Narrative and Critical History of America, Vol. 2 (of 8) / Spanish Explorations and Settlements in America from the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Century

by Unknown

Vice-President of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

WHEN the great apostle of the new faith, on his voyage from Asia to Europe, was shipwrecked on a Mediterranean island, “the barbarous people” showed him and his company “no little kindness.” On first acquaintance with their chief visitor they hastily judged him to be a murderer, whom, though he had escaped the sea, yet vengeance would not suffer to live. But afterward “they changed their minds, and said that he was a god.”[1012] The same extreme revulsion of feeling and judgment was wrought in the minds of the natives of this New World when the ocean-tossed voyagers from the old continent first landed on these shores, bringing the parted representatives of humanity on this globe into mutual acquaintance and intercourse. Only in this latter case the change of feeling and judgment was inverted. The simple natives of the fair western island regarded their mysterious visitors as superhuman beings; further knowledge of them proved them to be “murderers,” rapacious, cruel, and inhuman,—fit subjects for a dire vengeance.

In these softer times of ours the subject of the present chapter might well be passed silently, denied a revival, and left in the pitiful oblivion which covers so many of the distressing horrors of “man’s inhumanity to man.” But, happily for the writer and for the reader, the title of the chapter is a double one, and embraces two themes. The painful narrative to be rehearsed is to be relieved by a tribute of admiring and reverential homage to a saintly man of signal virtues and heroic services, one of the grandest and most august characters in the world’s history. Many of the obscure and a few of the dismal elements and incidents of long-passed times, in the rehearsal of them on fresh pages, are to a degree relieved by new light thrown upon them, by the detection and exposure of errors, and by readjustments of truth. Gladly would a writer on the subject before us avail himself of any such means to reduce or to qualify its repulsiveness. But advancing time, with the assertion of the higher instincts of humanity which have sharpened regrets and reproaches for all the enormities of the past, has not furnished any abatements for the faithful dealing with this subject other than that just presented.

It is a fact worthy of a pause for thought, that in no single instance since the discovery of our islands and continent by Europeans—to say nothing about the times before it—has any new race of men come to the knowledge of travellers, explorers, and visitors from the realms of so-called civilization, when the conditions were so fair and favorable in the first introduction and acquaintance between the parties as in that between Columbus and the natives of the sea-girt isle of Hispaniola. Not even in the sweetest idealizings of romance is there a more fascinating picture than that which he draws of those unsophisticated children of Nature, their gentleness, docility, and friendliness. They were not hideous or repulsive, as barbarians; they did not revolt the sight, like many of the African tribes, like Bushmen, Feejeans, or Hottentots; they presented no caricaturings of humanity, as giants or dwarfs, as Amazons or Esquimaux; their naked bodies were not mutilated, gashed, or painted; they uttered no yells or shrieks, with mad and threatening gestures. They were attractive in person, well formed, winning and gentle, and trustful; they were lithe and soft of skin, and their hospitality was spontaneous, generous, and genial. Tribes of more warlike and less gracious nature proved to exist on some of the islands, about the isthmus and the continental regions of the early invasion; but the first introduction and intercourse of the representatives of the parted continents set before the Europeans a race of their fellow-creatures with whom they might have lived and dealt in peace and love.

And what shall we say of the new-comers, the Spaniards,—the subjects of the proudest of monarchies, the representatives of the age of chivalry; gentlemen, nobles, disciples of the one Holy Catholic Church, and soldiers of the Cross of Christ? What sort of men were they, what was their errand, and what impress did they leave upon the scenes so fair before their coming, and upon those children of Nature whom they found so innocent and loving, and by whom they were at first gazed upon with awe and reverence as gods?

In only one score of the threescore years embraced in our present subject the Spaniards had sown desolation, havoc, and misery in and around their track. They had depopulated some of the best-peopled of the islands, and renewed them with victims deported from others. They had inflicted upon hundreds of thousands of the natives all the forms and agonies of fiendish cruelty, driving them to self-starvation and suicide as a way of mercy and release from an utterly wretched existence. They had come to be viewed by their victims as fiends of hate, malignity, and all dark and cruel desperation and mercilessness in passion. The hell which they denounced upon their victims was shorn of its worst terror by the assurance that these tormentors were not to be there.

