Peru and other rich parts of America inflamed the greed of inumerable adventurers, and that these men, in order to wring gold and other treasures from the natives, resorted to the most heartless cruelties. We also must call to mind, that in company with these conquerors went hosts of monks and priests of all orders, eager to convert the "heathen" to the "only true creed." Ruthlessly invading the temples of the "infidels," they turned the banner of the Cross, this beacon light of promise, into an awful oriflame of war, spreading destruction and disaster. The well known accounts, given by the Spanish bishop Las Casas, disclose among other horrible events the fact—heretofore unheard of in human history—that whole bands and tribes of American Indians, to evade the tyranny of their European oppressors, slaughtered their own children, and then committed suicide.
These Indians had been compelled not only to work in the gold mines and in the pearl fisheries, but to perform all other labor that white men were unable or unwilling to do. As under the cruel treatment of their oppressors the natives rapidly dwindled away and whole islands became depopulated the Portuguese as well as the Spaniards resorted to the importation of negro slaves, whom they captured in Africa and brought to America.
It was not long before the profits, derived from this trade, attracted the eyes of English adventurers. The first to become engaged in that new branch of business, was William Hawkins. It was he who undertook the first regular slave hunts to the coast of Guinea and opened that shameful traffic in which England was engaged for nearly three centuries. His son, John Hawkins, sailing under a charter of Queen Elizabeth, continued the lucrative business and grew rich.
That this men-hunter imagined himself under the special protection of the heavenly father appears from several entries in his log-book. When, invading a negro village near Sierra Leone, he almost fell into captivity himself and would have been exposed to the same fate that he inflicted, without compunction, upon thousands of other unfortunate men and women, he wrote: "God, who worketh all things for the best, would not have it so, and by Him all escaped without danger; His name be praised for it." At another time, when his vessels were becalmed for a long time in midocean and great suffering ensued: "But Almighty God, who never suffereth His elect to perish, sent us the ordinarie Breeze, which is the northwest wind."
To what extent the name of Christianity was abused, we see from the fact that Hawkins, when entering upon his greatest expedition with five ships in 1567 sacrilegiously named his flagship "Jesus Christ."
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