Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/69

Rh hanged. Ovando founded a town near the scene of the massacre, to which he blasphemously gave the name of St. Mary of the true Peace! The five native chieftains of the districts of Hispaniola had now perished, and the island was desolate. Twelve years after his great discovery Columbus wrote to the Spanish monarchs: —

To supply the actual needs of labor, after the devastation and depopulation of the island, negro slaves were sent to Hispaniola in 1505. Then, too, began another series of outrages in the forcible abduction and transfer, under the grossest deception, of natives of the Lucayan Islands. In five years forty thousand of these were kidnapped and transported to Hispaniola.

Two words, of widely contrasted significations and associations, have been adopted into our English speech from the language of the natives of that once happy island, — hammock, or hamac, designating the couch of listless repose, and hurricane, the sound of which aptly expresses the whirling tornado of tempests and waves, and well offsets, in its symbol of Spanish havoc, the bed of peace and ease.

Historians, by their use of the term, have consented to receive from the first Spanish knights-errant and marauders in the New World the respectable and colorless word Conquest to define the method of their mastery of territory