But if the dogs fed upon the Indian's body, the monk was ever vigilant to save his soul. A woman was holding her child of twelve months, says Las Casas, when she perceived the approach of the hounds in full cry after a party of natives. Feeling that she could not escape, she instantly tied her babe to her leg and then suspended herself from a beam. The dogs came up at the moment that a monk was baptizing the child, thus luckily cutting off its purgatory just behind the jaws that devoured it.
Spaniards were known to feed their dogs, when short of meat, by chopping off a native's arm and throwing it to them; and a few fed their dogs exclusively upon native-meat. We have the authority of Las Casas for the fact, which he took care to have well attested from various sources, that a Spaniard would borrow a quarter of native from a friend for his hounds, promising to return it at a favorable opportunity. Somebody asked one of these generous livers how his housekeeping flourished. "Well enough," was the reply; "I have killed twenty of these rascally Indians, and now, thank God, my dogs have something to eat."
The Spaniards paid their gambling debts in natives. If a governor lost heavily at cards, he would give the winner an order upon some cacique for a corresponding amount of gold, or natives in default of the metal, knowing that the gold could no longer be procured. Sometimes the lucky gambler made the levy without applying to the cacique. The stakes were not unfrequently for three and four hundred Indians in the early days of the colonies, when natives were so plenty that one could be bought for a cheese, or an arroba of vinegar, wine, or lard. Eighty natives were swapped for a mare, and a hundred for a lame horse. When it began to be difficult to lay hands upon them, it was only necessary to send for a missionary, who would gradually collect them for purposes of instruction and worship. When the habit of attending a chapel was pretty well confirmed, the building was surrounded, the young and stout ones were seized and branded, and carried away, with the most attractive females, for further indoctrination in the Christian arts.
A device of the caciques which was practised in Nicaragua might easily have been pursued in Hayti. But the account of Las Casas refers to the former province. When a demand was made upon one cacique to supply laborers, he would repair to another, and say, "The devil who has me in his power wants so many men and women. I have no doubt that your devil will say the same thing to you. Let us arrange the matter. Give me the facility of procuring my quota in your tribe, and you shall take yours from my tribe." "It is agreed; for my devil has just made a similar demand of me." Each cacique would then swear to the Commanders, who were very nice upon the technicality so long as slaves were plenty, that the men furnished came from his own district, thus saving his life and his credit with his people. This was a great convenience; for in all savage exigencies and dire perils men must study how they can best arrange with the inevitable.
But it will be too painful to recount the various inventions for punishing these unhappy children of Nature. The dogs, perhaps, were merciful, for they killed and ate a native on the spot. Cutting off the ear and nose was an ordinary barbarity,—in its origin it was a way to save time in collecting ornaments; shutting fifty or more into a house and setting it in flames was a favorite method of extemporizing a bonfire; pricking a crowd of insurgent natives over a precipice into the sea was an exceptional act of mercy,—they would place one hand over their eyes and take the plunge. It was a common sport to match stout Indians with the hounds, and bet upon their wrestling. In the pearl-fisheries, in rowing galleys, in agriculture, in the mines, in carrying ship-timber, anchors, and pieces of ordnance, in transporting produce, the Spaniards wasted the natives as if they were wind-and water-power which Nature would supply without limit. How can this ferocity be accounted for? It consulted neither interest nor personal safety. They raged like men stung to madness by poisonous clouds of insects; the future received no consideration; plans for improving the methods of cultivating different crops, or for introducing new staples, could not be carried out. Once having tasted native blood, like their own dogs, the hunting mania possessed them, till two millions of Haytians alone had perished. The population had become so reduced as early as 1508 that they were obliged to organize great Indian chases on the main-land, and a Coolie trade sprang up in the Lucayan Islands, to keep the Haytian mines and plantations supplied with hands. Forty thousand of these Lucayans were transported, on the assurance of the Spaniards that they would be restored to the souls of their ancestry, who had gone to reside in that Mountain-land of the West. Was there a touch of grim Spanish humor in this inducement to emigrate? For certainly the Lucayans did very soon rejoin those departed souls.
Wine and the climate maddened these unbridled Europeans. Avarice is a calculating passion; but here were aimless and exhausting horrors, like those which swarm in the drunkard's corrupted brain. What were vices at home became transformed into manias here. The representatives of other nations were not slow to imitate the example of the possessors of Hayti. Venezuela was ceded to a company of Germans in 1526, whose object was simply to strip the country of its treasures. Las Casas tries to believe that the Spaniards seemed like just men by the side of these new speculators; but it was not possible to destroy natives faster than was done in the countries under Spanish rule. The Germans, after all, were forced to employ Spaniards to pursue the Indians when they attempted to escape from this new system of farming into the mountains, and they profited so well by the lessons of their Catholic hunters, that, upon their departure, they hit upon new expedients for making the natives productive. The German Governor constructed a great palisaded park, into which he managed to drive all the Indians of the neighborhood, and then informed them that they could issue from it only as slaves, unless they paid a certain ransom, whose value he fixed. They were deliberately starved into adopting one or the other alternative. Those who could procure gold were let out to collect it, leaving their wives and children as pledges of their return. Many of the others preferred to die of hunger and thirst. When the ransomed natives departed with their families, the Governor had them pursued, reparked, and subjected to a repetition of this sponging process, and again a third time, so admirably did it work. This strikes Las Casas as a refinement of cruelty, which can be attributed only to the fact that these Germans were Lutheran heretics, and never assisted at the mass. "This is the way," he says, "that they conformed to the royal intention of establishing Christianity in these countries!"
How did the Spaniards conform to it? Rude soldiers became the managers of the different working gangs into which the Indians had been divided, and it devolved upon them to superintend their spiritual welfare. Enough has been said about their brutality; but their ignorance was no less remarkable. Las Casas complains that they could not repeat the Credo, nor the Ten Commandments. Their ignorance of the former would have been bliss, if they had been practically instructed in the latter. John Colmenero was one of these common soldiers who became installed in a Commandery (Encomienda). When the missionaries visited his plantation, they found that the laborers had not the slightest notions of Christianity. They examined John upon the subject, and discovered to their horror that he did not know even how to make the sign of the cross. "What have you been teaching these poor Indians?" they asked him. "Why, that they are all going to the Devil! Won't your signin santin cruces help to teach them that?"[U]
[Footnote U: Llorente, Tom. I. p. 180.]
No doubt it would; for we know how serviceable in that way Ovando found it, when he plotted to seize the beautiful Anacaona, who governed the province of Xaragua in Hayti. This he did, and also gave the signal for a dreadful massacre of her subjects, whom he had beguiled to a military spectacle, by lifting his hand to the cross of Alcantara that was embroidered on his dress.
Colmenero had not a head for business like that other Spaniard who baptized all the inhabitants of a village and took away their idols of gold, for which he substituted copper ones, and then compelled the natives to purchase them of him at so many slaves per idol.