n desolation, havoc, and misery in and around their track. They had
depopulated some of the best peopled of the islands and renewed them
with victims deported from others. They had inflicted upon hundreds of
thousands of the natives all the forms and agonies of fiendish cruelty,
driving them to self-starvation and suicide, as a way of mercy and
release from an utterly wretched existence. They had come to be viewed
by their victims as fiends of hate, malignity, and all dark and cruel
desperation and mercilessness in passion. The hell which they denounced
upon their victims was shorn of its worst terror by the assurance that
these tormentors were not to be there. Las Casas, the noble missionary,
the true soldier of the cross, and the few priests and monks who
sympathized with him, in vain protested against these cruelties."

To all these causes we must add the narrow colonial policy of Spain.
Imitating Venice and ancient Carthage instead of Greece, she held her
dependencies under the straitest servitude to herself as conquered
provinces, repressing all political or commercial independence. A
similar restrictive policy, indeed, hampered the colonies of other
nations, but it was nowhere else so irrational or blighting as in
Spanish America.

CHAPTER III.

EXPLORATION AND COLONIZATION BY THE FRENCH AND THE ENGLISH

[1534]

How the French fought for foothold in Florida and were routed by the
Spaniards has just been related. So early as 1504, and possibly much
earlier, before Cabot or Columbus, French sailors were familiar with the
fisheries of Newfoundland. To the Isle of Cape Breton they gave its name
in remembrance of their own Brittany. The attention of the French
Government was thus early directed toward America, and it at length
determined to share in the new discoveries along with the Spanish and
the English.

In 1524 Verrazano, a Florentine navigator, was sent by Francis I. on a
voyage of discovery to the New World. Sighting the shores of America
near the present Wilmington, North Carolina, he explored the coast of
New Jersey, touched land near New York Bay, and anchored a few days in
the harbor of Newport. In this vicinity he came upon an island, which
was probably Block Island. Sailing from here along the coast as far
north as Newfoundland, he named this vast territory New France.

[Illustration: Verrazano, the Florentine Navigator.]

[Illustration: Jacques Cartier. From an old print.]

[1540]

In 15