THE LUG AY AN INDIANS. 89 



Hayti is almost completely in a state of revolting and hopeless 

 savagery, and recent writers assert that Jamaica is rapidly trav- 

 eling the same road. The condition of Cuba is by no means en- 

 couraging to her friends ; and in the Bahamas, abandoned home- 

 steads, costly villas tumbling to ruins, roofless walls, and fields 

 and plantations converted into tropical jungles, testify to any- 

 thing but prosperity. The population of the Bahamas is less 

 to-day than it was on the day Columbus landed, and it is not 

 increasing. 



He found the Bahamas in the possession of a prosperous and 

 happy people who called the islands the Lucayas, and themselves 

 Ceboynas. Twelve years afterward every soul of this population 

 of more than forty thousand men, women, and children had per- 

 ished in a strange land under the lash of the slave-driver; the 

 race was blotted off the face of the earth, and the only impression 

 which has been left upon our civilization by those who first wel- 

 comed it to this continent is a single word, which, together with 

 the luxurious article it designates, has spread over the whole 

 earth. The Ceboynas gave us the hammock, and this one Lucayan 

 word is their only monument. 



Nowhere in all the black pages of history is there a darker 

 tragedy than theirs ; and while it is eminently proper that we 

 should pay all homage to the transcendent genius and noble na- 

 ture of the great admiral, and that we should celebrate with all 

 pomp and pride the miraculous growth of our own civilization, 

 does it not also become us to commemorate in some way, at the 

 same time, the story of the unhappy and forgotten Ceboynas, to 

 whom the discovery had a still more profound significance ? 



How intensely interesting, just at present, is any addition to 

 our knowledge of the other party to the transaction ! The writer 

 has recently spent two seasons in zoological research in the Baha- 

 ma Islands, and has been able to learn a few facts, which are new 

 to the science of anthropology, relating to the bodily structure of 

 the long-lost Ceboynas, and thus to contribute toward the per- 

 petuation of their memory. 



There is not much intrinsic interest in a few fragments of hu- 

 man bones, but the Ceboyna skull which stands upon my table as 

 I write gives life and vivid reality to the familiar story in the 

 first chapter of my school history, and calls up in all its details 

 with startling clearness the drama of the Bahama Islands. 



To most of us these islands are little more than dots upon the 

 map, but, small and sterile and unimportant as they are, they 

 form one of the fairest landscapes upon earth, for they present all 

 the conditions which are most favorable for intensity of color of 

 earth and sea and sky. Under the combined influence of white 

 soil, intense sunlight, and perfect purity of air and water, they 



