The Red Man and the White Man in North America

Chapter 1

CHAPTER I.

SPANISH DISCOVERERS AND INVADERS.

A lively, indeed a dramatic, interest attaches to the occasion and the incidents which first brought together for recognition, for sight and intercourse, representatives of the human family that had been parted by oceans for unknown centuries. Neither of these branches of a common stock had knowledge of the other. There was to be a first meeting, as of strangers. In view of all the dismal and harrowing results which were to follow, burdening with tragedies of woe and cruelty the relations between the white man and the red man, especially those of the Spaniards and the natives of the American islands, one might be tempted to wish that the ocean had been impassable. The more grateful, therefore, is it to recall the fact, that the very first contact and recognition between those of the Old World and the New, when the time had come that they were no longer to be deferred, present to us a sweet and lovely picture. Would that its charm and repose of simple peacefulness might have been the long perspective of the then following ages!

The great-hearted Admiral had kept his high resolve and hope through all the weary delays of his course over unknown seas, with panic-stricken and mutinous sailors. They might reckon over what part of the expanse of waters they had passed in their poor vessels, but knew not how much remained. But signs of land had appeared in sea drift-wood, and birds, and a stick carved by tool. On the night of Thursday, Oct. 11, 1492, Columbus, standing, near midnight, on the poop of his vessel, saw a moving light, which afterwards proved, as he surmised, to be a torch, carried from one hut to another, on the island which he named San Salvador. On the next morning, clad in complete, armor, with the banner of Spain, his captains around him, bearing the royal insignia of Ferdinand and Isabella, he landed on a spot which he says was fresh and fruitful like a garden full of trees. The natives in simple amazement looked on, as they lined the shores and saw their mysterious visitors kneel with devout tears on the earth.

And here is Columbus's report of his first impression from those whom he looked upon then as simply materials for making Christians: —

“Because they had much friendship for us, and because I knew they were people that would deliver themselves better to the Christian faith, and be converted more through love than by force, I gave to some of them some colored caps, and some strings of glass beads for their necks, and many other things of little value, with which they were delighted, and were so entirely ours that it was a marvel to see. The same afterwards came swimming to the ships' boats where we were, and brought us parrots, cotton threads in balls, darts, and many other things which we gave them, such as bells and small glass beads. In fine, they took and gave all of whatever they had with good-will. But it appeared to me they were a people very poor in everything. They went totally naked. They were well made, with very good faces, hair like horse-hair, their color yellow, and they painted themselves; without arms, save darts pointed with a fish's tooth. They ought to make faithful servants and of good understanding, for I see that very quickly they repeat all that is said to them; and I believe they would easily be converted to Christianity, for it appeared to me that they had no creed.”

Assisted very kindly afterwards by one of the native chiefs, when one of his caravels had shoaled, he writes to their Majesties of the Indians: —

“They are a loving, uncovetous people, so docile in all things that I assure your Highnesses I believe in all the world there is not a better people or a better country. They love their neighbors as themselves, and they have the sweetest and the gentlest way of talking in the world, and always with a smile.”

When the Protestant French colony, under Ribault, in 1562, entered the St. John River in Florida, they were impressed in a similarly enthusiastic way with the grace, simplicity, and natural charms of the kindly savages who received them with full confidence and courtesy. Their journalist portrays the natives as in stature, shape, features, and manners manly, dignified, and agreeable. The women, well favored and modest, permitted no one “dishonestly to approach too near them;” and “both men and women were so beautifully painted that the best painter of Europe could not amende it.”

