Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/79

Rh Afterward, reaching the sea at the Bay of San Miguel, he waded into the water, with sword and shield, and took possession of the whole ocean, with its islands, for the kings of Castile. To this noble and heroic Spaniard rightly accrued the glory, in 1516, of launching two well-equipped barks from the river Balsas, — the first keels of European navigators to plough the waters of the Pacific. And the feat which preceded this triumph was in full keeping with it; for the timber of the vessels had been cut and framed on the Atlantic side of the continent, and the rigging and equipments had been transported with it by Spaniards, negroes, and Indians, with incredible toil, over the rough mountains and the oozy soil of the isthmus.

The work of further conquest was, by royal and ecclesiastical instructions, to proceed under the guidance of a proclamation, which may safely be called the most extraordinary state document ever penned. Its whole purport, terms, and spirit are so astounding in the assumptions and in the impossible conditions which it involved, as well as in the utter futility of its proffers of humanity to the Indians, that it would provoke the ridicule and derision of readers of these days as if it were a comic travesty, did it not deal with such profoundly momentous matters. This document, in the form of instructions to the viceroys in the Indies, was prepared by a learned Spanish jurist, and bears the Latin title of “The Requisition.” It was to be read as a proclamation, or a herald's announcement, by the commander as he invaded each Indian province for conquest, — an exception dispensing with this when the natives were supposed to be so-called cannibals. It recited the Bible narrative of the creation by God of the human pair; the unity and the dispersion of the race; the lordship over this whole race and over all the earth, which the Almighty had given to St. Peter, and then to his successors the popes; the donation made by the reigning pontiff of lordship over all the Indies to the monarchs of Spain; and it called