pants, who left as
heirlooms generation upon generation of hateful memories. Their dreams,
their deeds, their terrific tempers, lurked for the newcomers, and
harried them forth or made them kin. It is a cumulative story of dire
and fateful proceedings, like the story of the family of Pelops. It must
be told with deliberation. So the place, the climate, the aborigines,
the early atrocities, the importation of new races and characteristics,
command consideration as inevitable elements of the narrative.

This spot of the New World was the first to ache beneath the white man's
greedy and superstitious tread. A tenacious Gothic race, after its long
blockade by Moors in the northern mountains of the Iberian Peninsula,
had lately succeeded in recovering the last stronghold of Arab power and
learning. Fresh from the atrocities of that contest, its natural bigotry
deepened by its own struggle for national existence, sombre, fanatical,
cruel, and avaricious, but enterprising and indomitable, it is wafted
across the ocean by Columbus, to expend its propensities unchecked
against a weaker and less characteristic barbarism. What might be
expected, when a few noble men succeed in transporting the worst
features of their own country, in such numbers of intractable people,
the raking of seaports, with little on board in the way of religion,
save the traditions of the Church and the materials for exhibiting the
drama of the Mass! This is the contingent which civilization detaches
for the settlement of another world. It effaces a smiling barbarism by a
saturnine and gloomy one, as when a great forest slides from some height
over a wild gay meadow. These capable, cruel men went sailing among the
Bahamas, soothed by the novelty and delight of finding land, and tried
to behave at first as men do among artless children who measure every
thing by their own scantiness; for they compelled themselves to be very
mild and condescending, till, after various mischances and rebuffs by
sea and land, the temper breaks forth in rage at disappointments, and
Hayti is the first place which is blasted by that frightful Spanish
scowl. The change was as sudden as that from calm weather to one of her
tempests. The whole subsequent history seems as if it were the revenge
of Columbus's own imagination, when the sober truth was discovered
instead of Cipango and the King of India. Thus was the New World
unsettled, and the horrors of San Domingo committed to the soi