FROM CORDOVA TO CATHAY.

swear to Your Majesty,” wrote Columbus, “there are no better people on earth ;
they are gentle and without knowing what evil is, neither killing nor stealing.”
And yet, what was their fate? We know, and it is true, that their lovable
qualities availed them not, but rather hastened their extinction. One cannot.
but wonder why it was. We may find the keynote of the acts of Columbus in
a quaint expression regarding him by Bernal Diaz, one of the conquerors who
followed him: “He took his life in his hand that he might give light to them
who sit in darkness, and satisfy the thirst for gold which all men feel.” This
thirst for gold was overpowering; it controlled all his actions, and caused him
to inaugurate a system of slavery that eventually caused the extinction of all
the Indians of the West Indies. Yes; it is a melancholy truth that of all the
aborigines discovered by Columbus, in the Bahamas, Cuba and the larger islands,
not a descendant lives to-
day. In fact, hardly one
remained alive fifty years
after the discovery.

In the year 1508, Hayti
having been depopulated of
its Indians, the cruel Span-
iards came to the Bahamas
and deported the Lucayans,
to wear their lives away in
the mines. They enticed
them aboard their vessels
under pretext of taking
them to see their friends
who had died. “For it is
certain,” says the historian
Herrera, “that all the In-
dian nations believed in the
immortality of the soul, and that when the body was dead the spirit went to
certain places of delight.”

By these allurements above forty thousand were transported, never to
return; and a few years later, the islands, found teeming with inhabitants,
were deserted and solitary. In Cuba were found other, Indians, but a little
better supplied with articles of adornment and subsistence, who had hammocks
(hamacas), made fire by rubbing together two pieces of wood, raised maize, or
Indian corn, and spun cotton, which grew everywhere in their fields.

The only domesticated quadruped was found in Cuba, the uwtia or dumb dog;
while in the Bahamas the people had domesticated only the parrot.

Having been extinct three hundred years at least, little remains from which
to reconstruct the lives of these primitive people at the period of discovery.

 

THE LANDING-PLACE OF COLUMBUS.
(Watling’s Island.)