The Spaniards and the French very soon found, and had long and sharp experience of the fact, that even these natives of the Southern isles and peninsula, who seem to have been of a more gentle and tractable spirit than those of the North, had in them latent passions which, when stung by oppression and outrage, could assert their fury. It is pleasant to note with emphasis the fact, that, in the conduct and course of his first voyage, Columbus having been ever anxious to secure that result, his intercourse with the natives was wholly peaceful. By his resolute discipline over a comparatively small number of men, by his regard for their safety, and his desire to reciprocate the gentle courtesy he had received from the children of Nature, who looked upon him and his followers as having veritably come among them from the skies, he succeeded in repressing every insult and wrong, and for a time deferred violence and the shedding of blood. The first impression which the Spaniards received of the inhabitants of those islands earliest visited was, that their docility and feminine qualities wholly disabled them even of resentment, and would make all aggression on their part an impossibility. This impression continued, and was for a time strengthened on the second voyage, opening other islands, — with an exception, however, soon to be stated. Those fair and luxuriant regions, free of wild beasts, spontaneously yielding the supplies of life to the indolent and happy natives, suggested the image of Paradise to the care-worn and passionate rovers from the Old World. It was natural that the unorthodox fancy should present itself, even to the minds of ecclesiastics, that these favored beings, though in human form, might possibly not be of the lineage of Adam, nor sharers in the primeval curse, as they seemed so innocent and guileless, and needed not to win their bread by the sweat of their brow. When the prow of Columbus was headed for his return to Spain, as he stopped on his way at the eastern end of Hispaniola, a party of the natives, whom he describes as armed and ferocious in aspect and treacherous in their manifestations, presented themselves on the shore and provoked hostilities. Here the first acts of violence occurred, and the first blood was shed on both sides. But Columbus, so far as he could understand the communications made to him in answer to his questions as to the regions where gold abounded, received information of other neighboring islands, — afterwards known as the Caribbean, or Antilles, — where the natives were predatory, piratical, and warlike, invading their neighbors for slaughter and captives, and addicted to cannibalism. Of these more brave and savage natives he was afterwards to have dire experience. We may therefore rest with the grateful conclusion, that the first intercourse between the representatives of the two races began and ended in amity. Nor does it appear that those nine natives whom Columbus transported were taken against their will, or were treacherously kidnapped, as, more than a century later, were Indians on the New England coast by British freebooters.

Before Columbus sailed on his return, one of his vessels having been shipwrecked on the western end of Hispaniola, the cacique of the natives of that district, Guacanagari, had shown him sympathy and kindness, offering him all friendly help. The spot was so lovely, and life seemed so attractive there, that the Admiral yielded to the wishes of many of his men that he would leave them as a colony on the shore, to pursue the objects of the discoverers. Obtaining the consent and the promise of supplies from the cacique, Columbus, using portions of the wreck for the purpose, constructed a fort, and with explicit and discreet commands for caution, good discipline, and peaceful courses, he left in it thirty-nine men. The subsequent woes of the Admiral, and the opening of hostile relations with the natives, are to be traced to this ill-omened experiment.

The site of the colony was called Navidad, the Admiral having landed there on Christmas day. He returned to Spain with undiminished confidence in his visions of precious wealth from the New World. His illusion that he was on the confines of India was confirmed in the chance similarity of sounds which fell upon his ears in the names of places. When the natives, pointing in the direction whence gold came, used the word “Cubanacan” (“the centre of Cuba”), it signified to the Admiral the Grand Khan. The island which they called “Cibao,” and which really proved the richest in treasure, was this longed-for Cipango.

When Columbus made his second visit to the Islands, it was with a company of fifteen hundred men, of every class and condition of life, clerical, noble, professional, and menial. There was a fleet of seventeen vessels, laden with all that was needed for use and luxury and defence for a prosperous colony, with all sorts of seeds and plants, with domestic animals and poultry, and, above all, with mules and horses, the marvel and terror of the natives, realizing to them the fable of the Centaur.

Before visiting the colony which he had left at the fort, Columbus touched at Santa Cruz, one of the Antilles. Here he had a skirmish, blood being shed on both sides, with some of those Caribs, of whom he had heard such warning because of their courage, ferocity, and predatory rovings. More terrible yet was their repute as cannibals.

