94 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



keeping a keen watch for a place to build a fort ; for, he says, " In- 

 asmuch as the people are perfectly defenseless, and totally unac- 

 quainted with arms, a force of fifty men could keep them captive 

 in their own island and make them do whatever might be de- 

 sired/' in case the king might not wish them all taken to Spain as 

 slaves. 



As he found no gold, except the nose-ornament, worth about 

 a dollar and a half, which the owner refused to barter for glass 

 beads, Columbus soon left the Lucayas, and for a few years they 

 were forgotten. By an accident hardly less probable than the 

 discovery of a new world, he soon actually found rich gold- 

 mines in Hayti, and for a time the Spaniards forgot their de- 

 sire to give light to them who sit in darkness, in their eager- 

 ness to slake their thirst for gold. They did not, however, forget 

 the cotton nets of the Ceboynas, and they soon discovered, as all 

 white men in the tropics do, that it is much easier to lie in a ham- 

 mock puffing a cigar, and to sip chocolate as the days slip by, than 

 to dig for gold, and they then bethought themselves of their duty 

 to enlighten the darkness of the heathen natives of the Lucayas. 



The king at once perceived the importance of bringing these 

 people under Christian influences, and in 1509, or less than eleven 

 years after the discovery, he issued an order for the deportation 

 of the whole population of the Lucayas to New Spain, and the 

 work of conversion was at once vigorously instituted with the aid 

 of blood-hounds. 



For a time the Spaniards seem to have regarded the Antilles 

 as an inexhaustible slave-quarry, and to have thought it cheaper 

 to replenish their exhausted stock of slaves than to care for 

 those they had. They soon found, however, that it was not so 

 easy as Columbus had thought to make the Ceboynas " do what- 

 ever might be desired " ; and while the people who had never 

 labored for themselves were powerless to escape slavery, they 

 resisted to the death all the efforts of the Spaniards to profit by 

 their labor. 



So relentless were the conquerors, and so determined and hope- 

 less the captives, that the unhappy slaves perished by wholesale 

 in the mines of Hayti, under the lashes of their drivers and the 

 steel swords which were often broken over their obstinate heads ; 

 and even now the mind recoils from the contemplation of the few 

 facts regarding the fate of the Lucayans which history has pre- 

 served. 



As an illustration, Las Casas gives, among others, the case of 

 one Spaniard who, three months after he had received three hun- 

 dred Lucayan slaves, had less than thirty left alive. For a short 

 time this destruction was made good by fresh importations, but 

 the supply was soon exhausted. All the islands were left deso- 



