tory, related by the Spanish historians themselves, it is so completely an assumption of the art of the "father of lies," and betrays such a consciousness of the real nature of the business they were engaged in, that it would be looked upon as a happy burlesque of some waggish wit upon them. The fact however stands on the authority of Gomera, Herrera, Oviedo, and others. Ovando, the governor, seeing the rapidly wasting numbers of the natives, and hearing the complaints of the adventurers, began to cast about for a remedy, and at length this most felicitous scheme, worthy of Satan in the brightest moment of his existence, burst upon him.-There were the inhabitants of the Lucayo Isles, living in heathen idleness, and ignorant alike of Christian mines and Christian sugarworks. It was fitting that they should not be left in such criminal and damnable neglect any longer. He proposed, therefore, that these benighted creatures should be brought to the elysium of Hispaniola, and civilized in the gold mines, and instructed in the Christian religion in the sugar-mills! The idea was too happy, and too full of the milk of Christian kindness to be lost. At once, all the amiable gold-hunters clapped their hands with ecstasy at the prospect of so many new martyrs to the Christian faith; and Ferdinand, the benevolent and most Catholic Ferdinand, assented to it with the zeal of a royal nursing father of the church! A fleet was speedily fitted out for the benighted Lucayos; and the poor inhabitants there, wasting their existence in merely cultivating their maize, plucking their oranges, or fishing in their streams, just as their need or their inclination prompted them, were told by the Spaniards that they came from the heaven of their

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ancestors-isles of elysian beauty and fertility; where all pain and death were unknown, and where their friends and relations, living in heavenly felicity, needed only their society to render that felicity perfect!-that these beatified relatives had prayed them to hasten and bring them to their own scene of enjoyment -now waited impatiently for their arrival-and that they were ready to convey them thither, to the fields of heaven, in fact, without the black transit of death! The simple creatures, hearing a story which chimed in so exactly with their fondest belief, flocked on board with a blind credulity, not even to be exceeded by the Bubble-dupes of modern England, and soon found themselves in the grasp of fiends, and added to the remaining numbers of the Hispaniolan wretches in the mines and plantations. Forty thousand of these poor people were decoyed by this hellish artifice; and Satan himself, on witnessing this Spanish chef d'ouvre, must have felt ashamed of his inferiority of tact in his own profession!*

*How affecting is Peter Martyr's account of these poor Lucayans, thus fraudulently decoyed from their native countries. "Many of them, in the anguish of despair, obstinately refuse all manner of sustenance, and retiring to desert caves and unfrequented woods, silently give up the ghost. Others, repairing to the sea-coast on the northern side of Hispaniola, cast many a longing look towards that part of the ocean where they suppose their own islands to be situated; and as the sea-breeze rises, they eagerly inhale it-fondly believing that it has lately visited their own happy valleys, and comes fraught with the breath of those they love, their wives and their children. With this idea, they continue for hours on the coast, until nature becomes utterly exhausted, when, stretching out their arms towards the ocean, as if to take a last embrace of their distant country and relatives, they sink down and expire without a groan. One of them, who was more desirous of life, or had greater courage than most of his

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But the climax yet remained to be put to the inflictions on these islanders:-and that was found in the pearl fishery of Cubagua. Columbus had discovered this little wretched island-Columbus had suggested and commenced the slavery of the Indians,-and it seemed as though a Columbus was to complete the fabric of their misery. Don Diego, Columbus's son, had compelled an acknowledgment of his claims in the vice-royalty of the New World. He had enrolled himself by his marriage with the daughter of Don Ferdinand de Toledo, brother of the Duke of Alva, and a relative of the king, amongst the highest nobility of the land. Coming over to assume his hereditary station, he brought a new swarm of these proud and avaricious hidalgoes with him. He seized upon and distributed amongst them whatever portions of Indians remained unconsumed; and casting his eyes on this sand-bank of Cubagua, he established a colony of pearl-fishers upon it-where the Indians, and especially the wretched ones decoyed from the Lucayos, were compelled to find in diving the last extremity of their sufferings.

countrymen, took upon him a bold and difficult piece of work. Having been used to build cottages in his native country, he procured instruments of stone, and cut down a large spongy tree, called jaruma (the bombax, or wild cotton), the body of which he dexterously scooped into a canoe. He then provided himself with oars, some Indian corn, and a few gourds of water, and prevailed on another man and woman to embark with him on a voyage to the Lucayos. Their navigation was prosperous for near two hundred miles, and they were almost within sight of their long-lost shores, when unfortunately they were met by a Spanish ship, which brought them back to slavery and sorrow! The canoe is still preserved in Hispaniola as a curiosity, considering the circumstances under which it was made."-Decad. vii.

And was there no voice raised against these dreadful enormities? Yes-and with the success which always attends the attempt to defend the weak against the powerful and rapacious in distant colonies. The Dominican monks, much to their honour, inveighed, from time to time, against them; but the Franciscans, on the other hand, sanctioned them, on the old plea of policy and necessity. It was necessary that the Spaniards should compel the Indians to labour, or they must abandon their grand source of wealth. That was conclusive. Where are the people that carry their religion or their humanity beyond their interest? The thing was not to be expected. One man, indeed, roused by the oppressions of Diego Columbus, and his notorious successor, Albuquerque, a needy man, actually appointed by Ferdinand to the office of Distributor of the Indians!-one man, Bartholomew de Las Casas, dared to stand forward as their champion, and through years of unremitting toil to endeavour to arrest from the government some mitigation of their condition. Once or twice he appeared on the eve of success. At one time Ferdinand declared the Indians free subjects, and to be treated as such; but the furious opposition which arose in the colony on this decision, soon drew from the king another declaration, to wit, that the Pope's bull gave a clear and satisfactory right to the Indians-that no man must trouble his conscience on account of their treatment, for the king and council would take all that on their own responsibility, and that the monks must cease to trouble the colony with their scruples. Yet the persevering Las Casas, by personal importunity at the court of Spain, painting the miseries and destruction

of the Indians, now reduced from a million-not to sixty thousand as before,* but to fourteen thousand— again succeeded in obtaining a deputation of three monks of St. Jerome, as superintendents of all the colonies, empowered to relieve the Indians from their heavy yoke; and returned thither himself, in his official character of Protector of the Indians. But all his efforts ended in smoke. His coadjutors, on reaching Hispaniola, were speedily convinced by the violence and other persuasives of the colonies, that it was necessary that the Indians should be slaves; and the only resource of the benevolent Las Casas was to endeavour to found a new colony where he might employ the Indians as free men, and civilize and Christianize them. But this was as vain a project as the other. His countrymen were now prowling along every shore of the New World that they were acquainted with, kidnapping and carrying off the inhabitants as slaves, to supply the loss of those they had worked to death. The dreadful atrocities committed in these kidnapping cruizes, had made the name of the Spaniards terrible wherever they had been; and as the inhabitants could no longer anywhere be decoyed, he found the Spanish admiral on the point of laying waste with fire and sword, so as to seize on all its people in their flight, the very territory granted him in which to try his new experiment of humanity. The villany was accomplished; and amid the desolation of Cumana-the

In less than fifty years from the arrival of the Spaniards, not more than two hundred Indians could be found in Hispaniola; and Sir Francis Drake states that when he touched there in 1585, not one was remaining; yet so little were the Spaniards benefited by their cruelty, that they were actually obliged to convert pieces of leather into money!-See Hakluyt's Voyages, vol. iii.