that of Saint Domingo, which in time became
sponsor for the whole island. It was long
afterwards that the old hidalgo town in the Santiago
plain, with the Homeric name of "Santiago de
los Cavalleros," was built for those stately
gentlemen whose blood was too blue, and whose
escutcheons were too old, to permit them to
dwell among the merchants by the shore. The
city was abandoned when France wrested the
Antilles' queen from Spain, but its remains still
attest the magnificence and wealth of its olden
time. Nothing more completely photographs
the spirit of the age than that aristocratic town,
built exclusively for the emigrant nobility, who
would not choose to dwell even in the same
streets and squares as the unblessed plebeians
who made their gold by vulgar trade; yet who
themselves traded more largely, but more cruelly
and piratically, than the honest burgher who
kept his shop and sold his stores at so much per
cent., and climbed up from penury to affluence
by maravedis and pesatas at a time.

After the disgrace of the Columbus family,
when the Genoese hero was sent home in chains
to the land he had helped to honour and enrich,
Ovando was nominated governor of Hispaniola,
where he made himself conspicuous for his ability
as a good coloniser, with the set-off of abominable
cruelty towards the natives. What with
wars and rigorous treatment of all kinds, the
million of inhabitants whom Columbus found on
the island soon got reduced to twenty-four thousand,
and then the Spaniards, too proud to work
for themselves, and alarmed at the want of
servants to work for them, imported other Indians
from the Bahamas, who got as badly treated
as their predecessors, and also died off by
hundreds. And then the Bishop of Chiapa, in
Mexico, seeking to ameliorate the condition of
these aborigines, persuaded the king to charter
a company of merchants for the slave trade, so
that some remnant of the oppressed people
might be saved. Thus slaves and negroes were
first imported into Haïti at the instance of a
Christian bishop, and with the design of showing
a vicarious kind of charity to the Caribs. No
one then looked forward into the misty future
stealing on; no one then thought that the slaves
imported now, simply to help lift the yoke from
off the Indian's neck, would some day so multiply
and increase that they would take the land and
hold it, and so entirely thrust out the lingering
remnant of the race they were sent to save, as to
assume to themselves the rights of citizenship
and country, which no logic could divert to them
from the aborigines. The Portuguese had been
the first to begin the trade. Having to restore
two Moorish prisoners, they received so many
negroes in exchange that the idea of a regular
traffic in slaves was suggested to them, and
acted on; and soon this commerce in sable flesh
grew so large and profitable that the King of
Portugal took the title of Lord of Guinea, as
evidencing the richest province, and the most
lucrative trade, belonging to him. Hawkins
was the first Englishman engaged in that trade,
and in 1562 brought his first cargo of three
hundred negro slaves to Haïti; but it was as
early as 1522 that the slaves were sufficiently
numerous to dare a revolt, and begin, in fact, the
series of insurrections which culminated in the
terrible crisis of 1791, and ended in the
establishment of the Black Republic and the creation
of a "Curly-headed France" in the Caribbean
Sea.

Haïti and the adjacent islands were very
cosmopolitan in their population. Like all the
rest of the New World, they attracted the
adventurous spirits for whom home and the
ordinary way were too narrow, and offered an
asylum to those whose freedom of thoughts had
made the Old-World life impossible. Adventurers
from Spain, merchants from Portugal,
traders and pirates from France and England,
with refugees from Acadia (Evangeline's Acadia),
and Huguenots from the mother country,
negroes from Africa, Indians from the Bahamas,
and the native Caribs, all made up a mixed and
motley population, in which there was still wanting
one dominant party to take the lead of the
rest. Petty struggles were there in plenty.
Admiral Drake took Saint Domingo and made the
Spaniards buy him off; then the French
expelled the Spaniards, and the Spaniards expelled
the French; but at last the Dons were thrust
altogether to the eastern side, and never
recovered their lost territory again, and probably
never will. The eastern side, however, is still
Spanish in its language and traditions, and there
is a marked and notable difference between that
and the Frenchified west. The next upon the
scene were the famous buccaneers, so called from
"boucan," the hurdle on which they smoked their
wildgame; and, indeed, in the present Franco-
Haïtian language, boucaner is still used instead of
"cuire au four," to bake. These buccaneers were
hunters on the island of Tortugas, lying at some
little distance from Haiti, who kept their regular
hunting-grounds there, but poached, when they
could, on the preserves of the Antilles' queen.
Their mode of life was singular enough. They
lived together in couples, holding all things in
common, so that if one died the other inherited
what was left. Each hunter, or couple of
hunters, had twenty or thirty hounds to bring down
the wild oxen and other beasts, the skins of
which they traded off to merchants and ships'
crews; reserving the best, though, for
themselves, to make themselves court suits and
country wear. They were a wild-looking set,
with their huge untanned leather boots and
ungainly dress of skins usually soaked and smeared
with blood; and none of the colonists of more
civilised manners cared for much intercourse
with them. They held themselves in no country
and beyond law, for "when they crossed the line,
the baptism of the sea set them free from all
social obligations;" so that by degrees, licence
producing lawlessness, and lawlessness crime,
from simple hunters and tanners with a dash of
the poacher, they grew to be the most daring and
dangerous pirates in the world. They were of
all nations, but chiefly French and English; and
by their numbers and audacity became so