AUSTRIALIA DEL ESPIRITU SANTO 171 



blankets were welcome. And in this earthly paradise 

 there were " no snakes, jiggers, ants, nor mosquitoes." 

 " I am able to say with good reason," writes Quiros, " that 

 a land more delightful, healthy, and fertile, a site better 

 supplied with quarries, timber, clay for tiles, bricks for 

 founding a great city on the sea, with a port and a good 

 river on a plain, with level lands near the hills, nor better 

 adapted to raise plants and all that Europe and the Indies 

 produce, could not be found." It was a land, he believed, 

 that could easily support two hundred thousand Spaniards. 

 A big river must mean a big land. And quite close were 

 seven islands, extending eight hundred miles. Here 

 then should rise the New Jerusalem, "a very great and New 

 prosperous city," the capital of a continent stretching J eiusa em - 

 from the Equator to the Pole, a link of strength in the 

 golden chain of that Empire on which the sun never set, 

 and which in the end would bind the whole world in blessed 

 submission to God and to His Church. 



Every prospect pleased, but the men were vile. Their 

 unchanged descendants are described by Moresby as 

 " black fine athletic men, woolly-headed, many of them 

 with really pleasing faces, well-armed with clubs and 

 three-pronged spears, barbed with human bones, which 

 they throw to a great distance " ; the women, he adds, Spaniards 

 are " unsightly Eves." The great desire of Quiros was 

 to catch the souls of these people ; and to catch their 

 souls, he thought, you must first catch their bodies, " so 

 as to establish peace and friendship based on the good 

 work we intended x to do for them." And the men who 

 had to catch them were not the sick captain and the 

 Franciscans, who do singularly little in this story but 

 Torres and the soldiers. And their methods were primitive. 

 " When," says one writer, simply, " our people saw so many 

 people on the beach, they began to fire off some arque- 

 buses, on which the beach was left clear, all flying into 

 the woods." There followed a fight. A native was shot, 

 his head and foot were cut off, and his body was hung to 

 a tree, and shown to other natives ; the soldiers, complains 

 Quiros, " pretending that this cruelty was a means of 



