Colonization and Christianity/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V.
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 Bovadillo, the governor who superseded Columbus, and loaded him with irons, only bestowed allotments of Indians with a more liberal hand, to ingratiate himself with the fierce adventurers who filled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.
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'ouvre, must have felt ashamed of his inferiority of tact in his own profession![1]
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,[2] 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!"[3]
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.
- ↑ How affecting is Peter Martyr's account of these poor Lucayans, thus fraudulently decoyed from their native countries. "Many of them, in the anguish of despair, obstinately refuse all manner of sustenance, and retiring to desert caves and unfrequented woods, silently give up the ghost. Others, repairing to the sea-coast on the northern side of Hispaniola, cast many a longing look towards that part of the ocean where they suppose their own islands to be situated; and as the sea-breeze rises, they eagerly inhale it—fondly believing that it has lately visited their own happy valleys, and comes fraught with the breath of those they love, their wives and their children. With this idea, they continue for hours on the coast, until nature becomes utterly exhausted, when, stretching out their arms towards the ocean, as if to take a last embrace of their distant country and relatives, they sink down and expire without a groan. . . . . . One of them, who was more desirous of life, or had greater courage than most of his countrymen, took upon him a bold and difficult piece of work. Having been used to build cottages in his native country, he procured instruments of stone, and cut down a large spongy tree, called jaruma (the bombax, or wild cotton), the body of which he dexterously scooped into a canoe. He then provided himself with oars, some Indian corn, and a few gourds of water, and prevailed on another man and woman to embark with him on a voyage to the Lucayos. Their navigation was prosperous for near two hundred miles, and they were almost within sight of their long-lost shores, when unfortunately they were met by a Spanish ship, which brought them back to slavery and sorrow! The canoe is still preserved in Hispaniola as a curiosity, considering the circumstances under which it was made."—Decad. vii.
- ↑ In less than fifty years from the arrival of the Spaniards, not more than two hundred Indians could be found in Hispaniola; and Sir Francis Drake states that when he touched there in 1585, not one was remaining; yet so little were the Spaniards benefited by their cruelty, that they were actually obliged to convert pieces of leather into money!—See Hakluyt's Voyages, vol. iii.
- ↑ Las Casas, in his zeal for the Indians, has been charged with exaggerating the numbers destroyed, but no one has attempted to deny the following fact asserted by him: "I once beheld four or five principal Indians roasted alive at a slow fire; and as the miserable victims poured forth dreadful screams, which disturbed the commanding officer in his afternoon slumbers—he sent word that they should be strangled; but the officer on guard (I know his name—I know his relatives in Seville) would not suffer it; but causing their mouths to be gagged, that their cries might not be heard, he stirred up the fire with his own hands, and roasted them deliberately till they all expired. I saw it myself!!!"