Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/86

66 Columbus portrays to their Majesties the gentle and kindly creatures who welcomed the mysterious white visitors to their island shores, it is but a long and varied racking of all our sensibilities to follow the course of the invaders. There was no possible deed, or trick, or artifice of barbarity, ingratitude, treachery, and cunning and despicable fraud, which the invaders scrupled to practise on those nude and simple children of Nature. Steel-clad warriors, a single score of them, would overmatch thousands of those poor savages when they were driven to any show of resistance. The horse on which the warrior was mounted was to the Indian a more terrific monster than Milton has fashioned from all the shapes of demons for his hellish phalanxes; and it was the horse, not the man upon it, which secured to Cortes the conquest of Mexico. The fierce Spanish blood-hound, also, comes into the horrid warfare to track the wretched victims of greed through the swamps and mountain thickets. The only gleam of mercy, the only arresting hush from agony, that relieves the later narratives, is when we come for moments upon the mention of the name of Las Casas, the great Spanish apostle of the Indians, with his rebuking word.

If, amid the horrors and atrocities connected with the successive Spanish conquests on our islands and continent, anything could add a sharper and more distressing outrage to the story, this would be found in the apparently utter insensibility to their own cruelty and irreverence in which the Spaniards attached the holiest names and epithets to the places where their acts were often the most fiendish, — names borne by many of those places to this day. The sacred title of the Trinity; the names of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; the sweet roll of epithets — of love, pity, mercy, and sorrow — for the Virgin Mother; the names of prophets, apostles, and evangelists, of saints and martyrs, of holy days and sacraments, — are strewn all over the islands, bays, coasts, and rivers of our southern