Transcriber’s note:
The original spelling, hyphenation, and punctuation has been retained, with the exception of apparent typographical errors which have been corrected.

COLONIZATION AND CHRISTIANITY.

COLONIZATION AND CHRISTIANITY:

A
POPULAR HISTORY
OF THE
TREATMENT OF THE NATIVES
BY THE EUROPEANS
IN ALL THEIR COLONIES.
BY
WILLIAM HOWITT.

Have we not all one father?—hath not one God created us?

Why do we deal treacherously every man against his brother?

Malachi ii. 10.

LONDON:
LONGMAN, ORME, BROWN, GREEN, & LONGMANS.
1838.

LONDON:
PRINTED BY MANNING AND SMITHSON,
IVY-LANE, PATERNOSTER-ROW.

The object of this volume is to lay open to the public the most extensive and extraordinary system of crime which the world ever witnessed. It is a system which has been in full operation for more than three hundred years, and continues yet in unabating activity of evil. The apathy which has hitherto existed in England upon this subject has proceeded in a great measure from want of knowledge. National injustice towards particular tribes, or particular individuals, has excited the most lively feeling, and the most energetic exertions for its redress,—but the whole wide field of unchristian operations in which this country, more than any other, is engaged, has never yet been laid in a clear and comprehensive view before the public mind. It is no part of the present volume to suggest particular plans of remedy. The first business is to make known the nature and the extent of the evil,—that once perceived, in this great country there will not want either heads to plan or hands to accomplish all that is due to the rights of others, or the honour and interest of England.

West End Cottage, Esher,
June 8th, 1838.

CONTENTS.

COLONIZATION AND CHRISTIANITY.

CHAPTER I.

These are they, O Lord!

Who in thy plain and simple gospel see

All mysteries, but who find no peace enjoined,

No brotherhood, no wrath denounced on them

Who shed their brethren’s blood! Blind at noon-day

As owls; lynx-eyed in darkness.—Southey.

Christianity has now been in the world upwards of One Thousand Eight Hundred Years. For more than a thousand years the European nations have arrogated to themselves the title of Christian! some of their monarchs, those of most Sacred and most Christian Kings! We have long laid to our souls the flattering unction that we are a civilized and a Christian people. We talk of all other nations in all other quarters of the world, as savages, barbarians, uncivilized. We talk of the ravages of the Huns, the irruptions of the Goths; of the terrible desolations of Timour, or Zenghis Khan. We talk of Alaric and Attila, the sweeping carnage of Mahomet, or the cool cruelties of more modern Tippoos and Alies. We shudder at the war-cries of naked Indians, and the ghastly feasts of Cannibals; and bless our souls that we are redeemed from all these things, and made models of beneficence, and lights of God in the earth!

It is high time that we looked a little more rigidly into our pretences. It is high time that we examined, on the evidence of facts, whether we are quite so refined, quite so civilized, quite so Christian as we have assumed to be. It is high time that we look boldly into the real state of the question, and learn actually, whether the mighty distance between our goodness and the moral depravity of other people really exists. Whether, in fact, we are Christian at all!

Have bloodshed and cruelty then ceased in Europe? After a thousand years of acquaintance with the most merciful and the most heavenly of religions, do the national characters of the Europeans reflect the beauty and holiness of that religion? Are we distinguished by our peace, as the followers of the Prince of Peace? Are we renowned for our eagerness to seek and save, as the followers of the universal Saviour? Are our annals redolent of the delightful love and fellowship which one would naturally think must, after a thousand years, distinguish those who pride themselves on being the peculiar and adopted children of Him who said, “By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another?” These are very natural, but nevertheless, very awkward questions. If ever there was a quarter of the globe distinguished by its quarrels, its jealousies, its everlasting wars and bloodshed, it is Europe. Since these soi-disant Christian nations have risen into any degree of strength, what single evidence of Christianity have they, as nations, exhibited? Eternal warfare!—is that Christianity? Yet that is the history of Christian Europe. The most subtle or absurd pretences to seize upon each other’s possessions,—the contempt of all faith in treaties,—the basest policy,—the most scandalous profligacy of public morals,—the most abominable international laws!—are they Christianity? And yet they are the history of Europe. Nations of men selling themselves to do murder, that ruthless kings might ravish each other’s crowns—nations of men, standing with jealous eyes on the perpetual watch against each other, with arms in their hands, oaths in their mouths, and curses in their hearts;—are those Christian? Yet there is not a man acquainted with the history of Europe that will even attempt to deny that that is the history of Europe. For what are all our international boundaries; our lines of demarcation; our frontier fortresses and sentinels; our martello towers, and guard-ships; our walled and gated cities; our bastions and batteries; and our jealous passports? These are all barefaced and glaring testimonies that our pretence of Christianity is a mere assumption; that after upwards of a thousand years of the boasted possession of Christianity, Europe has not yet learned to govern itself by its plainest precepts; and that her children have no claim to, or reliance in that spirit of “love which casteth out all fear.” It is very well to vaunt the title of Christian one to another—every nation knows in its own soul, it is a hollow pretence. While it boasts of the Christian name, it dare not for a moment throw itself upon a Christian faith in its neighbour. No! centuries of the most unremitted hatred,—blood poured over every plain of Europe, and sprinkled on its very mountain tops, cry out too dreadfully, that it is a dismal cheat. Wars, the most savage and unprovoked; oppressions, the most desperate; tyrannies, the most ruthless; massacres, the most horrible; death-fires, and tortures the most exquisite, perpetuated one on another for the faith, and in the very name of God; dungeons and inquisitions; the blood of the Vaudois, and the flaming homes of the Covenanters are all in their memories, and give the lie to their professions. No! Poland rent in sunder; the iron heel of Austria on the prostrate neck of Italy; and invasions and aggressions without end, make Christian nations laugh with a hollow mockery in their hearts, in the very midst of their solemn professions of the Christian virtue and faith.

But I may be told that this character applies rather to past Europe than to the present. What! are all these things at an end? For what then are all these standing armies? What all these marching armies? What these men-of-war on the ocean? What these atrocities going on from year to year in Spain? Has any age or nation seen such battles waged as we have witnessed in our time? How many Waterloos can the annals of the earth reckon? What Timour, or Zenghis Khan, can be compared to the Napoleon of modern Europe? the greatest scourge of nations that ever arose on this planet; the most tremendous meteor that ever burnt along its surface! Have the multitude of those who deem themselves the philosophical and refined, as well as the Christian of Europe, ceased to admire this modern Moloch, and to forget in his individual and retributory sufferings at St. Helena, the countless agonies and the measureless ruin that he inflicted on innocent and even distant nations? While we retain a blind admiration of martial genius, wilfully shutting our senses and our minds to the crimes and the pangs that constitute its shadow, it is laughable to say that we have progressed beyond our fathers in Christian knowledge. At this moment all Europe stands armed to the teeth. The peace of every individual nation is preserved, not by the moral probity and the mutual faith which are the natural growth of Christian knowledge, but by the jealous watch of armed bands, and the coarse and undisguised force of brute strength. To this moment not the slightest advance is made towards a regular system of settling national disputes by the head instead of the hand. To this moment the stupid practice of settling individual disputes between those who pride themselves on their superior education and knowledge, by putting bullets instead of sound reasons into each other’s heads, is as common as ever. If we really are a civilized people, why do we not abandon barbarian practices? If we really are philosophical, why do we not shew it? It is a poor compliment to our learning, our moral and political philosophy, and above all, to our religion, that at this time of day if a dispute arise between us as nations or as men, we fall to blows, instead of to rational inquiry and adjustment. Is Christianity then so abstruse? No! “He that runneth may read, and the way-faring man, though a fool, cannot err therein.” Then why, in the name of common sense, have we not learned it, seeing that it so closely concerns our peace, our security, and our happiness? Surely a thousand years is time enough to teach that which is so plain, and of such immense importance! We call ourselves civilized, yet we are daily perpetrating the grossest outrages; we boast of our knowledge, yet we do not know how to live one with another half so peaceably as wolves; we term ourselves Christians, yet the plainest injunction of Christ, “to love our neighbour as ourselves,” we have yet, one thousand eight hundred and thirty-eight years after his death, to adopt! But most monstrous of all has been the moral blindness or the savage recklessness of ourselves as Englishmen.

Secure from actual warfare, we have loved

To swell the war-whoop, passionate for war!

Alas! for ages ignorant of all

Its ghastlier workings (famine or blue plague,

Battle, or siege, or flight through wintry snows,)

We, this whole people, have been clamorous

For war and bloodshed; animating sports,

The which we pay for as a thing to talk of,

Spectators and not combatants! Abroad

Stuffed out with big preamble, holy names,

And adjurations of the God in heaven,

We send our mandates for the certain death

Of thousands and ten thousands! Boys and girls,

And women, that would groan to see a child

Pull off an insect’s leg, all read of war,

The best amusement for our morning’s meal!

The poor wretch who has learnt his only prayers

From curses, who knows scarce words enough

To ask a blessing from his heavenly Father,

Becomes a fluent phraseman, absolute,

Technical in victories, and deceit,

And all our dainty terms for fratricide;

Terms which we trundle smoothly o’er our tongues

Like mere abstractions, empty sounds, to which

We join no feeling, and attach no form!

As if the soldier died without a wound;

As if the fibres of this god-like frame

Were gored without a pang; as if the wretch

Who fell in battle, doing bloody deeds,

Passed off to heaven, translated and not killed;

As though he had no wife to pine for him,

No God to judge him! Therefore evil days

Are coming on us, O my countrymen!

And what, if all-avenging Providence,

Strong and retributive, should make us know

The meaning of our words, force us to feel

The desolation and the agony of our fierce doings?

Coleridge.

This is the aspect of the Christian world in its most polished and enlightened quarter:—there surely is some need of serious inquiry; there must surely be some monstrous practical delusion here, that wants honestly encountering, and boldly dispersing.

But if such is the internal condition of Christian Europe, what is the phasis that it presents to the rest of the world? With the exception of our own tribes, now numerously scattered over almost every region of the earth, all are in our estimation barbarians. We pride ourselves on our superior knowledge, our superior refinement, our higher virtues, our nobler character. We talk of the heathen, the savage, and the cruel, and the wily tribes, that fill the rest of the earth; but how is it that these tribes know us? Chiefly by the very features that we attribute exclusively to them. They know us chiefly by our crimes and our cruelty. It is we who are, and must appear to them the savages. What, indeed, are civilization and Christianity? The refinement and ennoblement of our nature! The habitual feeling and the habitual practice of an enlightened justice, of delicacy and decorum, of generosity and affection to our fellow men. There is not one of these qualities that we have not violated for ever, and on almost all occasions, towards every single tribe with which we have come in contact. We have professed, indeed, to teach Christianity to them; but we had it not to teach, and we have carried them instead, all the curses and the horrors of a demon race. If the reign of Satan, in fact, were come,—if he were let loose with all his legions, to plague the earth for a thousand years, what would be the characteristics of his prevalence? Terrors and crimes; one wide pestilence of vice and obscenity; one fearful torrent of cruelty and wrath, deceit and oppression, vengeance and malignity; the passions of the strong would be inflamed—the weak would cry and implore in vain!

And is not that the very reign of spurious Christianity which has lasted now for these thousand years, and that during the last three hundred, has spread with discovery round the whole earth, and made the name of Christian synonymous with fiend? It is shocking that the divine and beneficent religion of Christ should thus have been libelled by base pretenders, and made to stink in the nostrils of all people to whom it ought, and would, have come as the opening of heaven; but it is a fact no less awful than true, that the European nations, while professing Christianity, have made it odious to the heathen. They have branded it by their actions as something breathed up, full of curses and cruelties, from the infernal regions. On them lies the guilt, the stupendous guilt of having checked the gospel in its career, and brought it to a full stop in its triumphant progress through the nations. They have done this, and then wondered at their deed! They have visited every coast in the shape of rapacious and unprincipled monsters, and then cursed the inhabitants as besotted with superstition, because they did not look on them as angels! People have wondered at the slow progress, and in many countries, the almost hopeless labours of the missionaries;—why should they wonder? The missionaries had Christianity to teach—and their countrymen had been there before them, and called themselves Christians! That was enough: what recommendations could a religion have, to men who had seen its professors for generations in the sole characters of thieves, murderers, and oppressors? The missionaries told them that in Christianity lay their salvation;—they shook their heads, they had already found it their destruction! They told them they were come to comfort and enlighten them;—they had already been comforted by the seizure of their lands, the violation of their ancient rights, the kidnapping of their persons; and they had been enlightened by the midnight flames of their own dwellings! Is there any mystery in the difficulties of the missionaries? Is there any in the apathy of simple nations towards Christianity?

The barbarities and desperate outrages of the so-called Christian race, throughout every region of the world, and upon every people that they have been able to subdue, are not to be paralleled by those of any other race, however fierce, however untaught, and however reckless of mercy and of shame, in any age of the earth. Is it fit that this horrible blending of the names of Christianity and outrage should continue? Yet it does continue, and must continue, till the genuine spirit of Christianity in this kingdom shall arouse itself, and determine that these villanies shall cease, or they who perpetrate them shall be stripped of the honoured name of—Christian! If foul deeds are to be done, let them be done in their own foul name; and let robbery of lands, seizure of cattle, violence committed on the liberties or the lives of men, be branded as the deeds of devils and not of Christians. The spirit of Christianity, in the shape of missions, and in the teaching and beneficent acts of the missionaries, is now sensibly, in many countries, undoing the evil which wolves in the sheep’s clothing of the Christian name had before done. And of late another glorious symptom of the growth of this divine spirit has shown itself, in the strong feeling exhibited in this country towards the natives of our colonies. To fan that genuine flame of love, is the object of this work. To comprehend the full extent of atrocities done in the Christian name, we must look the whole wide evil sternly in the face. We must not suffer ourselves to aim merely at the redress of this or that grievance; but, gathering all the scattered rays of aboriginal oppression into one burning focus, and thus enabling ourselves to feel its entire force, we shall be less than Englishmen and Christians if we do not stamp the whole system of colonial usage towards the natives, with that general and indignant odium which must demolish it at once and for ever.

CHAPTER II.
THE DISCOVERY OF THE NEW WORLD.

The spoilers are come upon all high places through the wilderness.

Jeremiah xii. 12.

Forth rush the fiends as with the torrent’s sweep,

And deeds are done that make the angels weep.—Rogers.

