# The Red Man and the White Man in North America/Chapter 1

CHAPTER I.
SPANISH DISCOVERERS AND INVADERS.
A lively, indeed a dramatic, interest attaches to the occasion and the incidents which first brought together for recognition, for sight and intercourse, representatives of the human family that had been parted by oceans for unknown centuries. Neither of these branches of a common stock had knowledge of the other. There was to be a first meeting, as of strangers. In view of all the dismal and harrowing results which were to follow, burdening with tragedies of woe and cruelty the relations between the white man and the red man, especially those of the Spaniards and the natives of the American islands, one might be tempted to wish that the ocean had been impassable. The more grateful, therefore, is it to recall the fact, that the very first contact and recognition between those of the Old World and the New, when the time had come that they were no longer to be deferred, present to us a sweet and lovely picture. Would that its charm and repose of simple peacefulness might have been the long perspective of the then following ages!
The great-hearted Admiral had kept his high resolve and hope through all the weary delays of his course over unknown seas, with panic-stricken and mutinous sailors. They might reckon over what part of the expanse of waters they had passed in their poor vessels, but knew not how much remained. But signs of land had appeared in ​sea-weed, drift-wood, and birds, and a stick carved by tool. On the night of Thursday, Oct. 11, 1492, Columbus, standing, near midnight, on the poop of his vessel, saw a moving light, which afterwards proved, as he surmised, to be a torch, carried from one hut to another, on the island which he named San Salvador. On the next morning, clad in complete, armor, with the banner of Spain, his captains around him, bearing the royal insignia of Ferdinand and Isabella, he landed on a spot which he says was fresh and fruitful like a garden full of trees. The natives in simple amazement looked on, as they lined the shores and saw their mysterious visitors kneel with devout tears on the earth.
And here is Columbus's report of his first impression from those whom he looked upon then as simply materials for making Christians: —
“Because they had much friendship for us, and because I knew they were people that would deliver themselves better to the Christian faith, and be converted more through love than by force, I gave to some of them some colored caps, and some strings of glass beads for their necks, and many other things of little value, with which they were delighted, and were so entirely ours that it was a marvel to see. The same afterwards came swimming to the ships' boats where we were, and brought us parrots, cotton threads in balls, darts, and many other things which we gave them, such as bells and small glass beads. In fine, they took and gave all of whatever they had with good-will. But it appeared to me they were a people very poor in everything. They went totally naked. They were well made, with very good faces, hair like horse-hair, their color yellow, and they painted themselves; without arms, save darts pointed with a fish's tooth. They ought to make faithful servants and of good understanding, for I see that very quickly they repeat all that is said to them; and I believe they would easily be converted to Christianity, for it appeared to me that they had no creed.”
​Assisted very kindly afterwards by one of the native chiefs, when one of his caravels had shoaled, he writes to their Majesties of the Indians: —
“They are a loving, uncovetous people, so docile in all things that I assure your Highnesses I believe in all the world there is not a better people or a better country. They love their neighbors as themselves, and they have the sweetest and the gentlest way of talking in the world, and always with a smile.”
When the Protestant French colony, under Ribault, in 1562, entered the St. John River in Florida, they were impressed in a similarly enthusiastic way with the grace, simplicity, and natural charms of the kindly savages who received them with full confidence and courtesy. Their journalist portrays the natives as in stature, shape, features, and manners manly, dignified, and agreeable. The women, well favored and modest, permitted no one “dishonestly to approach too near them;” and “both men and women were so beautifully painted that the best painter of Europe could not amende it.”
The Spaniards and the French very soon found, and had long and sharp experience of the fact, that even these natives of the Southern isles and peninsula, who seem to have been of a more gentle and tractable spirit than those of the North, had in them latent passions which, when stung by oppression and outrage, could assert their fury. It is pleasant to note with emphasis the fact, that, in the conduct and course of his first voyage, Columbus having been ever anxious to secure that result, his intercourse with the natives was wholly peaceful. By his resolute discipline over a comparatively small number of men, by his regard for their safety, and his desire to reciprocate the gentle courtesy he had received from the children of Nature, who looked upon him and his followers as having veritably come ​among them from the skies, he succeeded in repressing every insult and wrong, and for a time deferred violence and the shedding of blood. The first impression which the Spaniards received of the inhabitants of those islands earliest visited was, that their docility and feminine qualities wholly disabled them even of resentment, and would make all aggression on their part an impossibility. This impression continued, and was for a time strengthened on the second voyage, opening other islands, — with an exception, however, soon to be stated. Those fair and luxuriant regions, free of wild beasts, spontaneously yielding the supplies of life to the indolent and happy natives, suggested the image of Paradise to the care-worn and passionate rovers from the Old World. It was natural that the unorthodox fancy should present itself, even to the minds of ecclesiastics, that these favored beings, though in human form, might possibly not be of the lineage of Adam, nor sharers in the primeval curse, as they seemed so innocent and guileless, and needed not to win their bread by the sweat of their brow. When the prow of Columbus was headed for his return to Spain, as he stopped on his way at the eastern end of Hispaniola, a party of the natives, whom he describes as armed and ferocious in aspect and treacherous in their manifestations, presented themselves on the shore and provoked hostilities. Here the first acts of violence occurred, and the first blood was shed on both sides. But Columbus, so far as he could understand the communications made to him in answer to his questions as to the regions where gold abounded, received information of other neighboring islands, — afterwards known as the Caribbean, or Antilles, — where the natives were predatory, piratical, and warlike, invading their neighbors for slaughter and captives, and addicted to cannibalism. Of these more brave and savage natives he was afterwards to have dire experience. We may therefore rest with the grateful conclusion, that the first intercourse between the representatives of the two ​races began and ended in amity. Nor does it appear that those nine natives whom Columbus transported were taken against their will, or were treacherously kidnapped, as, more than a century later, were Indians on the New England coast by British freebooters.
Before Columbus sailed on his return, one of his vessels having been shipwrecked on the western end of Hispaniola, the cacique of the natives of that district, Guacanagari, had shown him sympathy and kindness, offering him all friendly help. The spot was so lovely, and life seemed so attractive there, that the Admiral yielded to the wishes of many of his men that he would leave them as a colony on the shore, to pursue the objects of the discoverers. Obtaining the consent and the promise of supplies from the cacique, Columbus, using portions of the wreck for the purpose, constructed a fort, and with explicit and discreet commands for caution, good discipline, and peaceful courses, he left in it thirty-nine men. The subsequent woes of the Admiral, and the opening of hostile relations with the natives, are to be traced to this ill-omened experiment.
The site of the colony was called Navidad, the Admiral having landed there on Christmas day. He returned to Spain with undiminished confidence in his visions of precious wealth from the New World. His illusion that he was on the confines of India was confirmed in the chance similarity of sounds which fell upon his ears in the names of places. When the natives, pointing in the direction whence gold came, used the word “Cubanacan” (“the centre of Cuba”), it signified to the Admiral the Grand Khan. The island which they called “Cibao,” and which really proved the richest in treasure, was this longed-for Cipango.
When Columbus made his second visit to the Islands, it was with a company of fifteen hundred men, of every class and condition of life, clerical, noble, professional, and menial. ​There was a fleet of seventeen vessels, laden with all that was needed for use and luxury and defence for a prosperous colony, with all sorts of seeds and plants, with domestic animals and poultry, and, above all, with mules and horses, the marvel and terror of the natives, realizing to them the fable of the Centaur.
Before visiting the colony which he had left at the fort, Columbus touched at Santa Cruz, one of the Antilles. Here he had a skirmish, blood being shed on both sides, with some of those Caribs, of whom he had heard such warning because of their courage, ferocity, and predatory rovings. More terrible yet was their repute as cannibals.
That beautiful island realm, which has borne successively the names of Hispaniola, St. Domingo, and Hayti, was to be the scene where disaster, sorrow, outrage, carnage, and every form and degree of oppression, cruelty, treachery, and atrocity were to introduce the tragic and revolting history, lengthened and crimsoned in the years to follow, of the relations between the Spaniards and the natives. The island in all that splendid archipelago, second in size only to Cuba, and richer and fairer than any other in the group, was estimated at its discovery, perhaps with some exaggeration, to have on its thirty thousand square miles a population of a million souls. Las Casas says the population had been 1,200,000. Though, as afterwards appeared, there had been feuds between the wilder mountain tribes and the more peaceful dwellers by the shores and in the valleys, all the chroniclers describe the natives as gentle and kindly, living an indolent, tranquil life, without care or labor, and presenting an image of Arcadian simplicity. The invaders afterwards learned that the island was divided into five districts, under the same number of caciques.
