Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/272

 and a regular traffic between the Guinea coast and the colony was soon established.

This statement, however, has been contradicted by the abbe Gregoire, in his Apologie de B. de Las Casas, in the memoirs of the French institute; also by the writer of the article Casas, in the Biographie Universelle, after an examination of all the Spanish and Portuguese historians of that period. This charge, he says, rests solely on the authority of Kerrera, an elegant but inaccurate writer. "Negro slavery," says another writer, "was a device struck out in a bold and unconscientious age to meet a great emergency, — the age of Cortes and Pizarro." But by it an evil of fearful magnitude has been entailed upon our hemisphere.

The true sources of wealth in the island were now ascertained, not to consist in digging for gold among the barren mountains, but in cultivating the rich soil of the plains. The sugar-cane was introduced and extensively cultivated. In the hard labor necessary in rearing and manipulating it, the hardiness of the negro was shown infinitely superior to the fragile Indian. Plantation after plantation was brought under cultivation, and yielded a handsome profit. Both Indians and negroes were tasked beyond all reasonable bounds, and the consequence was that the former died and the latter rebelled.

As Spain, however, extended her conquests on the main land, the importance of Hispaniola as a colony began to decline; and at the beginning of the seventeenth century the island had become nearly a desert, the natives having been all but extirpated, and the Spanish residents being few, and congregated in several widely-separated stations round the coast. At this time the West Indian seas swarmed with buccaneers, adventurers without homes, families, or country, the refuse of all nations and climes. These men, the majority of whom were French, English, and Dutch, being prevented by the Spaniards from holding any permanent settlement in the new world, banded together in self-defense, and roved the seas in quest of subsistence, seizing vessels, and occasionally landing on the coast of one of the Spanish possessions, and committing terrible ravages. A party of these buccaneers had, about the year 1629, occupied the small island of Tortuga, on the northwest coast of St. Domingo. From this island they used to make frequent incursions into St. Domingo, for the purpose of hunting; the forests of that island abounding with wild cattle, horses and swine, the progeny of the tame animals which the Spaniards had introduced into the island. At length, after various struggles with the Spanish occupants, these adventurers made good their footing in the island of St. Domingo, drove the Spaniards to its eastern extremity, and became masters of its western parts. As most of them were of French origin, they were desirous of placing themselves under the protection of France; and Louis XIV. and his government being flattered with the prospect of thus acquiring a rich possession in the new world, a friendly intercourse between