He said, “They are eaters of men’s flesh,
intractable and abominable, not like the gentler people
we find hereabouts! It is certain that before
long, fleet after fleet coming, our two thousand here
growing into many thousands, more cities than Isabella
arising, commerce and life as in Europe beginning—Well,
these fiercer, Caribal islands will be overrun, taken
for Spain! What better to do with their people?
I do not wish to slay them and eat them!”
“Slaves—”
“How many Moors in Castile and Arragon, slaves
and none the worse for it, being baptized, being kindly
enough entreated! And now the Portuguese bring
Negroes, and are they the worse off, being taken from
a deep damnation? Long ago, I have read, the
English were taken to Rome and sold in the market
place, and the blessed Gregory, seeing them, cried,
`Christ shall be preached in their nation!’
Whereupon he sent Augustine and all England was saved.—
Look you, this world is rude and worketh rudely!
But it climbs in the teeth of its imperfections!”
“I do not doubt that,” I said. “When
it wills to climb.”
“I do but lay it before the Sovereigns,”
he answered. “I do not know what they will
think of it there. But truly I know not what
else to do with these Asiatics when they withstand
us! And even in slavery they must gain from Christians!
What matters masters when they find the True Master?”
Juan Lepe brooded still while the pen scratched and
scratched across the page. The noise ceased.
I looked up to see if he were in pain again, and met
gray-blue eyes as longing as a child’s.
“What I would,” he said, “is that
the Lord would give to me forever to sail a great ship,
and to find, forever to find! The sea is wider
than the land, and it sends its waves upon all lands.
Not Viceroy, but the Navigator, the Finder—”
Juan Lepe also thought that there streamed his Genius.
Here he was able, but there played the Fire. But
he, like many another, had bound himself. Don
Cristoval Colon— Viceroy—and
eighths and tenths!
TWELVE of our ships went home to Spain.
February wheeled by. March was here, and every
day the sun sent us more heat.
The Indians around us still were friendly—women
and all. From the first there was straying in
the woods with Indian women. Doubtless now, in
the San Salvador islands, in Cuba and in Hispaniola,
among those Guaricos fled from us to the mountains,
would be infants born of Spanish fathers. Juan
Lepe contemplated that filling in the sea between
Asia and Europe with the very blood.
Sickness broke out. It was not such as that first
sickness at La Navidad, but here were many more to
lie ill. Besides Juan Lepe, we now possessed
three physicians. They were skillful, they labored
hard, we all labored. Men died of the malady,
but no great number. But now among the idle of
mind and soul and the factious arose the eternal murmur.
Not heaven but hell, these new lands! Not wealth
and happy ease, but poverty and miserable toil!
Not forever new spectacle and greedy wonder, but tiresome
river, forest and sea, tiresome blue heaven, tiresome
delving and building, tiresome rules, restrictions,
commandments, yeas and nays! Parties arose, two
main parties, and within each lesser differings.
