Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/87

Rh and generally there is with them a frightful legend. Columbus, writing to the monarchs in 1498, estimates that, “in the name of the sacred Trinity,” the Spanish markets may be supplied with such and such numbers of slaves. Las Casas writes that on one occasion the Spaniards hanged thirteen Indians “in honor and reverence of Christ, our Lord, and his twelve apostles.” After a dire slaughter of the Indians, in his first encounter with them at Tabasco, Cortes enjoined a solemn religious ceremonial, with cross and chant and mass and Te Deum, and named the bloody spot “Saint Mary of Victory.” He wrote that the odds had been so immense against him “that Heaven must have fought on his side.” Las Casas dryly adds, that “this was the first preaching of the gospel by Cortes in New Spain.” Columbus, with all his nobleness of soul, has left no example set by him, and no protest, for withstanding or rebuking the spirit of his countrymen. On the contrary, his own leading and example marked the course followed by his sons and all his successors, — Ovando, Ojeda, Nicuesa, Enciso, Vasco Nuñez, Pedrarias, Pizarro, and Cortes. Ojeda always wore, concealed on his person, an amulet or charm of the Holy Virgin, which he firmly believed was his infallible protection under all risks on sea and land, in private brawls and desperate battles. On his first return voyage Columbus, as has been mentioned, took home with him, as the first-fruits of a new slave race, nine Indians. They were compensated by being secured against future woe by Christian baptism. One of them dying soon after the ceremony was, we are told, “the first of his race to enter heaven.” On various pretences Columbus sent to Spain many ship-loads of slaves. It was only on the third of his four voyages, in 1498, that he touched the mainland of the continent, at Paria, near the Isthmus of Darien; and then followed in succession the work of so-called discovery, which opened either division of the continent to the same worse than barbarous havoc of rapacity and fiendishness.