Only what is needful for the truth of history is to be told here, while shocking details are to be passed by. And as the rehearsal is made to set forth in relief the nobleness, grandeur of soul, and heroism of a man whose nearly a century of years was spent in holy rebuke, protest, exposure, and attempted redress of this work of iniquity, a reader may avert his gaze from the narration of the iniquity and fix it upon the character and career of the “Apostle to the Indians.”

There was something phenomenal and monstrous, something so aimless, reckless, wanton, unprovoked, utterly ruinous even for themselves, in that course of riot and atrocity pursued by the Spaniards, which leads us—while palliation and excuse are out of the question—to seek some physical or moral explanation of it. This has generally been found in referring to the training of Spanish nature in inhumanity, cruelty, contempt of human life, and obduracy of feeling, through many centuries of ruthless warfare. It was in the very year of the discovery of America that the Spaniards, in the conquest of Granada, had finished their eight centuries of continuous war for wresting their proud country from the invading Moors. This war had made every Spaniard a fighter, and every infidel an enemy exempted from all tolerance and mercy. Treachery, defiance of pledges and treaties, brutalities, and all wild and reckless stratagems, had educated the champions of the Cross and faith in what were to them but the accomplishments of the soldier and the fidelity of the believer. Even in the immunities covenanted to the subject-Moors, of tolerance in their old home and creed, the ingenuities of their implacable foes found the means of new devices for oppression and outrage. The Holy Office of the Inquisition, with all its cavernous secrets and fiendish processes, dates also from the same period, and gave its fearful consecration to all the most direful passions.

With that training in inhumanity and cruelty which the Spanish adventurers brought to these shores, we must take into view that towering, overmastering rapacity and greed which were to glut themselves upon the spoils of mines, precious stones, and pearls. The rich soil, with the lightest tillage, would have yielded its splendid crops for man and beast. Flocks would have multiplied and found their own sustenance for the whole year without any storage in garner, barn, or granary. A rewarding commerce would have enriched merchants on either side of well-traversed ocean pathways. But not the slightest thought or recognition was given during the first half-century of the invasion to any such enterprise as is suggested by the terms colonization, the occupancy of soil for husbandry and domestication. Spanish pride, indolence, thriftlessness regarded every form of manual labor as a demeaning humiliation. There was no peasantry among the new-comers. The humblest of them in birth, rank, and means was a gentleman; his hands could not hold a spade or a rake, or guide the plough. The horse and the hound were the only beasts on his inventory of values. Sudden and vast enrichment by the treasures of gold wrung from the natives, first in their fragmentary ornaments, and then by compulsory toil from the mines which would yield it in heaps, were the lure and passion of the invaders. The natives, before they could reach any conception of the Divine Being of the Catholic creed, soon came to the understanding of the real object of their worship: as a cacique plainly set forth to a group of his trembling subjects, when, holding up a piece of gold, he said, “This is the Spaniards’ god.” A sordid passion, with its overmastery of all the sentiments of humanity, would inflame the nerves and intensify all the brutal propensities which are but masked in men of a low range of development even under the restraints of social and civil life. We must allow for the utter recklessness and frenzy of their full indulgence under the fervors of hot climes, in the loosening of all domestic and neighborly obligations, in the homelessness of exile and the mad freedom of adventure. Under the fretting discomforts and restraints of the ocean-passage hither, the imagination of these rapacious treasure-seekers fed itself on visions of wild license of arbitrary power over simple victims, and of heaps of treasure to be soon carried back to Spain to make a long revel in self-indulgence for the rest of life.

“Cruelties” was the comprehensive term under which Las Casas gathered all the enormities and barbarities, of which he was a witness for half a century, as perpetrated on the successive scenes invaded by his countrymen on the islands and the main of the New World. He had seen thousands of the natives crowded together, naked and helpless, for slaughter, like sheep in a park or meadow. He had seen them wasted at the extremities by torturing fires, till, after hours of agony, they turned their dying gaze, rather in amazed dread than in rage, upon their tormentors. Mutilations of hands, feet, ears, and noses surrounded him with ghastly spectacles of all the processes of death without disease. One may well leave all details to the imagination; and may do this all the more willingly that even the imagination will fail to fill and fashion the reality of the horror.