Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/71

Rh on land or sea have engaged him, had not its charms been heightened not only by the hope of easily attained wealth, but by opportunities of marauding adventure, and by victims on whom he might flesh his sword in ruthless carnage. In less than four years after Columbus had landed on the island, hundreds of thousands of the natives — more than a third of its population — had been put to death. There seems to have been something aimless in this slaughter. It can hardly be said to have been even provoked in its primary indulgence; and when the terrified and maddened natives were driven to resort to their simple methods of defence or flight, there was a wanton brutality, a diabolical and mocking revel of atrocity, in the fierce and indiscriminate method of hunting them for havoc and torture.

The spirit of discovery had, from its first stirring among the people of Southern Europe, been associated with the spirit of rapine and tyranny, and the enslavement of the people whom it brought to light. The discovery, under Prince Henry of Portugal, of the Canary Islands, put them as a matter of course under tribute to him. His navigators then steadily coursed their way down the western coast of Africa. Cape Nam soon lost the significance of its name, “Not,” as defining a limit for safe voyaging. Successive adventurers, beginning their enterprises from about the year 1400, skirted the African coast further south, till 1486, when Bartholomew Diaz made his way over six thousand miles of ocean to the Cape of Good Hope, and turned the continent. Slaves became from the first an article of commerce for all these voyagers.

It fell to Alexander VI., on application of Ferdinand and Isabella, to confer on their crowns all the lands in the “Indies” discovered and to be discovered. When what was thus given away under the name of the Indies proved to be a whole new continent, Francis I. of France, envying the wealth which the Emperor Charles V. drew from