That beautiful island realm, which has borne successively the names of Hispaniola, St. Domingo, and Hayti, was to be the scene where disaster, sorrow, outrage, carnage, and every form and degree of oppression, cruelty, treachery, and atrocity were to introduce the tragic and revolting history, lengthened and crimsoned in the years to follow, of the relations between the Spaniards and the natives. The island in all that splendid archipelago, second in size only to Cuba, and richer and fairer than any other in the group, was estimated at its discovery, perhaps with some exaggeration, to have on its thirty thousand square miles a population of a million souls. Las Casas says the population had been 1,200,000. Though, as afterwards appeared, there had been feuds between the wilder mountain tribes and the more peaceful dwellers by the shores and in the valleys, all the chroniclers describe the natives as gentle and kindly, living an indolent, tranquil life, without care or labor, and presenting an image of Arcadian simplicity. The invaders afterwards learned that the island was divided into five districts, under the same number of caciques.

As has been said, the cacique or chieftain of the tribe in whose bounds the little colony with its citadel had been planted, had shown himself chivalrously courteous and friendly to the wrecked adventurers, and promised Colum a loyal fidelity. When the Admiral anxiously but hopefully approached the spot, it was to confront a bitter disappointment. The disaster which he had to contemplate was shrouded in a mystery which was never wholly cleared. Desolation and silence rested on the scene. Havoc and desertion everywhere showed their evidences, without revealing the cause, the occasion, or the agents. Not a Spaniard survived on the spot, or ever was found to tell the story; and the Admiral was left to surmise an explanation, with such unsatisfactory help as he afterwards had from the natives. The inferences fully certified were, that the colonists, mostly of low character, had become restless, insubordinate, and lawless, had fallen into neglect of all prudence, and broken into discord. They had scattered themselves among the natives, oppressing them, and indulging in the grossest licentiousness, thus provoking a revenge which had fatally accomplished its work. With a heavy heart the Admiral faced the calamity. He soon selected a more healthful site for a town, which he called Isabella, to be occupied by the edifices and tilled fields of one thousand colonists, whose main and consuming passion was the search for gold. Columbus sent back to Spain twelve of the vessels, retaining the other five. In these return vessels were men, women, and children captured on the Caribbean islands. It may have been under the prompting of a humane purpose, however darkened in its view of justice or expediency, that the Admiral, while sending over more than five hundred captives, in a letter to their Majesties proposed for the future to transport to Spain an indefinite number of natives to be sold as slaves, — the blessing accruing to them of being instructed in Christianity and rescued from perdition, while the proceeds of their sale would relieve the enormous expense of the enterprise to the royal treasury, and procure live-stock and other supplies for the colony.

It is to be observed that the first company of natives transported for sale as slaves were thought to be not un consigned to that fate on the ground that they were cannibals. It was preposterous to suppose that, having once been sold, they would be returned here as baptized Christians, for the purpose of aiding in the conversion of other Caribs. But afterwards large gangs of captives were committed to the same fate simply as “prisoners of war.” Considerable debate was raised in the Spanish Council as to the rightfulness of this disposition of such a class of captives. But the final decision allowed it.

It was on this fair island that the dreams and illusions which had so sweetly kindled and wrapped the imaginations of both races alike, were broken and gave place to ghastly realities. The savages ceased to regard their visitors as having swept down upon them from a pure heaven, and if their theology had taken in the alternate realm of destiny, would have traced them as fiends to the pit of all horrors. The Spaniards on their part came to a better knowledge of the Indian character in its spirit and capacities of passion. They found the natives cunning, ingenious in stratagem, and capable of duplicity and guile; bold and venturesome and courageous too in the arts of war, with javelins, sharpened spears, bows and arrows, and bucklers. They found also that the savages had a profound and by no means a puerile and inoperative religion of their own, far better in its impulses and practice than that of the reckless and dissolute marauders. Sickness, want reaching to near starvation, utter unwillingness to labor even for food, discontent, a rebellious spirit, bitter disappointment of hope, and the grossest indulgence of all foul passions, — all culminated in their effects at Isabella. When Columbus returned there from a cruise to Cuba, he found a state of open warfare between his colonists and many of the native chiefs, who, goaded to desperation, had conspired to exterminate the intruders. Columbus himself in March, 1495, took the field with his little army of infantry and cavalry, and twenty of the fiercest blood-hounds, against a body of the natives, perhaps over-estimated at a hundred thousand.

