Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/68

48 merchant and navigator, Amerigo Vespucci, who by strange fortune has attached his name to the continent, — the expedition had a bloody encounter with the Caribs, taking many of them captives for the slave marts of Seville and Cadiz.

Nicholas de Ovando, who was in command at Hispaniola while Columbus was in Spain, by his insubordinate, cruel, and oppressive course, baffled all the more humane purposes of the Admiral for any mild subjugation and rule of the natives. His savage cruelty and his desperate tyranny in working the mines and fields by the hard task-works of the Indians, whose slight constitutions unfitted them for any kind of toil, visited upon them a sum of horrors and of tortures. The apostolic Las Casas, himself a witness of these enormities and agonies, has described them in terms and images too revolting to be traced in their details. He says, “I saw them with my bodily, mortal eyes.” Famine, despair, and madness drove multitudes to self-destruction, and mothers suffocated the infants at their breasts. Ovando closed the succession of his atrocities by a general massacre of natives and their chiefs, committed under the very basest arts of duplicity and treachery, while the unsuspecting victims were straining their confiding hospitality, with presents, wild games, dances, and songs, for his delight. The scene of the outrage was that exquisite region, well-nigh a poetic and fairy realm, on the western coast and promontory of the island, then called Xaragua. Anacaona, the sister of its cacique, is described as a most lovely, intelligent, and kindly woman. She was the wife of that noble chieftain Caonabo, whose death as a captive on the way to Spain has just been mentioned. Pardoning the previous hostility of the Spaniards, who had made her a widow, she had manifested to the intruders on her domains the utmost forbearance and kindness. A pretence to justify the massacre was found in a secret report that she and her subjects were meditating that of the Spaniards. She herself was taken in chains to St. Domingo, and there