Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/66

46 consigned to that fate on the ground that they were cannibals. It was preposterous to suppose that, having once been sold, they would be returned here as baptized Christians, for the purpose of aiding in the conversion of other Caribs. But afterwards large gangs of captives were committed to the same fate simply as “prisoners of war.” Considerable debate was raised in the Spanish Council as to the rightfulness of this disposition of such a class of captives. But the final decision allowed it.

It was on this fair island that the dreams and illusions which had so sweetly kindled and wrapped the imaginations of both races alike, were broken and gave place to ghastly realities. The savages ceased to regard their visitors as having swept down upon them from a pure heaven, and if their theology had taken in the alternate realm of destiny, would have traced them as fiends to the pit of all horrors. The Spaniards on their part came to a better knowledge of the Indian character in its spirit and capacities of passion. They found the natives cunning, ingenious in stratagem, and capable of duplicity and guile; bold and venturesome and courageous too in the arts of war, with javelins, sharpened spears, bows and arrows, and bucklers. They found also that the savages had a profound and by no means a puerile and inoperative religion of their own, far better in its impulses and practice than that of the reckless and dissolute marauders. Sickness, want reaching to near starvation, utter unwillingness to labor even for food, discontent, a rebellious spirit, bitter disappointment of hope, and the grossest indulgence of all foul passions, — all culminated in their effects at Isabella. When Columbus returned there from a cruise to Cuba, he found a state of open warfare between his colonists and many of the native chiefs, who, goaded to desperation, had conspired to exterminate the intruders. Columbus himself in March, 1495, took the field with his little army of infantry and cavalry, and twenty of the fiercest blood-hounds, against a