Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/285

Rh bring the drama to its close. It is with the second act as it was in progress, and with its actors and incidents, that we now study the fortune of our aborigines under one of its developments.

The prizes which the New World opened to European enterprise and adventure proved very soon to offer temptations to all the maritime powers of the Old World. The Papal Bull which conferred the whole continent on the crown of Spain was treated as if it were a simple pleasantry, even by monarchs who avowed themselves docile and faithful subjects of his Holiness; and as soon as some of the princes and people of Europe had broken from the bonds of the old Church, any claimed prerogative of the Pope to confer rights or jurisdiction here was utterly, and as if by common consent, discredited.

So the next act in the tragic history of our aborigines opens with the events which first acquainted them with the fact that the race of pale-faces coming from across the sea were not all of one nation, subjects of the same sovereign, having common interests; but, in fierce and bloody rivalry, were transferring to this new soil jealousies and hostilities of foreign dynasties. The earliest lesson of this sort which our Southern Indians had a chance to learn, if their understandings could take it in, was that some difference in the religion of the invaders — as that of the French Huguenots and the Spanish Catholics in Florida — could add an embitterment to the raging passion of their strife.

Beginning as early as the year 1504, we find a constantly increasing number of fishermen from European ports, almost exclusively French, resorting to the banks near Newfoundland for the profitable catch of cod. There were markets for vast quantities of this product of the sea, as a cheap food for which there was a large demand for the Lenten period and the frequent Fast days of the Church, before its unity was riven by the Reformation. It is observable, too, that during the first outburst of the rage and