Colonization and Christianity. William Howitt
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’œuvre, must have felt ashamed of his inferiority of tact in his own profession!3
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