slaughtered them, often with the addition of tortures and torments in
order to induce them to reveal the whereabouts of other bands. When it
was possible the Spaniards sometimes hanged thirteen of them in a row in
commemoration of their Blessed Saviour and the Twelve Apostles; and while
they were hanging, and before they had quite died, they would hack at
them with their swords in order to test the edge of the steel. At the
last stand, when the fierceness and bitterness of the contest rose to a
height on both sides, Cotabanama was captured and a plan made to broil
him slowly to death; but for some reason this plan was not carried out,
and the brave chief was taken to San Domingo and publicly hanged like a
thief.


After that there was never any more resistance; it was simply a case of
extermination, which the Spaniards easily accomplished by cutting of the
heads of women as they passed by, and impaling infants and little
children on their lances as they rode through the villages. Thus, in the
twelve years since the discovery of Columbus, between half a million and
a million natives, perished; and as the Spanish colonisation spread
afterwards from island to island, and the banner of civilisation and
Christianity was borne farther abroad throughout the Indies, the same
hideous process was continued. In Cuba, in Jamaica, throughout the
Antilles, the cross and the sword, the whip-lash and the Gospel advanced
together; wherever the Host was consecrated, hideous cries of agony and
suffering broke forth; until happily, in the fulness of time, the dire
business was complete, and the whole of the people who had inhabited this
garden of the world were exterminated and their blood and race wiped from
the face of the earth . . . . Unless, indeed, blood and race and hatred
be imperishable things; unless the faithful Earth that bred and reared
the race still keeps in her soil, and in the waving branches of the trees