It is difficult, as Humboldt says, to distinguish, in the calculations by the Spanish writers of the amount of gold sent to Spain, “between that obtained by washings and that which had been accumulated for ages in the hands of the natives, who were pillaged at will.”  He inclines, however, to the opinion, that a scientific system of mining would renew the supply of gold, which may not be represented by the scanty washings that have been occasionally tried in Hayti and Cuba.  In Hayti, “as well as at Brazil, it would be more profitable to attempt subterraneous workings, on veins, in primitive and intermediary soils, than to renew the gold-washings which were abandoned in the ages of barbarism, rapine, and carnage."[F]

[Footnote F:  Personal Narrative, Vol.  III. p. 163, note.  Bohn’s Series.]

But the chief interest which Spain took in Hayti was derived from the collars and bracelets which shone dully against the skins of the caciques and native women in the streets of Seville.  It did not require an exhausted treasury, and the clamor of a Neapolitan war for sinews, to stimulate the appetite of a nation whose sensibility for gold was as great as its superstition.  Columbus triumphed over the imaginations of men through their avarice; the procession of his dusky captives to the feet of Isabella was as if the Earth-Spirit, holding a masque to tempt Catholic majesties to the ruin of the mine, sent his familiars, “with the earth-tint yet so freshly embrowned,” to flatter with heron-crests, the plumes of parrots, and the yellow ore.  Behind that naked pomp the well-doubleted nobles of Castile and Aragon trooped gayly with priests and crosses, the pyx and the pax, and all the symbols of a holy Passion, to crime and death.

Columbus discovered Guanahani, which he named San Salvador, on the morning of the 12th of October, 1492.  After cruising among these Lucayan Islands, or Bahamas, for some time, he reached Cuba on the 28th of the same month.  His Lucayan interpreters were understood by the natives of Cuba, notwithstanding they spoke a different dialect.  They were also understood at Hayti, which was reached on the 6th of December; but here the Cuban interpreter was found to be more useful.  Each island appeared to have a dialect of a language whose origin has been variously attributed to Florida, to Central America, and to the Caribbee Islands.  But the Indians of Central America could not understand the Cubans and Haytians, and they in turn spoke a different language from the Caribs, some of whose words they had borrowed.  A favorite theory is, that the Ygneris were ancient inhabitants of the West Indian Islands, distinct from the Caribs, who made their way from Florida by the Lucayan Islands, leaving Hayti to the right, and reaching South America by that fringe of islands that stretches from Porto Rico to Trinidad, through which the great current is strained into the Caribbean Sea.  Humboldt says,[G]