CHAPTER II.

THE PLACE—­THE CLIMATE—­NATIVES—­SETTLERS.

This old haunted house of Hayti had many occupants, who left as heirlooms generation upon generation of hateful memories.  Their dreams, their deeds, their terrific tempers, lurked for the newcomers, and harried them forth or made them kin.  It is a cumulative story of dire and fateful proceedings, like the story of the family of Pelops.  It must be told with deliberation.  So the place, the climate, the aborigines, the early atrocities, the importation of new races and characteristics, command consideration as inevitable elements of the narrative.

This spot of the New World was the first to ache beneath the white man’s greedy and superstitious tread.  A tenacious Gothic race, after its long blockade by Moors in the northern mountains of the Iberian Peninsula, had lately succeeded in recovering the last stronghold of Arab power and learning.  Fresh from the atrocities of that contest, its natural bigotry deepened by its own struggle for national existence, sombre, fanatical, cruel, and avaricious, but enterprising and indomitable, it is wafted across the ocean by Columbus, to expend its propensities unchecked against a weaker and less characteristic barbarism.  What might be expected, when a few noble men succeed in transporting the worst features of their own country, in such numbers of intractable people, the raking of seaports, with little on board in the way of religion, save the traditions of the Church and the materials for exhibiting the drama of the Mass!  This is the contingent which civilization detaches for the settlement of another world.  It effaces a smiling barbarism by a saturnine and gloomy one, as when a great forest slides from some height over a wild gay meadow.  These capable, cruel men went sailing among the Bahamas, soothed by the novelty and delight of finding land, and tried to behave at first as men do among artless children who measure every thing by their own scantiness; for they compelled themselves to be very mild and condescending, till, after various mischances and rebuffs by sea and land, the temper breaks forth in rage at disappointments, and Hayti is the first place which is blasted by that frightful Spanish scowl.  The change was as sudden as that from calm weather to one of her tempests.  The whole subsequent history seems as if it were the revenge of Columbus’s own imagination, when the sober truth was discovered instead of Cipango and the King of India.  Thus was the New World unsettled, and the horrors of San Domingo committed to the soil.