The Heritage Of Hatred - 1

The Heritage Of Hatred - 1

Although the journey from Jamaica to Espanola had been accomplished in four days by
Mendez in his canoe, the caravels conveying the party rescued from Puerto Santa Gloria
were seven weary weeks on this short voyage; a strong north-west wind combining with
the west-going current to make their progress to the north-west impossible for weeks at a
time. It was not until the 13th of August 1503 that they anchored in the harbour of San
Domingo, and Columbus once more set foot, after an absence of more than two years, on
the territory from the governorship of which he had been deposed.
He was well enough received by Ovando, who came down in state to meet him, lodged
him in his own house, and saw that he was treated with the distinction suitable to his high
station. The Spanish colony, moreover, seemed to have made something of a hero of
Columbus during his long absence, and they received him with enthusiasm. But his
satisfaction in being in San Domingo ended with that. He was constantly made to feel
that it was Ovando and not he who was the ruler there;—and Ovando emphasised the
difference between them by numerous acts of highhanded authority, some of them of a
kind calculated to be extremely mortifying to the Admiral. Among these things he
insisted upon releasing Porras, whom Columbus had confined in chains; and he talked of
punishing those faithful followers of Columbus who had taken part in the battle between
Bartholomew and the rebels, because in this fight some of the followers of Porras had
been killed. Acts like these produced weary bickerings and arguments between Ovando
and Columbus, unprofitable to them, unprofitable to us. The Admiral seems now to have
relapsed into a condition in which he cared only for two things, his honours and his
emoluments. Over every authoritative act of Ovando's there was a weary squabble
between him and the Admiral, Ovando claiming his right of jurisdiction over the whole
territory of the New World, including Jamaica, and Columbus insisting that by his
commission and letters of authority he had been placed in sole charge of the members of
his own expedition.
And then, as regards his emoluments, the Admiral considered himself (and not without
justice) to have been treated most unfairly. By the extravagant terms of his original
agreement he was, as we know, entitled to a share of all rents and dues, as well as of the
gold collected; but it had been no one's business to collect these for him, and every one's
business to neglect them. No one had cared; no one had kept any accounts of what was
due to the Admiral; he could not find out what had been paid and what had not been paid.
He accused Ovando of having impeded his agent Carvajal in his duty of collecting the
Admiral's revenues, and of disobeying the express orders of Queen Isabella in that
matter; and so on-a state of affairs the most wearisome, sordid, and unprofitable in which
any man could be involved.
And if Columbus turned his eyes from the office in San Domingo inland to that Paradise
which he had entered twelve years before, what change and ruin, dreary, horrible and
complete, did he not discover! The birds still sang, and the nights were still like May in
Cordova; but upon that happy harmony the sound of piteous cries and shrieks had long
since broken, and along and black December night of misery had spread its pall over the
island. Wherever he went, Columbus found the same evidence of ruin and desolation.
Where once innumerable handsome natives had thronged the forests and the villages,
there were now silence and smoking ruin, and the few natives that he met were
emaciated, terrified, dying. Did he reflect, I wonder, that some part of the responsibility
of all this horror rested on him? That many a system of island government, the machinery
of which was now fed by a steady stream of human lives, had been set going by him in
ignorance, or greed of quick commercial returns? It is probable that he did not; for he
now permanently regarded himself as a much-injured man, and was far too much
occupied with his own wrongs to realise that they were as nothing compared with the
monstrous stream of wrong and suffering that he had unwittingly sent flowing into the
world.
