Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/80

60 upon the natives to follow the whole civilized world in paving obedience to and seeking the protection of the Church. If the natives comply with this appeal, they and their lands shall be secure, and they shall have “many privileges and exemptions”! If they refuse, robbery and devastation shall spoil all their possessions, and they themselves will be enslaved or killed.

A marvellously strange document indeed! It was to be read by mail-clad and mounted warriors, with their blood-hounds, to naked, unarmed savages. Who was to interpret to them its theology, its Bible terms, its ecclesiastical assumptions and subtilties, and the reasons justifying its alternative of conditions? This document is said to have been first read by the friars in the train of Ojeda, in his attack on the savages of Carthagena.

Furnished with this “Requisition,” the great captain Pedrarias, Governor of Darien, with a strong armament, started on his “consecrated” enterprise. The sickening story is too harrowing and revolting for relation in all its dark and hideous details. No element of treachery, ingratitude, ferocity, rapacity, or fiendishness is lacking in it. The torture, the fire, and the fangs of blood-hounds were put into service to extort the secret of treasures of gold and pearls; and thousands and thousands of men, women, and children, whom the “Requisition” had pronounced members of God's one human family, were treated with a pitiless barbarity at which the heart shudders. The only palliating thought which offers itself, as we read the story, is that the Spanish invaders, themselves but partially civilized, and with but a mockery of Christianity as their religion, became actually dehumanized and brutalized by the scenes and experiences around them, by a homeless and hazardous life on sea and land, under a burning sun, amid swamps and exposures, often starving,