heritage on this continent, an article by the Paulist Father Hecker in the “Catholic World,” for July, 1879, makes the following statement: —
“The discovery of the western continent was eminently a
religious enterprise. The motive which animated Columbus, in common
with the Franciscan prior (his patron Perez) and Isabella
the Catholic, was the burning desire to carry the blessings of the
Christian faith to the inhabitants of a new continent; and it was
the inspiration of this idea which brought a new world to light.
Sometimes missionaries were slain, but the fearless soldiers of the
cross continued unceasingly their work of converting the natives
and bringing them into the fold of Christ.”
Strangely enough do such sentences of a modern convert
read, as a comment upon the actual deeds of the Spanish
crusaders, as related exclusively by Catholic writers.
When Columbus sailed in the spring of 1498, on his third voyage, the disasters and discontents which had been thoroughly reported in Spain as having visited their miseries on the island colony, had substituted disgust for the former enthusiasm for sharing in the enterprise. The Admiral himself proposed that his new complement of men should be largely composed of convicts. Bitterly did he and the natives rue this experiment of the importation of men some of whom had judicially lost their ears.
It was with such material on his arrival at Hispaniola, where he found a full riot of mutiny and disorder, that Columbus had recourse to the system of repartimientos, — a device which quickened and instigated many new forms of barbarous iniquity against the natives. This system was one by which vast tracts of land were assigned to the most desperate in their revolt, with the right to compel the labor of bands of the natives. One Spaniard thus became the irresponsible and arbitrary master of, it might be, hundreds of natives. These, of course, were but slaves. They had never needed and had never used anything answering to what we call bodily labor, or task-work, as their generous
