The first interest of the voyagers was in the inhabitants of this delightful land.  They found them well built, athletic-looking men, most of them young, with handsome bodies and intelligent faces.  Columbus, eager to begin his missionary work, gave them some red caps and some glass beads, with which he found them so delighted that he had good hopes of making converts, and from which he argued that “they were a people who would better be freed and converted to our Holy Faith by love than by force,” which sentence of his contains within itself the whole missionary spirit of the time.  These natives, who were the freest people in the world, were to be “freed”; freed or saved from the darkness of their happy innocence and brought to the light of a religion that had just evolved the Inquisition; freed by love if possible, and by red caps and glass beads; if not possible, then freed by force and with guns; but freed they were to be at all costs.  It is a tragic thought that, at the very first impact of the Old World upon this Eden of the West, this dismal error was set on foot and the first links in the chain of slavery forged.  But for the moment nothing of it was perceptible; nothing but red caps and glass beads, and trinkets and toys, and freeing by love.  The sword that Columbus held out to them, in order to find out if they knew the use of weapons, they innocently grasped by the blade and so cut their fingers; and that sword, extended with knowledge and grasped with fearless ignorance, is surely an emblem of the spread of civilisation and of its doubtful blessings in the early stages.  Let us hear Columbus himself, as he recorded his first impression of Guanahani: 

“Further, it appeared to me that they were a very poor people, in everything.  They all go naked as their mothers gave them birth, and the women also, although I only saw one of the latter who was very young, and all those whom I saw were young men, none more than thirty years of age.  They were very well built with very handsome bodies, and very good faces.  Their hair was almost as coarse as horses’ tails, and short, and they wear it over the eyebrows, except a small quantity behind, which they wear long and never cut.  Some paint themselves blackish, and they are of the colour of the inhabitants of the Canaries, neither black nor white, and some paint themselves white, some red, some whatever colour they find:  and some paint their faces, some all the body, some only the eyes, and some only the nose.  They do not carry arms nor know what they are, because I showed them swords and they took them by the edge and ignorantly cut themselves.  They have no iron:  their spears are sticks without iron, and some of them have a fish’s tooth at the end and others have other things.  They are all generally of good height, of pleasing appearance and well built:  I saw some who had indications of wounds on their bodies, and I asked them by signs if it was that, and they showed