The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 56, June, 1862

Protection and amelioration, then, became the cry. In consequence of the great increase of cattle in the island, it was considered no more than just that the Indians should no longer be used as beasts of burden. They were also to have one day in the seven, besides the Church festivals, for their own use; and intendants were appointed who were to have a general supervision of their affairs, and to protect them from barbarous punishments. These regulations were a weir of reeds thrown across a turbid and tumultuous Amazon.

Las Casas was an eye-witness of the cruelties which he exposed in his memoirs to the Government, those uncompromising indictments of his own nation and of the spirit of the age. He had seen the natives slaughtered like sheep in a pen, and the butchers laid bets with each other upon their dexterity in cleaving them asunder at a stroke. Children, torn from the bosoms of their mothers, were brained against the stones, or thrown into the water with mocking cries,—"That will refresh you!" A favorite mode of immolation, which had the merit of exciting theological associations, was to bind thirteen of the natives to as many stakes, one for each apostle and one for the Saviour, and then to make a burnt-offering of them. Others were smeared with pitch and lighted. Sometimes a fugitive who had been recaptured was sent into the forest with his severed hand,—"Go, carry this letter to the others who have escaped, with our compliments."

"I have seen," says Las Casas, "five chiefs and several other Indians roasting together upon hurdles, and the Spanish captain was enraged because their cries disturbed his siesta. He ordered them to be strangled, that he might hear no more of it. But the superintendent, whom I know, as well as his family, which is from Seville, more cruel than the officer, refused to end their torture." He would not be cheated of his after-dinner luxury, so he gagged them with sticks, and replenished the fires.23

Columbus first made use of dogs against the Indians, but merely to intimidate. They were swift dogs of chase, impetuous and dangerous, but did not yet deserve to be called blood-hounds. The Spaniards, however, by frequently using them in the pursuit of escaping natives, without thinking it worth while to restrain their motions, gradually educated them to a taste for human blood. From the breed, thus modified, the West-Indian blood-hound descended, possibly not without admixture with other savage dogs of French and English breeds which were brought to the island by their scarcely less savage owners. Many of the dogs which the Spaniards carried to South America roamed at large and degenerated into beasts of prey. Soldiers at one time were detailed to hunt them, and were then nicknamed Mataperros, or dog-slayers.

But if the dogs fed upon the Indian's body, the monk was ever vigilant to save his soul. A woman was holding her child of twelve months, says Las Casas, when she perceived the approach of the hounds in full cry after a party of natives. Feeling that she could not escape, she instantly tied her babe to her leg and then suspended herself from a beam. The dogs came up at the moment that a monk was baptizing the child, thus luckily cutting off its purgatory just behind the jaws that devoured it.

Spaniards were known to feed their dogs, when short of meat, by chopping off a native's arm and throwing it to them; and a few fed their dogs exclusively upon native-meat. We have the authority of Las Casas for the fact, which he took care to have well attested from various sources, that a Spaniard would borrow a quarter of native from a friend for his hounds, promising to return it at a favorable opportunity. Somebody asked one of these generous livers how his housekeeping flourished. "Well enough," was the reply; "I have killed twenty of these rascally Indians, and now, thank God, my dogs have something to eat."

The Spaniards paid their gambling debts in natives. If a governor lost heavily at cards, he would give the winner an order upon some cacique for a corresponding amount of gold, or natives in default of the metal, knowing that the gold could no longer be procured. Sometimes the lucky gambler made the levy without applying to the cacique. The stakes were not unfrequently for three and four hundred Indians in the early days of the colonies, when natives were so plenty that one could be bought for a cheese, or an arroba of vinegar, wine, or lard. Eighty natives were swapped for a mare, and a hundred for a lame horse. When it began to be difficult to lay hands upon them, it was only necessary to send for a missionary, who would gradually collect them for purposes of instruction and worship. When the habit of attending a chapel was pretty well confirmed, the building was surrounded, the young and stout ones were seized and branded, and carried away, with the most attractive females, for further indoctrination in the Christian arts.

