THE TREASURE REVEALED 223 



It is certain the conquistadors of the early sixteenth cen- 

 tury were not much bothered with scruple. Twenty years after 

 Columbus found his paradise (at the cost of creating his own 

 personal hell) here is the requiem of Peter Martyr: ''A great 

 number of them [the Indians] died of strange and new dis- 

 eases which consumed them like rotten sheep. And to tell the 

 truth our men's insatiable desire of gold so oppressed these 

 poor wretches with extreme labor and toil, whereas before 

 they had lived pleasantly and at liberty, given only to plays 

 and pastimes, as dancing, fishing, fowling and hunting of 

 little conies, that many of them perished even for very anguish 

 of mind, the which (with their unaccustomed labor) are 

 things of themselves sufficient to engender many new dis- 

 eases." The way was now clear for the brief domination of 

 a new kind of savage, the Buccaneer. For out of this native 

 growth of the western world grew a kind of first government 

 free of the European feudal pattern. From the hordes of the 

 Brethren of the Coast, as their organization became perfected, 

 both England and France made use of leaders like Henry 

 Morgan and the Frenchman Le Clerc. 



But there is also another side to the Caribbean development 

 that came in an orderly fashion out of native Spanish roots 

 that helps to balance this anarchistic savagery of the Buc- 

 caneer. The history of Las Casas, the greatest individual of 

 the early Caribbean world, is in itself a history of Christian 

 political and social progress in the West Indies and Central 

 America that can be matched only later in the north by the 

 militant liberalism of Roger Williams. Las Casas almost 

 singlehanded was responsible for the perpetuation of the 

 Indian culture that is so much a part of the Spanish-American 

 culture of today. 



His story is too well known in general to need great detail. 

 To refresh our memories we can remember that he started 

 out as a landed proprietor in Hispaniola. The maltreatment 



