hanged. Ovando founded a town near the scene of the massacre, to which he blasphemously gave the name of St. Mary of the true Peace![1] The five native chieftains of the districts of Hispaniola had now perished, and the island was desolate. Twelve years after his great discovery Columbus wrote to the Spanish monarchs: —
“The Indians of Hispaniola were and are the riches of the
island; for it is they who cultivate and make the bread and the
provisions for the Christians, who dig the gold from the mines, and
perform all the offices and labors both of men and beasts. I am
informed that six parts out of seven of the natives are dead, all
through ill-treatment and inhumanity, — some by the sword, others
by blows and cruel usage, others through
hunger.”[2]
To supply the actual needs of labor, after the devastation
and depopulation of the island, negro slaves were sent
to Hispaniola in 1505. Then, too, began another series of
outrages in the forcible abduction and transfer, under the
grossest deception, of natives of the Lucayan Islands. In
five years forty thousand of these were kidnapped and
transported to Hispaniola.
Two words, of widely contrasted significations and associations, have been adopted into our English speech from the language of the natives of that once happy island, — hammock, or hamac, designating the couch of listless repose, and hurricane, the sound of which aptly expresses the whirling tornado of tempests and waves, and well offsets, in its symbol of Spanish havoc, the bed of peace and ease.
Historians, by their use of the term, have consented to receive from the first Spanish knights-errant and marauders in the New World the respectable and colorless word Conquest to define the method of their mastery of territory
4