A device of the caciques which was practised in Nicaragua might easily have been pursued in Hayti. But the account of Las Casas refers to the former province. When a demand was made upon one cacique to supply laborers, he would repair to another, and say, "The devil who has me in his power wants so many men and women. I have no doubt that your devil will say the same thing to you. Let us arrange the matter. Give me the facility of procuring my quota in your tribe, and you shall take yours from my tribe." "It is agreed; for my devil has just made a similar demand of me." Each cacique would then swear to the Commanders, who were very nice upon the technicality so long as slaves were plenty, that the men furnished came from his own district, thus saving his life and his credit with his people. This was a great convenience; for in all savage exigencies and dire perils men must study how they can best arrange with the inevitable.

But it will be too painful to recount the various inventions for punishing these unhappy children of Nature. The dogs, perhaps, were merciful, for they killed and ate a native on the spot. Cutting off the ear and nose was an ordinary barbarity,—in its origin it was a way to save time in collecting ornaments; shutting fifty or more into a house and setting it in flames was a favorite method of extemporizing a bonfire; pricking a crowd of insurgent natives over a precipice into the sea was an exceptional act of mercy,—they would place one hand over their eyes and take the plunge. It was a common sport to match stout Indians with the hounds, and bet upon their wrestling. In the pearl-fisheries, in rowing galleys, in agriculture, in the mines, in carrying ship-timber, anchors, and pieces of ordnance, in transporting produce, the Spaniards wasted the natives as if they were wind-and water-power which Nature would supply without limit. How can this ferocity be accounted for? It consulted neither interest nor personal safety. They raged like men stung to madness by poisonous clouds of insects; the future received no consideration; plans for improving the methods of cultivating different crops, or for introducing new staples, could not be carried out. Once having tasted native blood, like their own dogs, the hunting mania possessed them, till two millions of Haytians alone had perished. The population had become so reduced as early as 1508 that they were obliged to organize great Indian chases on the main-land, and a Coolie trade sprang up in the Lucayan Islands, to keep the Haytian mines and plantations supplied with hands. Forty thousand of these Lucayans were transported, on the assurance of the Spaniards that they would be restored to the souls of their ancestry, who had gone to reside in that Mountain-land of the West. Was there a touch of grim Spanish humor in this inducement to emigrate? For certainly the Lucayans did very soon rejoin those departed souls.

Wine and the climate maddened these unbridled Europeans. Avarice is a calculating passion; but here were aimless and exhausting horrors, like those which swarm in the drunkard's corrupted brain. What were vices at home became transformed into manias here. The representatives of other nations were not slow to imitate the example of the possessors of Hayti. Venezuela was ceded to a company of Germans in 1526, whose object was simply to strip the country of its treasures. Las Casas tries to believe that the Spaniards seemed like just men by the side of these new speculators; but it was not possible to destroy natives faster than was done in the countries under Spanish rule. The Germans, after all, were forced to employ Spaniards to pursue the Indians when they attempted to escape from this new system of farming into the mountains, and they profited so well by the lessons of their Catholic hunters, that, upon their departure, they hit upon new expedients for making the natives productive. The German Governor constructed a great palisaded park, into which he managed to drive all the Indians of the neighborhood, and then informed them that they could issue from it only as slaves, unless they paid a certain ransom, whose value he fixed. They were deliberately starved into adopting one or the other alternative. Those who could procure gold were let out to collect it, leaving their wives and children as pledges of their return. Many of the others preferred to die of hunger and thirst. When the ransomed natives departed with their families, the Governor had them pursued, reparked, and subjected to a repetition of this sponging process, and again a third time, so admirably did it work. This strikes Las Casas as a refinement of cruelty, which can be attributed only to the fact that these Germans were Lutheran heretics, and never assisted at the mass. "This is the way," he says, "that they conformed to the royal intention of establishing Christianity in these countries!"

