Spanish West Indies

“ French influence is in no danger of dying out in Martinique and Guadaloupe. [Pg 108] The Spanish race is not dying in Cuba and Puerto Rico. England will soon be no more than a name in Barbadoes and the Antilles. Having acquitted our conscience by emancipation, we have left our West Indian interest to sink or swim. Our principle has been to leave each part of our empire (except the East Indies) to take care of itself: we give the various inhabitants liberty, and what we understand by fair play ”

“ This island became a veritable pandemonium—the sink of the West Indies. It was the place of call for rovers of all nations, the market for their booty, and the storehouse for everything in the way of supplies. The merchants pandered to the tastes of their customers, and drinking and gambling went on continually. But in 1638 it was surprised by the Spaniards, who began to be alarmed at this nest of pirates at their very doors. They chose a time when most of the rovers were away on a cruise, and the buccaneers gone hunting in Hispaniola. ”

“ Latterly the West Indies have sunk into neglect by Europe. Except for the difficulties of the planters their history is almost a blank sheet. Few know .anything about the beautiful islands or the grand forests of the mainland. Even the discovery of gold in Guiana, which goes to confirm the reports of Ralegh, three centuries ago, is only known to a few. Ruin and desolation have fallen upon them since the peace of 1815 and the emancipation. Even the negro—the protégé of the benevolent—is no longer the object of interest he once was. ”

“ As the Indies were the scene of struggles between great nations and the raids of buccaneers, so also was the Mediterranean a battlefield for Christian and Turk, and a centre for piracy.
Reports of golden cities, pearls and emeralds in profusion, and wealth that passed all description, led the Spaniards to explore every island and river, until the cannibals became less alarming. Yet their sufferings were terrible. Hurricanes sunk their frail craft on the sea and earthquakes wrung their very souls on land. ”

“ In the colonies the most striking feature of Spanish economic policy was its wastefulness. After the conquest of the New World, it was to the interest of the Spaniards to gradually wean the native Indians from barbarism by teaching them the arts and sciences of Europe, to encourage such industries as were favoured by the soil, and to furnish the growing colonies with those articles which they could not produce themselves, and of which they stood in need. Only thus could they justify their monopoly of the markets of Spanish America. ”

“ Compared with the passive inertia which had all through the history of the Spanish West Indies retarded individual and communal advancement, it was like a sudden birth of aspirations and endeavors all directed towards a lofty goal, perhaps still vague to the multitude, but clearly and strongly defined in the minds of the men who with a singular unity of purpose, forgetting for once all the petty jealousies that had clouded so many big issues in previous periods, combined for concerted action for the common good. ”

“ However much we may deprecate the treatment of the Indians by the conquistadores, we must not forget that the greater part of the population of Spanish America to-day is still Indian, and that no other colonizing people have succeeded like the Spaniards in assimilating and civilizing the natives. The code of laws which the Spaniards gradually evolved for the rule of their transmarine provinces, was, in spite of defects which are visible only to the larger experience of the present day, one of the wisest, most humane and best co-ordinated of any to this day published for any colony. ”

“ But the love of country, the unknown but magnified perils of a sea voyage, and stories of cruel Spaniards and man-eating Caribs, prevented many from going to the Indies, notwithstanding the great inducements offered. The English planters found it difficult to get negroes, as their enemy controlled the trade. As for the Indians, they had to deal with cannibals whose women cultivated small clearings, but resented anything like coercion, while no labour [Pg 146] whatever could be got from the men. ”

“ Why should Spain claim the whole of the New World? England, Holland, and France began to dispute her supremacy and determined to get a share of the good things. The "invincible domination" of Spain led her to declare war against England, with the result that the hardy sea-dogs of that time began to worry the fat galleons at sea, and to pillage the treasure depôts on the Main.
And here we must mention that there were two important places in the Indies where Spain was most vulnerable—the Mona Passage between Hispaniola and Porto Rico and the Isthmus of Darien. ”

“ Now that Guiana was made known, vessels of other nationalities went trading along the coast, everywhere meeting with a hearty welcome from the Indians as long as the visitors were not Spanish. They were only so many additions to their friends—their enemies were confined to Trinidad and the Orinoco, leaving the whole coast of Guiana to its rightful owners. In fact, the Spaniards could no more subdue the Caribs of the Main than they could those of the islands. Only in Trinidad, where the Arawak was employed against the cannibal, was a settlement made possible. ”

“ English privateers began to extend their operations westward, and to sap the very sources of Spanish wealth and power, while the wars which absorbed the attention of the Spaniards in Europe, from the revolt of the Low Countries to the Treaty of Westphalia, left the field clear for these ubiquitous sea-rovers. The maritime powers, although obliged by the theory of colonial exclusion to pretend to acquiesce in the Spaniard's claim to tropical America, secretly protected and supported their mariners who coursed those western seas. ”

“ Intruding colonies in the West Indies.—In the early years of the conquest Spain had occupied the larger West Indian islands—Cuba, Española, Porto Rico, and Jamaica—but had neglected the lesser islands. They thus became a field for colonization by Spain's enemies. In the seventeenth century the subjects of Holland, France, and England began to establish settlements in the West Indies, in the heart of the Spanish sea, while England intruded in the northern mainland. ”

“ There are five booksellers houses, and the fashions are well displayed in other shops. The French colonists, whether Creoles* or French, consider the West Indies as their country. They cast no wistful looks towards France. They marry, educate, and build in and for the West Indies, and for the West Indies alone. In our colonies it is different. They are considered more as temporary lodging-places, to be deserted as soon as the occupiers have made money enough by molasses and sugar to return home. ”