We have thus in our first chapter glanced at the scene of crime and abomination which Europe through long ages presented, still daring to clothe itself in the fair majesty of the Christian name. It is a melancholy field of speculation—but our business is not there just now; we must hasten from it, to that other field of sorrow and shame at which we also glanced. For fifteen centuries, during which Christianity had been promulgated, Europe had become little aware of its genuine nature, though boastful of its profession; but during the latter portion of that period its nations had progressed rapidly in population, in strength, and in the arts of social life. They had, amid all their bickerings and butcherings, found sufficient leisure to become commercial, speculative, and ambitious of still greater wealth and power. Would to God, in their improvements, they could have numbered that of religious knowledge! Their absurd crusades, nevertheless, by which they had attempted to wrest the Holy City from the infidels to put it into the possession of mere nominal Christians, whose very act of seizing on the Holy Land proclaimed their ignorance of the very first principles of the divine religion in whose cause they assumed to go forth—these crusades, immediately scandalous and disastrous as they were, introduced them to the East; gave them knowledge of more refined and immensely wealthy nations; and at once raised their notions of domestic luxury and embellishment; gave them means of extended knowledge; and inspired them with a boundless thirst for the riches of which they had got glimpses of astonishment. The Venetians and Genoese alternately grew great by commerce with that East of which Marco Polo brought home such marvellous accounts; and at length, Henry of Portugal appeared, one of the noblest and most remarkable princes in earth’s annals! He devoted all the energies of his mind and the resources of his fortune to discovery! Fixing his abode by the ocean, he sent across it not merely the eyes of desire, but the far-glances of dawning science. Step by step, year by year, spite of all natural difficulties, disasters and discouragements, he threw back the cloud that had for ages veiled the vast sea; his ships brought home news of isle after isle—spots on the wide waste of waters, fairer and more sunny than the fabled Hesperides; and crept along the vast line of the African coast to the very Cape of Hope. He died; but his spirit was shed abroad in an inextinguishable zeal, guided and made invincible by the Magnet, “the spirit of the stone,” the adoption of which he had suggested.[1]—At once arose Gama and Columbus, and as it were at once—for there were but five years and a few months between one splendid event and the other,—the East and the West Indies by the sea-path, and America, till then undreamed of, were discovered!

What an era of amazement was that! Worlds of vast extent and wonderful character, starting as it were into sudden creation before the eyes of growing, inquisitive, and ambitious Europe! Day after day, some news, astounding in its very infinitude of goodness, was breaking upon their excited minds; news which overturned old theories of philosophy and geography, and opened prospects for the future equally confounding by their strange magnificence! No single Paradise discovered; but countless Edens, scattered through the glittering seas of summer climes, and populous realms, stretching far and wide beneath new heavens, from pole to pole—

Another nature, and a new mankind.—Rogers.

Since the day of Creation, but two events of superior influence on the destinies of the human race had occurred—the Announcement of God’s Law on Sinai, and the Advent of his Son! Providence had drawn aside the veil of a mighty part of his world, and submitted the lives and happiness of millions of his creatures to the arbitrium of that European race, which now boasted of superior civilization—and far more, of being the regenerated followers of his Christ. Never was so awful a test of sincerity presented to the professors of a heavenly creed!—never was such opportunity allowed to mortal men to work in the eternal scheme of Providence! It is past! Such amplitude of the glory of goodness can never again be put at one moment into the reach of the human will. God’s providence is working out its undoubted design in this magnificent revelation of

That maiden world, twin-sister to the old;—Montgomery.

But they who should have worked with it in the benignity and benevolence of that Saviour whose name they bore, have left to all futurity the awful spectacle of their infamy!

Had the Europeans really at this eventful crisis been instructed in genuine Christianity, and imbued with its spirit, what a signal career of improvement and happiness must have commenced throughout the vast American continent! What a source of pure, guiltless, and enduring wealth must have been opened up to Europe itself! Only let any one imagine the natives of America meeting the Europeans as they did, with the simple faith of children, and the reverence inspired by an idea of something divine in their visitors; let any one imagine them thus meeting them, and finding them, instead of what they actually were, spirits base and desperate as hell could have possibly thrown up from her most malignant regions—finding them men of peace instead of men of blood, men of integrity instead of men of deceit, men of love and generosity instead of men of cruelty and avarice—wise, enlightened, and just! Let any one imagine that, and he has before him such a series of grand and delightful consequences as can only be exhibited when Christianity shall really become the actuating spirit of nations; and they shall as the direct consequence, “beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks.” Imagine the Spaniards and the Portuguese to have been merely what they pretended to be,—men who had been taught in the divine law of the New Testament, that “God made of one blood all the nations of the earth;” men who, while they burned to “plant the Cross,” actually meant by it to plant in every new land the command, “thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself;” and the doctrine, that the religion of the Christian is, to “do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly before God.” Imagine that these men came amongst the simple people of the New World, clothed in all the dignity of Christian wisdom, the purity of Christian sentiment, and the sacred beauty of Christian benevolence; and what a contrast to the crimes and the horrors with which they devastated and depopulated that hapless continent! The historian would not then have had to say—“The bloodshed and attendant miseries which the unparalleled rapine and cruelty of the Spaniards spread over the New World, indeed disgrace human nature. The great and flourishing empires of Mexico and Peru, steeped in the blood of FORTY MILLIONS of their sons, present a melancholy prospect, which must excite the indignation of every good heart.”[2] If, instead of that lust of gold which had hardened them into actual demons, they had worn the benign graces of true Christians, the natives would have found in them a higher image of divinity than any which they had before conceived, and the whole immense continent would have been laid open to them as a field of unexampled and limitless glory and felicity. They might have introduced their arts and sciences—have taught the wonders and the charms of household enjoyments and refinements—have shewn the beauty and benefit of cultivated fields and gardens; their faith would have created them confidence in the hearts of the natives, and the advantages resulting from their friendly tuition would have won their love. What a triumphant progress for civilization and Christianity! There was no wealth nor advantage of that great continent which might not have become legitimately and worthily theirs. They would have walked amongst the swarming millions of the south as the greatest of benefactors; and under their enlightened guidance, every species of useful produce, and every article of commercial wealth would have sprung up. Spain need not have been blasted, as it were, by the retributive hand of Divine punishment, into the melancholy object which she is this day. That sudden stream of gold which made her a second Tantalus, reaching to her very lips yet never quenching her thirst, and leaving her at length the poorest and most distracted realm in Europe, might have been hers from a thousand unpolluted sources, and bearing along with it God’s blessing instead of his curse: and mighty nations, rivalling Europe in social arts and political power, might have been now, instead of many centuries hence, objects of our admiration, and grateful repayers of our benefits.

But I seem to hear many voices exclaiming, “Yes! these things might have been, had men been what they are not, nor ever were!” Precisely so!—that is the point I wish expressly to illustrate before I proceed to my narrative. These things might have been, and would have been, had men been merely what they professed. They called themselves Christians, and I merely state what Christians would and must, as a matter of course, have done. The Spaniards professed to be, and probably really believed that they were, Christians. They professed zealously that one of their most ardent desires was to bring the newly-discovered hemisphere under the cross of Christ. Columbus returned thanks to God for having made him a sort of modern apostle to the vast tribes of the West. Ferdinand and Isabella, when he returned and related to them the wonderful story of his discovery, fell on their knees before their throne, and thanked God too! They expressed an earnest anxiety to establish the empire of the Cross throughout their new and splendid dominions. The very Spanish adventurers, with their hands heavy with the plundered gold, and clotted with the blood of the unhappy Americans, were zealous for the spread of their faith. They were not more barbarous than they were self-deluded; and I shall presently shew whence had sprung, and how had grown to such a blinding thickness, that delusion upon them. But the truth which I am now attempting to elucidate and establish, is of far higher and wider concernment than as exemplified in the early adventurers of Spain and Portugal. This grand delusion has rested on Europe for a thousand years; and from the days of the Spaniards to the present moment, has gone on propagating crimes and miseries without end. For the last three hundred years, Europe has been boasting of its Christianity, and perpetrating throughout the vast extent of territories in every quarter of the globe subjected to its power, every violence and abomination at which Christianity revolts. There is no nation of Europe that is free from the guilt of colonial blood and oppression. God knows what an awful share rests upon this country! It remains therefore for us simply to consider whether we will abandon our national crimes or our Christian name. Whether Europe shall continue so to act towards what it pleases to term “savage” nations, as that it must seem to be the very ground and stronghold of some infernal superstition, or so as to promote, what a large portion of the British public at least, now sincerely desires,—the Christianization, and with it the civilization, of the heathen.

I shall now pass in rapid review, the treatment which the natives of the greater portion of the regions discovered since the days of Columbus and Gama, have received at the hands of the nations styling themselves Christian, that every one may see what has been, and still is, the actual system of these nations; and I shall first follow Columbus and his immediate successors to the Western world, because it was first, though only by so brief a period, reached by the ships of the adventurers.

CHAPTER III.
THE PAPAL GIFT OF ALL THE HEATHEN WORLD TO THE PORTUGUESE AND SPANIARDS.

Woe is me, my mother, that thou hast born me a man of strife, and a man of contention to the whole earth.—Jeremiah xv. 10.

Also in their skirts is found the blood of the souls of the poor innocents.—Jeremiah v. 16.

Columbus, while seeking for a western track to the East Indies, on Friday, Oct. 12th, 1492, stumbled on a New World! The discoveries by Prince Henry of Portugal, of Madeira, and of a considerable extent of the African coast, had impressed him with a high idea of the importance of what yet was to be discovered, and of the possibility of reaching India by sea. This had led him to obtain a Bull from Pope Eugene IV. granting to the crown of Portugal all the countries which the Portuguese should discover from Cape Non to India. Columbus, having now discovered America, although unknown to himself, supposing it still to be some part of India, his monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, lost no time in applying for a similar grant. Alexander VI., a Spaniard, was equally generous with his predecessor, and accordingly divided the world between the Spaniards and Portuguese! “The Pope,” says Robertson, “as the vicar and representative of Jesus Christ, was supposed to have a right of dominion over all the kingdoms of the earth. Alexander VI., a pontiff infamous for every crime which disgraces humanity, filled the papal throne at that time. As he was born Ferdinand’s subject, and very solicitous to procure the protection of Spain, in order to facilitate the execution of his ambitious schemes in favour of his own family, he was extremely willing to gratify the Spanish monarchs. By an act of liberality, which cost him nothing, and that served to establish the jurisdiction and fortunes of the papal see, he granted in full right to Ferdinand and Isabella, all the countries inhabited by infidels which they had discovered, or should discover; and in virtue of that power which he derived from Jesus Christ, he conferred on the crown of Castile vast regions, to the possession of which he himself was so far from having any title, that he was unacquainted with their situation, and ignorant even of their existence. As it was necessary to prevent this grant from interfering with that formerly made to the crown of Portugal, he appointed that a line, supposed to be drawn from pole to pole, a hundred leagues to the westward of the Azores, should serve as a limit between them; and, in the plenitude of his power, bestowed all to the east of this imaginary line upon the Portuguese, and all to the west of it, upon the Spaniards. Zeal for propagating the Christian faith, was the consideration employed by Ferdinand in soliciting this Bull, and is mentioned by Alexander as his chief motive for issuing it.”

It is necessary, for the right understanding of this history, to pause upon this remarkable fact, and to give it the consideration which it demands. In this one passage lies the key to all the atrocities, which from that hour to the present have been perpetrated on the natives of every country making no profession of Christianity, which those making such a profession have been able to subdue. An Italian priest,—as the unfortunate Inca, Atahualpa, afterwards observed with indignant surprise, when told that the pope had given his empire to the Spaniards,—here boldly presumes to give away God’s earth as if he sate as God’s acknowledged vicegerent. Splitting this mighty planet into two imaginary halves, he hands one to the Spanish and the other to the Portuguese monarch, as he would hand the two halves of an orange to a couple of boys. The presumption of the act is so outrageous, that at this time of day, and forgetting for a moment all the consequences which flowed from this deed, one is ready to burst into a hearty fit of laughter, as at a solemn farce, irresistibly ludicrous from its grave extravagance. But it was a farce which cost, and still costs the miserable natives of unproselyted countries dear. It was considered no farce—there was seen no burlesque in it at the time of its enactment. Not only the kings of Spain and Portugal, but the kings and people of all Europe bowed to this preposterous decision, and never dreamed for a moment of calling in question its validity.

Edward IV. of England, on receiving a remonstrance from John II. of Portugal on account of some English merchants attempting to trade within the limits assigned to the Portuguese by the pope’s bull, so far from calling in question the right thus derived by the Portuguese from the pope, instantly ordered the merchants to withdraw from the interdicted scene.

Here then, we have the root and ground of that grand delusion which led the first discoverers of new lands, to imagine themselves entitled to seize on them as their own, and to violate every sacred right of humanity without the slightest perception of wrong, and even in many instances, in the fond belief that they were extending the kingdom of Christ. We have here the man of sin, the anti-Christ, so clearly foretold by St. Paul,—“the son of perdition, who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God or that is worshipped; so that he as God, sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God.... Even him, whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power, and signs and lying wonders; and with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth that they might be saved. And for this cause God shall send them a strong delusion, that they should believe a lie.”—Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, ii. 3, 4, 9, 10, 11.

Strange and abounding in most singular transactions as is the history of the Papal church, there is not to be found in it one fact in which the son of perdition, the proud anti-Christ, is more characteristically shown than in this singular transaction. We have him here enacting the God indeed! and giving away a world in a breath. Vast and mighty nations, isles scattered through unknown oceans, continents stretching through all climates, and millions on millions of human beings, who never heard of his country or his religion, much less of his name, are disposed of with all their fortunes; given up as so many cattle to the sword or the yoke of the oppressor—the very ground given from beneath their feet, and no place left them on God’s earth—no portion in his heritage, in time or in eternity, unless they acknowledged the mysterious dogmas and more mysterious power of this hoary and shaven priest! Never was “the son of perdition” more glaringly revealed; for perdition is the only word that can indicate that fulness of misery, devastation, and destruction, which went forth with this act, upon millions of innocent and unconscious souls. Never was “the deceivableness of unrighteousness” so signally exemplified; for here was all Europe,—monarchs, ministers,—whatever it possessed of wise, or learned, powerful, or compassionate, all blinded with such “a strong delusion,” that they could implicitly “believe a lie” of so monstrous and flagrant a kind.

It is difficult for us now to conceive how so gross a delusion could have wrapped in darkness all the intellect of the most active and aspiring portion of the globe; but it is necessary that we should fix this peculiar psychological phenomenon firmly and clearly in our minds, for on it depends the explication of all that was done against humanity during the reign of Papacy, and much that still continues to be done to this very day by ourselves, even while we are believing ourselves enfranchised from this “strong delusion,” and too much enlightened to “believe a lie.”

