Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/402

386 peace, and they must have been a difficulty to be reckoned with till the close of the seventeenth century at least.

It is difficult to judge what were the number of the inhabitants of the islands at the time of the discovery. In 1495, when the Indians of Hispaniola rose against Columbus, according to the Spaniards, the number who revolted was a hundred thousand. Some authors place the native population of Hispaniola as high as three millions. It must have been impossible for the invaders to have formed any accurate computation of the number of inhabitants in countries so mountainous and impenetrable as were the larger Antilles. However, all accounts agree that the Indians were very numerous, and Las Casas describes the islands as "abounding with inhabitants, as an anthill with ants."

It seems extraordinary how so numerous a people could have been exterminated in so comparatively short a time. Oppression and cruelty alone could not have succeeded in wiping them out so completely. The Caribs were treated with greater severity than the Arrowauks, and their numbers were small in comparison with their less warlike neighbors, and yet the race survives to this day in Dominica and St. Vincent. Probably there was an inherent weakness in the race itself that tended to its destruction. They were timid and vicious, and timidity and vice are qualities that must hasten the disappearance of any people. Famine and disease seem to have been the chief factors in blotting out the Arrowauks. In Hispaniola the Indians, hoping to rid themselves of the voracious Spaniards, refused any longer to sow any crops. The Spaniards do not seem to have suffered as was expected, but in a few months no less than a third of the number of Indians in that island are said to have perished from starvation. But in 1518, according to Herrera, a scourge appeared in the Greater Antilles that almost desolated them. We know how great are the ravages of any imported disease among barbarians.

In our own days the natives of Fiji were swept off in thousands by so comparatively mild a distemper as measles: we can therefore understand how terrible must have been the ravages of so fatal an illness as smallpox, which was then first introduced from Europe. Even at the present day it is dreaded, but at that time it was twenty times more deadly and dreadful than now. The Indians were swept off in crowds, and the islands were almost depopulated. The mortality was increased by the miserable sufferers flinging themselves into the streams and rivers to seek relief from the burning fever that consumed them. Granting that the great majority of the Indians succumbed from disease and famine, the remainder of a people deficient in stamina might easily have dwindled away under the conditions then existing. Labor was odious to them, and that in the