THE SPANIARDS IN HISPANIOLA.
The gathering signs of a long night of woe.—_Rogers._
The terms 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 him and his heirs. He was to be _their viceroy_
in 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 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 of _Te 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_, and
_followed by a crucifix_, which his followers planted in the earth,
and then prostrating themselves before it, _took possession of the
country_ in 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 primitive and 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 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 were _Christians_ who 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 the
strand,—for the purpose of plundering and destroying them, as we might
expect from _savages_, 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 great right 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 the _Christians_! 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 acted over 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, a _Christian_ and _Protestant_
historian. 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 to
seize 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 a _Protestant_ historian, 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 the _Christian_ reception 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 obtained _an 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 reduced_ to 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 months_ in 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 gold and 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 because _he 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, that _in most of
his doings he was guarded by some_ special providence; his very name
was not without some mystery; for in it is expressed the wonder he
performed, inasmuch as _he conveyed to the new world_ the 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, however diabolical, 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 devoted shores! 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
those REPARTIMENTOS, 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 refused entrance 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.