We must bear in mind then, that this strange phenomenon was the effect of nearly a thousand years’ labour of the son of perdition. For ages upon ages, every craft, priestly and political; every form of regal authority, of arms, and of superstition; every delusion of the senses, and every species of play upon the affections, hopes and fears of men, had been resorted to, and exerted, to rivet this “strong delusion” upon the human soul, and to make it capable of “believing a lie.”

In the two preceding chapters, I have denied the possession of Christianity to multitudes and nations who had assumed the name, with a sternness and abruptness, which no doubt have startled many who have now read them; but I call earnestly upon every reader, to attend to what I am now endeavouring deeply to impress upon him; for, I must repeat, that there is more of what concerns the progress of Christian truth, and consequently, the happiness of the human race, dependent on the thorough conception of the fact which I am going to state, than probably any of us have been sufficiently sensible of, and which we cannot once become really sensible of, without joining heart and hand in the endeavour to free our own great country, and Christendom in general, from the commission of cruelties and outrages that mock our profession of Christ’s religion, and brand the national name with disgrace.

There is no fact then, more clearly developed and established past all controversy, in the history of the Papal church, than that from its very commencement it set aside Christianity, and substituted in the words of the apostle, “a strong delusion” and “the belief of a lie.” The Bible—that treasury and depository of God’s truth—that fountain of all pure and holy and kindly sentiments—that charter of all human rights— that guardian of hope and herald of salvation, was withdrawn from the public eye. It was denounced as the most dangerous of two-edged instruments, and feared as the worst enemy of the Papal system. Christianity was no longer taught, the Bible being once disposed of; but an artful and deadly piece of machinery was put in action, which bore its name. Instead of the pure and holy maxims of the New Testament—its sublime truths full of temporal and eternal freedom, its glorious knowledge, its animating tidings, its triumphant faith—submission to popes, cardinals, friars, monks and priests, was taught—a Confessional and a Purgatory took their place. Christianity was no longer existent; but the very religion of Satan—the most cunning invention, by which working on human cupidity and ambition, he was enabled to achieve a temporary triumph over the Gospel. Never was there a more subtle discovery than that of the Confessional and the Purgatory. Once having established a belief in confession and absolution, and who would not be religious at a cheap rate?—in the Confessional—the especial closet of Satan, every crime and pollution might be practised, and the guilty soul made to believe that its sin was that moment again obliterated. Even if death surprised the sinner, there was power of redemption from that convenient purgatory. Paid prayers were substituted for genuine repentance—money became the medium of salvation, and Beelzebub and Mammon sate and laughed together at the credulity of mankind!

Thus, as I have stated, Christianity was no longer taught; but a totally different system, usurping its name. Instead of simple apostles, it produced showy popes and cardinals; instead of humble preachers, proud temporal princes, and dignitaries as proud; instead of the Bible, the mass-book and the legends of saints; instead of one God and one Saviour Jesus Christ, the eyes of its votaries were turned for help on virgins, saints, and anchorites—instead of the inward life and purity of the gospel-faith, outward ceremonies, genuflexions, and pageantry without end. Every man, however desperate his nature or his deeds, knew that for a certain amount of coin, he could have his soul white-washed; and, instead of a healthy and availing piety, that spurious and diabolical devotion was generated, which is found at the present day amongst the bandits of Italy and Spain—who one moment plunge their stiletto or bury their bullet in the heart of the unsuspecting traveller, and the next kneel at the shrine of the Virgin, perform some slight penance, offer some slight gift to the church, and are perfectly satisfied that they are in the way of salvation. It is that spurious devotion, indeed, which marks every superstition—Hindoo, Mahometan, or Fetish—wherever, indeed, mere outward penance, or the offering of money, is substituted for genuine repentance and a new life.

Let any one, therefore, imagine the effect of this state of things on Europe through seven or eight centuries. The light of the genuine gospel withdrawn—all the purity of the moral law of Christ—all the clear and convincing annunciations of the rights of man—all the feelings of love and sympathy that glow alone in the gospel;—and instead of these an empty show; legends and masses, miracle-plays and holiday pageants; such doctrines of right and wrong, such maxims of worldly policy preached as suited ambitious dignitaries or luxurious friars—and it will account for that singular state of belief and of conscience which existed at the time of the discovery of the new countries of the East and West. It would have been impossible that such ignorance, or such shocking perversion of reason and faith, could have grown up and established themselves as the characteristics of the public mind, had every man had the Bible in his hand to refer to, and imbue himself daily with its luminous sense of justice, and its spirit of humanity.

We shall presently see what effects it had produced on even the best men of the 15th and 16th centuries; but what perhaps is not quite so much suspected, we shall have to learn in the course of this volume to what an extent the influence of this system still continues on the Protestant mind. So thoroughly had it debauched the public morality, that it is to this source that we alone can come to explain the laxity of opinion and the apathy of feeling that have ever since characterized Europe in its dealings with the natives of all new countries. To this day, we no more regard the clearest principles of the gospel in our transactions with them, than if such principles did not exist. The Right of Conquest, and such robber-phrases, have been, and even still continue to be, “as smoothly trundled from our tongues,” as if we could find them enjoined on our especial approbation in the Bible. But genuine Christianity is at length powerfully awaking in the public mind of England; and I trust that even the perusal of this volume will strengthen our resolution to wash the still clinging stains of popery out of our garments, and to determine to stand by the morality of the Bible, and by that alone.

In closing this chapter, let me say that I should be very sorry to hurt the feelings of any modern Catholic. The foregoing strictures have no reference to them. However much or little of the ancient faith of the Papal church any of them may retain, I believe that, as a body, they are as sincere in their devotion as any other class of Christians; but the ancient system, character, and practice of the Church of Rome, are matters of all history, and too closely connected with the objects of this work, and with the interests of millions, to be passed without, what the author believes to be, a faithful exposition.

CHAPTER IV.
THE SPANIARDS IN HISPANIOLA.

The gathering signs of a long night of woe.—Rogers.

The terms of the treaty between the Spanish monarchs and Columbus, on his being engaged as a discoverer, signed by the parties on the 17th of April, 1492, are sufficiently indicative of the firm possession which the doctrines of popery had upon their minds. The sovereigns constituted Columbus high-admiral of all the seas, islands, and continents which should be discovered by him, as a perpetual inheritance for him and his heirs. He was to be their viceroy in those countries, with a tenth of the free profits upon all the productions and the commerce of those realms. This was pretty well for monarchs professing to be Christians, and who ought to have been taught—“thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house; thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his man-servant, nor his maid-servant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s.” But they had been brought up in another faith: the Pope had exclaimed—

Creation’s heir! the world, the world is mine!

and they took him literally and really at his word. And it will soon be seen that Columbus, though naturally of an honorable nature, was not the less the dupe of this fearful system. He proceeded on his voyage, discovered a portion of the West Indies, and speedily plunged into atrocities against the natives that would have been pronounced shocking in Timour or Attila. James Montgomery, in his beautiful poem, the West Indies, has strongly contrasted the character of Columbus and that of his successors.

The winds were prosperous, and the billows bore

The brave adventurer to the promised shore;

Far in the west, arrayed in purple light,

Dawned the New World on his enraptured sight.

Not Adam, loosened from the encumbering earth,

Waked by the breath of God to instant birth,

With sweeter, wilder wonder gazed around,

When life within, and light without he found;

When all creation rushing o’er his soul,

He seemed to live and breathe throughout the whole.

So felt Columbus, when divinely fair

At the last look of resolute despair,

The Hesperian isles, from distance dimly blue,

With gradual beauty opened on his view.

In that proud moment, his transported mind

The morning and the evening worlds combined;

And made the sea, that sundered them before,

A bond of peace, uniting shore to shore.

Vain, visionary hope! rapacious Spain

Followed her hero’s triumph o’er the main;

Her hardy sons in fields of battle tried,

Where Moor and Christian desperately died;—

A rabid race, fanatically bold,

And steeled to cruelty by lust of gold,

Traversed the waves, the unknown world explored;

The cross their standard, but their faith the sword;

Their steps were graves; o’er prostrate realms they trod;

They worshipped Mammon, while they vowed to God.

To estimate the effect of his theological education on such a man as Columbus, we have only to pause a moment, to witness the manner of his first landing in the new world, and his reception there. On discovering the island of Guanahani, one of the Bahamas, the Spaniards raised the hymn of Te Deum. At sunrise they rowed towards land with colours flying, and the sound of martial music; and amid the crowds of wondering natives assembled on the shores and hills around, Columbus, like another Mahomet, set foot on the beach, sword in hand, and followed by a crucifix, which his followers planted in the earth, and then prostrating themselves before it, took possession of the country in the name of his sovereign. The inhabitants gazed in silent wonder on ceremonies so pregnant with calamity to them, but without any suspicion of their real nature. Living in a delightful climate, hidden through all the ages of their world from the other world of labour and commerce, of art and artifice, of avarice and cruelty, they appeared in the primitive and unclad simplicity of nature. The Spaniards, says Peter Martyr,—“Dryades formossissimas, aut nativas fontium nymphas de quibus fabulatur antiquitas, se vidisse arbitrati sunt:”—they seemed to behold the most beautiful dryads, or native nymphs of the fountains, of whom antiquity fabled. Their forms were light and graceful, though dusky with the warm hues of the sun; their hair hung in long raven tresses on their shoulders, unlike the frizzly wool of the Africans, or was tastefully braided. Some were painted, and armed with a light bow, or a fishing spear; but their countenances were full of gentleness and kindness. Columbus himself, in one of his letters to Ferdinand and Isabella, describes the Americans and their country thus:—“This country excels all others, as far as the day surpasses the night in splendour: the natives love their neighbour as themselves; their conversation is the sweetest imaginable; their faces always smiling, and so gentle, so affectionate are they, that I swear to your highnesses there is not a better people in the world.” The Spaniards indeed looked with as much amazement on the simple people, and the paradise in which they lived, as the natives did on the wonderful spectacle of European forms, faces, dress, arts, arms, and ships.—Such sweet and flowing streams; such sunny dales, scattered with flowers as gorgeous and beautiful as they were novel; trees covered with a profusion of glorious and aromatic blossoms, and beneath their shade the huts of the natives, of simple reeds or palm-leaves; the stately palms themselves, rearing their lofty heads on the hill sides; the canoes skimming over the blue waters, and birds of most resplendent plumage flying from tree to tree. They walked

Through citron-groves and fields of yellow maize,

Through plantain-walks where not a sunbeam plays.

Here blue savannas fade into the sky;

There forests frown in midnight majesty;

Ceiba, and Indian fig, and plane sublime,

Nature’s first-born, and reverenced by time!

There sits the bird that speaks! there quivering rise

Wings that reflect the glow of evening skies!

Half bird, half fly, the fairy king of flowers,

Reigns there, and revels through the fragrant bowers;

Gem full of life, and joy, and song divine,

Soon in the virgin’s graceful ear to shine.

The poet sung, if ancient Fame speaks truth,

“Come! follow, follow to the Fount of Youth!

I quaff the ambrosial mists that round it rise,

Dissolved and lost in dreams of Paradise!”

And there called forth, to bless a happier hour,

It met the sun in many a rainbow-shower!

Murmuring delight, its living waters rolled

’Mid branching palms, and amaranths of gold!

Rogers.

It were an absurdity to say that they were Christians who broke in upon this Elysian scene like malignant spirits, and made that vast continent one wide theatre of such havoc, insult, murder, and misery as never were before witnessed on earth. But it was not exactly in this island that this disgraceful career commenced. Lured by the rumour of gold, which he received from the natives, Columbus sailed southward first to Cuba, and thence to Hispaniola. Here he was visited by the cazique, Guacanahari, who was doomed first to experience the villany of the Spaniards. This excellent and kind man sent by the messengers which Columbus had despatched to wait on him, a curious mask of beaten gold, and when the vessel of Columbus was immediately afterwards wrecked in standing in to the coast, he appeared with all his people on the strand,—for the purpose of plundering and destroying them, as we might expect from savages, and as the Cazique would have been served had he been wrecked himself on the Spanish, or on our own coast at that time? No! but better Christian than most of those who bore that name, he came eagerly to do the very deed enjoined by Christ and his followers,—to succour and to save. “The prince,” says Herrera, their own historian, “appeared all zeal and activity at the head of his people. He placed armed guards to keep off the press of the natives, and to keep clear a space for the depositing of the goods as they came to land: he sent out as many as were needful in their canoes to put themselves under the guidance of the Spaniards, and to assist them all in their power in the saving of their goods from the wreck. As they brought them to land, he and his nobles received them, and set sentinels over them, not suffering the people even to gratify that curiosity which at such a crisis must have been very great, to examine and inspect the curious articles of a new people; and his subjects participating in all his feelings, wept tears of sincere distress for the sufferers, and condoled with them in their misfortune. But as if this was not enough, the next morning, when Columbus had removed to one of his other vessels, the good Guacanahari appeared on board to comfort him, and to offer all that he had to repair his loss!”

This beautiful circumstance is moreover still more particularly related by Columbus himself, in his letter to his sovereigns; and it was on this occasion that he gave that character of the country and the people to which I have just referred. Truly had he a great right to say that “they loved their neighbour as themselves.” Let us see how the Spaniards and Columbus himself followed up this sublime lesson.

Columbus being now left on the coast of the new world with but one crazy vessel,—for Pinzon the commander of the other, had with true Spanish treachery, set off on his way homewards to forestall the glory of being the first bearer of the tidings of this great discovery to Europe,—he resolved to leave the number of men which were now inconvenient in one small crowded vessel, on the island. To this Guacanahari consented with his usual good nature and good faith. Columbus erected a sort of fort for them; gave them good advice for their conduct during his absence, and sailed for Spain. In less than eleven months he again appeared before this new settlement, and found it levelled with the earth, and every man destroyed. Scarcely had he left the island when these men had broken out in all those acts of insult, rapacity, and oppression on the natives which only too soon became the uniform conduct of the Christians! They laid violent hands on the women, the gold, the food of the very people who had even kindly received them; traversed the island in the commission of every species of rapacity and villany, till the astonished and outraged inhabitants now finding them fiends incarnate instead of the superior beings which they had deemed them, rose in wrath, and exterminated them.