Here for the first time, as an example to be followed all along the course of the hostilities between the Europeans of every nationality and the natives, we find the white men artfully engaging the help as allies of one tribe of savages against other hostile tribes, — a dismal aggravation of all the iniquities and atrocities of a wild warfare. In the subsequent swoops of Spanish marauders and invaders in South America and in Mexico, it is safe to affirm that there were instances in which the victory was won for them by their savage allies, numbering hundreds to each one of the foreign soldiery, without whose aid, with the consequent discord and despair which it caused to the wild foe, the Spaniards would have been vanquished or starved. Columbus availed himself of the former friendship of the cacique Guacanagari, to engage his tribe against the conspiring chieftains; and, by thus fomenting animosities among the enemy, won his triumph. The horse had been a most terrific spectacle to the natives; but the bloodhound, who sprang with his unrelaxing fangs to the neck of his victim, and then disembowelled him, proved to be a deadlier instrumentality. The wild hordes quailed before their tormentors; and after they had yielded in the palsy of an abject despair, they were allowed to make their peace only by submitting to a severe quarterly tribute to be paid to the Spanish crown. In this opening act of an ever deepening and lengthening tragedy, appeared the first in the line of successive nobles and patriots, of wise and great men, who have asserted themselves at intervals as organizers and heroes for the people of the woods, to resist the outrages of the white man. Caonabo was the lofty-souled patriot of Hispaniola. A captive with unsubdued and scornful spirit, he died on his voyage to Spain.

In a voyage made by Alonzo de Ojeda from Seville, in 1499, — in which he was accompanied by the Florentine merchant and navigator, Amerigo Vespucci, who by strange fortune has attached his name to the continent, — the expedition had a bloody encounter with the Caribs, taking many of them captives for the slave marts of Seville and Cadiz.

Nicholas de Ovando, who was in command at Hispaniola while Columbus was in Spain, by his insubordinate, cruel, and oppressive course, baffled all the more humane purposes of the Admiral for any mild subjugation and rule of the natives. His savage cruelty and his desperate tyranny in working the mines and fields by the hard task-works of the Indians, whose slight constitutions unfitted them for any kind of toil, visited upon them a sum of horrors and of tortures. The apostolic Las Casas, himself a witness of these enormities and agonies, has described them in terms and images too revolting to be traced in their details. He says, “I saw them with my bodily, mortal eyes.” Famine, despair, and madness drove multitudes to self-destruction, and mothers suffocated the infants at their breasts. Ovando closed the succession of his atrocities by a general massacre of natives and their chiefs, committed under the very basest arts of duplicity and treachery, while the unsuspecting victims were straining their confiding hospitality, with presents, wild games, dances, and songs, for his delight. The scene of the outrage was that exquisite region, well-nigh a poetic and fairy realm, on the western coast and promontory of the island, then called Xaragua. Anacaona, the sister of its cacique, is described as a most lovely, intelligent, and kindly woman. She was the wife of that noble chieftain Caonabo, whose death as a captive on the way to Spain has just been mentioned. Pardoning the previous hostility of the Spaniards, who had made her a widow, she had manifested to the intruders on her domains the utmost forbearance and kindness. A pretence to justify the massacre was found in a secret report that she and her subjects were meditating that of the Spaniards. She herself was taken in chains to St. Domingo, and there hanged. Ovando founded a town near the scene of the massacre, to which he blasphemously gave the name of St. Mary of the true Peace! The five native chieftains of the districts of Hispaniola had now perished, and the island was desolate. Twelve years after his great discovery Columbus wrote to the Spanish monarchs: —

“The Indians of Hispaniola were and are the riches of the island; for it is they who cultivate and make the bread and the provisions for the Christians, who dig the gold from the mines, and perform all the offices and labors both of men and beasts. I am informed that six parts out of seven of the natives are dead, all through ill-treatment and inhumanity, — some by the sword, others by blows and cruel usage, others through hunger.”

