The Heritage Of Hatred - 2

The Heritage Of Hatred - 2

The five chiefs who had ruled with justice and wisdom over the island of Espanola in the

early days of Columbus were all dead, wiped out by the wave of wild death and cruelty

that had swept over the island. The gentle Guacanagari, when he saw the desolation that

was beginning to overwhelm human existence, had fled into the mountains, hiding his

face in shame from the sons of men, and had miserably died there. Caonabo, Lord of the

House of Gold, fiercest and bravest of them all, who first realised that the Spaniards were

enemies to the native peace, after languishing in prison in the house of Columbus at

Isabella for some time, had died in captivity during the voyage to Spain. Anacaona his

wife, the Bloom of the Gold, that brave and beautiful woman, whose admiration of the

Spaniards had by their bloody cruelties been turned into detestation, had been shamefully

betrayed and ignominiously hanged. Behechio, her brother, the only cacique who did not

sue for peace after the first conquest of the island by Christopher and Bartholomew

Columbus, was dead long ago of wounds and sorrow. Guarionex, the Lord of the Vega

Real, who had once been friendly enough, who had danced to the Spanish pipe and

learned the Paternoster and Ave Maria, and whose progress in conversion to Christianity

the seduction of his wives by those who were converting him had interrupted, after

wandering in the mountains of Ciguay had been imprisoned in chains, and drowned in the

hurricane of June 30, 1502.

The fifth chief, Cotabanama, Lord of the province of Higua, made the last stand against

Ovando in defence of the native right to existence, and was only defeated after severe

battles and dreadful slaughters. His territory was among the mountains, and his last

insurrection was caused, as so many others had been, by the intolerable conduct of the

Spaniards towards the wives and daughters of the Indians. Collecting all his warriors,

Cotabanama attacked the Spanish posts in his neighbourhood. At every engagement his

troops were defeated and dispersed, but only to collect again, fight again with even

greater fury, be defeated and dispersed again, and rally again against the Spaniards. They

literally fought to the death. After every battle the Spaniards made a massacre of all the

natives they could find, old men, children, and pregnant women being alike put to the

sword or burned in their houses. When their companions fell beside them, instead of

being frightened they became more furious; and when they were wounded they would

pluck the arrows out of their bodies and hurl them back at the Spaniards, falling dead in

the very act. After one such severe defeat and massacre the natives scattered for many

months, hiding among the mountains and trying to collect and succour their decimated

families; but the Spaniards, who with their dogs grew skilful at tracking the Indians and

found it pleasant sport, came upon them in the places of refuge where little groups of

them were sheltering their women and children, and there slowly and cruelly slaughtered

them, often with the addition of tortures and torments in order to induce them to reveal

the whereabouts of other bands. When it was possible the Spaniards sometimes hanged

thirteen of them in a row in commemoration of their Blessed Saviour and the Twelve

Apostles; and while they were hanging, and before they had quite died, they would hack

at them with their swords in order to test the edge of the steel. At the last stand, when the

fierceness and bitterness of the contest rose to a height on both sides, Cotabanama was

captured and a plan made to broil him slowly to death; but for some reason this plan was

not carried out, and the brave chief was taken to San Domingo and publicly hanged like a

thief.

After that there was never any more resistance; it was simply a case of extermination,

which the Spaniards easily accomplished by cutting of the heads of women as they

passed by, and impaling infants and little children on their lances as they rode through the

villages. Thus, in the twelve years since the discovery of Columbus, between half a

million and a million natives, perished; and as the Spanish colonisation spread afterwards

from island to island, and the banner of civilisation and Christianity was borne farther

abroad throughout the Indies, the same hideous process was continued. In Cuba, in

Jamaica, throughout the Antilles, the cross and the sword, the whip-lash and the Gospel

advanced together; wherever the Host was consecrated, hideous cries of agony and

suffering broke forth; until happily, in the fulness of time, the dire business was

complete, and the whole of the people who had inhabited this garden of the world were

exterminated and their blood and race wiped from the face of the earth . . . . Unless,

indeed, blood and race and hatred be imperishable things; unless the faithful Earth that

bred and reared the race still keeps in her soil, and in the waving branches of the trees and

the green grasses, the sacred essences of its blood and hatred; unless in the full cycle of

Time, when that suffering flesh and blood shall have gone through all the changes of

substance and condition, from corruption and dust through flowers and grasses and trees

and animals back into the living body of mankind again, it shall one day rise up terribly

to avenge that horror of the past. Unless Earth and Time remember, O Children of the

Sun! for men have forgotten, and on the soil of your Paradise the African negro, learned

in the vices of Europe, erects his monstrous effigy of civilisation and his grotesque

mockery of freedom; unless it be through his brutish body, into which the blood and

hatred with which the soil of Espanola was soaked have now passed, that they shall

dreadfully strike at the world again.