Poor men gladly fled from their creditors to those fortunate islands, where naked savages wore strings of pearl and ornaments of solid gold were freely trucked for trumpery toys. Pious men were no less eager to visit the ignorant millions who at all risks must be persuaded to change their hideous idols for the cross and the image of Mary. Cruel and imperious men were soon attracted to lands where it might pass for a Christian duty to shed blood like water, and where a Castilian boor could set his foot on the necks of Incas and Caciques. The more these men saw of the reality, the more wild grew their dreams. One discoverer, landing in central America, believed himself to have come upon the earthly paradise. Another wandered through the swamps and pine-barrens of Florida, hoping to reach the fabulous Fountain of Youth in which all the stains of mortality might be washed away. Explorers of the jungles of Brazil expected to find them defended by a race of Amazons. Grave hidalgos, learned geographers feverishly sought the road to El Dorado, where the ground was strewn with riches, as uncared for as the stones on the sierras of Andalusia. Thousands of deluded mortals left their bones in pathless woods or on barren rocks over which they had toiled to find the golden city of Manoa.

It was small wonder if their heads were turned.. Such adventures as those of Cortes and Pizarro, with a handful of men overthrowing empires for which hundreds of thousands were ready to die, read even now like stories of romance; to what a

"AURI SACRA FAMES."

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pitch then must the dullest imagination have been raised among the adventurers whose eyes first saw the golden Temple of the Sun and the glittering palaces of Montezuma! They did find gold so often and so little regarded by the natives, that they might be excused for supposing that those mountains and rivers concealed endless treasures. Every ship that came home brought specimens of these riches, and renewed the ferment of restless and covetous minds. Romance and religion had their share in the work; but gold was the great loadstone that drew the ships of Spain to the west, and gold was the temptation through which so many Spaniards lost their souls in this land of Eden. The story of their conquest is a story of sins as well as of successes and delusions. The record of their toils and hardships is a light one beside that of their inhumanity; even savage cruelties were outdone by the piles of corpses and the streams of blood over which these Christians struggled so madly in their search for unhallowed wealth; and their quarrels were as notorious as their cruelties.

With such a fever upon them, the conquistadores coming after Columbus soon forgot the pious aspirations of that great and good man who, by means of the wealth to be gained from his discovery of what he took for the gold mines of Ophir, known of old to Solomon, had ardently desired to restore Jerusalem and make it a sacred name throughout all the world.

II.

If the Spanish adventurers were almost intoxicated by the marvels which they found on every side, how great must have been the wonder of the simple natives who saw such strangers come among them as unexpectedly as if they had fallen from the clouds ! The moving villages in which these white bearded men had crossed the ocean, the strange clothes and shells of iron with which they were covered, the magical instruments of which they were masters, their mysterious arts, their proud bearing, could not but persuade the Indians that their visitors were of some godlike race. Soon their awe was strengthened by unearthly terrors and new shapes of death. Fear fell upon them at the very sound of the thunder and lightning which the Europeans could produce at will; they were ready to worship the culverin or arquebus, which must have appeared to them like the spirit of their own volcanos, and which had a power of sudden destruction, "enough, as Montaigne says, "to fright Cæsar himself, if surprised with so little experience." Even more terrible was the unknown force of cavalry; rider and steed were taken for one animal, and whole hosts would fly before the hoofs of such a centaur. A certain tribe was once found praying to the skeleton of a horse. The fierce bloodhounds too that the Spaniards led about with them, played almost as great a part in the conquest as the sharp weapons and shining mail against which the savage clubs and arrows were shattered so uselessly; one

دو

THE WEAKNESS OF THE NATIVES.

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dog was held equal to two arquebusiers. Thus the dragons, fabled to guard the treasures of old romance, were here upon the side of the spoilers. Even the alligators which basked upon the river banks were pressed into the service of the Spaniards and made to swarm in the moats of their castles. The fierce Caribs, the more peaceful inhabitants of the islands, the civilized multitudes of Mexico, were alike helpless against such arms and such allies. Only those tribes, here and there, who used poisoned arrows, had any fair chance of resisting whatever claims might be made upon them by so mighty invaders. For the most part, the Spaniards encountered no enemies more to be feared than the mosquitos which made some coasts almost uninhabitable.

At first the white men were generally received with kindness, and might have all they desired given freely or sold on easy terms. It was only when the natives had some taste of their rapacity, that they ventured to oppose it by violence and cunning, as was natural. This was a case where gentleness, patience, and friendly measures would in time have gained for the superior race far more than brutal force was able to secure. Cruelty better becomes weakness than strength. Yet little did the Spaniards understand that

To have a giant's strength; but tyrannous

To use it like a giant.

Few of us indeed can rise above the temptation of being harsh and imperious towards a much in

ferior people with whose deficiencies and despised habits we come daily in contact. In British India, where the law protects all men from violence and gross oppression, the better class of natives too often complain bitterly of the manner used towards them by our civil and military officers. These are for the most part men of intelligence, culture, and a degree of humanity which would have passed for mawkish sentiment in the sixteenth century. The conquistadores were not even favourable specimens of their age and country. We scarcely need to be told that among the early adventurers were many outlaws and ne'er-do-wells, the scum of prisons and gambling houses, needy braggadocios, godless soldiers of fortune for whom the spilling of human blood was a pastime as well as a profession, men, in short, who would have been brigands and cutthroats in Europe if they had not been conquerors in America. Imagine how such a man, of mean birth and narrow mind, would behave when he found himself in a position to curse and beat a drove of his fellow creatures through whose exertions he hoped for sudden wealth. Why had they taken the trouble to come so far over the sea, if they were not to enslave those helpless Indians at their will! Decent, well meaning men, even men of real religious principle, looked at the matter in this way, and by the same temptations were soon drawn into some degree of the same inhumanity; the sons of the true church had small care of the rights of heathen. So before many years had passed the bewildered, crushed, and despairing natives found