386 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



peace, and they must have been a difficulty to be reckoned with till 

 the close of the seventeenth century at least. 



It is difficult to judge what were the number of the inhabitants 

 of the islands at the time of the discovery. In 1495, when the 

 Indians of Hispaniola rose against Columbus, according to the 

 Spaniards, the number who revolted was a hundred thousand. Some 

 authors place the native population of Hispaniola as high as three 

 millions. It must have been impossible for the invaders to have 

 formed any accurate computation of the number of inhabitants in 

 countries so mountainous and impenetrable as were the larger An- 

 tilles. However, all accounts agree that the Indians were very 

 numerous, and Las Casas describes the islands as " abounding with 

 inhabitants, as an anthill with ants." 



It seems extraordinary how so numerous a people could have been 

 exterminated in so comparatively short a time. Oppression and 

 cruelty alone could not have succeeded in wiping them out so com- 

 pletely. The Caribs were treated with greater severity than the Ar- 

 rowauks, and their numbers were small in comparison with their less 

 warlike neighbors, and yet the race survives to this day in Dominica 

 and St. Vincent. Probably there was an inherent weakness in the 

 race itself that tended to its destruction. They were timid and 

 vicious, and timidity and vice are qualities that must hasten the dis- 

 appearance of any people. Famine and disease seem to have been 

 the chief factors in blotting out the Arrowauks. In Hispaniola the 

 Indians, hoping to rid themselves of the voracious Spaniards, refused 

 any longer to sow any crops. The Spaniards do not seem to have 

 suffered as was expected, but in a few months no less than a third of 

 the number of Indians in that island are said to have perished from 

 starvation. But in 1518, according to Herrera, a scourge appeared 

 in the Greater Antilles that almost desolated them. We know 

 how great are the ravages of any imported disease among barbarians. 



In our own days the natives of Fiji were swept off in thousands 

 by so comparatively mild a distemper as measles: we can therefore 

 understand how terrible must have been the ravages of so fatal an 

 illness as smallpox, which was then first introduced from Europe. 

 Even at the present day it is dreaded, but at that time it was twenty 

 times more deadly and dreadful than now. The Indians were swept 

 off in crowds, and the islands were almost depopulated. The mor- 

 tality was increased by the miserable sufferers flinging themselves 

 into the streams and rivers to seek relief from the burning fever that 

 consumed them. Granting that the great majority of the Indians 

 succumbed from disease and famine, the remainder of a people de- 

 ficient in stamina might easily have dwindled away under the condi- 

 tions then existing. Labor was odious to them, and that in the 



