In The Brave Old Days

( Originally Published 1905 )

With all her cannons loaded, and her decks for action cleared And her death's head at the mast-head sailed the bold buccaneer. —Scott.

IN 1523 Hernandez de Cordova, conqueror of Nicaragua, fought his way from the Pacific coast, and after subduing tribe after tribe claimed the territory for his royal master and founded the cities of Cordova and Leon. What a race of giants were these early Spaniards! Men of iron constitution, of unsatisfied ambitions, whom no dangers could appal or fatigue conquer, and withal bearing with them in their romantic campaigns the lofty ideals of the Iberian Hidalgo. Cruel! Of course they were. Sherman was cruel when he marched to Atlanta, so cruel that to-day the South reviles his memory. Lord Kitchener, the Sirdar of Egypt, was cruel when he carried destruction into the hordes of the Soudan, and dragged from its tomb the putrefying body of the Mandi. Cruelty is inseparable from conquest, and as of old, it is now, and ever will be vae victis—woe to the conquered, and again, "to the victors belong the spoils." When the Germans laid upon the bleeding back of France the war indemnity that startled the civilized world by its weight and colossal proportions, Thiers cried out:

"Grand Dieu! Your Imperial Highness, if a man began at the Redemption and counted until now, he would be counting francs for the next fifty years before he would reach this terrible amount." "I know it," answered the implacable Bismarck for his master, " but we brought with us a Jew who counts from the deluge."

Nor can we, of all peoples, decently afford to put the lash on the backs of the Spaniards for isolated instances of cruelty to their Indian slaves. As time counts, it is not so long ago since slaves in Barbadoes on the least symptom of insubordination, were killed without mercy, sometimes burned alive, as in the Southern States to-day, or hung up in iron cages to starve to death and rot. Nor need we go back very far in the history of England, to the time when wretched creatures, Jews, were dragged by dozens at horses' tails through the streets of London, broken on the wheel, or torn to pieces by infuriated mobs. So let us keep quiet lest these foreign writers "come back at us."

The year before Cordova founded this city an extraordinary man, Gil d'Avila, sailed out of Panama, carrying with him in his caravel of thirty tons, three hundred infantry and thirty-two horse. Gil was a daring adventurer, a fearless sea-rover, whose ambition was to have his name writ large on the temple of fame. Among those who sailed with him out of Panama were some who were influenced by avarice and the hope of glory. Among them was the high-spirited cavalier, bound on romantic enterprise; the restless adventurer, in quest of new laurels in unsailed seas; the fearless caballero, wooing the charm of novelty in unexplored lands; and the disgraced courtier, resolved by reckless daring to wipe out the memory of his humiliation. They landed on the southern coast of Honduras, fought their way through the wilderness and open plains, reducing villages and towns, and finally entered the territory of the warlike cacique Diriangan, then and now known as Nicaragua. At the head of seven thousand of his fighting men, Diriangan barred the pass. This was in April, 1522. Gil carried the fight to him, and won the battle. He returned to Panama, where his men gave an alluring and marvellous account of the wealth of the country, the fertility of the soil and its wonderful people.

Avila at once sailed for Spain to ask a royal audience and seek means to settle his conquest and establish a government. When he returned lie heard with amazement and chagrin that Hernandez de Cordova had conquered Nicaragua, and already had named and begun to build the cities of Leon and Cordova.

Gil d' Avila at once collected a few daring adventurers, sailed again from Panama, and entered the Bay of Honduras, crossed the country and sacked the infant cities of Hernandez de Cordova. One or two skirmishes with the troops of Cordova followed, the feud ending with the appointment of Avila as the first governor of Nicaragua. He died the year after his appointment, and was succeeded by his son-in-law, Rodrigo de Contreras.

The policy of the home government in dealing with the Indians was, from the beginning, a policy of conciliation and paternalism. In common with the church, it conceded much and yielded to the aboriginal customs, traditions, habits and feelings, where these did not conflict with the natural law or the Noachic precepts. Spain established the famous "Council of the Indians," which issued, under the royal seal, orders safeguarding the rights of the tribes and forbidding any of its colonial officials to hold Indian slaves. Rodrigo de Contreras ignored this command of the council, and by common report treated his slaves with great harshness and cruelty. Charges were preferred against him by the bishop of Nicaragua, Antonio de Valdivieso, and he was summoned home to meet them.

Meanwhile his son, Hernandez, raised the standard of rebellion against the king of Spain. He defeated the loyalists in one or two engagements, murdered the bishop and sacked the city of Leon. Flushed with victory, he sailed for Panama, took the city, and established a revolutionary Junta, intending to extend his conquest and ultimately build up an independent kingdom. This was in 1549, and before the end of the year he died, and with him his dream of conquest. Leon was rebuilt on its old site on the western shore of Lake Managua, at the foot of the great volcano of Momotombo.

But some curse seemed to have fallen on the new city, and an avenging Nemesis to haunt its streets. The huge volcanic mount deluged it with red-hot ashes and incandescent sand, a plague ate up its people, the earth shook its great buildings and tumbled its cathedral towers to the ground. The Nicaraguans began to believe their city was accursed, that God was avenging the death of their martyred bishop, whose blood had dried upon and now dyed the steps of the altar where lie sank to his death from the poniard of Hernandez de Contreras. They began a novena to St. James, Spain's patron saint, and entered upon a solemn fast, as did the Ninevites of old, to stay the avenging strokes of God. A succession of calamities followed, and in despair they resolved to abandon their beloved city and build a new Leon by the side of the Indian town of Subtiaba.

Sunday morning, May, 1610, after a solemn high mass, the inhabitants of Leon, following their bishop and clergy, the officers of the fort and municipality, and bearing aloft the banner of the House of Braganza, marched in procession through the gate of San Pedro and bade good-bye forever to the doomed city. The ruins of old Leon remain to this day, overgrown with vines and vegetable parasites, where scorpions, lizards, and centipedes crawl, and bats dwell. The cruel and sacrilegious deed of Contreras is yet spoken of with horror among the peons, with whom it lingers as a tradition, and many profess to see, even now, the blood of the bishop on the steps of the altar of the old church.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Caribbean Sea and Pacific coast swarmed with French privateers and English corsairs—freebooters of the ocean, unrecognized, uncommissioned, fighting their own battles on their own responsibility, unlicensed rovers, starving to-day and to-morrow gorged with plunder: Henry Morgan, knighted for his rascally deeds, and made governor of Jamaica, sacked Panama, and burned the city; Drake, the vulture of the Atlantic, and so great an object of terror to the floating Spaniards that his death moved Lope de Vega to sing a hymn of triumph in his epic poem, the "Dragontea;" Penn and Venables; Daniels, the Dick Turpin of the Caribbean Sea, who carried a chaplain and had prayers said before sacking a town or sinking a Spanish galley.

What a shadowy procession of great and clever scoundrels, of adventurous and courageous cutthroats, of corsarios, pirates, privateers, and guerillas of the sea, passes before us at the command of memory, and once again enact their bloody parts in the tragedies of the centuries that are buried with them! Conspicuous among these rovers of the sea was Captain Dampier, who, in September, 1685, sailed up the Realejo with as reckless a crew of pirates as ever scuttled a ship or cut a throat. Dampier entered Leon by night, slaughtered many of its men and looted the city. He burned the hospital, cathedral, Convent of Mercy, and destroyed many of the finest dwellings.