How did the Spaniards conform to it? Rude soldiers became the managers of the different working gangs into which the Indians had been divided, and it devolved upon them to superintend their spiritual welfare. Enough has been said about their brutality; but their ignorance was no less remarkable. Las Casas complains that they could not repeat the Credo, nor the Ten Commandments. Their ignorance of the former would have been bliss, if they had been practically instructed in the latter. John Colmenero was one of these common soldiers who became installed in a Commandery (Encomienda). When the missionaries visited his plantation, they found that the laborers had not the slightest notions of Christianity. They examined John upon the subject, and discovered to their horror that he did not know even how to make the sign of the cross. "What have you been teaching these poor Indians?" they asked him. "Why, that they are all going to the Devil! Won't your signin santin cruces help to teach them that?"24

No doubt it would; for we know how serviceable in that way Ovando found it, when he plotted to seize the beautiful Anacaona, who governed the province of Xaragua in Hayti. This he did, and also gave the signal for a dreadful massacre of her subjects, whom he had beguiled to a military spectacle, by lifting his hand to the cross of Alcantara that was embroidered on his dress.

Colmenero had not a head for business like that other Spaniard who baptized all the inhabitants of a village and took away their idols of gold, for which he substituted copper ones, and then compelled the natives to purchase them of him at so many slaves per idol.

"Come, then, caciques and Indians, come!" This was the ordinary style of proclamation. "Abandon your false gods, adore the God of the Christians, profess their religion, believe in the gospel, receive the sacrament of baptism, recognize the King of Castile for your king and master. If you refuse, we declare war upon you to kill you, to make you slaves, to spoil you of your goods, and to cause you to suffer as long and as often as we shall judge convenient,"25 and for the good of your souls.

In 1542, Charles V. procured a bull from Pope Paul III. restoring the Indians to their natural freedom: this he confirmed and despatched to the island. Las Casas, the Protector of the Indians, had carried his point at last, but the Indians were beyond protection. The miserable remnant were no longer of consequence, for the African had begun to till the soil enriched by so much native blood. Thus ends the first chapter of the Horrors of San Domingo.

Schoelcher reminds us that the traveller may read upon the tomb of Columbus at Seville: "Known worlds were not enough for him: he added a new to the old, and gave to heaven innumerable souls."

[To be continued.]

METHODS OF STUDY IN NATURAL HISTORY

A few miles from the southern extremity of Florida, separated from it by a channel, narrow at the eastern end, but widening gradually toward the west, and rendered every year more and more shallow by the accumulation of materials constantly collecting within it, there lies a line of islands called the Florida Keys. They are at different distances from the shore, stretching gradually seaward in the form of an open crescent, from Virginia Key and Key Biscayne, almost adjoining the main-land, to Key West, at a distance of twelve miles from the coast, which does not, however, close the series, for sixty miles farther west stands the group of the Tortugas, isolated in the Gulf of Mexico. Though they seem disconnected, these islands are parts of a submerged Coral Reef, concentric with the shore of the peninsula and continuous underneath the water, but visible above the surface at such points of the summit as have fully completed their growth.

This demands some explanation, since I have already said that no Coral growth can continue after it has reached the line of high-water. But we have not finished the history of a Coral wall, when we have followed it to the surface of the ocean. It is true that its normal growth ceases there, but already a process of partial decay as begun that insures its further increase. Here, as elsewhere, destruction and construction go hand in hand, and the materials that are broken or worn away from one part of the Reef help to build it up elsewhere. The Corals which form the Reef are not the only beings that find their home there: many other animals—Shells, Worms, Crabs, Star-Fishes, Sea-Urchins—establish themselves upon it, work their way into its interstices, and seek a shelter in every little hole and cranny made by the irregularities of its surface. In the Zoological Museum at Cambridge there are some large fragments of Coral Reef which give one a good idea of the populous aspect that such a Reef would present, could we see it as it actually exists beneath the water. Some of these fragments consist of a succession of terraces, as it were, in which are many little miniature caves, where may still be seen the Shells or Sea-Urchins which made their snug and sheltered homes in these recesses of the Reef.