Columbus formed a fresh settlement for his newcomers, and having defended it with mounds and ramparts of earth, went on a short voyage of discovery among the West Indian isles, and came back to find that the same scene of lust and rapine had been acted over again by his colony, and that the natives were all in arms for their destruction. It is curious to read the relation of the conduct of Columbus on this discovery, as given by Robertson, a Christian and Protestant historian. He tells us, on the authority of Herrera, and of the son of Columbus himself, that the Spaniards had outraged every human and sacred feeling of these their kind and hospitable entertainers. That in the voracity of their appetites, enormous as compared with the simple temperance of the natives, they had devoured up the maize and cassado-root, the chief sustenance of these poor people; that their rapacity threatened a famine; that the natives saw them building forts and locating themselves as permanent settlers where they had apparently come merely as guests; and that from their lawless violence as well as their voracity, they must soon suffer destruction in one shape or another from their oppressors. Self preservation prompted them to take arms for the expulsion of such formidable foes. “It was now,” adds Robertson, “necessary to have recourse to arms; the employing of which against the Indians, Columbus had hitherto avoided with the greatest solicitude.” Why necessary? Necessary for what? is the inquiry which must spring indignantly in every rightly-constituted mind. Because the Spaniards had been received with unexampled kindness, and returned it with the blackest ingratitude; because they had by their debauched and horrible outrages roused the people into defiance, those innocent and abused people must be massacred? That is a logic which might do for men who had been educated in the law of anti-Christ instead of Christ, and who went out with the Pope’s bull as a title to seize on the property of other people, wherever the abused and degraded cross had not been erected; but it could never have been so coolly echoed by a Protestant historian, if it had not been for the spurious morality with which the Papal hierarchy had corrupted the world, till it became as established as gospel truth. Hear Robertson’s relation of the manner in which Columbus repaid the Christian reception of these poor islanders.

“The body which took the field consisted only of two hundred foot, twenty horse, and twenty large dogs; and how strange soever it may seem to mention the last as composing part of a military force, they were not perhaps the least formidable and destructive on the whole, when employed against naked and timid Indians. All the caziques in the island, Guacanahari excepted, who retained an inviolable attachment to the Spaniards, were in arms, with forces amounting—if we may believe the Spanish historians—to a hundred thousand men. Instead of attempting to draw the Spaniards into the fastnesses of the woods and mountains, they were so improvident as to take their station in the Vega Real, the most open plain in the country. Columbus did not allow them to perceive their error, or to alter their position. He attacked them during the night, when undisciplined troops are least capable of acting with union and concert, and obtained an easy and bloodless victory. The consternation with which the Indians were filled by the noise and havoc made by the fire-arms, by the impetuous force of the cavalry, and the fierce onset of the dogs, was so great, that they threw down their weapons, and fled without attempting resistance. Many were slain; more were taken prisoners and reduced to servitude; and so thoroughly were the rest intimidated, that, from that moment, they abandoned themselves to despair, relinquishing all thoughts of contending with aggressors whom they deemed invincible.

“Columbus employed several months in marching through the island, and in subjecting it to the Spanish government, without meeting with any opposition. He imposed a tribute upon all the inhabitants above the age of fourteen. Every person who lived in those districts where gold was found, was obliged to pay quarterly as much gold-dust as filled a hawk’s bell; from those in other parts of the country, twenty-five pounds of cotton were demanded. This was the first regular taxation of the Indians, and served as a precedent for exactions still more intolerable.”

This is a most extraordinary example of the Christian mode of repaying benefits! These were the very people thus treated, that a little time before had received with tears, and every act of the most admirable charity, Columbus and his people from the wreck. And a Protestant historian says that this was necessary! Again we ask, necessary for what? To shew that Christianity was hitherto but a name, and an excuse for the violation of every human right! There was no necessity for Columbus to repay good with evil; no necessity for him to add the crime of Jezebel, “to kill and take possession.” If he really wanted to erect the cross in the new world, and to draw every legitimate benefit for his own country from it he had seen that all that might be effected by legitimate means. Kindness and faith were only wanted to lay open the whole of the new world, and bring all its treasures to the feet of his countrymen. The gold and gems might be purchased even with the toys of European children; and commerce and civilization, if permitted to go on hand in hand, presented prospects of wealth and glory, such as never yet had been revealed to the world. But Columbus, though he believed himself to have been inspired by the Holy Ghost to discover America,—thus commencing his will, “In the name of the most Holy Trinity, who inspired me with the idea, and who afterwards made it clear to me, that by traversing the ocean westwardly, etc.;” though Herrera calls him a man “ever trusting in God;” and though his son, in his history of his life, thus speaks of him:—“I believe that he was chosen for this great service; and that because he was to be so truly an apostle, as in effect he proved to be, therefore was his origin obscure; that therein he might the more resemble those who were called to make known the name of the Lord from seas and rivers, and from courts and palaces. And I believe also, that in most of his doings he was guarded by some special providence; his very name was not without some mystery; for in it is expressed the wonder he performed, inasmuch as he conveyed to the new world the grace of the Holy Ghost.” Notwithstanding these opinions—Columbus had been educated in the spurious Christianity, which had blinded his naturally honest mind to every truly Christian sentiment. It must be allowed that he was an apostle of another kind to those whom Christ sent out; and that this was a novel way of conveying the Holy Ghost to the new world. But he had got the Pope’s bull in his pocket, and that not only gave him a right to half the world, but made all means for its subjection, however diabolical, sacred in his eyes. We see him in this transaction, notwithstanding the superiority of his character to that of his followers, establishing himself as the apostle and founder of that system of destruction and enslavement of the Americans, which the Spaniards followed up to so horrible an extent. We see him here as the first to attack them, in their own rightful possessions, with arms—the first to pursue them with those ferocious dogs, which became so infamously celebrated in the Spanish outrages on the Americans, that some of them, as the dog Berezillo, received the full pay of soldiers; the first to exact gold from the natives; and to reduce them to slavery. Thus, from the first moment of modern discovery, and by the first discoverer himself, commenced that apostleship of misery which has been so zealously exercised towards the natives of all newly discovered countries up to this hour!

The immediate consequences of these acts of Columbus were these: the natives were driven to despair by the labours and exactions imposed upon them. They had never till then known what labour, or the curse of avarice was; and they formed a scheme to drive out their oppressors by famine. They destroyed the crops in the fields, and fled into the mountains. But there, without food themselves, they soon perished, and that so rapidly and miserably, that in a few months one-third of the inhabitants of the whole island had disappeared! Fresh succours arrived from Spain, and soon after, as if to realize to the afflicted natives all the horrors of the infernal regions, Spain, and at the suggestions of Columbus too, emptied all her gaols, and vomited all her malefactors on their devoted shores! A piece of policy so much admired in Europe, that it has been imitated by all other colonizing nations, and by none so much as by England! The consequences of this abominable system soon became conspicuous in the distractions, contentions, and disorders of the colony; and in order to soothe and appease these, Columbus resorted to fresh injuries on the natives, dividing their lands amongst his mutinous followers, and giving away the inhabitants—the real possessors—along with them as slaves! Thus he was the originator of those Repartimentos, or distribution of the Indians that became the source of such universal calamities to them, and of the extinction of more than fifty millions of their race.

Though Providence permitted these things, it did not leave them unavenged. If ever there was a history of the divine retribution written in characters of light, it is that of Spain and the Spaniards in America. On Spain itself the wrath of God seemed to fall with a blasting and enduring curse. From being one of the most powerful and distinguished nations of Europe, it began from the moment that the gold of America, gathered amidst the tears and groans, and dyed with the blood of the miserable and perishing natives, flowed in a full stream into it, to shrink and dwindle, till at once poor and proud, indolent and superstitious, it has fallen a prey to distractions that make it the most melancholy spectacle in Europe. On one occasion Columbus witnessed a circumstance so singular that it struck not only him but every one to whom the knowledge of it came. After he himself had been disgraced and sent home in chains, being then on another voyage of discovery,—and refused entrance into the port of St. Domingo by the governor—he saw the approach of a tempest, and warned the governor of it, as the royal fleet was on the point of setting sail for Spain. His warning was disregarded; the fleet set sail, having on board Bovadillo, the ex-governor, Roldan, and other officers, men who had been not only the fiercest enemies of Columbus, but the most rapacious plunderers and oppressors of the natives. The tempest came; and these men, with sixteen vessels laden with an immense amount of guilty wealth, were all swallowed up in the ocean—leaving only two ships afloat, one of which contained the property of Columbus!

But the fortunes of Columbus were no less disastrous. Much, and perhaps deservedly as he has been pitied for the treatment which he received from an ungrateful nation, it has always struck me that, from the period that he departed from the noble integrity of his character; butchered the naked Indians on their own soil, instead of resenting and redressing their injuries; from the hour that he set the fatal example of hunting them with dogs, of exacting painful labours and taxes, that he had no right to impose,—from the moment that he annihilated their ancient peace and liberty, the hand of God’s prosperity went from him. His whole life was one continued scene of disasters, vexations, and mortifications. Swarms of lawless and rebellious spirits, as if to punish him for letting loose on this fair continent the pestilent brood of the Spanish prisons, ceased not to harass, and oppose him. Maligned by these enemies, and sent to Europe in chains; there seeking restoration in vain, he set out on fresh discoveries. But wherever he went misfortune pursued him. Denied entrance into the very countries he had discovered; defeated by the natives that his men unrighteously attacked; shipwrecked in Jamaica, before it possessed a single European colony, he was there left for above twelve months, suffering incredible hardships, and amongst his mutinous Spaniards that threatened his life on the one hand, and Indians weary of their presence on the other. Having seen his authority usurped in the new world, he returned to the old,—there the death of Isabella, the only soul that retained a human feeling, extinguished all hope of redress of his wrongs; and after a weary waiting for justice on Ferdinand, he died, worn out with grief and disappointment. He had denied justice to the inhabitants of the world he had found, and justice was denied him; he had condemned them to slavery, and he was sent home in chains; he had given over the Indians to that thraldom of despair which broke the hearts of millions, and he himself died broken-hearted.

CHAPTER V.
THE SPANIARDS IN HISPANIOLA AND CUBA.

Her princes in the midst thereof are like wolves ravening for the prey; to shed blood, and to destroy souls, and to get dishonest gain.

Ezekiel xxii. 27.

But whether Columbus or others were in power, the miseries of the Indians went on. Bovadillo, the governor who superseded Columbus, and loaded him with irons, only bestowed allotments of Indians with a more liberal hand, to ingratiate himself with the fierce adventurers who filled the island. Raging with the quenchless thirst of gold, these wretches drove the poor Indians in crowds to the mountains, and compelled them to labour so mercilessly in the mines, that they melted away as rapidly as snow in the sun. It is true that the atrocities thus committed reaching the ears of Isabella, instructions were from time to time sent out, declaring the Indians free subjects, and enjoining mercy towards them; but like all instructions of the sort sent so far from home, they were resisted and set aside. The Indians, ever and anon, stung with despair, rose against their oppressors, but it was only to perish by the sword instead of the mine—they were pursued as rebels, their dwellings razed from the earth, and their caziques, when taken, hanged as malefactors.

In vain the simple race

Kneeled to the iron sceptre of their grace,

Or with weak arms their fiery vengeance braved;

They came, they saw, they conquered, they enslaved,

And they destroyed! The generous heart they broke;

They crushed the timid neck beneath the yoke;

Where’er to battle marched their fell array,

The sword of conquest ploughed resistless way;

Where’er from cruel toil they sought repose,

Around the fires of devastation rose.

The Indian as he turned his head in flight,

Beheld his cottage flaming through the night,

And, mid the shrieks of murder on the wind,

Heard the mute bloodhound’s death-step close behind.

The conquest o’er, the valiant in their graves,

The wretched remnant dwindled into slaves;

Condemned in pestilential cells to pine,

Delving for gold amidst the gloomy mine.

The sufferer, sick of life-protracting breath,

Inhaled with joy the fire-damp blast of death,—

Condemned to fell the mountain palm on high,

That cast its shadow to the evening sky,

Ere the tree trembled to his feeble stroke,

The woodman languished, and his heart-strings broke;

Condemned in torrid noon, with palsied hand,

To urge the slow plough o’er the obdurate land,

The labourer, smitten by the sun’s fierce ray,

A corpse along the unfinished furrow lay.

O’erwhelmed at length with ignominious toil,

Mingling their barren ashes with the soil,

Down to the dust the Charib people past,

Like autumn foliage withering in the blast;

The whole race sunk beneath the oppressor’s rod,

And left a blank amongst the works of God.

Montgomery.

In all the atrocities and indignities practised on these poor islanders, there were none which excite a stronger indignation than the treatment of the generous female cazique, Anacoana. This is the narrative of Robertson, drawn from Ovieda, Herrera, and Las Casas. “The province anciently named Zaragua, which extends from the fertile plain where Leogane is now situated, to the western extremity of the island, was subject to a female cazique, named Anacoana, highly respected by the natives. She, from the partial fondness with which the women of America were attached to the Europeans, had always courted the friendship of the Spaniards, and loaded them with benefits. But some of the adherents of Roldan having settled in her country, were so much exasperated at her endeavouring to restrain their excesses, that they accused her of having formed a plan to throw off the yoke, and to exterminate the Spaniards. Ovando, though he well knew what little credit was due to such profligate men, marched without further inquiry towards Zaragua, with three hundred foot, and seventy horsemen. To prevent the Indians from taking alarm at this hostile appearance, he gave out that his sole intention was to visit Anacoana, to whom his countrymen had been so much indebted, in the most respectful manner, and to regulate with her the mode of levying the tribute payable to the king of Spain.

“Anacoana, in order to receive this illustrious guest with due honour, assembled the principal men in her dominions, to the number of three hundred, and advancing at the head of these, accompanied by a great crowd of persons of inferior rank, she welcomed Ovando with songs and dances, according to the mode of the country, and conducted him to the place of her residence. There he was feasted for some days, with all the kindness of simple hospitality, and amused with the games and spectacles usual among the Americans upon occasions of mirth and festivity. But amid the security which this inspired, Ovando was meditating the destruction of his unsuspicious entertainer and her subjects; and the mean perfidy with which he executed this scheme, equalled his barbarity in forming it.

“Under colour of exhibiting to the Indians the parade of an European tournament, he advanced with his troops in battle array towards the house in which Anacoana and the chiefs who attended her were assembled. The infantry took possession of all the avenues which led to the village. The horsemen encompassed the house. These movements were the objects of admiration without any mixture of fear, until upon a signal which had been concerted, the Spaniards suddenly drew their swords and rushed upon the Indians, defenceless, and astonished at an act of treachery which exceeded the conception of undesigning men. In a moment, Anacoana was secured; all her attendants were seized and bound; fire was set to the house; and without examination or conviction, all these unhappy persons, the most illustrious in their country, were consumed in the flames. Anacoana was reserved for a more ignominious fate. She was carried in chains to St. Domingo, and after the formality of a trial before Spanish judges, was condemned upon the evidence of those very men who had betrayed her, to be publicly hanged!”