As has been said, the cacique or chieftain of the tribe in whose bounds the little colony with its citadel had been planted, had shown himself chivalrously courteous and friendly to the wrecked adventurers, and promised ​Columbus a loyal fidelity. When the Admiral anxiously but hopefully approached the spot, it was to confront a bitter disappointment. The disaster which he had to contemplate was shrouded in a mystery which was never wholly cleared. Desolation and silence rested on the scene. Havoc and desertion everywhere showed their evidences, without revealing the cause, the occasion, or the agents. Not a Spaniard survived on the spot, or ever was found to tell the story; and the Admiral was left to surmise an explanation, with such unsatisfactory help as he afterwards had from the natives. The inferences fully certified were, that the colonists, mostly of low character, had become restless, insubordinate, and lawless, had fallen into neglect of all prudence, and broken into discord. They had scattered themselves among the natives, oppressing them, and indulging in the grossest licentiousness, thus provoking a revenge which had fatally accomplished its work. With a heavy heart the Admiral faced the calamity. He soon selected a more healthful site for a town, which he called Isabella, to be occupied by the edifices and tilled fields of one thousand colonists, whose main and consuming passion was the search for gold. Columbus sent back to Spain twelve of the vessels, retaining the other five. In these return vessels were men, women, and children captured on the Caribbean islands. It may have been under the prompting of a humane purpose, however darkened in its view of justice or expediency, that the Admiral, while sending over more than five hundred captives, in a letter to their Majesties proposed for the future to transport to Spain an indefinite number of natives to be sold as slaves, — the blessing accruing to them of being instructed in Christianity and rescued from perdition, while the proceeds of their sale would relieve the enormous expense of the enterprise to the royal treasury, and procure live-stock and other supplies for the colony.
It is to be observed that the first company of natives transported for sale as slaves were thought to be not ​unfairly consigned to that fate on the ground that they were cannibals. It was preposterous to suppose that, having once been sold, they would be returned here as baptized Christians, for the purpose of aiding in the conversion of other Caribs. But afterwards large gangs of captives were committed to the same fate simply as “prisoners of war.” Considerable debate was raised in the Spanish Council as to the rightfulness of this disposition of such a class of captives. But the final decision allowed it.
It was on this fair island that the dreams and illusions which had so sweetly kindled and wrapped the imaginations of both races alike, were broken and gave place to ghastly realities. The savages ceased to regard their visitors as having swept down upon them from a pure heaven, and if their theology had taken in the alternate realm of destiny, would have traced them as fiends to the pit of all horrors. The Spaniards on their part came to a better knowledge of the Indian character in its spirit and capacities of passion. They found the natives cunning, ingenious in stratagem, and capable of duplicity and guile; bold and venturesome and courageous too in the arts of war, with javelins, sharpened spears, bows and arrows, and bucklers. They found also that the savages had a profound and by no means a puerile and inoperative religion of their own, far better in its impulses and practice than that of the reckless and dissolute marauders. Sickness, want reaching to near starvation, utter unwillingness to labor even for food, discontent, a rebellious spirit, bitter disappointment of hope, and the grossest indulgence of all foul passions, — all culminated in their effects at Isabella. When Columbus returned there from a cruise to Cuba, he found a state of open warfare between his colonists and many of the native chiefs, who, goaded to desperation, had conspired to exterminate the intruders. Columbus himself in March, 1495, took the field with his little army of infantry and cavalry, and twenty of the fiercest blood-hounds, against a ​body of the natives, perhaps over-estimated at a hundred thousand.
Here for the first time, as an example to be followed all along the course of the hostilities between the Europeans of every nationality and the natives, we find the white men artfully engaging the help as allies of one tribe of savages against other hostile tribes, — a dismal aggravation of all the iniquities and atrocities of a wild warfare. In the subsequent swoops of Spanish marauders and invaders in South America and in Mexico, it is safe to affirm that there were instances in which the victory was won for them by their savage allies, numbering hundreds to each one of the foreign soldiery, without whose aid, with the consequent discord and despair which it caused to the wild foe, the Spaniards would have been vanquished or starved. Columbus availed himself of the former friendship of the cacique Guacanagari, to engage his tribe against the conspiring chieftains; and, by thus fomenting animosities among the enemy, won his triumph. The horse had been a most terrific spectacle to the natives; but the bloodhound, who sprang with his unrelaxing fangs to the neck of his victim, and then disembowelled him, proved to be a deadlier instrumentality. The wild hordes quailed before their tormentors; and after they had yielded in the palsy of an abject despair, they were allowed to make their peace only by submitting to a severe quarterly tribute to be paid to the Spanish crown. In this opening act of an ever deepening and lengthening tragedy, appeared the first in the line of successive nobles and patriots, of wise and great men, who have asserted themselves at intervals as organizers and heroes for the people of the woods, to resist the outrages of the white man. Caonabo was the lofty-souled patriot of Hispaniola. A captive with unsubdued and scornful spirit, he died on his voyage to Spain.
In a voyage made by Alonzo de Ojeda from Seville, in 1499, — in which he was accompanied by the Florentine ​merchant and navigator, Amerigo Vespucci, who by strange fortune has attached his name to the continent, — the expedition had a bloody encounter with the Caribs, taking many of them captives for the slave marts of Seville and Cadiz.
Nicholas de Ovando, who was in command at Hispaniola while Columbus was in Spain, by his insubordinate, cruel, and oppressive course, baffled all the more humane purposes of the Admiral for any mild subjugation and rule of the natives. His savage cruelty and his desperate tyranny in working the mines and fields by the hard task-works of the Indians, whose slight constitutions unfitted them for any kind of toil, visited upon them a sum of horrors and of tortures. The apostolic Las Casas, himself a witness of these enormities and agonies, has described them in terms and images too revolting to be traced in their details. He says, “I saw them with my bodily, mortal eyes.” Famine, despair, and madness drove multitudes to self-destruction, and mothers suffocated the infants at their breasts. Ovando closed the succession of his atrocities by a general massacre of natives and their chiefs, committed under the very basest arts of duplicity and treachery, while the unsuspecting victims were straining their confiding hospitality, with presents, wild games, dances, and songs, for his delight. The scene of the outrage was that exquisite region, well-nigh a poetic and fairy realm, on the western coast and promontory of the island, then called Xaragua. Anacaona, the sister of its cacique, is described as a most lovely, intelligent, and kindly woman. She was the wife of that noble chieftain Caonabo, whose death as a captive on the way to Spain has just been mentioned. Pardoning the previous hostility of the Spaniards, who had made her a widow, she had manifested to the intruders on her domains the utmost forbearance and kindness. A pretence to justify the massacre was found in a secret report that she and her subjects were meditating that of the Spaniards. She herself was taken in chains to St. Domingo, and there ​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! 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.”
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 ​here. Stately volumes in our libraries bear the titles of Histories of the Conquest of Mexico, of Peru, etc.; and their versions in other languages repeat the title. The descendants of the French and English colonists on this soil may congratulate themselves that that word is appropriated exclusively to the Spanish freebooters. For, by whatever method other nationalities obtained and hold territory here, it was not first acquired by the intent of conquest, nor by that way alone. The word conquest, by the Spaniards, is a very tame one to apply to the method of their rapacity and fiendish inhumanity, as they disembarked on these virgin realms, and bore down upon its harmless native tribes as with the sweep of a vengeful malice and rage. Some other word of our capable language than conquest would more fitly define the riot and wreck, the greed and the diabolical cruelty, of those first invaders. And that more fitting word would need to be one of the most harrowing and appalling in its burden of outrages and woes. The campaigns of Cyrus, of Alexander, of Pompey, of Julius Caesar, of Titus and Vespasian, might shrink from being classed with the Spanish conquest of America; and we should have to turn to the ferocities of Tamerlane, of Ghengis Khan, of the princes of India and Tartary, and of the brute men of Africa, for points of parallel with it.
We must remember the training of centuries, through which not only the nobles, but also those of meanest rank fired with Spanish blood, had passed, and the full results of which exhibited themselves just at the period of the discovery of America. During six or more of those previous centuries the Spaniard had been a fighter for his own territory and creed. By desperate valor and inhuman cruelty he had driven the Moor from the former, and had engaged all the fury of a heart-consuming bigotry in a most devout though craven superstition to impose the latter. Honest, painstaking industry for thrift and homely good had no attraction for the Spaniard. Nor would even enterprise ​on land or sea have engaged him, had not its charms been heightened not only by the hope of easily attained wealth, but by opportunities of marauding adventure, and by victims on whom he might flesh his sword in ruthless carnage. In less than four years after Columbus had landed on the island, hundreds of thousands of the natives — more than a third of its population — had been put to death. There seems to have been something aimless in this slaughter. It can hardly be said to have been even provoked in its primary indulgence; and when the terrified and maddened natives were driven to resort to their simple methods of defence or flight, there was a wanton brutality, a diabolical and mocking revel of atrocity, in the fierce and indiscriminate method of hunting them for havoc and torture.
