Vasco Nunnez,
praying to the Virgin on the mountains of Darien, and going down from
off them into the valleys to hunt the Indian caciques, and fling them
alive to his bloodhounds; there was, at least, with all this fierceness
and cruelty, a desperate courage which we cannot refuse to admire, and
which mingles with and corrects our horror. It is the refinement of the
Spaniard's cruelty in the settled and conquered provinces, excused by no
danger and provoked by no resistance, the details of which witness to
the infernal coolness with which it was perpetrated; and the great
bearing of the Indians themselves under an oppression which they
despaired of resisting, raises the whole history to the rank of a
world-wide tragedy, in which the nobler but weaker nature was crushed
under a malignant force which was stronger and yet meaner than itself.
Gold hunting and lust were the two passions for which the Spaniards
cared; and the fate of the Indian women was only more dreadful than that
of the men, who were ganged and chained to a labour in the mines which
was only to cease with their lives, in a land where but a little before
they had lived a free contented people, more innocent of crime than
perhaps any people upon earth. If we can conceive what our own feelings
would be--if, in the 'development of the mammalia,' some baser but more
powerful race than man were to appear upon this planet, and we and our
wives and children at our own happy firesides were degraded from our
freedom, and became to them what the lower animals are to us, we can
perhaps realise the feelings of the enslaved nations of Hispaniola.

As a harsh justification of slavery, it is sometimes urged that men who
do not deserve to be slaves will prefer death to the endurance of it;
and that if they prize their liberty, it is always in their power to
assert it in the old Roman fashion. Tried even by so hard a rule, the
Indians vindicated their right; and, before the close of the sixteenth
century, the entire group of the Western Islands in the hands of the
Spaniards, containing, when Columbus discovered them, many millions of
inhabitants, were left literally desolate from suicide. Of the anecdotes
of this terrible self-immolation, as they were then known in England,
here are a few out of many.

The first is simple, and a specimen of the ordinary method. A Yucatan
cacique, who was forced with his old subjects to labour in the mines, at
last 'calling those miners in