It is impossible for human treachery, ingratitude, and cruelty to go beyond that. All that we could relate of the deeds of the Spaniards in Hispaniola, would be but the continuance of this system of demon oppression. The people, totally confounded with this instance of unparalleled villany and butchery, sunk into the inanition of despair, and were regularly ground away by the unremitted action of excessive labour and brutal abuse. In fifteen years they sunk from one million to sixty thousand!—a consumption of upwards of sixty thousand souls a-year in one island! Calamities, instead of decreasing, only accumulated on their heads. Isabella of Spain died; and the greedy adventurers feeling that the only person at the head of the government that had any real sympathy with the sufferings of the natives was gone, gave themselves now boundless license. Ferdinand conferred grants of Indians on his courtiers, as the least expensive mode of getting rid of their importunities. Ovando, the governor, gave to his own friends and creatures similar gifts of living men, to be worked or crushed to death at their mercy—to perish of famine, or by the suicidal hand of despair. The avarice and rapacity of the adventurers became perfectly rabid. Nobles at home, farmed out these Indians given by Ferdinand to those who were going out to take part in the nefarious deeds—

They sate at home, and turned an easy wheel,

That set sharp racks at work to pinch and peel.

The small and almost nominal sum which had been allowed to the natives for their labour was now denied them; they were made absolute and unconditional slaves, and groaned and wasted away in mines and gold-dust streams, rapidly as those streams themselves flowed. The quantity of wealth drawn from their very vitals was enormous. Though Ovando had reduced the royal portion to one-fifth, yet it now amounted to above a hundred thousand pounds sterling annually—making the whole annual produce of gold in that island, five hundred thousand pounds sterling; and considering the embezzlement and waste that must take place amongst a tribe of adventurers on fire with the love of gold, and fearing neither God nor man in their pursuit of it, probably nearer a million. Enormous fortunes sprung up with mushroom rapidity; luxury and splendour broke out with proportionate violence at home, and legions of fresh tormentors flocked like harpies to this strange scene of misery and aggrandizement. To add to all this, the sugar-cane—that source of a thousand crimes and calamities—was introduced! It flourished; and like another upas-tree, breathed fresh destruction upon this doomed people. Plantations and sugar-works were established, and became general; and the last and faintest glimmer of hope for the islanders was extinguished! Gold might possibly become exhausted, worked as the mines were with such reckless voracity; but the cane would spring afresh from year to year, and the accursed juice would flow for ever.

The destruction of human life now went on with such velocity, that some means were necessarily devised to obtain a fresh supply of victims, or the Spaniards must quit the island, and seek to establish their inferno somewhere else. But having perfected themselves in that part of Satan’s business which consisted in tormenting, they now very characteristically assumed the other part of the fiend’s trade—that of alluring and inveigling the unsuspicious into their snares. Were this not a portion of unquestionable history, related by the Spanish historians themselves, it is so completely an assumption of the art of the “father of lies,” and betrays such a consciousness of the real nature of the business they were engaged in, that it would be looked upon as a happy burlesque of some waggish wit upon them. The fact however stands on the authority of Gomera, Herrera, Oviedo, and others. Ovando, the governor, seeing the rapidly wasting numbers of the natives, and hearing the complaints of the adventurers, began to cast about for a remedy, and at length this most felicitous scheme, worthy of Satan in the brightest moment of his existence, burst upon him.—There were the inhabitants of the Lucayo Isles, living in heathen idleness, and ignorant alike of Christian mines and Christian sugar-works. It was fitting that they should not be left in such criminal and damnable neglect any longer. He proposed, therefore, that these benighted creatures should be brought to the elysium of Hispaniola, and civilized in the gold mines, and instructed in the Christian religion in the sugar-mills! The idea was too happy, and too full of the milk of Christian kindness to be lost. At once, all the amiable gold-hunters clapped their hands with ecstasy at the prospect of so many new martyrs to the Christian faith; and Ferdinand, the benevolent and most Catholic Ferdinand, assented to it with the zeal of a royal nursing father of the church! A fleet was speedily fitted out for the benighted Lucayos; and the poor inhabitants there, wasting their existence in merely cultivating their maize, plucking their oranges, or fishing in their streams, just as their need or their inclination prompted them, were told by the Spaniards that they came from the heaven of their ancestors—isles of elysian beauty and fertility; where all pain and death were unknown, and where their friends and relations, living in heavenly felicity, needed only their society to render that felicity perfect!—that these beatified relatives had prayed them to hasten and bring them to their own scene of enjoyment—now waited impatiently for their arrival—and that they were ready to convey them thither, to the fields of heaven, in fact, without the black transit of death! The simple creatures, hearing a story which chimed in so exactly with their fondest belief, flocked on board with a blind credulity, not even to be exceeded by the Bubble-dupes of modern England, and soon found themselves in the grasp of fiends, and added to the remaining numbers of the Hispaniolan wretches in the mines and plantations. Forty thousand of these poor people were decoyed by this hellish artifice; and Satan himself, on witnessing this Spanish chef d’œuvre, must have felt ashamed of his inferiority of tact in his own profession![3]

But the climax yet remained to be put to the inflictions on these islanders:—and that was found in the pearl fishery of Cubagua. Columbus had discovered this little wretched island—Columbus had suggested and commenced the slavery of the Indians,—and it seemed as though a Columbus was to complete the fabric of their misery. Don Diego, Columbus’s son, had compelled an acknowledgment of his claims in the vice-royalty of the New World. He had enrolled himself by his marriage with the daughter of Don Ferdinand de Toledo, brother of the Duke of Alva, and a relative of the king, amongst the highest nobility of the land. Coming over to assume his hereditary station, he brought a new swarm of these proud and avaricious hidalgoes with him. He seized upon and distributed amongst them whatever portions of Indians remained unconsumed; and casting his eyes on this sand-bank of Cubagua, he established a colony of pearl-fishers upon it—where the Indians, and especially the wretched ones decoyed from the Lucayos, were compelled to find in diving the last extremity of their sufferings.

And was there no voice raised against these dreadful enormities? Yes—and with the success which always attends the attempt to defend the weak against the powerful and rapacious in distant colonies. The Dominican monks, much to their honour, inveighed, from time to time, against them; but the Franciscans, on the other hand, sanctioned them, on the old plea of policy and necessity. It was necessary that the Spaniards should compel the Indians to labour, or they must abandon their grand source of wealth. That was conclusive. Where are the people that carry their religion or their humanity beyond their interest? The thing was not to be expected. One man, indeed, roused by the oppressions of Diego Columbus, and his notorious successor, Albuquerque, a needy man, actually appointed by Ferdinand to the office of Distributor of the Indians!—one man, Bartholomew de Las Casas, dared to stand forward as their champion, and through years of unremitting toil to endeavour to arrest from the government some mitigation of their condition. Once or twice he appeared on the eve of success. At one time Ferdinand declared the Indians free subjects, and to be treated as such; but the furious opposition which arose in the colony on this decision, soon drew from the king another declaration, to wit, that the Pope’s bull gave a clear and satisfactory right to the Indians—that no man must trouble his conscience on account of their treatment, for the king and council would take all that on their own responsibility, and that the monks must cease to trouble the colony with their scruples. Yet the persevering Las Casas, by personal importunity at the court of Spain, painting the miseries and destruction of the Indians, now reduced from a million—not to sixty thousand as before,[4] but to fourteen thousand—again succeeded in obtaining a deputation of three monks of St. Jerome, as superintendents of all the colonies, empowered to relieve the Indians from their heavy yoke; and returned thither himself, in his official character of Protector of the Indians. But all his efforts ended in smoke. His coadjutors, on reaching Hispaniola, were speedily convinced by the violence and other persuasives of the colonies, that it was necessary that the Indians should be slaves; and the only resource of the benevolent Las Casas was to endeavour to found a new colony where he might employ the Indians as free men, and civilize and Christianize them. But this was as vain a project as the other. His countrymen were now prowling along every shore of the New World that they were acquainted with, kidnapping and carrying off the inhabitants as slaves, to supply the loss of those they had worked to death. The dreadful atrocities committed in these kidnapping cruizes, had made the name of the Spaniards terrible wherever they had been; and as the inhabitants could no longer anywhere be decoyed, he found the Spanish admiral on the point of laying waste with fire and sword, so as to seize on all its people in their flight, the very territory granted him in which to try his new experiment of humanity. The villany was accomplished; and amid the desolation of Cumana—the bulk of whose people were carried off as slaves to Hispaniola, and the rest having fled from their burning houses to the hills—the sanguine Las Casas still attempted to found his colony. It need not be said that it failed; the Protector of the Indians retired to a monastery, and the work of Indian misery went on unrestrained. To their oppression, a new and more lasting one had been added; from their destruction, indeed, had now sprung that sorest curse of both blacks and whites—that foulest stain on the Christian name—the Slave Trade. Charles V. of Spain, with that perfect freedom to do as they pleased with all heathen nations which the Papal church had given to Spain and Portugal, had granted a patent to one of his Flemish favourites, for the importation of negroes into America. This patent he had sold to the Genoese, and these worthy merchants were now busily employed in that traffic in men which is so congenial to Christian maxims, that it has from that time been the favourite pursuit of the Christian nations; has been defended by all the arguments of the most civilized assemblies in the world, and by the authority of Holy Writ, and is going on at this hour with undiminished horrors.

It has been charged on Las Casas, that with singular inconsistency he himself suggested this diabolical trade; but of that, and of this trade, we shall say more anon. We will now conclude this chapter with the brief announcement, that Diego Columbus had now conquered Cuba, by the agency of Diego Velasquez, one of his father’s captains, and thus added another grand field for the consumption of natives, and the importation of slaves. We are informed that the Cubaans were so unwarlike that no difficulty was found in overrunning this fine island, except from a chief called Hatuey, who had fled from Hispaniola, and knew enough of the Spaniards not to desire their further acquaintance. His obstinacy furnishes this characteristic anecdote on the authority of Las Casas. “He stood upon the defensive at their first landing, and endeavoured to drive them back to their ships. His feeble troops, however, were soon broken and dispersed; and he himself being taken prison, Velasquez, according to the barbarous maxim of the Spaniards, considered him as a slave who had taken arms against his master, and condemned him to the flames.”

When Hatuey was fastened to the stake, a Franciscan friar, labouring to convert him, promised him immediate admission into the joys of heaven, if he could embrace the Christian faith. “Are there any Spaniards,” says he, after some pause, “in that region of bliss which you describe?” “Yes,” replied the monk, “but such only as are worthy and good.” “The best of them,” returned the indignant Cazique, “have neither worth nor goodness! I will not go to a place where I may meet with that accursed race!”[5]

The torch was clapped to the pile—Hatuey perished—and the Spaniards added Cuba to the crown without the loss of a man on their own part.

CHAPTER VI.
THE SPANIARDS IN JAMAICA AND OTHER WEST INDIAN ISLANDS.

The story of one West India Island, is the story of all. Whether Spaniards, French, or English took possession, the slaughter and oppression of the natives followed. I shall, therefore, quit these fair islands for the present, with a mere passing glance at a few characteristic facts.

Herrera says that Jamaica was settled prosperously, because Juan de Esquival having brought the natives to submission without any effusion of blood, they laboured in planting cotton, and raising other commodities, which yielded great profit. But Esquival in a very few years died in his office, and was buried in Sevilla Nueva, a town which he had built and destined for the seat of government. There is a dark tradition connected with the destruction of this town, which would make us infer that the mildness of Esquival’s government was not imitated by his successors. The Spanish planters assert that the place was destroyed by a vast army of ants, but the popular tradition still triumphs over this tradition of the planters. It maintains, that the injured and oppressed natives rose in their despair and cut off every one of their tyrants, and laid the place in such utter and awful ruin that it never was rebuilt, but avoided as a spot of horror. The city must have been planned with great magnificence, and laid out in great extent, for Sloane, who visited it in 1688, could discover the traces or remains of a fort, a splendid cathedral and monastery, the one inhabited by Peter Martyr, who was abbot and chief missionary of the island. He found a pavement at two miles distance from the church, an indication of the extent of the place, and also many materials for grand arches and noble buildings that had never been erected. The ruins of this city were now overgrown with wood, and turned black with age. Sloane saw timber trees growing within the walls of the cathedral upwards of sixty feet in height; and General Venables in his dispatches to Cromwell, preserved in Thurlow’s State Papers, vol. iii., speaks of Seville as a town that had existed in times past.

Both ancient tradition, and recent discoveries, says Bryan Edwards, in his History of the West Indies, give too much room to believe that the work of destruction proceeded not less rapidly in this island, after Esquival’s death, than in Hispaniola; for to this day caves are frequently discovered in the mountains, wherein the ground is covered almost entirely with human bones; the miserable remains, without all doubt, of some of the unfortunate aborigines, who, immured in those recesses, were probably reduced to the sad alternative of perishing with hunger or bleeding under the swords of their merciless invaders. That these are the skeletons of Indians is sufficiently attested by the skulls, which are preternaturally compressed. “When, therefore,” says Edwards, “we are told of the fate of the Spanish inhabitants of Seville, it is impossible to feel any other emotion than an indignant wish that the story were better authenticated, and that heaven, in mercy, had permitted the poor Indians in the same moment to have extirpated their oppressors altogether! But unhappily this faint glimmering of returning light to the wretched natives, was soon lost in everlasting darkness, since it pleased the Almighty, for reasons inscrutable to finite wisdom, to permit the total destruction of this devoted people; who, to the number of 60,000, on the most moderate estimate, were at length wholly cut off and exterminated by the Spaniards—not a single descendant of either sex being alive when the English took the island in 1655, nor I believe for a century before.”

The French historian, Du Tertre, informs us that his countrymen made a lawful purchase of the island of Grenada from the natives for some glass beads, knives and hatchets, and a couple of bottles of brandy for the chief himself. The nature of the bargain may be pretty well understood by the introduction of the brandy for the chief, and by the general massacre which followed, when Du Tertre himself informs us that Du Parquet, the very general who made this bargain, gave orders for extirpating the natives altogether, which was done with circumstances of the most savage barbarity, even to the women and children. The same historian assures us that St. Christopher’s, the principal of the Caribbee Isles, was won by the joint exertions of Thomas Warner, an Englishman, and D’Esnambuc, the captain of a French privateer, who both seem to have entered with hearty good-will into the business of massacre and extermination; by which means, and by excessive labour, the total aboriginal population of the West Indian islands were speedily reduced from six millions, at which Las Casas estimated them, to nothing.

