charaibes. For three days were the Spaniards thus royally entertained, and on the fourth the affectionate Indians regretted their departure.”

What beautiful pictures of a primitive age! what a more than realization of the age of gold! and what a dismal fall to that actualage of goldwhich was coming upon them! To turn from these delightful scenes to the massacres and oppressions of millions of these gentle and kind people, and then to the groans of millions of wretched Africans, which through three long centuries have succeeded them, is one of the most melancholy and amazing things in the criminal history of the earth; nor can we wonder at the feelings with which Bryan Edwards reviews this awful subject:—“All the murders and desolations of the most pitiless tyrants that ever diverted themselves with the pangs and convulsions of their fellow-creatures, fall infinitely short of the bloody enormities committed by the Spanish nation in the conquest of the New World—a conquest, on a low estimate, effected by the murder of ten millions of the species! After reading these accounts, who can help forming an indignant wish that the hand of Heaven, by some miraculous interposition, had swept these European tyrants from the face of the earth, who like so many beasts of prey, roamed round the world only to desolate and destroy; and more remorseless than the fiercest savage, thirsted for human blood without having the impulse of natural appetite to plead in their defence!”

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