irit of the
government being patriarchal.

We are told by Las Casas, who accompanied Velasquez in all his
expeditions, that "their dances were graceful and their singing
melodious, while with primeval innocence they thought no harm of being
clad only with nature's covering." The description of the gorgeous
hospitality extended to these treacherous invaders is absolutely
touching in the light of our subsequent knowledge. They reared no
sacred temples, nor did they seem to worship idols, and yet some few
antiquities have been preserved which would seem to indicate that the
natives possessed grotesque images, half human and half animal, like
Chinese gods in effect. These were wrought so rudely out of stone as
hardly to convey any fixed idea; vague and imperfect, it is not safe
to define them as idolatrous images. They might have been left here by
a previous race, for, as we are all aware, respectable authorities
hold that this part of the world was originally peopled by
Carthaginians, Israelites, Egyptians, Hindoos, and Africans. Columbus,
in his second voyage to the West Indies, found the stern-post of a
vessel lying on the shore of one of the Leeward isles, which was
strongly presumptive evidence that a European ship had been in these
waters before him. The fact that at this writing, as already
described, there lies in the harbor of Santiago the wreck of the old
St. Paul, which must be over three centuries old, shows how long a
piece of marine architecture may last, submerged in salt water.

An idol similar to those referred to was dug up in Hayti, and is now
believed to be in the British Museum, drawings of which the author has
seen, and which resemble original religious emblems examined by him in
the caves of Elephanta, at Bombay. This emblem, carved by a people
unacquainted with the use of edge tools, is believed by antiquarians
to afford a degree of light as to the history of worship of the
ancient inhabitants of Hispaniola, and also to form a collateral
support of the conjecture that they sprang from the parent stock of
Asia. According to Las Casas, the native Cubans had a vague tradition
of the formation of the earth, and of all created things; of the
deluge, of the ark, the raven, and the dove. They knew the tradition
of Noah also, according to the same high authority, but for our own
part we do not believe that the aborigines had any knowledge of this
Biblical story. Their priests were fanatics and kept the peo