Explorations and Settlements In America FROM THE Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Century NARRATIVE AND CRITICAL HISTORY OF AMERICA EDITED BY JUSTIN WINSOR LIBRARIAN OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY CORRESPOnding secRETARY MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY VOL. II. — PART II. BOSTON AND NEW YORK The Riverside Press, Cambridge Copyright, 1886, By HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY. All rights reserved. The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. E. Brant 6-1-36 CHAPTER V. LAS CASAS, AND THE RELATIONS OF THE SPANIARDS TO THE INDIANS. BY GEORGE EDWARD ELLIS, Vice-President of the Massachusetts Historical Society. WHEN the great apostle of the new faith, on his voyage from Asia to Europe, was shipwrecked on a Mediterranean island, "the barbarous people" showed him and his company "no little kindness." On first acquaintance with their chief visitor they hastily judged him to be a murderer, whom, though he had escaped the sea, yet vengeance would not suffer to live. But afterward "they changed their minds, and said that he was a god."1 The same extreme revulsion of feeling and judgment was wrought in the minds of the natives of this New World when the ocean-tossed voyagers from the old continent first landed on these shores, bringing the parted representatives of humanity on this globe into mutual acquaintance and intercourse. Only in this latter case the change of feeling and judgment was inverted. The simple natives of the fair western island regarded their mysterious visitors as superhuman beings; further knowledge of them proved them to be "murderers," rapacious, cruel, and inhuman, fit subjects for a dire vengeance. In these softer times of ours the subject of the present chapter might well be passed silently, denied a revival, and left in the pitiful oblivion which covers so many of the distressing horrors of "man's inhumanity to man." But, happily for the writer and for the reader, the title of the chapter is a double one, and embraces two themes. The painful narrative to be rehearsed is to be relieved by a tribute of admiring and reverential homage to a saintly man of signal virtues and heroic services, one of the grandest and most august characters in the world's history. Many of the obscure and a few of the dismal elements and incidents of long-passed times, in the rehearsal of them on fresh pages, are to a degree relieved by new light thrown upon them, by the detection and exposure of errors, and by readjustments of truth. Gladly would a writer on the subject before us avail himself of any such means to reduce or to qualify its repulsiveness. But advancing time, with the assertion of the higher instincts of humanity which have sharpened regrets and reproaches for all the enormities of the past, has not furnished any abatements for the faithful dealing with this subject other than that just presented. It is a fact worthy of a pause for thought, that in no single instance since the discovery of our islands and continent by Europeans-to say nothing about the times before it—has any new race of men come to the knowledge of travellers, explorers, and visitors from the realms of so-called civilization, when the conditions were so fair and favorable in the first introduction and acquaintance between the parties as in that between Columbus and the natives of the sea-girt isle of Hispaniola. Not even in the sweetest idealizings of romance is there a more fascinating picture than that which he draws of those unsophisticated children of Nature, their gentleness, docility, and friendliness. They were not hideous or repulsive, as barbarians; they did not revolt the sight, like many of the African tribes, like Bushmen, Feejeans, or Hottentots; they presented no caricaturings of humanity, as giants or dwarfs, as Amazons or Esquimaux; their naked bodies were not mutilated, gashed, or painted; they uttered no yells or shrieks, with mad and threatening gestures. They were attractive in person, well formed, winning and gentle, and trustful; they were lithe and soft of skin, and their hospitality was spontaneous, generous, and genial. Tribes of more warlike and less gracious nature proved to exist on some of the islands, about the isthmus and the continental regions of the early invasion; but the first introduction and intercourse of the representatives of the parted continents set before the Europeans a race of their fellow-creatures with whom they might have lived and dealt in peace and love. And what shall we say of the new-comers, the Spaniards, the subjects of the proudest of monarchies, the representatives of the age of chivalry; gentlemen, nobles, disciples of the one Holy Catholic Church, and soldiers. of the Cross of Christ? What sort of men were they, what was their errand, and what impress did they leave upon the scenes so fair before their coming, and upon those children of Nature whom they found so innocent and loving, and by whom they were at first gazed upon with awe and reverence as gods? In only one score of the threescore years embraced in our present subject the Spaniards had sown desolation, havoc, and misery in and around their track. They had depopulated some of the best-peopled of the islands, and renewed them with victims deported from others. They had inflicted upon hundreds of thousands of the natives all the forms and agonies of fiendish cruelty, driving them to self-starvation and suicide as a way of mercy and release from an utterly wretched existence. They had come to be viewed by their victims as fiends of hate, malignity, and all dark and cruel desperation and mercilessness in passion. The hell which they denounced |