We must not consider the Reef as a solid, massive structure throughout. The compact kinds of Corals, giving strength and solidity to the wall, may be compared to the larger trees in a forest, which give it shade and density; but between these grow all kinds of trailing vines, ferns and mosses, wild flowers and low shrubs, that till the spaces between the larger trees with a thick underbrush. The Coral Reef also has its underbrush of the lighter, branching, more brittle kinds, that fill its interstices and fringe the summit and the sides with their delicate, graceful forms. Such an intricate underbrush of Coral growth affords an excellent retreat for many animals that like its protection better than exposure to the open sea, just as many land-animals prefer the close and shaded woods to the open plain: a forest is not more thickly peopled with Birds, Squirrels, Martens, and the like, than is the Coral Reef with a variety of animals that do not contribute in any way to its growth, but find shelter in its crevices or in its near neighborhood.

But these larger animals are not the only ones that haunt the forest. There is a host of parasites besides, principally Insects and their larvae, which bore their way into the very heart of the tree, making their home in the bark and pith, and not the less numerous because hidden from sight. These also have their counterparts in the Reef, where numbers of boring Shells and marine Worms work their way into the solid substance of the wall, piercing it, with holes in every direction, till large portions become insecure, and the next storm suffices to break off the fragments so loosened. Once detached, they are tossed about in the water, crumbled into Coral sand, crushed, often ground to powder by the friction of the rocks and the constant action of the sea.

After a time, an immense quantity of such materials is formed about a Coral Reef; tides and storms constantly throw them up on its surface, and at last a soil collects on the top of the Reef, wherever it has reached the surface of the water, formed chiefly of its own débris, of Coral sand, Coral fragments, even large masses of Coral rock, mingled with the remains of the animals that have had their home about the Reef, with sea-weeds, with mud from the neighboring land, and with the thousand loose substances always floating about in the vicinity of a coast and thrown upon the rocks or shore with every wave that breaks against them. Add to this the presence of a lime-cement in the water, resulting from the decomposition of some of these materials, and we have all that is needed to make a very compact deposit and fertile soil, on which a vegetation may spring up, whenever seeds floating from the shore or dropped by birds in their flight take root on the newly formed island.

There is one plant belonging to tropical or sub-tropical climates that is peculiarly adapted by its mode of growth to the soil of these islands, and contributes greatly to their increase. This is the Mangrove-tree. Its seeds germinate in the calyx of the flower, and, before they drop, grow to be little brown stems, some six or seven inches long and about as thick as a finger, with little rootlets at one end. Such Mangrove-seedlings, looking more like cigars than anything else, float in large numbers about the Reef. I have sometimes seen them in the water about the Florida Reef in such quantities that one would have said some vessel laden with Havana cigars had been wrecked there, and its precious cargo scattered in the ocean.

In consequence of their shape and the development of the root, one end is a little heavier than the other, so that they float unevenly, with the loaded end a little lower than the lighter one. When they are brought by the tide against such a cap of soil as I have described, they become stranded upon it by their heavier end, the rootlets attach themselves slightly to the soil, the advancing and retreating waves move the little plant up and down, till it works a hole in the sand, and having thus established itself more firmly, steadied itself as it were, it now stands upright, and, as it grows, throws out numerous roots, even from a height of several feet above the ground, till it has surrounded the lower part of its stem with a close net-work of roots. Against this natural trellis or screen all sorts of materials collect; sand, mud, and shells are caught in it; and as these Mangrove-trees grow in large numbers and to the height of thirty feet, they contribute greatly to the solidity and compactness of the shores on which they are stranded.

