le
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
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