THE SPANIARDS IN HISPANIOLA AND CUBA.
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.
But whether 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 Bovadillo, the governor who superseded Columbus, and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 were pursued as rebels,
their dwellings razed from the earth, and their caziques, when taken,
hanged as malefactors.
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 a stronger 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 be but 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 of _upwards 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.
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 reduced the 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! Gold _might_ possibly 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 of _Christian_ mines and _Christian_
sugar-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, and _civilized_ in the gold mines, and _instructed in the
Christian religion_ in the sugar-mills! The idea was too happy, and
too full of the milk of _Christian_ kindness to be lost. At once,
all the amiable gold-hunters clapped their hands with ecstasy at
the prospect of so _many new martyrs to the Christian faith_; and
Ferdinand, the benevolent and _most Catholic_ Ferdinand, 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 their ancestors—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 Spanish _chef 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 was _necessary_
that 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 destruction of the Indians, now reduced from a million—not
to sixty thousand as before,[4] but to _fourteen 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 was
_necessary_ that 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 be _decoyed_, 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—the bulk 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 so _congenial_
to _Christian_ maxims, that it has from that time been the favourite
pursuit of the _Christian_ nations; 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 was found 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.