g and Queen of
Spain; duly making depositions in writing on the spot, and having them
signed and witnessed. Then he gave the name of San Salvador to the
island and said a prayer; and while this solemn little ceremony was in
progress, the astonished natives crept out of their hiding and surrounded
the strange white men. They gesticulated and grovelled and pointed
upwards, as though this gang of armed and bearded Spaniards, with the
tall white-bearded Italian in the midst of them, had fallen from the
skies.

The first interest of the voyagers was in the inhabitants of this
delightful land. They found them well built, athletic-looking men, most
of them young, with handsome bodies and intelligent faces. Columbus,
eager to begin his missionary work, gave them some red caps and some
glass beads, with which he found them so delighted that he had good hopes
of making converts, and from which he argued that "they were a people who
would better be freed and converted to our Holy Faith by love than by
force," which sentence of his contains within itself the whole missionary
spirit of the time. These natives, who were the freest people in the
world, were to be "freed"; freed or saved from the darkness of their
happy innocence and brought to the light of a religion that had just
evolved the Inquisition; freed by love if possible, and by red caps and
glass beads; if not possible, then freed by force and with guns; but
freed they were to be at all costs. It is a tragic thought that, at the
very first impact of the Old World upon this Eden of the West, this
dismal error was set on foot and the first links in the chain of slavery
forged. But for the moment nothing of it was perceptible; nothing but
red caps and glass beads, and trinkets and toys, and freeing by love.
The sword that Columbus held out to them, in order to find out if they
knew the use of weapons, they innocently grasped by the blade and so cut
their fingers; and that sword, extended with knowledge and grasped with
fearless ignorance, is surely an emblem of the spread of civilisation and
of its doubtful blessings in the early stages. Let us hear Columbus
himself, as he recorded his first impression of Guanahani:

"Further, it appeared to me that they were a very poor people, in
everything. They all go naked as their mothers gave them birth, and
the women also, although I only saw one of the latter who was very
young, and all those whom I saw w