THE HERITAGE OF HATRED
Although the journey from Jamaica to Espanola had been accomplished in
four days by Mendez in his canoe, the caravels conveying the party
rescued from Puerto Santa Gloria were seven weary weeks on this short
voyage; a strong north-west wind combining with the west-going current to
make their progress to the north-west impossible for weeks at a time. It
was not until the 13th of August 1503 that they anchored in the harbour
of San Domingo, and Columbus once more set foot, after an absence of more
than two years, on the territory from the governorship of which he had
been deposed.
He was well enough received by Ovando, who came down in state to meet
him, lodged him in his own house, and saw that he was treated with the
distinction suitable to his high station. The Spanish colony, moreover,
seemed to have made something of a hero of Columbus during his long
absence, and they received him with enthusiasm. But his satisfaction in
being in San Domingo ended with that. He was constantly made to feel
that it was Ovando and not he who was the ruler there;--and Ovando
emphasised the difference between them by numerous acts of highhanded
authority, some of them of a kind calculated to be extremely mortifying
to the Admiral. Among these things he insisted upon releasing Porras,
whom Columbus had confined in chains; and he talked of punishing those
faithful followers of Columbus who had taken part in the battle between
Bartholomew and the rebels, because in this fight some of the followers
of Porras had been killed. Acts like these produced weary bickerings and
arguments between Ovando and Columbus, unprofitable to them, unprofitable
to us. The Admiral seems now to have relapsed into a condition in which
he cared only for two things, his honours and his emoluments. Over every
authoritative act of Ovando's there was a weary squabble between him and
the Admiral, Ovando claiming his right of jurisdiction over the whole
territory of the New World, including Jamaica, and Columbus insisting
that by his commission and letters of authority he had been placed in
sole charge of the members of his own expedition.
And then, as regards his emoluments, the Admiral considered himself (and
not without justice) to have been treated most unfairly. By the
extravagant terms of his original agreement he was, as we know, entitled
to a share of all rents and dues, as well as of the gold collected; but
it had been no one's business to collect these for him, and every one's
business to neglect them. No one had cared; no one had kept any accounts
of what was due to the Admiral; he could not find out what had been paid
and what had not been paid. He accused Ovando of having impeded his
agent Carvajal in his duty of collecting the Admiral's revenues, and of
disobeying the express orders of Queen Isabella in that matter; and so
on-a state of affairs the most wearisome, sordid, and unprofitable in
which any man could be involved.
And if Columbus turned his eyes from the office in San Domingo inland to
that Paradise which he had entered twelve years before, what change and
ruin, dreary, horrible and complete, did he not discover! The birds
still sang, and the nights were still like May in Cordova; but upon that
happy harmony the sound of piteous cries and shrieks had long since
broken, and along and black December night of misery had spread its pall
over the island. Wherever he went, Columbus found the same evidence of
ruin and desolation. Where once innumerable handsome natives had
thronged the forests and the villages, there were now silence and smoking
ruin, and the few natives that he met were emaciated, terrified, dying.
Did he reflect, I wonder, that some part of the responsibility of all
this horror rested on him? That many a system of island government, the
machinery of which was now fed by a steady stream of human lives, had
been set going by him in ignorance, or greed of quick commercial returns?
It is probable that he did not; for he now permanently regarded himself
as a much-injured man, and was far too much occupied with his own wrongs
to realise that they were as nothing compared with the monstrous stream
of wrong and suffering that he had unwittingly sent flowing into the
world.
In the island under Ovando's rule Columbus saw the logical results of his
own original principles of government, which had recognised the right of
the Christians to possess the persons and labours of the heathen natives.
Las Casas, who was living in Espanola as a young priest at this time, and
was destined by long residence there and in the West Indies to qualify
himself as their first historian, saw what Columbus saw, and saw also the
even worse things that happened in after years in Cuba and Jamaica; and
it is to him that we owe our knowledge of the condition of island affairs
at this time. The colonists whom Ovando had brought out had come very
much in the spirit that in our own day characterised the rush to the
north-western goldfields of America. They brought only the slightest
equipment, and were no sooner landed at San Domingo than they set out
into the island like so many picnic parties, being more careful to carry
vessels in which to bring back the gold they were to find than proper
provisions and equipment to support them in the labour of finding it.