Such caps of soil on the summit of a Coral Reef are of course very insecure till they are consolidated by a long period of accumulation, and they may even be swept completely away by a violent storm. It is not many years since the light-house built on Sand Key for the greater security of navigation along the Reef was swept away with the whole island on which it stood. Thanks to the admirably conducted Investigations of the Coast-Survey, this part of our seaboard, formerly so dangerous on account of the Coral Reefs, is now better understood, and every precaution has been taken to insure the safety of vessels sailing along the coast of Florida.

I cannot deny myself the pleasure of paying a tribute here to the high scientific character of the distinguished superintendent of this survey, who has known so well how to combine the most important scientific aims with the most valuable practical results in his direction of it. If some have hitherto doubted the practical value of such researches,—and unhappily there are always those who estimate intellectual efforts only by their material results,—one would think that these doubts must be satisfied now that the Coast-Survey is seen to be the right arm of our navy. Most of the leaders in our late naval expeditions have been men trained in its service, and familiar with all the harbors, with every bay and inlet of our Southern coasts, from having been engaged in the extensive researches undertaken by Dr. Bache and carried out under his guidance. Many, even, of the pilots of our Southern fleets are men who have been employed upon this work, and owe their knowledge of the coast to their former occupation. It is a singular fact, that at this very time, when the whole country feels its obligation to the men who have devoted so many years of their lives to these investigations, a proposition should have been brought forward in Congress for the suspension of the Coast-Survey on economical grounds. Happily, the almost unanimous rejection of this proposition has shown the appreciation in which the work is held by our national legislature. Even without reference to their practical usefulness, it is a sad sign, when, in the hour of her distress, a nation sacrifices first her intellectual institutions. Then more than ever, when she needs all the culture, all the wisdom, all the comprehensiveness of her best intellects, should she foster the institution that have fostered them, in which they have been trained to do good service to their country in her time of need.

Several of the Florida Keys, such as Key West and Indian Key, are already large, inhabited islands, several miles in extent. The interval between them and the main-land is gradually filling up by a process similar to that by which the islands themselves were formed. The gentle landward slope of the Reef and the channel between it and the shore are covered with a growth of the more branching lighter Corals, such as Sea-Fans, Coral-lines, etc., answering the same purpose as the intricate roots of the Mangrove-tree. All the débris of the Reef, as well as the sand and mud washed from the shore, collect in this net-work of Coral growth within the channel, and soon transform it into a continuous mass, with a certain degree of consistence and solidity. This forms the foundation of the mud-flats which are now rapidly filling the channel and must eventually connect the Keys of Florida with the present shore of the peninsula.

Outside the Keys, but not separated from them by so great a distance as that which intervenes between them and the main-land, there stretches beneath the water another Reef, abrupt, like the first, on its seaward side, but sloping gently toward the inner Reef, and divided from it by a channel. This outer Reef and channel are, however, in a much less advanced state than the preceding ones; only here and there a sand-flat large enough to afford a foundation for a beacon or a lighthouse shows that this Reef also is gradually coming to the surface, and that a series of islands corresponding to the Keys must eventually be formed upon its summit. Some of my readers may ask why the Reef does not rise evenly to the level of the sea, and form a continuous line of land, instead of here and there an island. This is accounted for by the sensitiveness of the Corals to any unfavorable circumstances impeding their growth, as well as by the different rates of increase of the different kinds. Wherever any current from the shore flows over the Reef, bringing with it impurities from the land, there the growth of the Corals will be less rapid, and consequently that portion of the Reef will not reach the surface so soon as other parts, where no such unfavorable influences have interrupted the growth. But in the course of time the outer Reef will reach the surface for its whole length and become united to the inner one by the filling up of the channel between them, while the inner one will long before that time become solidly united to the present shore-bluffs of Florida by the consolidation of the mud-flats, which will one day transform the inner channel into dry land.