ally maltreated them, until the natives
rose in revolt and exterminated every white man. Even Columbus himself,
in 1494, had to fight the Indians at the landing-place.

A salubrious climate, a fertile soil, and simple wants rendered it
unnecessary for the native to do hard work; and although it is well
proven that he did mine copper and traded in it with the mound builders
of Florida, yet the native was not accustomed to arduous toil, and
rebelled against it. This, perhaps, was unfortunate, for the perpetuity
of his race at that time depended upon this very quality. The Spanish
"friend" who came to the island was incapable of work. He neither would
nor could, under his ethics of self-respect, abase himself to labor, so
he proceeded to enslave the native to labor for him. The Cuban rebelled,
and fled before the superior Spanish weapons from the coasts to the
mountain fastnesses of the interior.

EXTERMINATION OF THE NATIVES.

Then began that cruel and long-continued war of extermination, of which
history has recorded the most shocking details. The conquest was begun
under Diego Columbus, the son of the great discoverer. The merciless
Velasquez was his general, and the frightful cruelties which he
inaugurated upon the simple natives have been continued for nearly four
hundred years by his successors in the island, though the annihilation
of the aboriginal tribes themselves was a brief and bloody work.
Velasquez rode them down and trampled them--regardless of age or
sex--under the iron hoofs of his war-horses, slashed them with swords,
devastated their villages, and bore them away into slavery. The Cuban
had no weapons; the mountain fastnesses could not hide him from his
relentless pursuer. African slaves, who were brought to the island in
Spanish ships, were armed and forced by their masters to chase the
natives, and not a forest or mountain top was a place of refuge for
these doomed children of the soil. One historian declares: "There is
little doubt that before 1560 the whole of this native population had
disappeared from the island. They were so completely exterminated that
it is doubtful if the blood of their race was even remotely preserved in
the mixed classes who followed African and Chinese introduction."

[Illustration: MAGNIFICENT INDIAN STATUE IN THE PRADO, HAVANA, CUBA.]

A PERIOD OF REST.

For nearly two hundred years after the extermination of the natives,
Cuba rested without a struggle in the arms