hem, we read, were so given
over to idleness and sloth, that they actually made the islanders beasts
of burden, to carry them on their backs. It is a most unhappy fact that
the missionaries of the cross were often accompanied by bands of
miscreants, who wantonly broke every commandment in the decalogue and
trampled upon every precept of the gospel. See him in his last voyage,
beating about the rocks and shoals of an unknown archipelago, overtaken
by West India hurricanes, almost engulfed in waterspouts, scudding under
bare poles amid perilous breakers, blinded by lightning, deafened by
incessant peals of thunder, his crazy little barks tossed about like
cockle-shells in the raging waves, his anchors lost, his worm-eaten
vessels as full of holes as a honey-comb, two caravels abandoned, and
the two remaining run ashore at Jamaica, where Columbus built huts on
their decks to shelter his forlorn crew. See him stranded here, pressed
by hunger and want, visited by sickness and almost blindness, burning
with fever under the wilting, fiery heat of the tropics, desolate,
forsaken, infirm, and old. There he lay a whole year without relief,
until the cup of his misery was full.

If Columbus was sometimes harsh and cruel, we are to remember that he
lived in an age when the most cruel and barbarous punishments were
common. There are numerous instances of his clemency both to natives and
to his revolted Spaniards, and he more than once jeopardized his own
life by sparing theirs. Among a treacherous and vindictive race, many of
whom were continually plotting for his overthrow, the admiral, endowed
with full power over the lives and acts of his followers, was compelled
to make examples of the worst, many of whom were criminals released from
the prisons of Spain. Like other fighters, he met treachery with
treachery, cruelty with cruelty. He had never learned to love his
enemies, nor to turn his cheek for the second blow. Show us the man
invested with absolute power, in that or in any former age, who abused
it less. Try him by the moral standards, not of our humane and
enlightened age, but by those of his own. Compared with the deeds of
darkness that were done by Bobadilla and Ovando, the governors who
replaced him, the reign of Columbus appears, even at its worst, to have
been mild and merciful.

By the side of the atrocities and cruel massacres perpetrated under
Cortes in Mexico, and Pizarro in Peru, the few deeds of blood under
Colu