To supply the actual needs of labor, after the devastation and depopulation of the island, negro slaves were sent to Hispaniola in 1505. Then, too, began another series of outrages in the forcible abduction and transfer, under the grossest deception, of natives of the Lucayan Islands. In five years forty thousand of these were kidnapped and transported to Hispaniola.

Two words, of widely contrasted significations and associations, have been adopted into our English speech from the language of the natives of that once happy island, — hammock, or hamac, designating the couch of listless repose, and hurricane, the sound of which aptly expresses the whirling tornado of tempests and waves, and well offsets, in its symbol of Spanish havoc, the bed of peace and ease.

Historians, by their use of the term, have consented to receive from the first Spanish knights-errant and marauders in the New World the respectable and colorless word Conquest to define the method of their mastery of territory here. Stately volumes in our libraries bear the titles of Histories of the Conquest of Mexico, of Peru, etc.; and their versions in other languages repeat the title. The descendants of the French and English colonists on this soil may congratulate themselves that that word is appropriated exclusively to the Spanish freebooters. For, by whatever method other nationalities obtained and hold territory here, it was not first acquired by the intent of conquest, nor by that way alone. The word conquest, by the Spaniards, is a very tame one to apply to the method of their rapacity and fiendish inhumanity, as they disembarked on these virgin realms, and bore down upon its harmless native tribes as with the sweep of a vengeful malice and rage. Some other word of our capable language than conquest would more fitly define the riot and wreck, the greed and the diabolical cruelty, of those first invaders. And that more fitting word would need to be one of the most harrowing and appalling in its burden of outrages and woes. The campaigns of Cyrus, of Alexander, of Pompey, of Julius Caesar, of Titus and Vespasian, might shrink from being classed with the Spanish conquest of America; and we should have to turn to the ferocities of Tamerlane, of Ghengis Khan, of the princes of India and Tartary, and of the brute men of Africa, for points of parallel with it.

We must remember the training of centuries, through which not only the nobles, but also those of meanest rank fired with Spanish blood, had passed, and the full results of which exhibited themselves just at the period of the discovery of America. During six or more of those previous centuries the Spaniard had been a fighter for his own territory and creed. By desperate valor and inhuman cruelty he had driven the Moor from the former, and had engaged all the fury of a heart-consuming bigotry in a most devout though craven superstition to impose the latter. Honest, painstaking industry for thrift and homely good had no attraction for the Spaniard. Nor would even enterprise on land or sea have engaged him, had not its charms been heightened not only by the hope of easily attained wealth, but by opportunities of marauding adventure, and by victims on whom he might flesh his sword in ruthless carnage. In less than four years after Columbus had landed on the island, hundreds of thousands of the natives — more than a third of its population — had been put to death. There seems to have been something aimless in this slaughter. It can hardly be said to have been even provoked in its primary indulgence; and when the terrified and maddened natives were driven to resort to their simple methods of defence or flight, there was a wanton brutality, a diabolical and mocking revel of atrocity, in the fierce and indiscriminate method of hunting them for havoc and torture.

