Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/239

Rh plight of the white men would have made their ruin easy. But in most of these cases of the extremity of the whites they owed their safety and relief as much to the animosities of warring tribes as to the pity and kindness of the red men. Though the Spaniards by their atrocities had roused against themselves the dread and fiercest hate of their wretched victims, they were several times generously and piteously fed by them when they had neither money to purchase nor arms to wrest supplies. When the arrogant company of French Protestants under Ribault, in 1562, in the St. John River in Florida, had been reduced to starvation by their idleness and recklessness, the Indians, who despised their frivolity as much as they hated the haughty ferocity of the Spaniards, came to their relief. A friendly chief built and filled for them a store-house of supplies in their fort, and when on the night following a fire destroyed it with all its contents, rebuilt and filled it again. And when the desperate Frenchmen resolved to seek their way back to France, the savages helped them to build and rig a vessel. But instead of manifesting simple gratitude under such circumstances, the invaders were always on the watch to foment discords among the natives, that they might profit by engaging, if possible, a stronger tribe, or the stronger faction of a tribe, on their side.

There was a very broad distinction in the course pursued by the permanent English colonists, when their turn came, from that which was taken up by the Spaniards and the French in the earlier periods, as to any bargains or treaties about land with the natives. I cannot call to mind a single instance in which the Spaniards, recognizing any sort of vested right to territory occupied by the Indians, were at the pains even to ask leave of them for residence, much less to obtain a release of claims and a transfer of any space for their own lawful possession. The only exception to the sweep of this statement is in the case in which Columbus, after the loss of one of his vessels in his first