other articles also, among them a dead man’s head wrapped up with great care in a small basket.  Shaking their own living heads, Columbus and his party returned.  Suddenly they came on some suspicious-looking mounds of earth over which new grass was growing.  An examination of these showed them to be the graves of eleven of the Spaniards, the remains of the clothing being quite sufficient to identify them.  Doctor Chanca, who examined them, thought that they had not been dead two months.  Speculation came to an end in the face of this eloquent certainty; there were the dead bodies of some of the colonists; and the voyagers knelt round with bare heads while the bodies were replaced in the grave and the ceremony of Christian burial performed over them.

Little by little the dismal story was elicited from the natives, who became less timid when they saw that the Spaniards meant them no harm.  It seemed that Columbus had no sooner gone away than the colonists began to abandon themselves to every kind of excess.  While the echo of the Admiral’s wise counsels was yet in their ears they began to disobey his orders.  Honest work they had no intention of doing, and although Diego Arana, their commander, did his best to keep order, and although one or two of the others were faithful to him and to Columbus, their authority was utterly insufficient to check the lawless folly of the rest.  Instead of searching for gold mines, they possessed themselves by force of every ounce of gold they could steal or seize from the natives, treating them with both cruelty and contempt.  More brutal excesses followed as a matter of course.  Guacanagari, in his kindly indulgence and generosity, had allowed them to take three native wives apiece, although he himself and his people were content with one.  But of course the Spaniards had thrown off all restraint, however mild, and ran amok among the native inhabitants, seizing their wives and seducing their daughters.  Upon this naturally followed dissensions among themselves, jealousy coming hot upon the heels of unlawful possession; and, in the words of Irving, “the natives beheld with astonishment the beings whom they had worshipped as descended from the skies abandoned to the grossest of earthly passions and raging against each other with worse than brutal ferocity.”

Upon their strifes and dissensions followed another breach of the Admiral’s wise regulations; they no longer cared to remain together in the fort, but split up into groups and went off with their women into the woods, reverting to a savagery beside which the gentle existence of the natives was high civilisation.  There were squabbles and fights in which one or two of the Spaniards were killed; and Pedro Gutierrez and Rodrigo de Escovedo, whom Columbus had appointed as lieutenants to Arana, headed a faction of revolt against his authority, and took themselves off with nine other Spaniards and a great number of women.  They had