The spirit of discovery had, from its first stirring among the people of Southern Europe, been associated with the spirit of rapine and tyranny, and the enslavement of the people whom it brought to light. The discovery, under Prince Henry of Portugal, of the Canary Islands, put them as a matter of course under tribute to him. His navigators then steadily coursed their way down the western coast of Africa. Cape Nam soon lost the significance of its name, “Not,” as defining a limit for safe voyaging. Successive adventurers, beginning their enterprises from about the year 1400, skirted the African coast further south, till 1486, when Bartholomew Diaz made his way over six thousand miles of ocean to the Cape of Good Hope, and turned the continent. Slaves became from the first an article of commerce for all these voyagers.
It fell to Alexander VI., on application of Ferdinand and Isabella, to confer on their crowns all the lands in the “Indies” discovered and to be discovered. When what was thus given away under the name of the Indies proved to be a whole new continent, Francis I. of France, envying the wealth which the Emperor Charles V. drew from ​the New World, said he should like “to see the clause in Adam's will which entitled his brothers of Castile and Portugal to divide the New World between them.” A trifling fact as concerning this sweeping donation of a whole continent to Spaniards, as the discoverers, may not be unworthy of notice. Columbus had with him on his first voyage an Englishman and an Irishman. Unhappily for us they do not appear to have had any skill of pen to have served us as journalists of the voyage. But let us recognize them on the Spanish caravels as being there to represent the shares which have fallen to Englishmen and Irishmen on this soil; and, if we need the Pope's sanction to confirm our present territorial rights, let us find it in our ancestral claims through that valiant Englishman and his Hibernian companion.
When, soon after Columbus's return from his first voyage, the sovereigns applied to the court of Rome for an exclusive territorial title to the regions which their Admiral had discovered and might yet discover, they appear to have been persuaded that they had already secured that title by the fact of unveiling new lands in unknown seas. But influenced by jealousy of the Portuguese, who had already thus fortified their claims, they humbly asked the same sanction from his Holiness. Three successive bulls, issued in 1493, were intended to make the papal donation secure to all lands extending from the northern to the southern pole. The Portuguese at once challenged its actual and possible collision with their own prior rights. The other European sovereignties treated this exercise of the papal prerogative with utter indifference. Though they allowed nearly half a century to pass before they came into any direct rivalry with the Spaniards as they followed up their first enterprise, when French and English adventure entered on the track the Pope was not even appealed to as an arbiter. In 1611 two small Spanish vessels made a feint of assaulting the miserable English colony in Virginia, but ​gave over the enterprise under the belief that the colony was coming to its own speedy end.
We must define to our minds as clearly as possible the fixed and positive conviction held by all Christendom at the era of transatlantic discovery, anticipatory of any actual knowledge of a new race or people, as to what should be the relation between Christians and all other men and women, wherever found and whatever their condition. All who were not in the fold of the holy Roman Church were heathens. Heathen people had no natural rights, and could attain no rights even of a common humanity, but through baptism into the fold. The great Reformation was then about stirring in its elemental work; but as yet there had been no outburst. It had asserted its energy and wrought out its radical changes in human belief and practice, in season to have secured a most powerful influence in deciding the conditions under which what is now our national domain was actually settled by colonies of Europeans in the seventeenth century. But the era of discovery was when the old Church held an unbroken sway, and the Pope was the lord of Christendom. Protestants and Catholics, as we shall see, differed fundamentally as to their primary relations and duties towards our aborigines; but the matter in many vital respects had been prejudiced by the course of the first comers as Catholics. The assumption, held as a self-evident truth by the Roman Church, was that a state of heathenism imposed a disablement which impaired all human rights of property, liberty, and even of life; while the possession of the true faith conferred authority of jurisdiction over all the earth, with the right to seize and hold all heathen territory, and to subjugate and exterminate all heathen people who would not or could not be converted. As to what was meant by conversion, its means, methods, and evidences, the champion of the faith being the sole judge and arbiter in the case, there would be little satisfaction in raising any discussion. However ​
arrogant and complacent this assumption may seem to us, it had so culminated in its conclusion, had become so imbedded in general belief, and was so unchallenged, that it was held as a self-evident truth. The Pope was the vicegerent of God, and the depositary of supreme power over men.
All that we have had to rehearse of the relentless and shocking barbarities inflicted on our aborigines by Spanish invaders as disciples and champions of the Roman Church, in their dealings with heathen, stands wholly free from any sectarian Protestant prejudices. All our knowledge on the subject is derived from the documents of the Spanish and Catholic writers. They tell their own story, in their own way.
The earliest elaborate discussion of the fundamental question of the right of a Christian nation to make conquest of a barbarous and idolatrous people, and to assume the mastery over them, was the result of the protest of that noble enthusiast and philanthropist, Las Casas, the great apostle to the Indies. His father had been one of Columbus's ship-mates in his first voyage. The first sentiment of pity, which afterwards engaged the heart of Las Casas towards the natives for his whole following life, is thus pleasingly traced to its source. Among the captives taken to Spain by Columbus was a boy whom he had given to the father of Las Casas. The father had assigned this youth to his son, then a student at Salamanca. When Isabella had insisted that these captives should be returned, the youth was taken with them, much to the grief of Las Casas. He went with Ovando to Hispaniola in 1502, in his twenty-eighth year, and at once became the friend and champion of the natives against the dire and ruthless barbarities and the shocking outrages, so inhuman and atrocious, inflicted upon them by the Spaniards, as they slew them by thousands, after practising upon them the foulest treacheries, starving them, working them to death in the ​mines and pearl-fisheries, and in some places exterminating them altogether. Las Casas, as his knowledge and experience gradually enlightened him, protested against the whole course of proceeding; and at last, by honest soul wisdom, reached a conclusion which led him to assail the root of the whole iniquity, and to deny the right of conquest, with the inferences and conclusions drawn from the false assumption on that point. His heroic labors and his exposure to every form of peril and violence did not prevent his living with unimpaired vigor of mind to the age of ninety-two. In the first half of the sixteenth century he crossed the ocean at least a dozen times on errands to the Court of Spain, to seek for help in his kindly projects and to thwart the wiles of his enemies.
The learned and famous Dr. Juan Sepulveda, correspondent of Erasmus and Cardinal Pole, and historiographer to the Emperor Charles V., appeared as the leading opponent of Las Casas. He wrote a treatise — “Democrates Secundus, sive de Justis Belli Causis” — maintaining the right of the Pope, as the vicegerent of Christ, and under him that of the kings of Spain, to make a conquest of the New World, and subjects of its inhabitants, for the purpose of their conversion.
In 1550 the Emperor convoked a junta of theologians and others of the learned, to meet at Valladolid and debate the high and serious theme. The Council of the affairs of the Indies were present, and the junta made up fourteen persons. Sepulveda made his argument, and Las Casas replied, taking five days to read the substance of his treatise, called “Historia Apologetica.”
The lawfulness of a war of Conquest against the natives of the New World (the conquest, of course, involving the obligation of conversion) was maintained by Sepulveda substantially on these four grounds: —
1. The grievous sinfulness of the Indians as idolaters, and against their own nature and the light of Nature.
​2. Their barbarousness, which made it proper and necessary that they should serve a refined people.
3. They must be subjugated in order that they might be brought under the True Faith.
4. The weak among them needed protection from the cruelties of the strong, in cannibalism, and in being sacrificed to false gods. Sepulveda argued that more victims were sacrificed to the idols than fell in war, — which statement was doubtless false.
If the sort of Christianity which our age at least believes in, as “full of mercy and of good fruits,” was what was to follow on such a conquest of idolatrous barbarians, these reasons would not have been without weight. The authority of Scripture adduced by Sepulveda was from Deuter. xx. 10-15. Las Casas went deep in his final plea when he urged, in answer, that the cruel deeds related in the Jewish Scriptures were set before us “to be marvelled at and not imitated.” He also affirmed, as from his own experience, that the work of conversion was better advanced by the gentle ways of peace and mercy than by the rage and havoc of war, especially with such mild and childlike natives. The apostle of love had to speak cautiously, with ecclesiastics before him and the Inquisition behind him, when he impugned the well-recognized assumption by the Church of the lawfulness of using force and cruelty in the interest of the true faith. As to the rights of the monarchs of Spain over “the Indies,” he nobly pleaded that these were ​not the rights of mere tyrants because of physical strength and military power, but rights as Christians to do the natives good and to promote good government among them, especially after having drawn so much treasure from them. Las Casas, then seventy-six years of age, was judged to have gained the moral victory; but the decision of the Junta was against him, though with a halting earnestness, as the monarch only forbade the circulation of Sepulveda's book in Mexico or the Indies. Some of the writings of Las Casas remain to this day in manuscript, under a jealous ecclesiastical guardianship, accessible only to the privileged. Indeed, he himself appears to have directed such restrictions. Enough, however, is known of their revelations to explain their suppression.
