Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/81

Rh always lashed and maddened by the greed of gold and plunder. And if anything had been lacking to fill out the farcical absurdity and the comic drollery of the “Requisition,” it is found in the fact, that, so far from an attempt being made by any preparatory warning to interpret it or to convey its significance to a threatened and doomed Indian chieftain, the invaders, planning secret midnight attacks on the unsuspecting natives, would go through the form of mumbling over the jumble of theology and nonsense as they were hiding in the woods, all by themselves.

And this grimly comic element in the affair seems to have been appreciated, on one occasion at least, by two caciques of the province of Cenú, when the paper was in substance communicated to them by an invading captain, — the lawyer Enciso. The chiefs assented to what was said about the one supreme God, the Creator and Lord of all things; but “as to what was said about the Pope being lord of all the universe in the place of God, and of his giving the land of the Indies to the King of Castile, the Pope must have been drunk when he did it, for he gave what was not his; and that the king who had asked such a gift must be a madman in asking for what belonged to others.” They added, that if he wanted the land he must come and take it, and they would put his head on a stake. An aggravation of the superstitious frenzy against the poor heathen was found in the surmise that they actually worshipped the Devil. On the return of Columbus from his second voyage, in 1496, he had in his train some fancifully bedizened native chiefs, on whose head-gear and belts were wrought figures and grotesque emblems, some of which were regarded as showing the Devil in his own proper likeness, others as in the guise of a cat or owl. Even the good friend of Columbus, the curate Bernaldez, interpreted the symbols as those under which their uncanny deity appeared to them visibly.

In the interest of the claims of the Roman Church to a