“ The planters were never sure of being able to reap their crops, and often had literally to superintend the estate work, armed with sword and arquebuse, while their black and white slaves cultivated the soil.
Now the West Indies became the great training ground for three maritime nations—England, France, and Holland. Spain lost her prestige, and the struggle lay among her enemies for over a century. At first the three disputants for her place were equally matched; then Holland dropped behind, leaving England and France to fight it out. ”

“ The English must be free to trade everywhere—in fact the old claim of Spain to the whole of America must be finally abandoned.
The Spanish ambassador replied that the inquisition and trade to the West Indies were his master's two eyes, and that nothing different from the practice of former times could be permitted. On hearing this Cromwell, seeing that neither indemnity for the past nor promises of amendment in the future could be obtained, prepared for war, and commenced by fitting out an expedition to conquer Hispaniola. ”

“ The natives lacked the physical strength needed to meet the demands of their taskmasters, and negroes from the Portuguese settlements on the coast of Guinea were largely imported into the Spanish West Indies. Numbers of them were driven by ill-usage to take refuge in the forests and mountain fastnesses, where they led a nomadic life or made common cause with the natives, and when attacked by the Spaniards neither gave nor accepted quarter. ”

“ The French and British islands are much less given to perpetrating poetry than those in which the Spanish tongue is spoken, and show an equal disinclination to producing the heavy volumes on subjects too ponderous for the authors themselves which burden the dusty book-shelves of Ibero-American lands. On the whole, the West Indies are a virgin field for the literary artist who cares to turn his attention to them. ”

“ In the West Indies, however, Spain went farther. Here she had undoubtedly the right by discovery, although not by actual possession, save in the Greater Antilles. The weak English king who succeeded the strong-minded Tudor princess was not prepared to contest the Spanish supremacy here, but simply answered the complaints against English adventurers by disclaiming all responsibility. Neither England nor France had officially taken the ground that only actual possession created territorial rights, but many Englishmen were clamouring loudly to that effect. ”

“ The French did something in their own way, and the Dutch were not far behind. Indeed, the French may claim to have set the example for the Elizabethan freebooters, for in the first half of the sixteenth century privateers flocked to the Spanish Indies from Dieppe, Brest and the towns of the Basque coast. The gleam of the golden lingots of Peru, and the pale lights of the emeralds from the mountains of New Granada, exercised a hypnotic influence not only on ordinary seamen but on merchants and on seigneurs with depleted fortunes. ”

“ By the middle of the eighteenth century Spain had fallen behind, and even Holland had lost her prestige. It followed, therefore, that the only Power that could rival Great Britain was France, and she was an enemy that could never be despised. The struggle in the West Indies between these two Powers now became, if possible, more intense ”

“ But when that is done; when civilization, commerce, and education shall have been spread; when sufficient of our blood shall have been infused into the veins of those children of the sun; then, I think, we may be ready, without stain to our patriotism, to take off our hats and bid farewell to the West Indies. ”

“ It is the least desirable country in the world for the white man to select as his home.
The republic spreads about halfway across the island of San Domingo, whose history is rich in tales of bloodshed, piracy, and worse. The first of the West Indian islands to be annexed by Europe, San Domingo, or Española as Columbus named it, was the earliest Spanish settlement in the western world. As in Jamaica the Spaniards introduced religion so effectually that the original inhabitants, the gentle Caribs, were crushed out of existence. The Africans were introduced to do the work of the plantations. ”

“ From a Puerto Rico merchant I learnt that, if the English colonies were in a bad way, the Spanish colonies were in a worse. His own island, he said, was a nest of squalor, misery, vice, and disease. Blacks and whites were equally immoral; and so far as habits went, the whites were the filthier of the two. The complaints of the English West Indians were less sweeping, and, as to immorality between whites and blacks, neither from my companions in the 'Moselle' nor anywhere afterward did I hear or see a sign of it. ”

“ However it may be with us, and whatever the eventual fate of Cuba, the Spanish race has taken root there, and is visibly destined to remain. They have poured their own people into it. In Cuba alone there are ten times as many Spaniards as there are English and Scotch in all our West Indies together, and Havana is ten times the size of the largest of our West Indian cities. Refugees have flocked thither from the revolutions in the Peninsula. ”

“ Consequently, in Trinidad there are many political agitators.
Visitors will land from their mail steamer at Port of Spain and find themselves in a foreign-looking British West Indian capital, in an atmosphere of tramways, telephones, suffocating heat, negroes, and spasmodic bustle and noise. It is a town containing buildings reminiscent of its Spanish, French, and British periods of Government. Houses in all the styles of each nationality will be found on every side. ”

“ The Spanish ambassador in London presented a memorial of protest to the English king,351 and in Spain the Council of War blossomed into fresh activity to secure the defence of the West Indies and the coasts of the South Sea.352 Ever since 1672, indeed, the Spaniards moved by some strange infatuation, had persisted in a course of active hostility to the English in the West Indies. ”

“ If the coloured people in the West Indies can overtop contempt, it is because they are acquiring education, civilization, and power. In Jamaica they are, I hope, in a way to do this.
My theory—for I acknowledge to a theory—is this: that Providence has sent white men and black men to these regions in order that from them may spring a race fitted by intellect for civilization; and fitted also by physical organization for tropical labour. The negro in his primitive state is not, I think, fitted for the former; and the European white Creole is certainly not fitted for the latter. ”