Some of the nuggets and dust of gold which Columbus took back with him on his first homeward voyage were made into a sacramental vessel for the “Host.” The proportion of the coveted precious metal thus put to a consecrated use, compared to the freights of galleons and bullion-ships afterwards turned to the riot of rapacity and luxury, may fairly be taken as significant of the relations between the avowed missionary intent of the great enterprise of discovery and the direful spirit of remorseless inhumanity in dealing with the natives of the new-found continent and islands. Of the nine of those natives whom Columbus carried to Barcelona, two youths received in baptism the names of Ferdinand and Prince John, his son, who stood as their sponsors. The others were sent to Seville for a Christian education, that they might return as missionaries to their own people. Twelve priests were transported for the same purpose, the noble Las Casas after his ordinatien, following as the best of them. In the royal instructions, dictated by the gentle heart of Isabella, the welfare and blessing of the natives were declared to be the main object of all the further efforts of Columbus. He was strictly charged to treat them tenderly and lovingly, to deal with severity with any who might ​wrong them, and to convey to them the rich gifts sent to them by the sovereigns.
The first greeting between the people of the Old and the New World, the white men and the red men, was exchanged by a company of one hundred and twenty rude and rebellious sailors, on the three small vessels of Columbus. The second company of adventurers embraced at least fifteen hundred, on seventeen vessels. Many of them were nobles and gentlemen; but these qualities do not imply the obligation of any higher restraint upon the passions of greed and cruelty, as the titles borne by Spanish grandees answered on the roll of honor only to a scale of degrees in rapacity, license, and immunity. The definition of the term “hidalgo” is said to be, “a son of somebody,” — not, however, in the general sense that every human being has had a paternity, but that that somebody had a name.
When the zeal and rapacity of Spanish hidalgos and great captains were stirred to a fever glow for further discovery and conquest of the Indies, the King Fernando and his daughter Juana, Queen of Castile and Leon, sought vainly to extend, by some show of responsibility, the semblance of humanity towards the wretched natives. The work of tyranny and devastation, which had begun at the islands, was now rapidly extended to the mainland, in the region where the northern and southern portions of the continent were united between the two great oceans. Vasco Nuñez, on a predatory excursion from the Isthmus of Darien, had in September, 1513, climbed alone a mountain height, from which, so far as we know, he the first of all Europeans looked out upon the so-called South Sea, — the vast expanse of the Pacific, which takes in more than half the surface of the globe. The sublime and awing spectacle moved him to prostrate devotion and prayer by himself. He then summoned his followers to the same ecstasy of amazement, and to lift with him the Te Deum. ​Afterward, reaching the sea at the Bay of San Miguel, he waded into the water, with sword and shield, and took possession of the whole ocean, with its islands, for the kings of Castile. To this noble and heroic Spaniard rightly accrued the glory, in 1516, of launching two well-equipped barks from the river Balsas, — the first keels of European navigators to plough the waters of the Pacific. And the feat which preceded this triumph was in full keeping with it; for the timber of the vessels had been cut and framed on the Atlantic side of the continent, and the rigging and equipments had been transported with it by Spaniards, negroes, and Indians, with incredible toil, over the rough mountains and the oozy soil of the isthmus.
The work of further conquest was, by royal and ecclesiastical instructions, to proceed under the guidance of a proclamation, which may safely be called the most extraordinary state document ever penned. Its whole purport, terms, and spirit are so astounding in the assumptions and in the impossible conditions which it involved, as well as in the utter futility of its proffers of humanity to the Indians, that it would provoke the ridicule and derision of readers of these days as if it were a comic travesty, did it not deal with such profoundly momentous matters. This document, in the form of instructions to the viceroys in the Indies, was prepared by a learned Spanish jurist, and bears the Latin title of “The Requisition.” It was to be read as a proclamation, or a herald's announcement, by the commander as he invaded each Indian province for conquest, — an exception dispensing with this when the natives were supposed to be so-called cannibals. It recited the Bible narrative of the creation by God of the human pair; the unity and the dispersion of the race; the lordship over this whole race and over all the earth, which the Almighty had given to St. Peter, and then to his successors the popes; the donation made by the reigning pontiff of lordship over all the Indies to the monarchs of Spain; and it called ​upon the natives to follow the whole civilized world in paving obedience to and seeking the protection of the Church. If the natives comply with this appeal, they and their lands shall be secure, and they shall have “many privileges and exemptions”! If they refuse, robbery and devastation shall spoil all their possessions, and they themselves will be enslaved or killed.
A marvellously strange document indeed! It was to be read by mail-clad and mounted warriors, with their blood-hounds, to naked, unarmed savages. Who was to interpret to them its theology, its Bible terms, its ecclesiastical assumptions and subtilties, and the reasons justifying its alternative of conditions? This document is said to have been first read by the friars in the train of Ojeda, in his attack on the savages of Carthagena.
Furnished with this “Requisition,” the great captain Pedrarias, Governor of Darien, with a strong armament, started on his “consecrated” enterprise. The sickening story is too harrowing and revolting for relation in all its dark and hideous details. No element of treachery, ingratitude, ferocity, rapacity, or fiendishness is lacking in it. The torture, the fire, and the fangs of blood-hounds were put into service to extort the secret of treasures of gold and pearls; and thousands and thousands of men, women, and children, whom the “Requisition” had pronounced members of God's one human family, were treated with a pitiless barbarity at which the heart shudders. The only palliating thought which offers itself, as we read the story, is that the Spanish invaders, themselves but partially civilized, and with but a mockery of Christianity as their religion, became actually dehumanized and brutalized by the scenes and experiences around them, by a homeless and hazardous life on sea and land, under a burning sun, amid swamps and exposures, often starving, ​always lashed and maddened by the greed of gold and plunder. And if anything had been lacking to fill out the farcical absurdity and the comic drollery of the “Requisition,” it is found in the fact, that, so far from an attempt being made by any preparatory warning to interpret it or to convey its significance to a threatened and doomed Indian chieftain, the invaders, planning secret midnight attacks on the unsuspecting natives, would go through the form of mumbling over the jumble of theology and nonsense as they were hiding in the woods, all by themselves.
And this grimly comic element in the affair seems to have been appreciated, on one occasion at least, by two caciques of the province of Cenú, when the paper was in substance communicated to them by an invading captain, — the lawyer Enciso. The chiefs assented to what was said about the one supreme God, the Creator and Lord of all things; but “as to what was said about the Pope being lord of all the universe in the place of God, and of his giving the land of the Indies to the King of Castile, the Pope must have been drunk when he did it, for he gave what was not his; and that the king who had asked such a gift must be a madman in asking for what belonged to others.” They added, that if he wanted the land he must come and take it, and they would put his head on a stake. An aggravation of the superstitious frenzy against the poor heathen was found in the surmise that they actually worshipped the Devil. On the return of Columbus from his second voyage, in 1496, he had in his train some fancifully bedizened native chiefs, on whose head-gear and belts were wrought figures and grotesque emblems, some of which were regarded as showing the Devil in his own proper likeness, others as in the guise of a cat or owl. Even the good friend of Columbus, the curate Bernaldez, interpreted the symbols as those under which their uncanny deity appeared to them visibly.
In the interest of the claims of the Roman Church to a ​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 ​and luxuriant groves and fields teemed with all that was requisite for their subsistence. Under the mastery and the goading of the Spaniard they bent their backs to digging in the mines, to tillage in the fields to supply a wasteful indulgence, and to the carrying of heavy burdens. As retainers of their oppressors they were also trained to warfare, and bound to do a hateful service in raids against their own former friendly fellows.