Let any one read the following account from Herrera and Peter Martyr, of the manner in which the Spaniards were received in these islands:—“When any of the Spaniards came near to a village, the most ancient and venerable of the Indians, or the cazique himself, if present, came out to meet them, and gently conducting them into their habitations, seated them on stools of ebony curiously ornamented. These benches seemed to be seats of honour reserved for their guests, for the Indians threw themselves on the ground, and kissing the hands and feet of the Spaniards, offered them fruits and the choicest of their viands, entreating them to prolong their stay with such solicitude and reverence as demonstrated that they considered them as beings of a superior nature, whose presence consecrated their dwellings, and brought a blessing with it. One old man, a native of Cuba, approaching Columbus with great reverence, and presenting a basket of fruit, thus addressed him:—‘Whether you are divinities or mortal men we know not. You come into these countries with a force, against which, were we inclined to resist it, resistance would be a folly. We are all therefore at your mercy: but if you are men subject to mortality like ourselves, you cannot be unapprised that after this life there is another, wherein a very different portion is allotted to good and bad men. If, therefore, you expect to die, and believe with us that every one is to be rewarded in a future state according to his conduct in the present, you will do no hurt to those who do none to you.’”

Let the reader also, after listening to these exalted sentiments addressed by a savage, as we are pleased to term him, to a Christian, a term likewise used with as little propriety, read this account of the reception of Bartholomew Columbus by Behechio, a powerful cazique of Hispaniola. “As they approached the king’s dwelling, they were met by his wives to the number of thirty, carrying branches of the palm-tree in their hands, who first saluted the Spaniards with a solemn dance, accompanied with a song. These matrons were succeeded by a train of virgins, distinguished as such by their appearance; the former wearing aprons of cotton cloth, while the latter were arrayed only in the innocence of pure nature. Their hair was tied simply with a fillet over their foreheads, or suffered to flow gracefully on their shoulders and bosoms. Their limbs were finely proportioned, and their complexions though brown, were smooth, shining and lovely. The Spaniards were struck with admiration, believing that they beheld the dryads of the woods, and the nymphs of the fountains realizing ancient fable. The branches which they bore in their hands, they now delivered with lowly obeisance to the lieutenant, who, entering the palace, found a plentiful, and according to the Indian mode of living, a splendid repast already provided. As night approached, the Spaniards were conducted to separate cottages, wherein each was accommodated with a cotton hammock, and the next morning they were again entertained with dancing and singing. This was followed by matches of wrestling and running for prizes; after which two great bodies of armed Indians suddenly appeared, and a mock engagement ensued, exhibiting their modes of warfare with the Charaibes. For three days were the Spaniards thus royally entertained, and on the fourth the affectionate Indians regretted their departure.”

What beautiful pictures of a primitive age! what a more than realization of the age of gold! and what a dismal fall to that actual age of gold which was coming upon them! To turn from these delightful scenes to the massacres and oppressions of millions of these gentle and kind people, and then to the groans of millions of wretched Africans, which through three long centuries have succeeded them, is one of the most melancholy and amazing things in the criminal history of the earth; nor can we wonder at the feelings with which Bryan Edwards reviews this awful subject:—“All the murders and desolations of the most pitiless tyrants that ever diverted themselves with the pangs and convulsions of their fellow-creatures, fall infinitely short of the bloody enormities committed by the Spanish nation in the conquest of the New World—a conquest, on a low estimate, effected by the murder of ten millions of the species! After reading these accounts, who can help forming an indignant wish that the hand of Heaven, by some miraculous interposition, had swept these European tyrants from the face of the earth, who like so many beasts of prey, roamed round the world only to desolate and destroy; and more remorseless than the fiercest savage, thirsted for human blood without having the impulse of natural appetite to plead in their defence!”

CHAPTER VII.
THE SPANIARDS IN MEXICO.

And he knew their desolate palaces, and he laid waste their cities.

Ezekiel xix. 7.

How Cortez conquered,—Montezuma fell.—Montgomery.

Much of a Southern Sea they spake,

And of that glorious city won,

Near the setting of the sun,

Throned in a silver lake:

Of seven kings in chains of gold,

And deeds of death by tongue untold,—

Deeds such as breathed in secret there,

Had shaken the confession-chair!—Rogers.

Six and twenty years had now elapsed since Columbus arrived in the New World. During this period the Spaniards had not merely committed the crimes we have been detailing, but they had considerably extended their discoveries. Columbus, who first discovered the West Indian islands, was the first also to discover the mainland of America. He reached the mouth of the Orinoco; traversed the coasts of Paria and Cumana; Yanez Pinzon, steering southward, had crossed the line to the river Amazon; the Portuguese under Alvarez Cabral had by mere accident made the coast of Brazil; Bastidas and De la Cosa had discovered the coast of Tierra Firmè; in his fourth voyage, Columbus had reached Porto Bello in Panama; Pinzon and De Solis discovered Yucatan, and in a second voyage extended their route southward beyond the Rio de la Plata; Ponce de Leon had discovered Florida; and Balboa in Darien had discovered the South Sea. These were grand steps in discovery towards those mighty kingdoms that were soon to burst upon them. Cordova discovered the mouth of the river Potonchan, beyond Campeachy; and finally, Grijalva ranged along the whole coast of Mexico from Tabasco to the river Panuco. Of their transactions on these coasts during their progress in discovery, nothing further need be said than that they were characterized by their usual indifference to the rights and feelings of the natives, and that, finding them for the most part of a more warlike disposition, several of these commanders had suffered severely from them, and some of them lost their lives.

But a strange and astounding epoch was now at hand. The names of Cortez and Pizarro, Mexico and Peru, are become sounds familiar to all ears—linked together as in a spell of wild wonder, and stand as the very embodiment of all that is marvellous, dazzling, and romantic in history. Here were vast empires, suddenly starting from the veil of ages into the presence of the European world, with the glitter of a golden opulence beyond the very extravagance of Arabian fable; populous as they were affluent; with a new and peculiar civilization; with arts and a literature unborrowed of other realms, and unlike those of any other. Here were those fairy and most interesting kingdoms as suddenly assaulted and subdued by two daring adventurers with a mere handful of followers; and as suddenly destroyed! Their young civilization, their fair and growing fabric of policy, ruthlessly dashed down and utterly annihilated; their princes murdered in cold blood; their wealth dissipated like a morning dream; and their swarming people crushed into slaves, or swept from their cities and their fair fields, as a harvest is swept away by the sickle!

It is difficult, amid the intoxication of the imagination on contemplating such a spectacle,—for there is nothing like it in the history of the whole world—it is difficult, dazzled by military triumph, and seduced by the old sophisms of glory and adventure, to bring the mind steadily to contemplate the real nature and consequences of these events. The names of Cortez and Pizarro, indeed, through all the splendour of that renown with which the acclamations of their interested cotemporaries, and the false morality of their historians have surrounded them, still retain the gloom and terror of their cruelties. But this is derived rather from particular acts of outrageous atrocity, than from a just estimate of the total villany and unrighteous nature of their entire undertakings. Their entrance, assault, and subduction of the kingdoms of Mexico and Peru, were from first to last, in limine et in termino, the acts of daring robbers, on flame with the thirst of gold, and of a spurious and fanatical renown,—setting at defiance every sentiment of justice, mercy and right, and bound by no scruples of honour or conscience, in the pursuit of their object. It is not to be denied that in the prosecution of their schemes, they displayed the most chivalrous courage, and Cortez the most consummate address,—but these are the attributes of the arch-fiend himself—boundless ambition, gigantic talent, the most matchless and successful address without one feeling of pity, or one sentiment of goodness! These surely are not the qualities for which Christians ought to applaud such men as Cortez and Pizarro! They are these false and absurd notions, derived from the spirit of gentile antiquity, that have so long mocked the progress of Christianity, and held civilization in abeyance. It is to these old sophisms that we owe all the political evils under which we groan, and under which we have made all nations that have felt our power groan too. To every truly enlightened and Christian philosopher can there be a more melancholy subject of contemplation, than these romantic empires thus barbarously destroyed by an irruption of worse than Goths and Vandals? But that melancholy must be tenfold augmented, when we reflect what would have been the fate of these realms if Europe had been not nominally, but really Christianized at the moment of their discovery. If it had learned that the “peace on earth and good-will towards men,” with which the children of heaven heralded the gospel into the world, was not a mere flourish of rhetoric,—not a mere phrase of eastern poetry, “beautiful exceedingly;” but actually the promulgation of the grandest and most pregnant axiom in social philosophy, that had ever been, or should be made known to mankind, or that it was possible for heaven itself from the infinitude of its blessedness to send down to it. That in it lay concentrated the perfection of civil policy, the beauty of social life, the harmony of nations, and the prosperity of every mercantile adventure. That it was the triumphant basis, on which arts and sciences, literature and poetry, should raise their proudest fabrics, and society from its general adoption, date its genuine civilization and a new era of glory and enjoyment. Suppose that to have been the mind and feeling of Europe at that time—and it is merely to suppose it to be what it pretended to be—in possession of Christianity—what would have been the simple consequence? To the wonder that thrilled through Europe at the tidings of such discovered states, an admiration as lively would have succeeded. Vast kingdoms in the heart of the new world, with cities and cultivated fields; with temples and palaces; monarchs of great state and splendour; vessels of silver and gold in gorgeous abundance; municipal police; national couriers; and hieroglyphic writing, and records of their own invention! Why, what interesting intelligence to every lover of philosophy, of literature, and of the study of human nature! Genuine intelligence, and enlightened curiosity would have flocked thither to look and admire; genuine philanthropy, to give fresh strength and guidance to this germinating civilization,—and Christian spirits would have glowed with delight at the thought of shewing, in the elevated virtues, the justice, generosity and magnanimity derived by them from their faith, the benefits which it could confer on these growing states.

But to have expected anything of this kind from the Spaniards, would have been the height of folly. They had no more notion of what Christianity is, than the Great Mogul had. They knew no more than what Rome chose to tell them. They were not distinguished by one Christian virtue,—for they had been instructed in none. They were not more barbarous to the Americans, than they were faithless, jealous, malignant, and quarrelsome amongst each other. Disorderly and insubordinate as soldiers, nothing but the terrors of their destructive arms, and the fatal paralysis of mind which singular prophesies had cast on the Americans, could have prevented them from being speedily swept away in the midst of their riot and contention. The idea which the Spaniards had of Christianity, is best seen in the form of proclamation which Ojeda made to the inhabitants of Tierra Firmè, and which became the Spanish model in all future usurpations of the kind. After stating that the popes, as the successors of St. Peter, were the possessors of the world, it thus went on: “One of these pontiffs, as lord of the world, hath made a grant of these islands, and of Tierra Firmè of the ocean sea, to the Catholic kings of Castile, Don Ferdinand and Donna Isabella of glorious memory, and their successors, our sovereigns, with all they contain, as is more fully expressed in certain deeds passed upon that occasion, which you may see if you desire it, (Indians, who neither knew Latin, Spanish, nor the art of reading!). Thus his majesty is king and lord of these islands, and of the continent, in virtue of this donation; and as king and lord aforesaid, most of the islands to which his title hath been notified, have recognised his majesty, and now yield obedience and subjection to him as their lord, voluntarily and without resistance! and instantly, as soon as they received information (from the sword and musket!) they obeyed the religious men sent by the king to preach to them, and to instruct them in our holy faith!... You are bound and obliged (true enough!) to act in the same manner.... If you do this, you act well, and perform that to which you are bound and obliged; his majesty, and I in his name, will receive you with love and kindness, and will leave you and your children free and exempt from servitude, and in the enjoyment of all you possess, in the same manner as the inhabitants of the islands! (ay, love and kindness, such as they had shewn to the islanders. Satan’s genuine glozing—“lies like truth, and yet most truly lies.”) Besides this, his majesty will bestow upon you many privileges, exemptions, and rewards! (Ay, such as they had bestowed on the islanders—but here begins the simple truth.) But if you will not comply, or maliciously delay to obey my injunctions, then, with the help of God, I will enter your country by force; I will carry on war against you with the utmost violence; I will subject you to the yoke of the church and the king; I will take your wives and children, and will make slaves of them, and sell or dispose of them according to his majesty’s pleasure; I will seize your goods, and do all the mischief in my power to you as rebellious subjects, who will not acknowledge or submit to their lawful sovereign. And I protest that all the bloodshed and calamities which shall follow are to be imputed to you, and not to his majesty, or to me, or to the gentlemen who serve under me, etc.”—Herrera.

Here then we have the romance stripped away from such ruffians as Cortez and Pizarro. We have here the very warrant under which they acted—a tissue of such most impudent fictions, and vindictive truths, as could only issue from that great office of delusion and oppression which corrupted all Europe with its abominable doctrine. The last sentence, however, betrays the inward feeling and consciousness of those who used it, that blood-guiltiness was not perfectly removed to their satisfaction, and is a miserable attempt at further self-delusion. These apostles of the sword, before whose proclamation our sarcasms against Mahomet and his sword-creed, fall to the ground, knew only too well that all their talk of love and kindness to the islanders was the grossest falsehood. The Pope’s bull could not blind them to that; and though the misery they inflicted is past, Europe still needs the warning of their deeds, to open its eyes to the nature of much of its own morality.

Cortez commenced his career against Mexico with breach of faith to his employer. It was villain using villain, and with the ordinary results. Velasquez, the governor of Cuba, who had sent out Grijalva, roused by the description of the new and beautiful country which he had coasted, now sought for a man, so humble in his pretensions and so destitute of alliance, that he might trust him with a fleet and force for the acquisition of it. Such a man he believed he had found in Hernando Cortez,—a man, like many other men in Spain, of noble blood, but very ignoble fortune—poor, proud, so hot and overbearing in his disposition and so dissipated in his habits, that his father was glad to send him out as an adventurer. Ovando, governor of Hispaniola, the notorious betrayer of Anacoana, and murderer of her chiefs, was his relation, and received him with open arms as a fit instrument in such work as he had to do. Cortez attended Velasquez in that expedition to Cuba in which the cazique Hatuey was burnt at the stake for his resistance to their invasion, and died bearing that memorable testimony to Spanish Christianity. Velasquez, who had acted the traitor towards Diego Columbus, whose deputy in the government of Cuba he was, had however scarcely sent out Cortez, when he conceived a suspicion that he would show no better faith than he himself had done. Scarcely had Cortez sailed for Trinidad, when Velasquez sent instructions after him, to deprive him of his commission. Cortez eluded this by hastening to the Havanna, where an express also to arrest him was forwarded. Cortez, fully justified the suspicions of Velasquez; for, from the moment that he found himself at the head of a fleet, he abandoned every idea of acknowledging the authority which had put it into his command. He boldly avowed his intentions to his fellow adventurers, and as their views, like his own, were plunder and dominion, he received their applause and their vows of adherence. Thus supported in his schemes of ambition, he set sail for the Mexican coast, with eleven vessels of various burdens and characters. His own, or admiral’s ship, was of a hundred tons, three of seventy or eighty tons, and the others were open boats. He carried with him six hundred and seventeen men; amongst whom were to be found only thirteen muskets, thirty-two cross-bows, sixteen horses, ten small field-pieces, and four falconets. Behold Cortez and his comrades thus on their way to conquer the great kingdom of Mexico, bearing on their great banner the figure of a large cross, and this inscription,—Let us follow the Cross, for under this sign we shall conquer!

