All these things were done in these seas by Englishmen in the days of old, done for greed of gain and the lust of bloodshed. Done also in the name of religion, and because two sects, worshipping the same God, quarrelled in regard to ritual; and because one sect put a sword at the throat of the other and said, Do as we do, or die. Just as the Inquisition proved to be the undoing of the might and wealth of Spain, so did the Inquisition, indirectly, give the West Indies to the English. The West Indian waters formed the training school of Drake and Frobisher, Hawkins and Raleigh; and these men founded the navy. In later days Rodney revived the Caribbean school, and there Nelson learned how to outwit the French in ocean battles. Because of these things, but not only because of these things, do we owe a great debt to these Antillean islands.
So far as we are concerned the history of the Indies is a medley of romance, the romance of British greatness. There we laid the foundation of our Empire; the Caribbean Sea is the font of the temple of our greatness.
But, for the islands themselves, there is little record
of history save where their existence first influenced the politics of Europe. The Spaniards were the first white men to tread their fragrant shores and bring destruction to a race of wild red men whose first instinct was that of fear. Columbus, the Genoese mariner, first and greatest of all explorers, anchored his tiny vessels in Morant Bay, Jamaica, on his second voyage to America. The beauty of the place bewildered him, and when his patron, the King of Spain, asked for a description of the island, the artistic Genoese crumpled a piece of paper, and presented that as a picture of the rugged formation of the Queen of the Antilles. Four times did Columbus journey to the Indies, which were annexed by him to the Spanish Crown. The horrors of the early Spanish rule can only be imagined. Millions of the gentle Caribs were transported to the mainland, and worked to death in the Spanish gold mines. Those that were permitted to remain were, if they survived the Inquisition, pressed into slavery.
So the Spaniards ruled for a century and a half; for one hundred and sixty years they claimed the bulk of the West Indian islands as their own. This claim was uncontested by the powers of Europe, but the Spaniards were harassed always by the buccaneers, French and English, whose ships swept the main in search of prey. Whether England was at war with Spain or not, the English sea-dogs were always at the throats of Spaniards in the western hemisphere.
The Protector Cromwell essayed to break the Western power of Spain, and sent Penn and Venables to crush them out of the Indies. In an engagement off Domingo the British were defeated, but the doughty English captains retired on to Jamaica, which they annexed to England. Then the French filibusters drove the Spaniards out of Hayti, and gave it to the crown of France. The French had held the smaller Antilles—Martinique, St. Lucia, Grenada, St. Vincent, and Antigua. In times of war with France, Britain had taken these islands, but they had been retaken by the French. It was in Rodney’s time that they all came permanently under the English flag. Nowadays the British hold all the larger islands, the French retain the smaller lands of Martinique, Guadaloupe, Deserva, Marie Galante, Les Saints, St. Bartholomew, and part of St. Martin, the Dutch hold five, the Danish three, and Spain still holds three. One or two are part of the Venezuelan Republic, Puerto Rico belongs to the U.S.A., and several are independent.