So ended his adventure. Yet not so, For the Victoria, faithful to his hand That laid her charge upon her, southward sailed Around the Cape and westward to Seville. El Cano brought her in, and her strange tale Told to the Emperor. "And the Admiral said," He ended, "that indeed these heathen lands God meant should all be Christian, for He set A cross of stars above the southern sea, A passion-flower upon the southern shore, To be a sign to great adventurers. These be two marvels,—and upon the way We gained a kingdom, but we lost a day!"
IX
WAMPUM TOWN
"Elephants' teeth?"
"A fair lot, but I am sick of the Guinea coast. The Lisbon slavers get more of black ivory than we do of the white."
The good Jean Parmentier, who asked the question, and the youth called Jean Florin, who answered it, were looking at a stanch weather-beaten little cargo-ship anchored in the harbor of Dieppe. She had been to the Gold Coast, where wild African chiefs conjured elephants' tusks out of the mysterious back country and traded them for beads, trinkets and gay cloth. In Dieppe this ivory was carved by deft artistic fingers into crucifixes, rosaries, little caskets, and other exquisite bibelots. African ivory was finer, whiter and firmer than that of India, and when thus used was almost as valuable as gold.
But within the last ten years the slave trade had grown more profitable than anything else. A Portuguese captain would kidnap or purchase a few score negroes, take them, chained and packed together like convicts, to Lisbon or Seville and sell them for fat gold moidores and doubloons. The Spanish conquistadores had not been ten years in the West Indies before they found that Indian slavery did not work. The wild people, under the terrible discipline of the mines and sugar plantations, died or killed themselves. Planters of Hispaniola declared one negro slave worth a dozen Indians.
"I do not wonder that the cacique Hatuey told the priest that he would burn forever rather than go to a heaven where Spaniards lived," said Jean Florin. "To roast a man is no way to change his religion."