their former pursuits, habits, and enjoyments. They worked for the production of commodities which had no interest in their eyes. They were hurried off to the mines without any suitable provision being made for a great movement of population. Nothing, in such a mode of government, had time to grow. It was not, as in older and settled countries, a surplus part of the adventurous youth that was attracted to a severe but gainful occupation, but the most stable and precious part of the community, such as fathers of families, was suddenly demanded for a kind of labor for which it had received no previous training, and in the profits of which it had no concern. It would have been contrary to all the laws by which life is regulated if such a mode of proceeding had been otherwise than most fatal to the people among whom it was introduced. They died, as they must have died, by thousands, and the mode of supplying this vacuum was equally contradictory to the laws of nature. In a limited space, like that of an island, we are able to trace clearly the results of this outrageous and barbarous statesmanship, and we must be prepared in the course of the narrative to watch the gradual extinction of the Indian inhabitants of the West India islands, just as we might observe the extinction of so many lights which there was not air enough to support, and which die out from sheer inanition.* Such is the unwelcome but manifest conclusion which follows from our first general consideration of the various events that have already been recorded in the history of Spanish America. * Knowing the fate of these Indian nations, I have been anxious to put on record any Indian names that occur, that the ethnologist may have before him the few words that are left of their languages, which may furnish some slight clew to the genealogy of these destroyed races. CHAPTER I. NATURE AND CUSTOMS OF THE INDIANS. MINOR VOYAGES. OJEDA AND NICUESA START ON THEIR VOYAGE.-OJEDA'S MISFORTUNES.-HIS DEATH. CHAPTER I. NATURE AND CUSTOMS OF THE INDIANS.-MINOR VOYAGES. -OJEDA AND NICUESA START ON THEIR VOYAGE.—OJE•DA'S MISFORTUNES.-HIS DEATH. THE HE course of history is like that of a great river wandering through various countries; now, in the infancy of its current, collecting its waters from obscure small springs in plashy meadows, and from unconsidered rivulets which the neighboring rustics do not know the names of; now, in its boisterous youth, forcing its way through mountains; now, in middle life, flowing with equable current busily by great towns, its waters sullied yet enriched with commerce; and now, in its burdened old age, making its slow and difficult way with an ever-widening expanse of waters, over which the declining sun looms grandly, to the sea. The uninstructed or careless traveler generally finds but one form of beauty or of meaning in the river or upon its banks. The romantic gorge or wild cascade is perhaps the only kind of scenery which delights him. And so it has often been in our estimate of history. Well-fought battles, or the doings of gay courts, or bloody revolutions, have been the chief sources of attraction; while less adorned events, but not of less real interest or import, have often escaped our notice altogether. In order to gain some of that interest in the present |