as of far less value than those of the dogs that were sometimes set upon
them in sport. A Spaniard riding along would make a wager with his
fellow that he would cut the head off a native with one stroke of his
sword; and many attempts would be laughingly made, and many living bodies
hideously mutilated and destroyed, before the feat would be accomplished.
Another sport was one similar to pigsticking as it is practised in India,
except that instead of pigs native women and children were stuck with the
lances. There was no kind of mutilation and monstrous cruelty that was
not practised. If there be any powers of hell, they stalked at large
through the forests and valleys of Espanola. Lust and bloody cruelty, of
a kind not merely indescribable but unrealisable by sane men and women,
drenched the once happy island with anguish and terror. And in payment
for it the Spaniards undertook to teach the heathen the Christian
religion.


The five chiefs who had ruled with justice and wisdom over the island of
Espanola in the early days of Columbus were all dead, wiped out by the
wave of wild death and cruelty that had swept over the island. The
gentle Guacanagari, when he saw the desolation that was beginning to
overwhelm human existence, had fled into the mountains, hiding his face
in shame from the sons of men, and had miserably died there. Caonabo,
Lord of the House of Gold, fiercest and bravest of them all, who first
realised that the Spaniards were enemies to the native peace, after
languishing in prison in the house of Columbus at Isabella for some time,
had died in captivity during the voyage to Spain. Anacaona his wife, the
Bloom of the Gold, that brave and beautiful woman, whose admiration of
the Spaniards had by their bloody cruelties been turned into detestation,
had been shamefully betrayed and ignominiously hanged. Behechio, her
brother, the only cacique who did not sue for peace after the first