In the island under Ovando's rule Columbus saw the logical results of his own original
principles of government, which had recognised the right of the Christians to possess the
persons and labours of the heathen natives. Las Casas, who was living in Espanola as a
young priest at this time, and was destined by long residence there and in the West Indies
to qualify himself as their first historian, saw what Columbus saw, and saw also the even
worse things that happened in after years in Cuba and Jamaica; and it is to him that we
owe our knowledge of the condition of island affairs at this time. The colonists whom
Ovando had brought out had come very much in the spirit that in our own day
characterised the rush to the north-western goldfields of America. They brought only the
slightest equipment, and were no sooner landed at San Domingo than they set out into the
island like so many picnic parties, being more careful to carry vessels in which to bring
back the gold they were to find than proper provisions and equipment to support them in
the labour of finding it. The roads, says Las Casas, swarmed like ant-hills with these
adventurers rushing forth to the mines, which were about twenty-five miles distant from
San Domingo; they were in the highest spirits, and they made it a kind of race as to who
should get there first. They thought they had nothing to do but to pick up shining lumps
of gold; and when they found that they had to dig and delve in the hard earth, and to dig
systematically and continuously, with a great deal of digging for very little gold, their
spirits fell. They were not used to dig; and it happened that most of them began in an
unprofitable spot, where they digged for eight days without finding any gold. Their
provisions were soon exhausted; and in a week they were back again in San Domingo,
tired, famished, and bitterly disappointed. They had no genius for steady labour; most of
them were virtually without means; and although they lived in San Domingo, on what
they had as long as possible, they were soon starving there, and selling the clothes off
their backs to procure food. Some of them took situations with the other settlers, more
fell victims to the climate of the island and their own imprudences and distresses; and a
thousand of them had died within two years.
Ovando had revived the enthusiasm for mining by two enactments. He reduced the share
of discovered gold payable to the Crown, and he developed Columbus's system of forced
labour to such an extent that the mines were entirely worked by it. To each Spaniard,
whether mining or farming, so many natives were allotted. It was not called slavery; the
natives were supposed to be paid a minute sum, and their employers were also expected
to teach them the Christian religion. That was the plan. The way in which it worked was
that, a body of native men being allotted to a Spanish settler for a period, say, of six or
eight months—for the enactment was precise in putting a period to the term of slavery—
the natives would be marched off, probably many days' journey from their homes and
families, and set to work under a Spanish foreman. The work, as we have already seen,
was infinitely harder than that to which they were accustomed; and most serious of all, it
was done under conditions that took all the heart out of the labour. A man will toil in his
own garden or in tilling his own land with interest and happiness, not counting the hours
which he spends there; knowing in fact that his work is worth doing, because he is doing
it for a good reason. But put the same man to work in a gang merely for the
aggrandisement of some other over-man; and the heart and cheerfulness will soon die out
of him.
It was so with these children of the sun. They were put to work ten times harder than any
they had ever done before, and they were put to it under the lash. The light diet of their
habit had been sufficient to support them in their former existence of happy idleness and
dalliance, and they had not wanted anything more than their cassava bread and a little fish
and fruit; now, however, they were put to work at a pressure which made a very different
kind of feeding necessary to them, and this they did not get. Now and then a handful of
pork would be divided among a dozen of them, but they were literally starved, and were
accustomed to scramble like dogs for the bones that were thrown from the tables of the
Spaniards, which bones they ground up and mixed with their, bread so that no portion of
them might be lost. They died in numbers under these hard conditions, and, compared
with their lives, their deaths must often have been happy. When the time came for them
to go home they were generally utterly worn out and crippled, and had to face a long
journey of many days with no food to support them but what they could get on the
journey; and the roads were strewn with the dead bodies of those who fell by the way.
And far worse things happened to them than labour and exhaustion. It became the custom
among the Spaniards to regard the lives of the natives as of far less value than those of
the dogs that were sometimes set upon them in sport. A Spaniard riding along would
make a wager with his fellow that he would cut the head off a native with one stroke of
his sword; and many attempts would be laughingly made, and many living bodies
hideously mutilated and destroyed, before the feat would be accomplished. Another sport
was one similar to pigsticking as it is practised in India, except that instead of pigs native
women and children were stuck with the lances. There was no kind of mutilation and
monstrous cruelty that was not practised. If there be any powers of hell, they stalked at
large through the forests and valleys of Espanola. Lust and bloody cruelty, of a kind not
merely indescribable but unrealisable by sane men and women, drenched the once happy
island with anguish and terror. And in payment for it the Spaniards undertook to teach the
heathen the Christian religion.