Assisted very kindly afterwards by one of the native chiefs, when one of his caravels had shoaled, he writes to their Majesties of the Indians: —
“They are a loving, uncovetous people, so docile in all things
that I assure your Highnesses I believe in all the world there is not
a better people or a better country. They love their neighbors as
themselves, and they have the sweetest and the gentlest way of
talking in the world, and always with a
smile.”[1]
When the Protestant French colony, under Ribault, in
1562, entered the St. John River in Florida, they were
impressed in a similarly enthusiastic way with the grace,
simplicity, and natural charms of the kindly savages who
received them with full confidence and courtesy. Their
journalist portrays the natives as in stature, shape, features,
and manners manly, dignified, and agreeable. The women,
well favored and modest, permitted no one “dishonestly to
approach too near them;” and “both men and women were
so beautifully painted that the best painter of Europe could
not amende it.”
The Spaniards and the French very soon found, and had long and sharp experience of the fact, that even these natives of the Southern isles and peninsula, who seem to have been of a more gentle and tractable spirit than those of the North, had in them latent passions which, when stung by oppression and outrage, could assert their fury. It is pleasant to note with emphasis the fact, that, in the conduct and course of his first voyage, Columbus having been ever anxious to secure that result, his intercourse with the natives was wholly peaceful. By his resolute discipline over a comparatively small number of men, by his regard for their safety, and his desire to reciprocate the gentle courtesy he had received from the children of Nature, who looked upon him and his followers as having veritably come
- ↑ Navarrete, Col. vol. i. p. 21, as quoted by Arthur Helps, in “The Conquerors of the New World and their Bondsmen,” vol. i. p. 105.