“So powerfully,” says Robertson,—to whose curious remarks I shall occasionally draw the attention of my readers,—“were Cortez and his followers animated with both these passions (religion and avarice) that no less eager to plunder the opulent country whither they were bound, than zealous to propagate the Christian faith (!) among its inhabitants, they set out, not with the solicitude natural to men going upon dangerous services, but with that confidence which arises from security of success, and certainty of the divine protection.” No doubt they believed the cross which they followed was the cross of Christ, but every one now will be quite as well satisfied that it was the cross of one of the two thieves, a most fitting ensign for such an expedition. Cortez, indeed, was a fiery zealot, and frequently endangered the success of his enterprise by his assault on the gods and temples of the natives, just as Mahomet or Omar would have done; for there was not a pin to choose between the faith in which he had been educated, and that of the prophet of Mecca. One followed the cross, the other the crescent, but their faith alike was—the sword.[6]

After touching at different spots, to remind the natives of the Christian faith by “routing them with great slaughter,” and carrying off provisions, cotton garments, gold, and twenty female slaves, one of whom was the celebrated woman, called by the Spaniards Donna Marina, who rendered them such services as interpreter, they entered, on the 2nd of April 1519, the harbour of St. Juan de Ulua. Here we are told by the Spanish historians, that the natives came on board in the most friendly and unsuspicious manner. Two of them were officers from the local government, sent to inquire what was the object of Cortez in coming thither, and offering any assistance that might be necessary to enable him to proceed in his voyage. Cortez assured them that he came with the most friendly intentions, to seek an interview with the king, of great importance to the welfare of their country; and next morning, in proof of the sincerity and friendliness of his views, landed his troops and ammunition, and began a fortification. This brought Teutile and Pilpatoe, as Robertson calls them, or Teuhtlile and Cuitlalpita, according to Clavigero, himself a Mexican, the local governors, into the camp with a numerous attendance. Montezuma, the emperor, had been alarmed, as well he might, by the former appearance of the Spaniards on his coast, and these officers urged Cortez to take his departure. He persisted, however, that he must see Montezuma, being come as an ambassador from the king of Spain to him, and charged with communications that could be opened to no one else—falsehoods worthy of a robber, for he not only had no commission from the king of Spain, but was in open rebellion to the Spanish government at the moment. To induce him to depart, these simple people resorted to the same unlucky policy as our ancestors the Saxons did with the Danes, and presented him with a present of ten loads of fine cotton cloth, plumes of various colours, and articles in gold and silver of rich and curious workmanship, besides a quantity of provisions. These not only inflamed his cupidity to the utmost, but another circumstance served to convince him that he had stumbled upon a different country to what any of his countrymen had yet found in America; and stimulated equally his ambition to conquer it. He observed painters at work in the train of Teuhtlile and Pitalpatoe,[7] sketching on cotton cloth, himself, his men, his horses, ships and artillery. To give more effect to these drawings, he sounded his trumpets, threw his army into battle array, put it through a variety of striking military movements, and tore up the neighbouring woods with the discharge of his cannon. The Mexicans, struck with terror and admiration at these exhibitions, dispatched speedy information of all these particulars by the couriers, and in seven days received the answer of the emperor, though his capital was one hundred and eighty miles off, that Cortez must instantly depart the country. But had he had the slightest intention of the kind, the unlucky courtesy of the emperor would have changed his resolve. To render his command the more palatable, he sent an ambassador of rank, with a hundred men of burden carrying presents, and they again poured out before Cortez such a flood of treasures, as astonished him and his greedy followers.

There were boxes full of pearls and precious stones; gold in its native state, and gold wrought into the richest trinkets; two wheels, the one of gold, the other of silver. That of gold, representing the Mexican century, had the image of the sun engraved in the middle, round which were different figures in bass-relief. Bernal Diaz says the circumference was thirty palms of Toledo, and the value of it ten thousand sequins. The one of silver, in which the Mexican year was represented, was still larger, with a moon in the middle, surrounded also with figures in bass-relief.[8] Thirty loads or bales of cotton cloths of the most exquisite fineness, and pictures in feather-work of surprising brilliancy and art. These were all opened out on mats in the most tempting manner; and besides these, was a vizor, which Cortez had desired at the last interview might be filled with gold dust, telling the officer most truly—that “the Spaniards had a disease of the heart which could only be cured by gold.”

Cortez took the presents, and coolly assured the ambassador that he should not quit the country till he had seen the emperor. A third message, accompanied by a third and more peremptory order for his departure, producing no greater effect, the officers left the camp in displeasure, and Cortez prepared to march into the country.

But before he commenced his expedition there were a few measures to be taken. He was a traitor to the governor of Cuba who had sent him out; and the governor had still adherents in the army, who objected to what appeared to them this rash enterprise against so powerful and populous an empire. It was necessary to silence these people, and his mode of doing this reminds one of the solemn artifices of Oliver Cromwell. He held out to the soldiers such prospects of booty as secured them to his interests, and on the discontented remonstrating with him, he appeared to fall in with their views, and gave instant orders for the return home, at the same time sending his emissaries amongst the soldiers to exasperate them against the return. When the order for re-embarkation the next day was therefore issued, the whole army seemed in a fury against it, and Cortez feigning to have believed the order for the return was their own desire, now declared that he was ready to lead them forwards. But this was not sufficient. Knowing that he was a traitor to the trust reposed in him, he resorted to one of those grave farces by which usurpers often attempt to give an appearance of title to their power, though they know well enough the emptiness of it. He laid out the plan of a town,—named it Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz, or the Rich Town of the True Cross, established magistrates and a municipal council, and then appeared before them and resigned his command into their hands, having taken good care that the magistrates were so much his creatures as instantly to re-invest him with it. Assuming now this command, not as flowing from the governor of Cuba, but from the constituted authorities under the crown, and therefore from the crown itself, he immediately seized on the officers who had murmured at his breach of faith, clapped them in chains, and sent them aboard the fleet! So far so good; but the reflection still came, how would all these deeds sound at home? and Cortez therefore took the only means that could secure him in that quarter. He collected all the gold that could be procured by any means, and sent it by the hand of two of the mock magistrates of Vera Cruz to the King of Spain, giving a plausible colouring to their assumption of power independent of Cuba, and soliciting a confirmation of it.

These were the measures of an adventurer not more daring than artful; yet a single circumstance shewed him still his insecurity. At the moment that his magistrates were about to sail for Spain, he discovered that a conspiracy was in existence to seize one of the vessels in the harbour, and to sail to Cuba, and give the alarm to Velasquez. This startling fact determined him to put the coup de grace to his measures,—to destroy his fleet, and let his followers see that there was no longer any resource but to follow him boldly in his attack upon Mexico, or perish. He had the address to bring his men to commit this act themselves: they dragged the vessels ashore—stripped them of sails, rigging, iron-work—whatever might be useful, and then broke them up. A more daring and politic action is not upon record. Cortez, in fact, had nothing to hope from his fleet, and had cast his life and fortune on the conquest of this great and wealthy realm.

When we contemplate him at this juncture, we are however not more struck with his daring and determined policy, than as Christians we are indignant at the real nature of the act that he meditated. This was no other than to ravage this young and growing empire, to plunder it of its gold, and consume its millions of inhabitants in mines and plantations, by the sword and by the lash, as his countrymen had consumed the wealth and the people of the islands,—and all this on pretence of planting the Cross! It was the cool speculation of a daring robber, hardened by a false faith, and by witnessing deeds of blood and outrage, to a total insensibility to every feeling but the diseased overgrowth of selfish ambition.

The attempt to subdue a kingdom stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean in a breadth of above five hundred leagues from east to west, and of upwards of two hundred from north to south—a kingdom populous, fertile, and of a warlike reputation; and that with a force of not seven hundred men, appears at first view an act of madness: but Cortez was too well acquainted with American warfare to know that it was not impracticable. In the first place, he knew that the weapons of the natives had very little effect upon the quilted cotton dress which the Spaniards adopted on these expeditions, and that by the terror of their fire-arms and their union of movement, they could in almost all cases and situations keep them at that distance which took away even that little effect, while it left them open to the full play of the European missives. He knew the terror that the natives had of the Spanish horses, dogs, and artillery; and moreover he had speedily discovered, through the means of one of the women slaves brought from Darien who proved to be a Mexican by birth, that Mexico was a kingdom newly cemented by the arms of Montezuma and his immediate predecessors, and therefore full of provinces still smarting under the sense of their subjugation, and ready to seize on an occasion of revenge. In fact, he had speedily practical evidence of this, for the cazique of Chempoalla, a neighbouring town, sent an embassy to him soliciting his friendship, and offering to join him in his designs against Montezuma, whom he represented as a haughty and exacting tyrant to the provinces. Cortez of course caught gladly at this alliance, and removing his settlement, planted it at Quiabislan, near Chempoalla. The hint was given him of the real condition of the empire, and he was too crafty to neglect it. He immediately gave himself out as the champion of the aggrieved and oppressed, come to redress all their wrongs, and restore them to their liberties!

But there was another and most singular cause which gave Cortez a fair prospect of success. Throughout the American kingdoms ancient prophecies prevailed,—that a new race was to come in, and seize upon the reins of power, and before it the American tribes were to quail and give place. In the islands, in Mexico, in Peru,—far and wide,—this mysterious tradition prevailed. Everywhere these terrible people were expected to come from towards the rising of the sun: they were to be completely clad, and to lay waste every country before them;—circumstances so entirely verified in the Spaniards, that the spirit of the American natives died within them at the rumour of their approach, as the natives of Canaan did at that of the Israelites coming with the irresistible power and the awful miracles of God. For ages these prophecies had weighed on the public mind, and had been sung with loud lamentations at their solemn festivals. Cazziva, a great cazique, declared that in a supernatural interview with one of the Zemi, this terrible event had been revealed to him. “The demons which they worshipped,” says Acosta, “in this instance, told them true.” Montezuma therefore, though naturally haughty, warlike, and commanding, on so appalling an event as the fulfilment of these ancient prophecies, lost his courage, his decision, his very power of mind, and exhibited nothing but the most utter vacillation and weakness, while Cortez was advancing towards his capital in defiance of his orders.

Having strengthened himself by the alliance of the Chempoallans, and others of the Totonacas, and chastised the Tlascalans, a fierce people who gave no credit to his pretences, he advanced to Cholula, a place of great importance, consisting, according to Cortez’s account, of forty thousand houses and many populous suburban villages. Montezuma had now consented to his reception, and he was received in this city by his orders. It was a sacred city,—“the Rome of Anahuac or Mexico,” says Clavigero, full of temples, and visited by hosts of pilgrims. Here, suspecting treachery, he determined to strike terror into both the emperor and the people. “For this purpose,” says Robertson, “the Spaniards and Zempoallans were drawn up in a large court which had been allotted for their quarters near the centre of the town. The Tlascalans had orders to advance; the magistrates, and several of the chief citizens, were sent for, under various pretences, and seized. On a signal given, the troops rushed out, and fell upon the multitude destitute of leaders, and so much astonished, that the weapons dropping from their hands, they stood motionless and incapable of defence. While the Spaniards pressed them in front, the Tlascalans attacked them in the rear. The streets were filled with bloodshed and death; the temples, which afforded a retreat to the priests and some of the leading men, were set on fire, and they perished in the flames. This scene of horror continued two days, during which the wretched inhabitants suffered all that the destructive rage of the Spaniards, or the implacable revenge of their Indian allies, could inflict. At length the carnage ceased, after the slaughter of six thousand Cholulans, without the loss of a single Spaniard! Cortez then released the magistrates, and reproaching them bitterly for their intended treachery, declared that as justice was now appeased he forgave the offence, but required them to recall the citizens who had fled, and reestablish order in the town. Such was the ascendant which the Spaniards had acquired over this superstitious race of men, and so deeply were they impressed with an opinion of their superior discernment, as well as power, that in obedience to this command, the city was in a few days again filled with people, who amidst the ruins of their sacred buildings, yielded respectful service to men whose hands were stained with the blood of their relatives and fellow-citizens.

“From Cholula,” adds Robertson, “Cortez marched directly towards Mexico, which was only twenty leagues distant:”—and that is all the remark that he makes on this brutal butchery of an innocent people, by a man on his march to plant the cross! A Christian historian sees only in this most savage and infernal action, a piece of necessary policy—so obtuse become the perceptions of men through the ordinary principles of historic judgment. But the Christian mind asks what business Cortez had there at all? The people were meditating his destruction? True;—and it was natural and national that they should get rid of so audacious and lawless an enemy, who entered their country with the intentions of a robber, set at defiance the commands of their king, and stirred up rebellion at every step he took. The Mexicans would have been less than men if they had not resolved to cut him off. What right had he there? What right to disturb the tranquillity of their country, and shed the blood of its people? These are questions that cannot be answered on any Christian principles, or on any principles but those of the bandit and the murderer. Six thousand people butchered in cold blood—two days employed in hewing down trembling wretches, too fearful to even raise a single weapon against the murderers! Heavens! are these the deeds that we admire as heroic and as breathing of romance? Yet, says Clavigero, “He ordered the great temple to be cleaned from the gore of his murdered victims; and raised there the standard of the cross; after giving the Cholulans, as he did all the other people among whom he stopped,” some idea of the Christian religion!!! What idea had the Abbé Don Francesco Saverio Clavigero of Christianity himself?

But Cortez had plunged headlong into the enterprise—he had set his life and that of his followers at stake on the conquest of Mexico, and there was no action, however desperate, that he was not prepared to commit. And sure enough his hands became well filled with treachery and blood. It is not my business to dwell particularly upon these atrocities, but merely to recall the memory of them; yet it may be as well to give, in the words of Robertson, the manner in which the Spaniards were received into the capital, because it contrasts strongly with the manner in which the Christians behaved in this same city, and to this same monarch.

