Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/23

Rh strike it upon its rear coast, on its eastern shore. That is precisely what he thought he had done, first by touching some of its outlying islands, then on its main. And his constant questions on the spot were for Cathay, for the realm of Prester John, the treasures of Indian mines. He was looking, not for America, but for India. And he was, as he believed, not in a new world, but on an edge of the old familiar world. India it was to be all the way, and India it was at the end. On his fourth and last voyage, Columbus wrote from Veragua, to Ferdinand and Isabella, that he was within nineteen days' land journey of the Ganges. And so everything on his way and at the end of his way took a name from the lure and illusion under which he won a higher renown of glory than he knew. The islands which he first reached became, as they are now, the West Indies. The royal council in Spain which managed, or rather mismanaged, all that came of the great enterprise, became “The Council for the Indies;” and the aborigines on these superb domains of forests, mountains, lakes, and rivers were called, and, if ever they shall have all vanished away, will be known in history, as “Indians.”

It is to be noted, however, that the French, who so soon after followed the Spaniards by voyages to the southern and northern bounds on the mainland of our domain, did not adopt or use the word “Indians” as a name for the aborigines. I do not recall a single case of its use by any of the French explorers. They uniformly spoke and wrote of the natives as “les Sauvages,” — the savages. Occasionally a reference may be found in which a French writer will use the expression, “The Indians, as the English call the savages.”

Deferring to future discussion the leading topics which this large subject will present to us, as we follow up the subsequent relations between the people of the Old World and those of the New, we may occupy ourselves in these introductory pages with a general view of the field before