Page:How and Why Library 030.jpg



VI. Children from Spain
Other ships sailed away for sugar. They found sugar right here in the New World. When Columbus came across the sea, before any other white man, he came in a Spanish ship. He found warm islands and the mainland, far south of where the English and Dutch people afterwards came to live. Spanish people followed him. They were glad to find that sugar cane would grow in many parts of tropical America. Sugar was worth a great deal of money. Do you know, no one, not even kings, had enough sugar to eat until shiploads of it were sent to the Old World from America?

Puritan and Dutch and Quaker lads often went as cabin boys, on the ships that sailed to the Spanish colonies for sugar. The farther south the ships sailed, the warmer it grew. The sun was high and bright; the sea and sky very blue. A steady wind blew all day long and filled the white sails. They passed dozens of green islands. On the islands were palm trees. One of the most beautiful things in the world is a palm tree, with a crown of green plumes, on the hill top of an island, against a blue sky. What would you think, then, of an island that was seven hundred miles long, and more than a hundred miles wide, lying in a sea as blue as indigo, and all its hill tops plumed with twenty-five kinds of palm trees?

"O-o-o-o-h!" is what the cabin boys on the sailing vessels said, when they saw Cuba. It was such a big island! It was so lovely, so green, so rich in fruits and other food plants. It had such wide harbors for ships, and it lay among smaller islands, right where all the ships would have to pass to go to lands beyond. No wonder the Spanish people called Cuba "The Pearl." No wonder they built their finest city in America, on the widest harbor of this jewel of an island. This city they named Havana. It was one hundred years old when the English and Dutch came to America to live.

To get to Havana a trading ship had to run the flag of its country up the mast. Then it sailed through a narrow passage into the harbor. The city was guarded by castle forts. It had a high wall around it. Over the wall, church towers and palm trees and roofs of red tile could be seen. It looked like some old Spanish city sleeping in the sun. Perhaps a Spanish merchant, in white