Mr. Parkman rightly says that the spirit of Spanish enterprise in America is expressed in the following address of Dr. Pedro de Santander, to the King, in 1557, of the expedition of De Soto: —
“It is lawful that your Majesty, like a good shepherd, appointed by the hand of the Eternal Father, should tend and lead out your sheep, since the Holy Spirit has shown spreading pastures whereon are feeding lost sheep, which have been snatched away by the dragon, the Demon. These pastures are the New World, wherein is comprised Florida, now in possession of the Demon; and here he makes himself adored and revered. This is the Land of Promise possessed by idolaters, the Amorite, Amalekite, Moabite, Canaanite. This is the land promised by the Eternal Father to the Faithful, since we are commanded by God in the Holy Scriptures to take it from them, being idolaters, and, by reason of their idolatry and sin, to put them all to the knife, leaving no living thing save maidens and children, their cities robbed and sacked, their walls and houses levelled to the earth.”
The writer, however, leaves open the opportunity for securing many slaves. In pleadings like this, no previous measure or limitation of effort or time is indicated for attempts at conversion, and we are left to infer that the supposed futility of them warranted anticipating them by death, and so making the doom of the heathen sure.
In accordance with that rule of equity and reason which enjoins, that, when we judge or rehearse the actions and methods of men of other generations and circumstances ​and creeds, we should set them in their own time and accept the sincerity of their believing or purposing in qualification of our condemnation of them, we must allow even the bloody devastators of the New World to explain to us their convictions and motives. Their age was one in which the Church which represented Christianity was most lofty and unchallenged in its claims, most ruthless in the sweep of its pretensions, and most utterly destitute and unconscious in its appreciation of the spirit of the gospel. A heathen was a child of the Devil, not of God; his certain and everlasting doom was in the pit of torments; he had no rights here or hereafter. The Christian, sure of heaven as he was, was all the more a rightful claimant to the earth and everything upon it; his own blessed lot and privilege involved no obligation of pity or mercy for the heathen. The Spaniards — from their monarch down to the humblest of their colonists — never made purchase of or paid price for a single foot of land on our continent or islands as Protestants did, whatever may have been the fairness or the meanness of their bargains. The right of conquest was supreme for the invaders: the opportunity of baptism was full payment to the natives. Conquest of heathendom and heathens was something even more sacred than a right: it was transcendently a solemn duty. “The earth is the Lord's;” He is its rightful owner, ruler, and disposer; the Pope is His vicegerent; the children of the one fold are his champions. True, the heathen whom the Spaniards encountered were idolaters, and some of them were believed to offer human sacrifices; the invaders frequently saw the mutilated remains of victims from those foul altars. Speaking of the brutish superstitions and the human sacrifices found among the Aztecs, Prescott adds these words: “The debasing institutions of the Aztecs furnish the best ​apology for their conquest.” Popocatapetl yielded its sulphur to Cortes in replenishing his ammunition.
But it does not appear that any deepening shade of the state of heathenism heightened in the breast of a child of the Church the right or duty of conquest. There could be no worse state than that of a heathen; no greater, no less degree in his condemnation. Every infliction, horror, or agony visited upon his body was a stretch and an ingenuity of mercy to him, because intended (even if not effectual) for the saving of his soul. If he could only be baptized before he died, he owed an unspeakable debt to any one who, by whatever cruelty, terminated his life. But if after all this cruelty he died unbaptized, that was his misfortune. The history of Spanish discovery, exploration, and colonization, so far as it concerns the relations of the invaders with the natives, is at every stage of it marked by ruthless and atrocious cruelties, by outrages and enormities of iniquity, over the perusal of which the heart sickens. Those who crave a knowledge of them in the detail must seek it in the too faithful — we can hardly, in this connection, use the pure terms “truthful” and “candid” — historical narratives. There is no good use to come of the rehearsal of them. One whose painful task has required of him to trace in the records that story of torturous horror, can hardly fail to wish that those records had never been written, or that they had perished, had lost their awful skill of forever perpetuating the story of man's inhumanity to man, and had become as mute as the heart-pangs and the once quivering nerves of the victims that have been resolved into peaceful dust. Indeed, so faithfully was the curious skill of the graver engaged to illustrate the brutal enormities of these conquests, that, without reading a line of the text of many of these volumes, one may learn more than he craves of their contents simply from their illustrations.
After reading those sweet words and phrases in which ​Columbus portrays to their Majesties the gentle and kindly creatures who welcomed the mysterious white visitors to their island shores, it is but a long and varied racking of all our sensibilities to follow the course of the invaders. There was no possible deed, or trick, or artifice of barbarity, ingratitude, treachery, and cunning and despicable fraud, which the invaders scrupled to practise on those nude and simple children of Nature. Steel-clad warriors, a single score of them, would overmatch thousands of those poor savages when they were driven to any show of resistance. The horse on which the warrior was mounted was to the Indian a more terrific monster than Milton has fashioned from all the shapes of demons for his hellish phalanxes; and it was the horse, not the man upon it, which secured to Cortes the conquest of Mexico. The fierce Spanish blood-hound, also, comes into the horrid warfare to track the wretched victims of greed through the swamps and mountain thickets. The only gleam of mercy, the only arresting hush from agony, that relieves the later narratives, is when we come for moments upon the mention of the name of Las Casas, the great Spanish apostle of the Indians, with his rebuking word.
If, amid the horrors and atrocities connected with the successive Spanish conquests on our islands and continent, anything could add a sharper and more distressing outrage to the story, this would be found in the apparently utter insensibility to their own cruelty and irreverence in which the Spaniards attached the holiest names and epithets to the places where their acts were often the most fiendish, — names borne by many of those places to this day. The sacred title of the Trinity; the names of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; the sweet roll of epithets — of love, pity, mercy, and sorrow — for the Virgin Mother; the names of prophets, apostles, and evangelists, of saints and martyrs, of holy days and sacraments, — are strewn all over the islands, bays, coasts, and rivers of our southern ​continent, and generally there is with them a frightful legend. Columbus, writing to the monarchs in 1498, estimates that, “in the name of the sacred Trinity,” the Spanish markets may be supplied with such and such numbers of slaves. Las Casas writes that on one occasion the Spaniards hanged thirteen Indians “in honor and reverence of Christ, our Lord, and his twelve apostles.” After a dire slaughter of the Indians, in his first encounter with them at Tabasco, Cortes enjoined a solemn religious ceremonial, with cross and chant and mass and Te Deum, and named the bloody spot “Saint Mary of Victory.” He wrote that the odds had been so immense against him “that Heaven must have fought on his side.” Las Casas dryly adds, that “this was the first preaching of the gospel by Cortes in New Spain.” Columbus, with all his nobleness of soul, has left no example set by him, and no protest, for withstanding or rebuking the spirit of his countrymen. On the contrary, his own leading and example marked the course followed by his sons and all his successors, — Ovando, Ojeda, Nicuesa, Enciso, Vasco Nuñez, Pedrarias, Pizarro, and Cortes. Ojeda always wore, concealed on his person, an amulet or charm of the Holy Virgin, which he firmly believed was his infallible protection under all risks on sea and land, in private brawls and desperate battles. On his first return voyage Columbus, as has been mentioned, took home with him, as the first-fruits of a new slave race, nine Indians. They were compensated by being secured against future woe by Christian baptism. One of them dying soon after the ceremony was, we are told, “the first of his race to enter heaven.” On various pretences Columbus sent to Spain many ship-loads of slaves. It was only on the third of his four voyages, in 1498, that he touched the mainland of the continent, at Paria, near the Isthmus of Darien; and then followed in succession the work of so-called discovery, which opened either division of the continent to the same worse than barbarous havoc of rapacity and fiendishness.
​Mines of the precious metals, gems and pearls — even more than food and water when they were on the edge of death — were the consuming cravings of the Spaniard. If a single token of such treasure was seen to sparkle or to gleam on the person of a savage, the secret of its source must be wrung from him; he must point the way to the mine; he must toil there to work it. Visions floated before the dreams of the invaders of spots where the soil was made of virgin gold and silver, of palaces built of those metals, of kitchen utensils and working tools fashioned from them. The poor natives, in their desperation, over and over again intermitted their simple husbandry on their own soil, in their own support, with the childish thought that they could starve the Spaniards and compel them to go home. There is an element of confusion in the history, for all modern readers, in the number of Spanish officials, with long, hard, high-sounding titles, among whom were distributed inconsistent functions, rival prerogatives of place and jurisdiction, with their jealousies, each having his partisans before the Council of the Indies and at the Spanish court. And these were not only haughty grandees and hidalgos, but adventurers of an ordinary type, from a land in which even the peasants had the spirit and port of gentlemen. Yet to relieve, if possible, this dismal justification of the right and duty of the conquest of the heathen, we must make emphatic the verbal statement, — and, our charity must add, the intent, — that conversion to the true faith and fold must be the accompaniment and crown of conquest. If the heathen should perish by the million in the savagery of the process which was designed for their conversion, this accident did not prejudice the Tightness and holiness of the intent. The conquerors meant to impart to the poor benighted creatures an unspeakable deliverance and blessing; but Satan had the start of them, and claimed his own. When, after an atrocious course of rapine, ​treachery, and ferocity by the invaders, the Inca Atahualpa was in the power of the Spaniards, his sentence was to be brought to death by fire. This was mercifully commuted to death by the bowstring, on the victim's consenting to be baptized.
