Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/104

94 keeping a keen watch for a place to build a fort; for, he says, "Inasmuch as the people are perfectly defenseless, and totally unacquainted with arms, a force of fifty men could keep them captive in their own island and make them do whatever might be desired," in case the king might not wish them all taken to Spain as slaves.

As he found no gold, except the nose-ornament, worth about a dollar and a half, which the owner refused to barter for glass beads, Columbus soon left the Lucayas, and for a few years they were forgotten. By an accident hardly less probable than the discovery of a new world, he soon actually found rich goldmines in Hayti, and for a time the Spaniards forgot their desire to give light to them who sit in darkness, in their eagerness to slake their thirst for gold. They did not, however, forget the cotton nets of the Ceboynas, and they soon discovered, as all white men in the tropics do, that it is much easier to lie in a hammock puffing a cigar, and to sip chocolate as the days slip by, than to dig for gold, and they then bethought themselves of their duty to enlighten the darkness of the heathen natives of the Lucayas.

The king at once perceived the importance of bringing these people under Christian influences, and in 1509, or less than eleven years after the discovery, he issued an order for the deportation of the whole population of the Lucayas to New Spain, and the work of conversion was at once vigorously instituted with the aid of blood-hounds.

For a time the Spaniards seem to have regarded the Antilles as an inexhaustible slave-quarry, and to have thought it cheaper to replenish their exhausted stock of slaves than to care for those they had. They soon found, however, that it was not so easy as Columbus had thought to make the Ceboynas "do whatever might be desired"; and while the people who had never labored for themselves were powerless to escape slavery, they resisted to the death all the efforts of the Spaniards to profit by their labor.

So relentless were the conquerors, and so determined and hopeless the captives, that the unhappy slaves perished by wholesale in the mines of Hayti, under the lashes of their drivers and the steel swords which were often broken over their obstinate heads; and even now the mind recoils from the contemplation of the few facts regarding the fate of the Lucayans which history has preserved.

As an illustration, Las Casas gives, among others, the case of one Spaniard who, three months after he had received three hundred Lucayan slaves, had less than thirty left alive. For a short time this destruction was made good by fresh importations, but the supply was soon exhausted. All the islands were left