flowing zeal, some embracing him, others kissing his hands. Abject spirits, who had outraged him by their insolence, now crouched at his feet; and those who had been the most mutinous during the voyage were now as humble and as ready to lick the dust from his feet as the most terrified of the natives. The natives soon recovered from their terror, as no attempt was made to pursue or molest them. Extremely artless and simple in themselves, the slightest acts of kindness were received with gratitude, and the toys and trinkets presented for their acceptance were accepted as gifts from heaven. Beyond cotton yarn, which they possessed in abundance, and parrots, which were domesticated in great numbers among them, they had little or nothing to give in return. Their boats consisted entirely of canoes, formed and hollowed, like those of the earliest on record, from a single tree, and capable of carrying from one to fifty persons. Columbus mentions that he saw one which could have contained one hundred and fifty persons, yet made from the trunk of a single tree.[1]
The first impressions of the natives on Columbus. The state in which Columbus found the natives is nowhere so well described as in his own language. Writing to the treasurer of Ferdinand and Isabella an account of his first voyage[2]—"As soon," says he, "as they saw our near approach, they would flee with such precipitation, that a father would not even stop to protect his son; and this not because any harm had been done to any of them, for, from the first, wherever I went and got speech with them, I gave