To be baptized! In the — devout shall we call it? — conviction of priest and believer, baptism signified conversion. True, men cannot impart what they have not themselves; and as baptism was about the whole of Christianity of which the ruthless invaders had the knowledge or the advantage, the rite signified the imparting the full benefit of the gospel of Christ to the heathen, as it did to those born in a Christian land.
In closing this rehearsal of the tragic and hideous story of the first opening of intercourse by Europeans, as represented by the Spaniards, with the natives of this continent, it would be a relief if a single gleam of light or mercy could be thrown across the distressing narrative. Our authorities are exclusively Spanish writers, many of them ecclesiastics. There is a series of similar relations awaiting our review, all of them stained with wrong and cruelty; and those of them which are associated with Puritan savagery, and even with the perfidy and meanness of our own republican Government, have many points of likeness to that which we have been reading. Nor do such harrowing episodes in history stand alone by themselves, or throw their shadows only over ages that are past. The brutal oppression of the weak by the strong finds its most signal illustrations in the annals of so-called Christian nations. Great Britain up to our own time, substituting the claims of civilization and of free intercourse for trade for those which the Spaniards advanced for the “holy faith,” has committed like atrocities in every quarter of the globe. Every feeble people and race, with degrees of civilization or barbarism, has had to yield to her compulsion for intercourse beyond their own wish and need; and she has ​scoured the seas and penetrated deserts to find victims of her mania for civilizing the world. But the Spaniards, as they were the first in the wrong, so they were beyond all approach of rivalry in the sum and method of their devastating and aimless havoc of frenzied and satanic passion against the least warlike and the most inoffensive of all our native tribes. If historic fidelity and candor in the use of our authorities would allow, it would cheer alike reader and writer if this direful record of slaughter and torture of a defenceless people had been at least, if not effectually, withstood by a steady protest, not merely from a single ecclesiastic, but by a considerable number of those who professed that the mainspring of the enterprise was the conversion of the natives. Instead of this relief, however, we do not need to pause long in our moralizing over the story to find that the most repulsive and shocking element in it is the persistent obtrusion, the even blasphemous reiteration, of a religious motive of the Conquest. The Jesuit Father, Charlevoix, who wrote a history of St. Domingo as well as of New France, gives in the latter work the following as one of the motives which prompted his historical labors: —
I have resolved to undertake this work in the desire to make known the mercies of the Lord and the triumph of religion over that small number of the elect, predestined before all ages, amid so many savage tribes, which till the French entered their country had lain buried in the thickest darkness of infidelity.
There was reason for this pious motive on the part of the historian who had to relate the zeal, devotion, and to themselves the satisfactory and rewarding success of his brother missionaries in New France. But he has nothing of the kind to tell us of Christian missionaries in St. Domingo before the work of devastation and depopulation had been completed. The natives were found by the Spaniards in a peaceful, contented, and, so to speak, ​innocent condition. There were from the first some among the Spanish invaders, besides ecclesiastics, who were men of gentle blood and of education. They called themselves Christians. All their references to their “sacred faith,” their most “holy church,” are profoundly reverential, and they exult over their privileges as its children. The freebooters and desperadoes among them, even the worst of them, did hold in dread the anathemas of the Church. The most and the least craven of them shrunk with terror from the denial of its sacraments in life and death. Why was the Church so utterly powerless and palsied then, in the exercise of a sway such as it has never had since that age? True, the ecclesiastics among the invaders were at first very few, and many of the marauding parties may not have been accompanied by a single ghostly adviser. But those marauders knew, as did the priests, that their terrific creed doomed the natives dying unbaptized to an awful woe; and yet they were not withheld from a wanton anticipation of it by visiting upon them a promiscuous slaughter. Small as might have been among them the number of those whom Charlevoix calls “the predestined elect,” there was no arrest of the work of slaughter sufficient to satisfy the condition of baptism.
In 1509, Diego, a son of the Admiral, came over as Governor of St. Domingo. He was followed, the next year, by a company of a dozen or more Dominican friars, earnest, resolute men, in poverty and heroic fidelity. A humble monastery was provided to shelter them. With an undaunted courage they resolved to rebuke, and in the name of all that was just and holy to protest against, the enormities of the Spanish desperadoes and the whole course of cruelty towards the natives. They put forward one of their number, Brother Antonio Montesino, who in a Sunday sermon addressed a great crowd of hearers of the principal persons of St. Domingo. His piercing rebukes and his scorching invectives, unsparing in their directness of ​address to the gross culprits before him, made them writhe in passion. He told them that Moors and Turks had a chance better than their own for salvation. To their plea that they could not dispense with the toil and service of the natives for all menial and laborious work, he bade them to do it themselves, with their own wives and children. The blood of the Spaniards was maddened by these “delirious things” uttered by the bold monk; his life was threatened, and it was expected that, under compulsion, he would retract his defiant sermon on the next Sunday. Instead of doing so, he but repeated and intensified his daring rebukes, and frankly warned his hearers that the Dominicans would refuse the sacraments to any who were guilty of oppressing the natives. That the Church and its priests had a power, which before this might have been used in terror if not to large effect, is proved by the fact that the monk was unharmed; while his scathed hearers, the chief in the Island, determined to send a protest against his alarming preaching to the Spanish monarch. Strangely enough too, they chose for the errand a Franciscan monk, Alonzo de Espinal, while the Dominicans commissioned the heroic preacher to represent their side at the Court. The agent of the colonists got the start for a hearing, found strong supporters in his plea for those who had sent him, and by his artful statement of the danger of impending ruin to the colony he had induced the king to engage the head of the Dominican order in Spain in a complaint against the preacher. It was only after meeting and overcoming many obstacles and much resistance that Father Antonio obtained access and a hearing at Court. But his noble earnestness was not wholly without effect. Thus were the colonists and the natives represented by priest against priest. The king took the usual course of referring the controversy to a junta, composed of some of his council and of theologians. But little that accrued to the relief or benefit of the natives came from the conference, from the measures which ​it recommended, or from the consequent orders of the king. The natives must be made to consent to be converted; they must work for their masters; they must be kindly treated, and after a fashion might receive something to be called wages. The most grateful result from the mission of the two priests representing the two sides of a bitter strife was that the Dominican, by his grace and skill of heart and zeal in private conferences, earnest and continued, completely won over to sympathy and co-operation with him his Franciscan brother.
The natives, however, had become thoroughly alienated by hatred and dread from the Spaniards, and kept aloof from them. What indeed had these Spaniards, with the proffer of their “holy faith,” to tempt and draw to them these children of Nature? What of help or blessing, of human pity and tenderness, came from them? Yet the more the natives shunned their tormentors, and sought to keep as far as possible from them, their aversion was accounted as only an obdurate resistance to being converted.
When Cortes, in his second expedition, was preparing for his siege of Montezuma's capital, he issued to his soldiers a paper of elaborate instructions. In this he said “conversion” was the great aim which made his enterprise a holy one, and that “without it the war would be manifestly unjust, and every acquisition made by it a robbery.”
In the enlightenment and free-thinking of our own age, which have relieved it from what are regarded as the bugbear superstitions and dreads fostered by the old priestcraft, there are many who will frankly say that the easy method offered to the heathen by which they might escape the fearful doom of hell, was just as rational as was the teaching them that they were really under such a doom. The doctrine of hell, and the rite of baptism as the symbol of full salvation from it, were well adjusted to each other, — both being irrational, superstitious, and ​childish, the one offsetting the other. The natives certainly had not the slightest conception whatever that because they were brought into existence outside the Christian fold, or for any other reason, they were all destined to endless miseries and torments hereafter; and probably they had as vague an appreciation of the doctrine as they had of the method of relief from the fate to which it assigned them.
Roger Williams, in one of those flashings of his keener insight which anticipated as axioms what it cost persecutors and formalists many years of painful and baffled effort to learn as proved truths, while on a visit to England in 1643, wrote and left for publication there a little tract with the title, “Christenings make not Christians; Or a brief Discourse concerning that name Heathen, commonly given to the Indians. As also concerning that great point of their conversion.” In this tract the writer, referring to the Spanish and French religious dealings with the natives, says: —
“If the reports (yea some of their own Historians) be true, what monstrous and most inhumane conversions have they made! — baptizing thousands, yea ten thousands, of the poore Natives; sometimes by wiles and subtle devices, sometimes by force, compelling them to submit to that which they understood neither before nor after their monstrous Christning of them.”
