One would not expect to find great wealth in these gray-looking mountains of simple and uniform structure; yet they abound in stones and metals. Besides the different kinds of marble, which it is not strange to find, diamonds also, jasper, agates, onyx, topaz, and other stones, a kind of jade and of malachite, are found in a great many places. Copper exists in considerable quantities in the neighborhood of Dondon and Jacmel, and in the Cibao; silver is found near San Domingo, and in various places in the Cibao, together with cinnabar, cobalt, bismuth, zinc, antimony, and lead in the Cibao, near Dondon and Azua, blue cobalt that serves for painting on porcelain, the gray, black specular nickel, etc.; native iron near the Bay of Samana, in the Mornes-du-Cap, and at Haut-and Bas-Moustique; other forms of that metal abound in numerous places, crystallized, spathic, micaceous, etc. Nitre can be procured in the Cibao, that great storehouse which has specimens of almost every metal, salt, and mineral; borax at Jacmel and Dondon, native alum at Dondon, and aluminous earth near Port-au-Prince; vitriol, of various forms, in a dozen places; naphtha, petroleum, and asphaltum at Banique, and sulphur in different shapes at Marmalade, La Soufrière, etc. The catalogue of this wealth would be tedious to draw up.
The reports concerning gold do not agree. It is maintained that there are mines and washings which have been neglected, or improperly worked, and that a vigorous exploration would reopen this source of wealth; but it is also said as confidently that the Spaniards took off all the gold, and were reduced to working mines of copper, before the middle of the sixteenth century. It is certain, however, that great quantities of gold were taken from the island by the Spaniards, while they had the natives to perform the labor. The principal sources from which gold can be procured are in the part of the island formerly occupied by the Spaniards; and when their power decayed, all important labors came to an end. But Oviedo records several lumps of gold of considerable size: one was Bobadilla's lump, found, during his government, at Bonne Aventure, which was worth thirty-six hundred castellanos, or $19,153. This was lost at sea on the way to Spain. The finding of pieces in the River Yaqui weighing nine ounces was occasionally recorded, and pieces of pure gold, without the least mixture, more than three inches in circumference, in the River Verte: they were undoubtedly found much oftener than recorded. Good authorities, writing at the close of the last century, declare that the mines of Cibao alone furnished more gold than all Europe had in circulation at that time. All the larger streams, and the basins near their sources, furnished gold.
Bobadilla's lump was found by a slave of Francisco de Garay, afterwards Governor of Jamaica. He and the famous Diaz worked a mine together in San Domingo. His slave was poking about with a pike in the shallows of the River Hayna, when the head struck the metal. Garay was so rejoiced that he sacrificed a pig, which was served upon this extemporaneous platter, and he boasted that there was no such dish in Europe. Twenty other ships with gold on board went down in the storm which swallowed up Garay's waif.[E]
[Footnote E: Great quantities of gold were embezzled by the Spanish officials. Las Casas in his lively arguments with the Council of State in behalf of the Indians, always insisted that his plan for controlling them would be more profitable as well as humane. He promised large increase of treasure, and showed how the royal officers appropriated the gold which they extorted from the natives. Piedro Arias, for instance, spent six years at Castilla-du-Oro, at a cost to the Government of fifty-four thousand ducats, during which time he divided a million's worth of gold with his officers, at the expense of thousands of natives, whose lives were the flux of the metallic ore, while he paid only three thousand pesos for the king's fifth.—Llorente: Oeuvres de Las Casas, Tom. II—p.472.]
Many French writers have maintained that the Indians procured their golden ornaments from Yucatan and other points of the main-land, by way of traffic. But they had nothing to barter, and their ornaments were numerous. Besides, the Spaniards found in various places near the rivers the holes and slight diggings whence the gold had been procured. It is said that the Haytian natives only washed for gold, but the Caribs had frequented the island long previously, and they without doubt earned gold away from it. The Spaniards were deceived by the Haytians, who did not wish to dig gold under the lash to glitter on the velvet of hidalgos.
It is difficult, as Humboldt says, to distinguish, in the calculations by the Spanish writers of the amount of gold sent to Spain, "between that obtained by washings and that which had been accumulated for ages in the hands of the natives, who were pillaged at will." He inclines, however, to the opinion, that a scientific system of mining would renew the supply of gold, which may not be represented by the scanty washings that have been occasionally tried in Hayti and Cuba. In Hayti, "as well as at Brazil, it would be more profitable to attempt subterraneous workings, on veins, in primitive and intermediary soils, than to renew the gold-washings which were abandoned in the ages of barbarism, rapine, and carnage."[F]
[Footnote F: Personal Narrative, Vol. III. p. 163, note. Bohn's
Series.]
But the chief interest which Spain took in Hayti was derived from the collars and bracelets which shone dully against the skins of the caciques and native women in the streets of Seville. It did not require an exhausted treasury, and the clamor of a Neapolitan war for sinews, to stimulate the appetite of a nation whose sensibility for gold was as great as its superstition. Columbus triumphed over the imaginations of men through their avarice; the procession of his dusky captives to the feet of Isabella was as if the Earth-Spirit, holding a masque to tempt Catholic majesties to the ruin of the mine, sent his familiars, "with the earth-tint yet so freshly embrowned," to flatter with heron-crests, the plumes of parrots, and the yellow ore. Behind that naked pomp the well-doubleted nobles of Castile and Aragon trooped gayly with priests and crosses, the pyx and the pax, and all the symbols of a holy Passion, to crime and death.
Columbus discovered Guanahani, which he named San Salvador, on the morning of the 12th of October, 1492. After cruising among these Lucayan Islands, or Bahamas, for some time, he reached Cuba on the 28th of the same month. His Lucayan interpreters were understood by the natives of Cuba, notwithstanding they spoke a different dialect. They were also understood at Hayti, which was reached on the 6th of December; but here the Cuban interpreter was found to be more useful. Each island appeared to have a dialect of a language whose origin has been variously attributed to Florida, to Central America, and to the Caribbee Islands. But the Indians of Central America could not understand the Cubans and Haytians, and they in turn spoke a different language from the Caribs, some of whose words they had borrowed. A favorite theory is, that the Ygneris were ancient inhabitants of the West Indian Islands, distinct from the Caribs, who made their way from Florida by the Lucayan Islands, leaving Hayti to the right, and reaching South America by that fringe of islands that stretches from Porto Rico to Trinidad, through which the great current is strained into the Caribbean Sea. Humboldt says,[G] in noticing the difference between the language of the Carib men and their women, that perhaps the women descended from the female captives made in this movement, the men being as usual slain. But the Haytians also claimed to have come from Florida. Perhaps, then, an emigration from Florida, which may be called, for want of any historical data, that of the Ygneris, covered all the West Indian Islands at a very early period, to be overlapped, in part, by a succeeding emigration of Caribs who were pressed out of Florida by the Appalachians.[H]
[Footnote G: Personal Narrative, Vol. III. p. 78, where see the subject discussed at length.]