The roads, says Las Casas, swarmed like ant-hills with these adventurers
rushing forth to the mines, which were about twenty-five miles distant
from San Domingo; they were in the highest spirits, and they made it a
kind of race as to who should get there first. They thought they had
nothing to do but to pick up shining lumps of gold; and when they found
that they had to dig and delve in the hard earth, and to dig
systematically and continuously, with a great deal of digging for very
little gold, their spirits fell. They were not used to dig; and it
happened that most of them began in an unprofitable spot, where they
digged for eight days without finding any gold. Their provisions were
soon exhausted; and in a week they were back again in San Domingo, tired,
famished, and bitterly disappointed. They had no genius for steady
labour; most of them were virtually without means; and although they
lived in San Domingo, on what they had as long as possible, they were
soon starving there, and selling the clothes off their backs to procure
food. Some of them took situations with the other settlers, more fell
victims to the climate of the island and their own imprudences and
distresses; and a thousand of them had died within two years.
Ovando had revived the enthusiasm for mining by two enactments. He
reduced the share of discovered gold payable to the Crown, and he
developed Columbus's system of forced labour to such an extent that the
mines were entirely worked by it. To each Spaniard, whether mining or
farming, so many natives were allotted. It was not called slavery; the
natives were supposed to be paid a minute sum, and their employers were
also expected to teach them the Christian religion. That was the plan.
The way in which it worked was that, a body of native men being allotted
to a Spanish settler for a period, say, of six or eight months--for the
enactment was precise in putting a period to the term of slavery--the
natives would be marched off, probably many days' journey from their
homes and families, and set to work under a Spanish foreman. The work,
as we have already seen, was infinitely harder than that to which they
were accustomed; and most serious of all, it was done under conditions
that took all the heart out of the labour. A man will toil in his own
garden or in tilling his own land with interest and happiness, not
counting the hours which he spends there; knowing in fact that his work
is worth doing, because he is doing it for a good reason. But put the
same man to work in a gang merely for the aggrandisement of some other
over-man; and the heart and cheerfulness will soon die out of him.
It was so with these children of the sun. They were put to work ten
times harder than any they had ever done before, and they were put to it
under the lash. The light diet of their habit had been sufficient to
support them in their former existence of happy idleness and dalliance,
and they had not wanted anything more than their cassava bread and a
little fish and fruit; now, however, they were put to work at a pressure
which made a very different kind of feeding necessary to them, and this
they did not get. Now and then a handful of pork would be divided among
a dozen of them, but they were literally starved, and were accustomed to
scramble like dogs for the bones that were thrown from the tables of the
Spaniards, which bones they ground up and mixed with their, bread so that
no portion of them might be lost. They died in numbers under these hard
conditions, and, compared with their lives, their deaths must often have
been happy. When the time came for them to go home they were generally
utterly worn out and crippled, and had to face a long journey of many
days with no food to support them but what they could get on the journey;
and the roads were strewn with the dead bodies of those who fell by the
way.
And far worse things happened to them than labour and exhaustion. It
became the custom among the Spaniards to regard the lives of the natives
as of far less value than those of the dogs that were sometimes set upon
them in sport. A Spaniard riding along would make a wager with his
fellow that he would cut the head off a native with one stroke of his
sword; and many attempts would be laughingly made, and many living bodies
hideously mutilated and destroyed, before the feat would be accomplished.
Another sport was one similar to pigsticking as it is practised in India,
except that instead of pigs native women and children were stuck with the
lances. There was no kind of mutilation and monstrous cruelty that was
not practised. If there be any powers of hell, they stalked at large
through the forests and valleys of Espanola. Lust and bloody cruelty, of
a kind not merely indescribable but unrealisable by sane men and women,
drenched the once happy island with anguish and terror. And in payment
for it the Spaniards undertook to teach the heathen the Christian
religion.