The claim has been set up, and to a certain extent allowed, that the Mexicans and Aztecs may be regarded as having reached a stage of actual civilization. It is scarcely probable that the obscurity which invests our prehistoric times and people will ever be removed. The theme and ​field offer very tempting, and to some extent rewarding, subjects for curious research and ingenious theory. But the theories crumble like the relics which we handle. The claim of having attained a state of civilization can be sustained for the Mexicans only by resting on the unsatisfactory plea that there is no sharp, positive line or point which divides barbarism from civilization. Prescott says that the civilization of Mexico was equivalent to that of England under Alfred, and similar to that of ancient and modern Egypt. The basis of this estimate is, that the Mexicans had made an advance on a nomadic life as hunters, and were fixed cultivators of the soil, raising corn, cotton, and vegetables, with skilled manufactures, with adobe dwellings, with hieroglyphical records for their annals; and that they showed architectural skill, as also ingenuity in a method of irrigating their fields.
After making due allowance for the pure fictions and the proved exaggerations of the early Spanish chroniclers, all that seems certified to us about the husbandry and manufactures, the palatial and ceremonial pomp, and the forms of law among the Mexicans, would not set them beyond that state which, when speaking of Orientals, we call barbaric.
It can hardly be allowed that a people are in any appreciable stage of civilization who offer human sacrifices and eat human flesh. Nor does it much relieve the matter to suggest that the latter hideous practice did not indicate a cannibal relish for such viands, but was simply incident to the previous religious ceremonial of offering human victims in sacrifice. The evidence seems sufficient that human flesh was a marketable commodity in Mexico, having a place with other food at the shambles; and that dainty dishes of it were daily served among the hundred courses on Montezuma's table. Peter Martyr tells us how “the hellish butchers,” as he calls them, prepared it. The blood of infants was used in the composition of ​sacrificial cakes: some of these were once sent as a propitiatory offering to Cortes. It may be urged that even these practices do not bar a claim to a stage of civilization, if we still allow the term where superstition about God and cruelty towards men match the most foul and atrocious practices of savages.
There are not lacking in our voluminous literature on this subject — representing, as it does, the diversity of opinions and judgments passed on the methods of the Spanish invaders, as presented in different aspects — pleadings reducing or palliating the atrocities which to us seem unrelieved, as springing from a ruthless cruelty. Humboldt says that we must allow in them for other and less mean passions than rapacity and fanaticism. Tracing these passions and others associated with them to their springs, they may be found to have arisen, and to have been intensified in their indulgence, by what we may call — though we can but vaguely define it — the chivalric spirit of the people and the age. This spirit — associated with crusades and religious wars, with the embittered hate of Moslems and Jews, with daring and reckless enterprises of adventure, with utter fearlessness in risking one's own limbs and life, and with a burning emulation of achievement through prowess and desperate endeavor — was transferred from its old, familiar, and comparatively exhausted fields to wholly new scenes, materials, and opportunities. These seem to have presented to the Spaniards no incitements to mental activity, to curious inquiries as to the antecedents of their new surroundings, to speculative or scientific investigations. All these intellectual instigations and processes, which have been so sedulously and ingeniously exercised under the quickening influences of the modern expansion of intelligence, had no attraction for those of such inert and undeveloped natures as marked the heterogeneous companies of adventurers flocking here with untrained principles and under the spell of the wildest impulses. ​The simple natives of the valleys and the mountains were regarded as game for the hunt. Had these natives been of a sturdier stock, — heroic, defiant, and resolved, and able from the first to contest each step and to resent each wrong of the invaders, — the game would at least have been lifted above a mere hunt as for foxes and rabbits to the more serious enterprise of an encounter with buffaloes, panthers, and grizzly bears. The tameness and defencelessness of the natives seem even to have become incitements to the Spaniards for a wanton sport of outrage upon them. There were master minds among the invaders, — men temporarily at least invested with powers, by commissions and instructions from their sovereigns, to exercise authority in the interests of wisdom and humanity. But their jealousies and the intrigues of their enemies at the court were constantly disabling and displacing them; so that there was here no grasp of control, no sternness of law and obedience.
The progress of the same kind of conquest by the Spaniards who first came into contact with the savages in the southern portion of our present domain, was attended by the same outrages and barbarities which marked its beginnings. De Soto had received his training for the opening and conquest of the regions of Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi, while a youth under Pizarro, in Peru. On his return the Spanish court made him governor of Cuba, and Adelantado, or provincial governor, of Florida. On arriving in Florida, in May, 1539, his first business was to capture some natives as slaves, pack-carriers, and guides. He found great help as an interpreter in a Spaniard, Juan Ortiz, who, having been captured by the Indians from the company under Narvaez, in 1528, had been living among them. De Soto had about a thousand followers, soldiers in full armor, with cutlasses and fire-arms, one cannon, two hundred and thirteen horses, greyhounds and blood-hounds, handcuffs, neck-collars, and chains for captives, all sorts ​of equipments and workmen, swine and poultry, priests, monks, and altar furniture. He had learned in Peru just what appliances were necessary for hounding and tormenting savages. But he had a rough and fierce experience in Florida. The natives were numerous, bold, and enraged by the memory of the barbarities of Narvaez. Yet he was, as a matter of course, successful. He soon captured Indians enough to carry his baggage and to do the menial work of his camps, as goaded slaves. He steadily hewed on his plundering way, with an expedition to Pensacola and an invasion of Georgia. Though he received kind treatment and warm hospitality from many chiefs and their tribes, he villanously repaid it by all manner of dastardly outrages, led on and maddened by the hope of mineral treasures, and indulging in abominable debaucheries. After having been generously entertained for thirty days where now stands the town of Rome, he proceeded to ravage the neighboring country. With Indians as his burden carriers, he entered Alabama, in July, 1540, where the natives had then their first sight of white men and horses. The pestiferous miasmas of those fair and fruitful regions proved very fatal to the Europeans, and the swamps, mosquitoes, and alligators would have overborne the fortitude and resolve of the invaders but for the passion for wealth that lured them on. The enslaved natives had to carry on litters many sick, in addition to their other burdens. De Soto had brought with him from Florida five hundred of the natives, men and women, chained and under guard. As any of these sickened or died, their places were supplied by fresh captives from bands of the Indians who ventured to face him. The simple and bewildered natives soon lost all the dread and awe with which they would have continued to venerate the strangers, as they saw them not only reduced by common human weaknesses, but exhibiting their odious character as robbers, thieves, assassins, and cruel desperadoes. The Spaniards visited ​the vilest outrages upon those who treated them with the most deference and friendliness. Making their way to Mobile, the mailed scoundrels were withstood by the brave but unprotected natives, who were overborne by horrible carnage. A battle which lasted for nine hours proved severe in its results upon the Spaniards. Eighty-two of them were killed, with forty-five of their horses. All their camp equipage, stores, instruments, medicines, and sacramental furniture were burned. Of the savages five or six hundred were slain. After similar progress and ravages De Soto reached the bank of the Mississippi, where, worn out by excitement, effort, and disease, he died, in May, 1542; and his body was sunk by night in the turbid stream.
His successor in command, with a remnant of three hundred and twenty men of the splendid army of one thousand, — their array humiliated and reduced to starvation, — leaving five hundred of his Indian slaves and taking with him one hundred, put together some wretched rafts, and floating down the river landed again at Tampa Bay, after four years of reckless and devastating wandering through Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and the Arkansas territory. The natives had been terribly reduced in numbers, except in Georgia. The Muscogees, previously living in the Ohio Valley, moved down soon after to Alabama, incorporating with them remnants of northern tribes which had been ravaged by the Iroquois and Hurons. It is to this miscellaneous gathering from fragments of adopted and conquered tribes that the English, when first penetrating the country, gave the name of “Creeks,” from the number of streams which course it.
The Spaniards were the first of Europeans to come into contact with the natives on our Pacific coast. While Pizarro, after crossing the Isthmus, went southward, and with heroic perseverance against all bafflings discovered Peru, in 1527, and made his “Conquest” of it in 1532, another ​party went northward. The further lure was the discovery of the Spice Islands. A station for supplies was established at Panama. Gil Gonzalez claimed the whole country of Nicaragua, whose coast he visited. The Spaniards claim special success and benefit for the natives from their mission and civilizing work among them in California, when entered by Cabrillo, in 1542. Their mission work, however, did not begin till near the close of the seventeenth century. This mission work was begun by the Jesuits, and was pursued by them till the general expulsion of the order from the Spanish dominions. The Franciscans succeeded them, and then the Dominicans. Alexander Forbes, in his “History of California,” gives from the work of Father Venegas, and from his own observations, very interesting accounts of the condition and results of the Spanish missions. The field was a stern and hard one, but it had been heroically worked. There were sixteen stations there in 1767, when the Jesuits were expelled. The funds for the missions were invested in farms in Mexico.
