And there—­the source of endless misery to these happy harmless creatures—­a certain Cacique, so goes the tale, took off Columbus’s cap of crimson velvet, and replaced it with a circle of gold which he wore.

Alas for them!  That fatal present of gold brought down on them enemies far more ruthless than the Caribs of the northern islands, who had a habit of coming down in their canoes and carrying off the gentle Arrawaks to eat them at their leisure, after the fashion which Defoe, always accurate, has immortalised in Robinson Crusoe.  Crusoe’s island is, almost certainly, meant for Tobago; Man Friday had been stolen in Trinidad.

Columbus came no more to Trinidad.  But the Spaniards had got into their wicked heads that there must be gold somewhere in the island; and they came again and again.  Gold they could not get; for it does not exist in Trinidad.  But slaves they could get; and the history of the Indians of Trinidad for the next century is the same as that of the rest of the West Indies:  a history of mere rapine and cruelty.  The Arrawaks, to do them justice, defended themselves more valiantly than the still gentler people of Hayti, Cuba, Jamaica, Porto Rico, and the Lucayas:  but not so valiantly as the fierce cannibal Caribs of the Lesser Antilles, whom the Spaniards were never able to subdue.

It was in 1595, nearly a century after Columbus discovered the island, that ’Sir Robert Duddeley in the Bear, with Captain Munck, in the Beare’s Whelpe, with two small pinnesses, called the Frisking and the Earwig,’ ran across from Cape Blanco in Africa, straight for Trinidad, and anchored in Cedros Bay, which he calls Curiapan, inside Punta Icacque and Los Gallos—­a bay which was then, as now, ‘very full of pelicans.’  The existence of the island was known to the English:  but I am not aware that any Englishman had explored it.  Two years before, an English ship, whose exploits are written in Hakluyt by one Henry May, had run in, probably to San Fernando, ’to get refreshing; but could not, by reason the Spaniards had taken it.  So that for want of victuals the company would have forsaken the ship.’  How different might have been the history of Trinidad, if at that early period, while the Indians were still powerful, a little colony of English had joined them, and intermarried with them.  But it was not to be.  The ship got away through the Boca Drago.  The year after, seemingly, Captain Whiddon, Raleigh’s faithful follower, lost eight men in the island in a Spanish ambush.  But Duddeley was the first Englishman, as far as I am aware, who marched, ’for his experience and pleasure, four long marches through the island; the last fifty miles going and coming through a most monstrous thicke wood, for so is most part of the island; and lodging myself in Indian townes.’  Poor Sir Robert—­’larding the lean earth as he stalked along’—­in ruff and trunk hose, possibly too in burning steel