Amyas spoke truth; for almost every atrocity against savages which had been committed by the Spaniards, and which was in later and worse times committed by the English, was wont to be excused in that same base fear of treachery.  Amyas’s plan, like that of Drake, and Cook, and all great English voyagers, had been all along to inspire at once awe and confidence, by a frank and fearless carriage; and he was not disappointed here.  He bade the men step boldly into their canoes, and follow the old Indian whither he would.  The simple children of the forest bowed themselves reverently before the mighty strangers, and then led them smilingly across the stream, and through a narrow passage in the covert, to a hidden lagoon, on the banks of which stood, not Manoa, but a tiny Indian village.

CHAPTER XXIV

HOW AMYAS WAS TEMPTED OF THE DEVIL

     “Let us alone.  What pleasure can we have
        To war with evil?  Is there any peace
     In always climbing up the climbing wave? 
        All things have rest, and ripen toward the grave
     In silence; ripen, fall, and cease: 
        Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease.”

Tennyson.

Humboldt has somewhere a curious passage; in which, looking on some wretched group of Indians, squatting stupidly round their fires, besmeared with grease and paint, and devouring ants and clay, he somewhat naively remarks, that were it not for science, which teaches us that such is the crude material of humanity, and this the state from which we all have risen, he should have been tempted rather to look upon those hapless beings as the last degraded remnants of some fallen and dying race.  One wishes that the great traveller had been bold enough to yield to that temptation, which his own reason and common sense presented to him as the real explanation of the sad sight, instead of following the dogmas of a so-called science, which has not a fact whereon to base its wild notion, and must ignore a thousand facts in asserting it.  His own good sense, it seems, coincided instinctively with the Bible doctrine, that man in a state of nature is a fallen being, doomed to death—­a view which may be a sad one, but still one more honorable to poor humanity than the theory, that we all began as some sort of two-handed apes.  It is surely more hopeful to believe that those poor Otomacs or Guahibas were not what they ought to be, than to believe that they were.  It is certainly more complimentary to them to think that they had been somewhat nobler and more prudent in centuries gone by, than that they were such blockheads as to have dragged on, the son after the father, for all the thousands of years which have elapsed since man was made, without having had wit enough to discover any better food than ants and clay.