We may here anticipate a statement, to be more fully advanced on later pages, that the Roman Catholic missions among the Indians, from the very first down to our own times, have been far more successful in accomplishing the aims and results which they have had in view, than have been those of any or of all the denominations of Protestants. But those aims and expected results have been most widely unlike, if not in full contrast, as had in view and labored for by Catholics and Protestants. In nothing concerning the theology or the government and discipline of those severed parties of the Christian fold, is the difference between them so broad or so deep as in the fundamental variance of their respective views as to the essential requisite for the conversion and Christianization of an American savage. Devout and heroic priests of the Roman Church, sharing the sweet and humane spirit of Las Casas, soon came hither from Spain on their consecrated missions, and according to their ​light in the exercise of their office, their interpretation of the Christian Gospel, and in loyalty to holy Church, they spent their lives, in perfect self-abnegation, through perils and stern sacrifices, in efforts to win the savages into the saving fold. It seems to us that what they were content to aim for would have been most easy of accomplishment; that the method which they adopted and the result which was to give them full satisfaction were such as might have been readily realized, especially when we consider the docility of the race of savages who were the first subjects of their efforts. They did not task in any way the understandings of the natives, nor provoke them to curious and perplexing exercises. They started with the positive authority, conveyed in simple, direct assertion, without explanation or argument, of the few fundamental doctrines of the Church; asking only, and fully content with, assent to them, however faint might be the apprehension of them by the neophytes, and however vacant or bewildered the mind which was to assimilate from them ideas or convictions. These processes of the understanding might be expected to follow after, if they were naturally and healthfully prompted, in the Christian development of the savage; but implicit acceptance of the elementary lessons was all that was exacted. The Creed and the Lord's Prayer were taught them by rote, first in Latin or Spanish, and as soon as possible interpreted in their own tongues. Then the altar service of the Church, with such gestures and observances as it required, with the help of candles, pictures, emblems, and processions for interpreting and aiding it, constituted the main part of what was exacted as the practice of Christian piety. The wild habits, customs, mode of life, and relations to each other of the savages were interfered with as little as possible. The rite of baptism sealed the salvation of the subject of it, whether infant or adult, and there was haste rather than delay in granting the boon. All the hard task-work of the Protestant missionary, to convey didactic ​instruction, to implant ideas, to stir mental activity, to explain doctrines, to open arguments, was dispensed with by the priest of the Roman Church. The Protestant could not take the first step in the conversion of a native without advancing it upon a previous stage in the process of civilization. His only medium was the mind, without any help from objective teaching by ritual, picture, or observance, or any aid from sense. The hopeful convert for the Protestant was considered as making difficult progress in his discipleship just to the degree in which he changed the whole manner and habit of his life.
In general it may be said that the Franciscan and the Jesuit Fathers have found satisfaction in their mission work among the American aborigines. They set for themselves an aim, with methods and conditions for securing it; and though these, being conformed to the theory of the Roman Church, may seem altogether inadequate as viewed by Protestants, they were the rule for its priests, and the result has stood to them for success.
In the judgment of Protestants, however, without any sharp indulgence of a sectarian spirit, it is to be affirmed, that, even if all the priests had been wise and faithful in their offices, this would not relieve the invasion and administration of the Spaniards in America from the severe reproach of a most unchristian treatment of the natives. The fidelity of the priests, taken in connection with the wilful recklessness of the soldiers and marauders, would but serve to confirm in the minds of Protestants a conviction which has many other tokens to warrant it, — that in the Roman system the Church is the priesthood, the laity being only a constituency and a following. Had the disciples of the Church no responsibility in the matter?
We have to look to the theocratical commonwealth established by the Jesuits in Paraguay, with its military appliances and fortresses, its rigidity of discipline, and its minute ​oversight of all the incidents and experiences of the daily life of the natives, for an illustration of the ideal of mission work as entertained by the priests of that period. The Jesuit commonwealth stands in strange contrast with the Puritan theocracy of Massachusetts, and it would be a curious study to draw out that contrast in particulars as covering matters of faith and rules of life. Our views of the extreme austerity and bigotry of the Puritan discipline as enforced among themselves by a company of English Protestants, would find quite another field for their exercise in tracing the method of priestly control over a generally docile and inert people, who were to be isolated on their peninsular domain from all intercourse with the open world.
The Fathers in the California missions had for the most part to feed and clothe their converts, to arrest their nomadic life, and, as the soil was light, to bring in the means of subsistence. The population of Lower California presented to Forbes, in 1835, a curious mixture of the progeny of European seamen, Spanish Creoles, and Indians. The writer says the missionaries had the finest fields and climate, the fairest opportunities, and the most facile subjects. But while he extols their sincerity and devotion, the results of their labors were to him doleful and dreary enough. “Most of the missions,” he says, “are in a wretched condition, and the Indians — poor and helpless slaves, both in body and mind — have no knowledge and no will but those of the Friars.” The word domesticated, as applied to animals, is more applicable to them than the word civilized. In 1833 about twenty thousand natives were connected with the missions, and soldiers were needed at every station. The Indians were lazy and helpless slaves, fed and flogged to compel their attendance on the Mass, and besotted by superstition.
When California was joined to the Union, it was estimated, — doubtless, extravagantly, — that there were in ​its bounds one hundred thousand Indians, and that a fifth part of these were more or less connected with the missions, partially civilized, jobbing, begging, stealing, laboring on the farms of Europeans, gambling and drinking, and generally in stages of improvidence, dissoluteness, and imbecility. The wild Indians in the gold-bearing regions were ruthlessly dealt with by adventurers, explorers, and miners.
After futile efforts by Congress by appropriations through commissioners and agents, — of which the Indians were wickedly defrauded, being only the more ingeniously wronged, — in 1853 tracts of twenty-five thousand acres were defined as Reservations for them. The hope was to secure, by the aid of resident guardians and advisers, and on a larger scale, all that had been good in the farming and missionary methods of the Spaniards.
It would have been gratifying to our national pride, if, in closing the review of the harrowing history of the dealings of the Spaniards with the original tribes on our present domain, we could say truly, that the transfer of responsibility to our own Government had essentially modified or improved the condition of those representatives of the native stock which had, for three centuries, been under the ecclesiastical and colonial charge of the royal successors of Ferdinand and Isabella.
* ↑ Navarrete, Col. vol. i. p. 21, as quoted by Arthur Helps, in “The Conquerors of the New World and their Bondsmen,” vol. i. p. 105.
* ↑ Navarrete, Col. vol. i. p. 21, as quoted by Arthur Helps, in “The Conquerors of the New World and their Bondsmen,” vol. i. p. 105.
* ↑ “La villa de la vera Paz.” A modern writer, Captain Southey (“History of the West Indies,” vol. i. p. 93), suggests, as a more appropriate name, Aceldama. The armorial shield of the town bears a dove with the olive branch, a rainbow, and a cross.
* ↑ Irving's Columbus, ii. 450.
* ↑ This single sentence, coming from the ingenuity of the gentle heart of Las Casas, puts him two centuries in advance of his own age as a rationalizing interpreter of the Scriptures. It was a bold interpolation of his own to throw into the Hebrew text the suggestion that it was written to amaze, rather than to guide, subsequent generations. Sepulveda was right in his interpretation of the text for those who believed in its divine, infallible authority. All the reason which sustained it as first used, applied to all like cases afterwards. The text, with inferences from it, as divine teaching — as also many other texts, especially this: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” — was ample warrant to many denominations of Christians in persecuting and cruel proceedings.
* ↑ Irving, who gives it in full in his Appendix of Documents, “Columbus,” vol. ii., applies to it the designation of a “curious manifesto.”
* ↑ Pioneers of France, p. 13.
* ↑ It has been charitably suggested that limbs and other fragments of human bodies seen in some of the native cabins may have been the remains of relatives intended for affectionate preservation.
* ↑ Charlevoix's New France, Shea's translation, vol. i. p. 103.
* ↑ This tract, known only by quotations referring to it, was long supposed to have been irrecoverably lost, no copy of it being known as in existence. A copy was accidentally discovered, uncatalogued, in the British Museum in 1880, by that most diligent, indefatigable, and thoroughly furnished literary antiquarian, Dr. Henry Martyn Dexter, and has been reprinted in Providence, R. I., 1881.