Spanish America: Its Romance, Reality and Future. C. Reginald Enock
bridges before their skilled tormentor appeared upon the earth. There is, relatively, but little game, and the traveller who might think to subsist upon it in his passage through the wilds will do well to ponder the experience of the early Conquistadores, some of which have been set down briefly in these pages.
Thus far the picture of travel here. There are phases on the other side to be considered. It is the explorer, the pioneer, who will find material for his desires in these lands. The geographer, the antiquarian, the naturalist, the ethnologist has before him a field which is the equal of any region, and the engineer, that most practical and valuable of travellers, has work before him in this score of independent states whose magnitude has, so far, no limit.
CHAPTER II
A HISTORICAL OUTLINE
It would be manifestly impossible, in the present work, to enter in detail upon the wide field of the history of the Spanish American States. Yet, just as in order to gain an intelligent idea topographically of the region we must refer to its main geographical features and disposition, so must we cast a glance at its historical outlines. Those readers who are drawn on to fill in the detail have ample material at hand in the books recently published on the Latin American States.[4]
The beginnings of history and of geography are, of course, inextricably interwoven, and in the case of America this is markedly so. America, in a sense, was discovered by accident, and its first discoverers did not know they had brought to being a new continent. Columbus, to his dying day, believed it was India he had reached, which he had set out to reach, and would not be persuaded to the contrary.
On the maps of the earlier geographers there was, in fact, no room for America. From the shores of Europe and Africa to those of Cathay—the old, mediaeval, and still the poetical name for China, the great Asiatic coast—stretched one sea, the Western Ocean, broken by some small islands and Cipango, or Japan. Scholars and dreamers, studying isolated passages in cryptic and classic writings, or arguing from general principles, in which the wish was at times father to the thought, believed that by sailing west India could be reached.
These dreams of poets and the beliefs of scholars crystallized in the mind of the Genoese sailor, Columbus, a man of humble origin, and after many disappointments and disillusions, in the interviewing of kings and high personages for aid and patronage (among them the King of England, but England with characteristic lack of imagination would have none of it, and the King of Portugal, who tried to cheat him), was enabled to set sail by aid of the Queen of Spain—women having more imagination than men—in three small vessels, and made his great and memorable landfall in the New World on October 12, 1492, in the Bahamas.
These islands Columbus and his officers believed to be those described by Marco Polo, as forming the eastern end of Asia; and thus arose the name of "Las Indias," the Indies, which America long retained.
As a result of this discovery, a controversy arose between Spain and Portugal, for, in 1454, the Pope had given the Portuguese—by what right he himself doubtless best knew—exclusive control of exploration and conquest on the road to the Indies, although his Bull had in view only the eastern route. Now, however, "spheres of influence" might easily clash. The two Powers repaired again to the Pope, successor of the former, and he, drawing a line across the map of the world from north to south, in a position west of the Azores a hundred leagues, awarded Spain everything that might lie beyond it. The Pope was a Spaniard. The Portuguese did not think the award fair. (It might have been mentioned that the Portuguese King, his "especial friend," had treacherously endeavoured to forestall Columbus by dispatching a caravel on his proposed route secretly, instead of helping him, a futile errand, however.) They protested, and by common consent the line was shifted to 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, corresponding to-day to the 50th degree of longitude.
Such a line cuts South America across the mouth of the Amazon, and the Spaniards claimed the right to exclude all other people and all trade but their own from beyond this line.
The subsequent conquest and discovery of America embodies some of the most romantic and stirring episodes in history. In his last voyage Columbus explored the West Indies and reached South America, landing at the mouth of the Orinoco, and he sailed along the coast of the Caribbean and Central America to Nombre de Dios—"Name of God"—near Colon. Henry VII of England—who had declined to help Columbus—now kindly permitted John Cabot to sail, in 1499, who discovered Newfoundland and did other valuable exploits. Hispaniola was the first Spanish Settlement, on the Island of Hayti, and this spread to the mainland. In 1513 Vasco Nuñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Darien and Panama and beheld the "South Sea," as described in our chapter upon Central America. The insistent hope of a "strait" or passage through these lands, giving a way to the Spice Islands of the Indies, was now given up, and when Magellan, in 1520, passed through the strait which bears his name, and sailed across the Pacific, it was understood that a vast continent and a vast ocean divided the world from Asia here, a new world, and that lying mainly within the sphere of influence which the Pope had so generously assigned to Spain.
With regard to this obsession of Colombus that westward lay the shortest route to India, and the insistent idea of a strait, have not these been materialized in the Panama Canal, and are not these ancient mariners vindicated to-day?
The New World now belonged to Spain. Perhaps the first purpose of the Spaniards was trade with the Indies, but their main object was that of gold, to be gained by slave labour. They could not themselves work in the tropics, even if they had had any desire for manual labour, which they had not. However, they began to introduce European plants and animals into Cuba and Hispaniola, a service which was of enormous value later to America, which possessed but a meagre range of staple food products and no beasts of burden or bovines. But gold—that was what they wanted. The shallow deposits of the island were soon exhausted, as were the poor willing Indians, killed off by forced labour. The barbarous treatment of the aborigines of the New World by the Spaniards—and the Portuguese—is one of the most dreadful blots on the history of America, indeed of the world.
The easily gotten gold being exhausted, it was necessary to go farther afield. The Darien Settlement was transferred to Panama, the coasts of Yucatan and the Gulf of Mexico were explored by Cordova and Grijalva, from Cuba, and in 1519 the great Conquest of Mexico was entered upon by Cortes.
So far the Spaniards had found little difficulty in subduing the Indians to their will, the inoffensive islanders, and Caribs, which latter became almost exterminated. The Indian folk of these islands were generally a simple and credible race, who at first looked upon the white man as a demi-god, but these simple children of the soil were treated with utmost callousness and barbarity. There is an example in the treatment of the natives of Watling Island in the Bahamas, which, as before remarked, was the first point in the New World trodden by Columbus. Of this land and its folk the explorer wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella: "These beautiful islands excel all other lands. The natives love their neighbours as themselves, their faces are always smiling, their conversation is the sweetest imaginable, and they are so gentle and affectionate that I swear to your Highness there is no better people in the world." But what was the lot of these folk? The Spaniards wanted further labour in the mines of Hispaniola, and to get these natives there they, trading on a characteristic love of the people for their ancestors and departed relatives, promised to convey them to the heavenly shores, where these were imagined as dwelling; and so, treacherously getting them on board the ships, they were taken away to the mines, where it is said 40,000 perished under starvation and the lash.
The natives of Mexico were people of a different stamp. The Aztecs were pueblo or town Indians, highly organized as soldiers, skilled in arts and crafts, with a developed civilization and certain intellectuality. They were highland folk, the Mexican plateau lying at seven to eight thousand feet above sea level, protected by mountain fastnesses. It was, in fact, an empire of the New World such as, in some respects, might compare with those ancient semi-barbaric empires of the Old World, in times more ancient. Its conquest by Cortes was an affair of great enterprise and toil, entailing heavy loss and suffering on