and the green grasses, the sacred essences of its blood and hatred;
unless in the full cycle of Time, when that suffering flesh and blood
shall have gone through all the changes of substance and condition, from
corruption and dust through flowers and grasses and trees and animals
back into the living body of mankind again, it shall one day rise up
terribly to avenge that horror of the past. Unless Earth and Time
remember, O Children of the Sun! for men have forgotten, and on the soil
of your Paradise the African negro, learned in the vices of Europe,
erects his monstrous effigy of civilisation and his grotesque mockery of
freedom; unless it be through his brutish body, into which the blood and
hatred with which the soil of Espanola was soaked have now passed, that
they shall dreadfully strike at the world again.




CHAPTER VIII

THE ADMIRAL COMES HOME

On September 12, 1504., Christopher Columbus did many things for the last
time. He who had so often occupied himself in ports and harbours with
the fitting out of ships and preparations for a voyage now completed at
San Domingo the simple preparations for the last voyage he was to take.
The ship he had come in from Jamaica had been refitted and placed under
the command of Bartholomew, and he had bought another small caravel in
which he and his son were to sail. For the last time he superintended
those details of fitting out and provisioning which were now so familiar
to him; for the last time he walked in the streets of San Domingo and
mingled with the direful activities of his colony; he looked his last