The spirit of discovery had, from its first stirring among the people of Southern Europe, been associated with the spirit of rapine and tyranny, and the enslavement of the people whom it brought to light. The discovery, under Prince Henry of Portugal, of the Canary Islands, put them as a matter of course under tribute to him. His navigators then steadily coursed their way down the western coast of Africa. Cape Nam soon lost the significance of its name, “Not,” as defining a limit for safe voyaging. Successive adventurers, beginning their enterprises from about the year 1400, skirted the African coast further south, till 1486, when Bartholomew Diaz made his way over six thousand miles of ocean to the Cape of Good Hope, and turned the continent. Slaves became from the first an article of commerce for all these voyagers.

It fell to Alexander VI., on application of Ferdinand and Isabella, to confer on their crowns all the lands in the “Indies” discovered and to be discovered. When what was thus given away under the name of the Indies proved to be a whole new continent, Francis I. of France, envying the wealth which the Emperor Charles V. drew from the New World, said he should like “to see the clause in Adam's will which entitled his brothers of Castile and Portugal to divide the New World between them.” A trifling fact as concerning this sweeping donation of a whole continent to Spaniards, as the discoverers, may not be unworthy of notice. Columbus had with him on his first voyage an Englishman and an Irishman. Unhappily for us they do not appear to have had any skill of pen to have served us as journalists of the voyage. But let us recognize them on the Spanish caravels as being there to represent the shares which have fallen to Englishmen and Irishmen on this soil; and, if we need the Pope's sanction to confirm our present territorial rights, let us find it in our ancestral claims through that valiant Englishman and his Hibernian companion.

When, soon after Columbus's return from his first voyage, the sovereigns applied to the court of Rome for an exclusive territorial title to the regions which their Admiral had discovered and might yet discover, they appear to have been persuaded that they had already secured that title by the fact of unveiling new lands in unknown seas. But influenced by jealousy of the Portuguese, who had already thus fortified their claims, they humbly asked the same sanction from his Holiness. Three successive bulls, issued in 1493, were intended to make the papal donation secure to all lands extending from the northern to the southern pole. The Portuguese at once challenged its actual and possible collision with their own prior rights. The other European sovereignties treated this exercise of the papal prerogative with utter indifference. Though they allowed nearly half a century to pass before they came into any direct rivalry with the Spaniards as they followed up their first enterprise, when French and English adventure entered on the track the Pope was not even appealed to as an arbiter. In 1611 two small Spanish vessels made a feint of assaulting the miserable English colony in Virginia, but gave over the enterprise under the belief that the colony was coming to its own speedy end.

We must define to our minds as clearly as possible the fixed and positive conviction held by all Christendom at the era of transatlantic discovery, anticipatory of any actual knowledge of a new race or people, as to what should be the relation between Christians and all other men and women, wherever found and whatever their condition. All who were not in the fold of the holy Roman Church were heathens. Heathen people had no natural rights, and could attain no rights even of a common humanity, but through baptism into the fold. The great Reformation was then about stirring in its elemental work; but as yet there had been no outburst. It had asserted its energy and wrought out its radical changes in human belief and practice, in season to have secured a most powerful influence in deciding the conditions under which what is now our national domain was actually settled by colonies of Europeans in the seventeenth century. But the era of discovery was when the old Church held an unbroken sway, and the Pope was the lord of Christendom. Protestants and Catholics, as we shall see, differed fundamentally as to their primary relations and duties towards our aborigines; but the matter in many vital respects had been prejudiced by the course of the first comers as Catholics. The assumption, held as a self-evident truth by the Roman Church, was that a state of heathenism imposed a disablement which impaired all human rights of property, liberty, and even of life; while the possession of the true faith conferred authority of jurisdiction over all the earth, with the right to seize and hold all heathen territory, and to subjugate and exterminate all heathen people who would not or could not be converted. As to what was meant by conversion, its means, methods, and evidences, the champion of the faith being the sole judge and arbiter in the case, there would be little satisfaction in raising any discussion. However arro

and complacent this assumption may seem to us, it had so culminated in its conclusion, had become so imbedded in general belief, and was so unchallenged, that it was held as a self-evident truth. The Pope was the vicegerent of God, and the depositary of supreme power over men.