Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/99

Rh Hayti is almost completely in a state of revolting and hopeless savagery, and recent writers assert that Jamaica is rapidly traveling the same road. The condition of Cuba is by no means encouraging to her friends; and in the Bahamas, abandoned homesteads, costly villas tumbling to ruins, roofless walls, and fields and plantations converted into tropical jungles, testify to anything but prosperity. The population of the Bahamas is less to-day than it was on the day Columbus landed, and it is not increasing.

He found the Bahamas in the possession of a prosperous and happy people who called the islands the Lucayas, and themselves Ceboynas. Twelve years afterward every soul of this population of more than forty thousand men, women, and children had perished in a strange land under the lash of the slave-driver; the race was blotted off the face of the earth, and the only impression which has been left upon our civilization by those who first welcomed it to this continent is a single word, which, together with the luxurious article it designates, has spread over the whole earth. The Ceboynas gave us the hammock, and this one Lucayan word is their only monument.

Nowhere in all the black pages of history is there a darker tragedy than theirs; and while it is eminently proper that we should pay all homage to the transcendent genius and noble nature of the great admiral, and that we should celebrate with all pomp and pride the miraculous growth of our own civilization, does it not also become us to commemorate in some way, at the same time, the story of the unhappy and forgotten Ceboynas, to whom the discovery had a still more profound significance?

How intensely interesting, just at present, is any addition to our knowledge of the other party to the transaction! The writer has recently spent two seasons in zoölogical research in the Bahama Islands, and has been able to learn a few facts, which are new to the science of anthropology, relating to the bodily structure of the long-lost Ceboynas, and thus to contribute toward the perpetuation of their memory.

There is not much intrinsic interest in a few fragments of human bones, but the Ceboyna skull which stands upon my table as I write gives life and vivid reality to the familiar story in the first chapter of my school history, and calls up in all its details with startling clearness the drama of the Bahama Islands.

To most of us these islands are little more than dots upon the map, but, small and sterile and unimportant as they are, they form one of the fairest landscapes upon earth, for they present all the conditions which are most favorable for intensity of color of earth and sea and sky. Under the combined influence of white soil, intense sunlight, and perfect purity of air and water, they