“In descending from the mountains of Chalco,[9] across which the road lay, the vast plain of Mexico opened gradually to their view. When they first beheld this prospect, one of the most striking and beautiful on the face of the earth—when they observed fertile and cultivated fields stretching further than the eye could reach—when they saw a lake resembling the sea in extent, encompassed with large towns; and discovered the capital city, rising upon an island in the middle, adorned with its temples and turrets—the scene so far exceeded their imagination, that some believed the fanciful dreams of romance were realized, and that its enchanted palaces and gilded domes were presented to their sight. Others could hardly persuade themselves that this wonderful spectacle was anything more than a dream. As they advanced, their doubts were removed; but their amazement increased. They were now fully satisfied that the country was rich beyond any conception which they had formed of it, and flattered themselves that at length they should obtain an ample recompense for all their services and sufferings.

“When they drew near the city, about a thousand persons, who appeared to be of distinction, came forth to meet them, adorned with plumes, and clad in mantles of fine cotton. Each of these, in his order, passed by Cortez, and saluted him according to the mode deemed most respectful and submissive in their country. They announced the approach of Montezuma himself, and soon after his harbingers came in sight. There appeared first, two hundred persons in an uniform dress, with large plumes of feathers alike in fashion, marching two and two in deep silence, barefooted, with their eyes fixed on the ground. These were followed by a company of higher rank, in their most showy apparel; in the midst of whom was Montezuma, in a chair or litter, richly ornamented with gold and feathers of various colours. Four of his principal favourites carried him on their shoulders; others supported a canopy of curious workmanship over his head. Before him marched three officers with rods of gold in their hands, which they lifted up on high at certain intervals, and at that signal all the people bowed their heads, and hid their faces, as unworthy to look on so great a monarch. When he drew near, Cortez dismounted, advancing towards him with officious haste, and in a respectful posture. At the same time Montezuma alighted from his chair, and leaning on the arms of two of his near relatives, approached with a slow and stately pace, his attendants covering the street with cotton cloths that he might not touch the ground. Cortez accosted him with profound reverence after the European fashion. He returned the salutation according to the mode of his country, by touching the earth with his hand, and then kissing it. This ceremony, the customary expression of veneration from inferiors towards those who were above them in rank, appeared such amazing condescension in a proud monarch, who scarcely deigned to consider the rest of mankind as of the same species with himself, that all his subjects firmly believed those persons before whom he humbled himself in this manner, to be something more than human. Accordingly, as they marched through the crowd, the Spaniards frequently, and with much satisfaction, heard themselves denominated Teules, or divinities. Montezuma conducted Cortez to the quarter which he had prepared for his reception, and immediately took leave of him, with a politeness not unworthy of a court more refined. ‘You are now,’ says he, ‘with your brothers in your own house; refresh yourselves after your fatigue; and be happy till I return.’”

The Spanish historians give some picturesque particulars of this interview, which Robertson has not copied. The dress of Montezuma is thus described: As he rode in his litter, a parasol of green feathers embroidered with fancy-work of gold was held over him. He wore hanging from his shoulders a mantle adorned with the richest jewels of gold and precious stones; on his head a thin crown of the same metal; and upon his feet shoes of gold, tied with strings of leather worked with gold and gems. The persons on whom he leaned, were the king of Tezcuco and the lord of Iztapalapan. Cortez put on Montezuma’s neck a thin cord of gold strung with glass beads, and would have embraced him, but was prevented by the two lords on whom the king leaned. In return for this paltry necklace, Montezuma gave Cortez two of beautiful mother-of-pearl, from which hung some large cray-fish of gold in imitation of nature.

Here, then, to their own wonder and admiration, were this handful of Spanish adventurers in the “glorious city,”

Near the setting of the sun,

Throned in a silver lake.

Generous minds would have rejoiced in the glory of such a discovery, and have exulted in the mutual benefits to be derived from an honourable intercourse between their own country and this new and beautiful one,—but Cortez and his men were merely gazing on the novel splendour of this interesting city with the greedy eyes of robbers, and thinking how they might best seize upon its power, and clutch its wealth. Who is not familiar with their rapid career of audacious villany, in this fairy capital? Scarcely were they received as guests,[10] when they seized on the monarch, and that at the very moment that he gave to Cortez his own daughter, and heaped on him other favours—and compelled him, under menaces of instantly stabbing him to the heart, to quit his palace, and take up his residence in their own quarters. The astonished and distressed king, now a puppet in their hands, was made to command every thing which they desired to be done; and they were by no means scrupulous in their exercise of this power, knowing that the people looked on the person of the monarch as sacred, and would not for a moment refuse to obey his least word, though in the hands of his enemies. The very first thing which they required him to do, was to order to be delivered up to them Qualpopoca, one of his generals, who had been employed in quelling one of the insurrections that the Spaniards had raised near Villa Rica, and who being attacked by the Spanish officer Escalante, left in command there, had killed him, with seven of his men, and taken one other alive. The order was obeyed, and the brave general, his son, and five of his principal officers, were burnt alive by these Christian heroes! To add to the cruelty and indignity of the deed, Montezuma himself was put into irons during the transaction, accompanied by threats of a darker kind.

The simplicity of Robertson’s remarks on this affair are singular: “In these transactions, as represented by the Spanish historians, we search in vain for the qualities which distinguish other parts of Cortez’s conduct.” What qualities? “To usurp a jurisdiction which could not belong to a stranger, who assumed no higher character than that of an ambassador from a foreign prince, and under colour of it, to inflict a capital punishment on men whose conduct entitled them to esteem, appears an act of barbarous cruelty.”

Why, the whole of Cortez’s conduct, from the moment that he entered with arms the kingdom of Mexico, was a usurpation that “could not belong to a stranger assuming merely the title of an ambassador.” What ambassador comes with armed troops; or when the monarch orders him to quit his realm, marches further into it; or foments rebellion as he goes along; or massacres the inhabitants by wholesale? Was the butchery of six thousand people at Cholula, no act of barbarous cruelty?

Well, by what Robertson complacently terms “the fortunate temerity in seizing Montezuma,” the Spaniards had suddenly usurped the sovereign power, and they did not pause here. They sent out some of their number to survey the whole kingdom; to spy out its wealth, and pitch on fitting stations for colonies. They put down such native officers as were too honest or able for them; they compelled Montezuma, though with tears and groans, to acknowledge himself the vassal of the Spanish crown. They divided the Mexican treasures amongst them; and finally drove the Mexicans to desperation.

The arrival of the armament from Cuba under Narvaez, sent by Velasquez to punish Cortez for his treason, and his victory over Narvaez, and the union of those troops with his own, belong to the general historian—my task is to exhibit his treatment to the natives; and his next exploit, is that of exposing Montezuma to the view of his exasperated subjects from the battlements of his house, in the hope that his royal puppet might have authority enough to appease them; a scheme which proved the death of the emperor—for his own subjects, indignant at his tame submission to the Spaniards, let fly their arrows at him. The fury of the Mexicans on this catastrophe, the terrible nocturnal retreat of Cortez from the city, still called amongst the inhabitants of Mexico, La Noche Triste, the sorrowful night,—the strange battle of Otumba, where Cortez, felling the standard-bearer of the army, dispersed in a moment tens of thousands like a mist,—the flight to Tlascala, and the return again to the siege,—the eight thousand Tamenes, or servile Indians, bearing through the hostile country to the lake the brigantines in parts, ready to put together on their arrival,—Father Olmedo blessing the brigantines as they were launched on the lake in the presence of wondering multitudes,—and the desperate siege and assault themselves, all are full of the most stirring interest, and display a sort of satanic grandeur in the man, amidst the horrors into which his ambitious guilt had plunged him, that are only to be compared to that of Napoleon in Russia, beset, in his extremity, by the vengeful warriors of the north. But the crowning disgrace of Cortez, is that of putting to the torture the new emperor, Guatimotzin, the nephew and son-in-law of Montezuma, whom the Mexicans, in admiration of his virtues and talents, had placed on the throne. The bravery with which Guatimotzin had defended his city, the frankness with which he yielded himself when taken, would have made his person sacred in the eyes of a generous conqueror; but Guatimotzin had committed the crime, unpardonable in the eyes of a Spaniard, of casting the treasures for which the Spaniards harassed his country into the lake,—and Cortez had him put to the severest torture to force from him the avowal of where they lay. Even he is said at length to have been ashamed of so base and horrid a business; yet he afterwards put him to death, and the manner in which this, and other barbarities are related by Robertson, is worthy of observation.

“It was not, however, without difficulty that the Mexican empire could be entirely reduced to the form of a Spanish province. Enraged and rendered desperate by oppression, the natives forgot the superiority of their enemies, and ran to arms in defence of their liberties. In every contest, however, the European valour and discipline prevailed. But fatally for the honour of their country, the Spaniards sullied the glory redounding from these repeated victories, by their mode of treating the vanquished people. After taking Guatimotzin, and becoming masters of his capital, they supposed that the king of Castile entered on possession of all the rights of the captive monarch, and affected to consider every effort of the Mexicans to assert their own independence, as the rebellion of vassals against their sovereign, or the mutiny of slaves against their master. Under the sanction of these ill-founded maxims, they violated every right that should be held sacred between hostile nations. After each insurrection, they reduced the common people, in the provinces which they subdued, to the most humiliating of all conditions, that of personal servitude. Their chiefs, supposed to be more criminal, were punished with greater severity, and put to death in the most ignominious or the most excruciating mode that the insolence or the cruelty of their conquerors could devise. In almost every district of the Mexican empire, the progress of the Spanish arms is marked with blood, and with deeds so atrocious, as disgrace the enterprising valour that conducted them to success. In the country of Panuco, sixty caziques, or leaders, and four hundred nobles were burnt at one time. Nor was this shocking barbarity perpetrated in any sudden sally of rage, or by a commander of inferior note. It was the act of Sandoval, an officer whose name is entitled to the second rank in the annals of New Spain; and executed after a solemn consultation with Cortez; and to complete the horror of the scene, the children and relatives of the wretched victims were assembled, and compelled to be spectators of their dying agonies.

“It seems hardly possible to exceed in horror this dreadful example of severity; but it was followed by another, which affected the Mexicans still more sensibly, as it gave them a more feeling proof of their own degradation, and of the small regard which their haughty masters retained for the ancient dignity and splendour of their state. On a slight suspicion, confirmed by a very imperfect evidence, that Guatimotzin had formed a scheme to shake off the yoke, and to excite his former subjects to take arms, Cortez, without the formality of a trial, ordered the unhappy monarch, together with the caziques of Tezeuco and Tacuba, the two persons of the greatest eminence in the empire, to be hanged; and the Mexicans, with astonishment and horror, beheld this disgraceful punishment inflicted upon persons to whom they were accustomed to look up with reverence hardly inferior to that which they paid to the gods themselves. The example of Cortez and his principal officers, encouraged and justified persons of subordinate rank to venture upon committing greater excesses.”

It is not easy to see how Cortez and his men “sullied the glory of their repeated victories,” by these actions—for these very victories were gained over a people who had no chance against European arms,—and were infamous in themselves, being violations of every sacred right of humanity. What, indeed, could sully the reputation of the man after the butchery of six thousand Cholulas in cold blood? The notions of glory with which Robertson, in common with many other historians, was infected, are mere remnants of that corrupted morality which Popery disseminated, and which created the Cortezes and Pizarros of those days, and the Napoleons of our own. No truth can be plainer to the sound sense of a real Christian, than that true glory can only be the result of great deeds done in a just cause. But Cortez’s whole career was one perpetual union of perfidy and blood. His words were not to be relied on for a moment. His promises of kindness and of restoration to both Montezuma and Guatimotzin, were followed only by fetters, tortures, and hanging.

Such were the horrors of the siege of Mexico, that Bernal Diaz says, they can be compared to nothing but those of the destruction of Jerusalem. According to Bernal Diaz, the slain exceeded one hundred thousand; and those who died of famine, bad food and water, and infection, Cortez himself asserts, were more than fifty thousand. Cortez, on gaining possession of the city, ordered all the Mexicans out of it; and Bernal Diaz, an eye-witness, says, that “for three days and three nights, all the three roads leading from the city, were seen full of men, women, and children; feeble, emaciated, and forlorn, seeking refuge where they could find it. The fetid smell which so many thousands of putrid bodies emitted was intolerable, and occasioned some illness to the general of the conquerors. The houses, streets, and canals, were full of disfigured carcases; the ground of the city was in some places dug up by the citizens in search of roots to feed on; and many trees stripped of bark for the same purpose. The general caused the dead bodies to be buried, and large quantities of wood to be burnt through all the city, as much in order to purify the infected air, as to celebrate his victory.”

But Providence failed not to visit the deeds of Cortez on himself, as he had done on Columbus. Bernal Diaz says, that “after the death of Guatimotzin, he became gloomy and restless; rising continually from his bed, and wandering about in the dark.” That “nothing prospered with him, and that it was ascribed to the curses he was loaded with.” His government was acknowledged late by the crown, and soon divided with other authorities. He returned, like Columbus, to Europe to seek redress of wrongs heaped on him; like him, not obtaining this redress, he sought to amuse his mind by fresh discoveries, and added California to the known regions; but the attempt to soothe his uneasy spirit was vain. Neglected, and even insulted by the crown, to which he had thus guiltily added vast dominions, he ended his days in the same fruitless and heart-wearing solicitation of the court which Columbus had done before.

CHAPTER VIII.
THE SPANIARDS IN PERU.

Their quiver is an open sepulchre; they are all mighty men.

Jeremiah v. 16.

They are cruel and have no mercy, their voice roareth like the sea; and they ride upon horses set in array as men of war.

Jeremiah vi. 23.

The scene widened, and with it the rapacity and rage for gold in the Spaniards. The possession and the plunder of Mexico only served to whet their appetite for carnage, and for one demon of avarice and cruelty to raise up ten. They had seen enough to convince them that the continent which they had reached was immense, and Mexico filled their imagination with abundance of wealthy empires to seize upon and devour. Into these very odd Christians, not the slightest atom of Christian feeling or Christian principle ever entered. They were troubled with no remorse for the horrible excesses of crime and ravage which they had committed. The cry of innocent nations that they had plundered, enslaved, and depopulated, and which rose to heaven fearfully against them, never seemed to pierce the proud brutishness of their souls. They had but one idea: that all these swarming nations were revealed to them by Providence for a prey. The Pope had given them up to them; and they had but one feeling,—a fiery, quenchless, rabid lust of gold. That they might enlighten and benefit these nations—that they might establish wise and beneficent relations with them; that they might enrich themselves most innocently and legitimately in the very course of dispensing equivalent advantages, never came across their brains. It was the spirit of the age, coolly says Robertson—but he does not tell us how such came to be its spirit, after a thousand years of the profession of Christianity. We have seen how that came to pass; and we must go on from that time to the present, tracing the dreadful effects of the substitution of Popery for Christian truth and mercy.