The five chiefs who had ruled with justice and wisdom over the island of
Espanola in the early days of Columbus were all dead, wiped out by the
wave of wild death and cruelty that had swept over the island. The
gentle Guacanagari, when he saw the desolation that was beginning to
overwhelm human existence, had fled into the mountains, hiding his face
in shame from the sons of men, and had miserably died there. Caonabo,
Lord of the House of Gold, fiercest and bravest of them all, who first
realised that the Spaniards were enemies to the native peace, after
languishing in prison in the house of Columbus at Isabella for some time,
had died in captivity during the voyage to Spain. Anacaona his wife, the
Bloom of the Gold, that brave and beautiful woman, whose admiration of
the Spaniards had by their bloody cruelties been turned into detestation,
had been shamefully betrayed and ignominiously hanged. Behechio, her
brother, the only cacique who did not sue for peace after the first
conquest of the island by Christopher and Bartholomew Columbus, was dead
long ago of wounds and sorrow. Guarionex, the Lord of the Vega Real, who
had once been friendly enough, who had danced to the Spanish pipe and
learned the Paternoster and Ave Maria, and whose progress in conversion
to Christianity the seduction of his wives by those who were converting
him had interrupted, after wandering in the mountains of Ciguay had been
imprisoned in chains, and drowned in the hurricane of June 30, 1502.
The fifth chief, Cotabanama, Lord of the province of Higua, made the last
stand against Ovando in defence of the native right to existence, and was
only defeated after severe battles and dreadful slaughters. His
territory was among the mountains, and his last insurrection was caused,
as so many others had been, by the intolerable conduct of the Spaniards
towards the wives and daughters of the Indians. Collecting all his
warriors, Cotabanama attacked the Spanish posts in his neighbourhood.
At every engagement his troops were defeated and dispersed, but only to
collect again, fight again with even greater fury, be defeated and
dispersed again, and rally again against the Spaniards. They literally
fought to the death. After every battle the Spaniards made a massacre of
all the natives they could find, old men, children, and pregnant women
being alike put to the sword or burned in their houses. When their
companions fell beside them, instead of being frightened they became more
furious; and when they were wounded they would pluck the arrows out of
their bodies and hurl them back at the Spaniards, falling dead in the
very act. After one such severe defeat and massacre the natives
scattered for many months, hiding among the mountains and trying to
collect and succour their decimated families; but the Spaniards, who with
their dogs grew skilful at tracking the Indians and found it pleasant
sport, came upon them in the places of refuge where little groups of them
were sheltering their women and children, and there slowly and cruelly
slaughtered them, often with the addition of tortures and torments in
order to induce them to reveal the whereabouts of other bands. When it
was possible the Spaniards sometimes hanged thirteen of them in a row in
commemoration of their Blessed Saviour and the Twelve Apostles; and while
they were hanging, and before they had quite died, they would hack at
them with their swords in order to test the edge of the steel. At the
last stand, when the fierceness and bitterness of the contest rose to a
height on both sides, Cotabanama was captured and a plan made to broil
him slowly to death; but for some reason this plan was not carried out,
and the brave chief was taken to San Domingo and publicly hanged like a
thief.
After that there was never any more resistance; it was simply a case of
extermination, which the Spaniards easily accomplished by cutting of the
heads of women as they passed by, and impaling infants and little
children on their lances as they rode through the villages. Thus, in the
twelve years since the discovery of Columbus, between half a million and
a million natives, perished; and as the Spanish colonisation spread
afterwards from island to island, and the banner of civilisation and
Christianity was borne farther abroad throughout the Indies, the same
hideous process was continued. In Cuba, in Jamaica, throughout the
Antilles, the cross and the sword, the whip-lash and the Gospel advanced
together; wherever the Host was consecrated, hideous cries of agony and
suffering broke forth; until happily, in the fulness of time, the dire
business was complete, and the whole of the people who had inhabited this
garden of the world were exterminated and their blood and race wiped from
the face of the earth . . . . Unless, indeed, blood and race and hatred
be imperishable things; unless the faithful Earth that bred and reared
the race still keeps in her soil, and in the waving branches of the trees
and the green grasses, the sacred essences of its blood and hatred;
unless in the full cycle of Time, when that suffering flesh and blood
shall have gone through all the changes of substance and condition, from
corruption and dust through flowers and grasses and trees and animals
back into the living body of mankind again, it shall one day rise up
terribly to avenge that horror of the past. Unless Earth and Time
remember, O Children of the Sun! for men have forgotten, and on the soil
of your Paradise the African negro, learned in the vices of Europe,
erects his monstrous effigy of civilisation and his grotesque mockery of
freedom; unless it be through his brutish body, into which the blood and
hatred with which the soil of Espanola was soaked have now passed, that
they shall dreadfully strike at the world again.