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thinking they had but to arrive at the mines, and gather gold, as easily and readily as fruit from the trees. When they arrived, however, they found, to their dismay, that it required experience to discover the veins of ore; that the whole process of mining was exceedingly slow and toilsome, and its results precarious.

They digged eagerly for a time, but found no ore; growing hungry, they threw by their implements, sat down to eat, and then returned to work. It was all in vain. “Their labour," says Las Casas," gave them a keen appetite and quick digestion, but no gold." They soon exhausted their provisions and their patience, and returned murmuring along the road they had lately trod so exultingly. They arrived at San Domingo half famished, downcast, and despairing. Such is too often the case of those who ignorantly engage in mining; which, of all objects of speculation, is the most brilliant, promising, and fallacious. Poverty soon fell upon these misguided men. Some wasted away, and died broken-hearted; others were hurried off by raging fevers; so that there soon perished upwards of a thousand men.

Ovando was reputed a man of great prudence and sagacity, and he certainly took several judicious measures for the regulation of the island and the relief of the colonists; but his policy was fatal to the natives. When he had been sent out to supersede Bobadilla, the queen, shocked at the cruel bondage which had been inflicted on the Indians, had pronounced them all free. The consequence was, they immediately refused to labour in the mines.

Ovando, in 1503, represented, that this entire

liberty granted to the natives was not merely ruinous to the colony, but detrimental to themselves, as it produced habits of idleness, profligacy, and neglect of all religion. The sovereigns permitted, therefore, that they should be obliged to labour moderately, if essential to their well-being, but that they should be paid regularly and fairly, and instructed in religion on certain days, and that all compulsory measures should be tempered with persuasion and kindness. Under cover of this hired labour, thus intended for the health of soul and body, more intolerable toil was exacted from them, and more horrible cruelties inflicted, than in the worst days of Bobadilla. Many perished from hunger, or sunk under the lash; many killed themselves in despair; and even mothers overcame the powerful instinct of nature, and destroyed the infants at their breasts, to spare them a life of wretchedness. Even those who survived the exacted terms of labour, and were permitted to return to their homes, which were often sixty and eighty leagues distant, were dismissed so worn down by toil and hardship, and so scantily furnished with provisions, that they perished by the way. Some sank down and died by the side of a brook, others under the shade of a tree, where they had crawled for shelter from the sun. "I have found many dead on the road," says the venerable Bishop Las Casas; "others gasping under the trees, and others in the pangs of death, faintly crying, Hunger! hunger!"

The wars of Ovando were equally desolating. To punish a slight insurrection in the province of Higuey, at the eastern end of the island, he sent his troops, who ravaged the country with fire and

sword, showed no mercy to age or sex, put many to death with the most wanton, ingenious, and horrible tortures, and brought off the brave Cotabanama, one of the five sovereign caciques of the island, in chains to San Domingo, where he was ignominiously hanged by Ovando for the crime of defending his territory and his native soil against usurping strangers.

But the most atrocious act of Ovando, and one that must heap odium on his name wherever the woes of the gentle natives of Hayti create an interest, was the punishment he inflicted on the province of Xaragua for a pretended conspiracy. The exactions of tribute in this once happy and hospitable province had caused occasional quarrels between the inferior caciques and the Spaniards: these were magnified by alarmists, and Ovando was persuaded that there was a deep-laid plot among the natives to rise upon their oppressors. He immediately set out for Xaragua, at the head of nearly four hundred well-armed soldiers, seventy of whom were steelclad horsemen. He gave out that he was going on a visit of friendship, to make arrangements about the payment of tribute.

Behechio, the ancient cacique of the province, was dead, and his sister, Anacaona, had succeeded to the government. She came forth to meet Ovando, according to the custom of her nation, attended by her most distinguished subjects, and her train of damsels, waving palm branches, and dancing to the cadence of their popular areytos. All her principal caciques had been assembled to do honour to her guests, who for several days were entertained with banquets and national games and dances. In return for these exhibitions, Ovando invited Ana

caona, with her beautiful daughter Higuenamota, and her principal subjects, to witness a tilting match by the cavalry in the public square. When all were assembled, the square crowded with unarmed Indians, Ovando gave a signal, and instantly the horsemen rushed into the midst of the naked and defenceless throng, trampling them under foot, cutting them down with their swords, transfixing them with their lances, and sparing neither age nor sex. Above eighty caciques had been assembled in one of the principal houses. It was surrounded by troops, the caciques were bound to the posts which supported the roof, and put to cruel tortures, until, in the extremity of anguish, they were made to admit the truth of the plot with which their queen and themselves had been charged. When self-accusation had thus been tortured from them, a horrible punishment was immediately inflicted; fire was set to the house, and they all perished miserably in the flames.

As to Anacaona, she was carried to San Domingo, where the mockery of a trial was given her, in which she was found guilty, on the confessions wrung by torture from her subjects, and on the testimony of their butchers, and she was barbarously hanged by the people whom she had so long and so signally befriended.

After the massacre at Xaragua, the destruction of its inhabitants still went on; they were hunted for six months amidst the fastnesses of the mountains, and their country ravaged by horse and foot, until, all being reduced to deplorable misery and abject submission, Ovando pronounced the province restored to order, and, in commemoration of his

triumph, founded a town near the lake, which he called Santa Maria de la Verdadera Paz (St. Mary of the True Peace).

Such was the tragical fate of the beautiful Anacaona, once extolled as the Golden Flower of Hayti; and such the story of the delightful region of Xaragua; a place which the Europeans, by their own account, found a perfect paradise, but which, by their vile passions, they filled with horror and desolation.

These are but brief and scanty anecdotes of the ruthless system which had been pursued, during the absence of the admiral, by the commander Ovando, this man of boasted prudence and moderation, who had been sent to reform the abuses of the island, and above all to redress the wrongs of the natives. The system of Columbus may have borne hard upon the Indians, born and brought up as they were in untasked freedom, but it was never cruel or sanguinary. He had fondly hoped, at one time, to render them civilized, industrious, and tributary subjects to the crown, zealous converts to the faith, and to derive from their regular tributes a great and steady revenue. How different had been the event! The five great tribes which had peopled the mountains and the valleys, at the time of the discovery, and had rendered by their mingled villages and hamlets, and tracts of cultivation, the rich levels of the vegas so many "painted gardens," had almost all passed away, and the native princes had perished chiefly by violent and ignominious deaths. "I am informed," said he, in a letter to the sovereigns, "that since I left this island, six parts out of seven of the natives are dead, all through ill-treatment

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