Colonization and Christianity/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI.
THE SPANIARDS IN JAMAICA AND OTHER WEST INDIAN ISLANDS.
The story of one West India Island, is the story of all. Whether Spaniards, French, or English took possession, the slaughter and oppression of the natives followed. I shall, therefore, quit these fair islands for the present, with a mere passing glance at a few characteristic facts.
Herrera says that Jamaica was settled prosperously, because Juan de Esquival having brought the natives to submission without any effusion of blood, they laboured in planting cotton, and raising other commodities, which yielded great profit. But Esquival in a very few years died in his office, and was buried in Sevilla Nueva, a town which he had built and destined for the seat of government. There is a dark tradition connected with the destruction of this town, which would make us infer that the mildness of Esquival's government was not imitated by his successors. The Spanish planters assert that the place was destroyed by a vast army of ants, but the popular tradition still triumphs over this tradition of the planters. It maintains, that the injured and oppressed natives rose in their despair and cut off every one of their tyrants, and laid the place in such utter and awful ruin that it never was rebuilt, but avoided as a spot of horror. The city must have been planned with great magnificence, and laid out in great extent, for Sloane, who visited it in 1688, could discover the traces or remains of a fort, a splendid cathedral and monastery, the one inhabited by Peter Martyr, who was abbot and chief missionary of the island. He found a pavement at two miles distance from the church, an indication of the extent of the place, and also many materials for grand arches and noble buildings that had never been erected. The ruins of this city were now overgrown with wood, and turned black with age. Sloane saw timber trees growing within the walls of the cathedral upwards of sixty feet in height; and General Venables in his dispatches to Cromwell, preserved in Thurlow's State Papers, vol. iii, speaks of Seville as a town that had existed in times past.
Both ancient tradition, and recent discoveries, says Bryan Edwards, in his History of the West Indies, give too much room to believe that the work of destruction proceeded not less rapidly in this island, after Esquival's death, than in Hispaniola; for to this day caves are frequently discovered in the mountains, wherein the ground is covered almost entirely with human bones; the miserable remains, without all doubt, of some of the unfortunate aborigines, who, immured in those recesses, were probably reduced to the sad alternative of perishing with hunger or bleeding under the swords of their merciless invaders. That these are the skeletons of Indians is sufficiently attested by the skulls, which are preternaturally compressed. "When, therefore," says Edwards, "we are told of the fate of the Spanish inhabitants of Seville, it is impossible to feel any other emotion than an indignant wish that the story were better authenticated, and that heaven, in mercy, had permitted the poor Indians in the same moment to have extirpated their oppressors altogether! But unhappily this faint glimmering of returning light to the wretched natives, was soon lost in everlasting darkness, since it pleased the Almighty, for reasons inscrutable to finite wisdom, to permit the total destruction of this devoted people; who, to the number of 60,000, on the most moderate estimate, were at length wholly cut off and exterminated by the Spaniards—not a single descendant of either sex being alive when the English took the island in 1655, nor I believe for a century before."
The French historian, Du Tertre, informs us that his countrymen made a lawful purchase of the island of Grenada from the natives for some glass beads, knives and hatchets, and a couple of bottles of brandy for the chief himself. The nature of the bargain may be pretty well understood by the introduction of the brandy for the chief, and by the general massacre which followed, when Du Tertre himself informs us that Du Parquet, the very general who made this bargain, gave orders for extirpating the natives altogether, which was done with circumstances of the most savage barbarity, even to the women and children. The same historian assures us that St. Christopher's, the principal of the Caribbee Isles, was won by the joint exertions of Thomas Warner, an Englishman, and D'Esnambuc, the captain of a French privateer, who both seem to have entered with hearty good-will into the business of massacre and extermination; by which means, and by excessive labour, the total aboriginal population of the West Indian islands were speedily reduced from six millions, at which Las Casas estimated them, to nothing.
Let any one read the following account from Herrera and Peter Martyr, of the manner in which the Spaniards were received in these islands:—"When any of the Spaniards came near to a village, the most ancient and venerable of the Indians, or the cazique himself, if present, came out to meet them, and gently conducting them into their habitations, seated them on stools of ebony curiously ornamented. These benches seemed to be seats of honour reserved for their guests, for the Indians threw themselves on the ground, and kissing the hands and feet of the Spaniards, offered them fruits and the choicest of their viands, entreating them to prolong their stay with such solicitude and reverence as demonstrated that they considered them as beings of a superior nature, whose presence consecrated their dwellings, and brought a blessing with it. One old man, a native of Cuba, approaching Columbus with great reverence, and presenting a basket of fruit, thus addressed him:—'Whether you are divinities or mortal men we know not. You come into these countries with a force, against which, were we inclined to resist it, resistance would be a folly. We are all therefore at your mercy: but if you are men subject to mortality like ourselves, you cannot be unapprised that after this life there is another, wherein a very different portion is allotted to good and bad men. If, therefore, you expect to die, and believe with us that every one is to be rewarded in a future state according to his conduct in the present, you will do no hurt to those who do none to you.' "
Let the reader also, after listening to these exalted sentiments addressed by a savage, as we are pleased to term him, to a Christian, a term likewise used with as little propriety, read this account of the reception of Bartholomew Columbus by Behechio, a powerful cazique of Hispaniola. "As they approached the king's dwelling, they were met by his wives to the number of thirty, carrying branches of the palm-tree in their hands, who first saluted the Spaniards with a solemn dance, accompanied with a song. These matrons were succeeded by a train of virgins, distinguished as such by their appearance; the former wearing aprons of cotton cloth, while the latter were arrayed only in the innocence of pure nature. Their hair was tied simply with a fillet over their foreheads, or suffered to flow gracefully on their shoulders and bosoms. Their limbs were finely proportioned, and their complexions though brown, were smooth, shining and lovely. The Spaniards were struck with admiration, believing that they beheld the dryads of the woods, and the nymphs of the fountains realizing ancient fable. The branches which they bore in their hands, they now delivered with lowly obeisance to the lieutenant, who, entering the palace, found a plentiful, and according to the Indian mode of living, a splendid repast already provided. As night approached, the Spaniards were conducted to separate cottages, wherein each was accommodated with a cotton hammock, and the next morning they were again entertained with dancing and singing. This was followed by matches of wrestling and running for prizes; after which two great bodies of armed Indians suddenly appeared, and a mock engagement ensued, exhibiting their modes of warfare with the Charaibes. For three days were the Spaniards thus royally entertained, and on the fourth the affectionate Indians regretted their departure."
What beautiful pictures of a primitive age! what a more than realization of the age of gold! and what a dismal fall to that actual age of gold which was coming upon them! To turn from these delightful scenes to the massacres and oppressions of millions of these gentle and kind people, and then to the groans of millions of wretched Africans, which through three long centuries have succeeded them, is one of the most melancholy and amazing things in the criminal history of the earth; nor can we wonder at the feelings with which Bryan Edwards reviews this awful subject:—"All the murders and desolations of the most pitiless tyrants that ever diverted themselves with the pangs and convulsions of their fellow-creatures, fall infinitely short of the bloody enormities committed by the Spanish nation in the conquest of the New World—a conquest, on a low estimate, effected by the murder of ten millions of the species! After reading these accounts, who can help forming an indignant wish that the hand of Heaven, by some miraculous interposition, had swept these European tyrants from the face of the earth, who like so many beasts of prey, roamed round the world only to desolate and destroy; and more remorseless than the fiercest savage, thirsted for human blood without having the impulse of natural appetite to plead in their defence!"