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Everywhere on the appearance of the ships, the Indian canoes took to flight. The island, along which they were now coasting, appeared very large and very high, from which latter peculiarity it gained, later on, its name of Hayti, which signifies High Land.
No sooner did the negro enter the climate of Hayti, and feel that more truculent and desolating one of the Spanish temper, than he began to revolt, to take to the mountains, to defend his life, to organize leagues with Caribs and other natives. The colonists were often slain in conflicts with them. The first negro insurrection in Hayti occurred in November, 1522.
These capable, cruel men went sailing among the Bahamas, soothed by the novelty and delight of finding land, and tried to behave at first as men do among artless children who measure every thing by their own scantiness; for they compelled themselves to be very mild and condescending, till, after various mischances and rebuffs by sea and land, the temper breaks forth in rage at disappointments, and Hayti is the first place which is blasted by that frightful Spanish scowl.
He was twenty then, and he was now twenty-three, and in that time had become a great reporter, and had been to Presidential conventions in Chicago, revolutions in Hayti, Indian outbreaks on the Plains, and midnight meetings of moonlighters in Tennessee, and had seen what work earthquakes, floods, fire, and fever could do in great cities, and had contradicted the President, and borrowed matches from burglars.
Lundy had visited Hayti, to examine the conditions of negro life there, had returned to Baltimore, where he had been brutally beaten by a slave dealer, and had finally come to Boston to test out the anti-slavery sentiment in New England.
Go to Hayti and stand on those fifty thousand graves of the best soldiers France ever had and ask them what they think of the Negro's sword. I would call him Napoleon, but Napoleon made his way to empire over broken oaths and through a sea of blood. This man never broke his word. I would call him Cromwell, but Cromwell was only a soldier, and the state he founded went down with him into his grave.
Not because he loved Hayti, but because since he went to lodge at the café of the Widow Ducrot, he had learned to love her daughter Claire, and Claire loved him. On the two thousand dollars due him from Ham they plotted to marry. This was not as great an adventure as it might appear.
When the habit of attending a chapel was pretty well confirmed, the building was surrounded, the young and stout ones were seized and branded, and carried away, with the most attractive females, for further indoctrination in the Christian arts. A device of the caciques which was practised in Nicaragua might easily have been pursued in Hayti.
Bearing northward, he advanced by an unknown and dangerous course along the coast of Hayti and through the intricate passes of the Bahamas.
First in importance came the re-establishment of French authority in the large and fertile island of Hayti, or St. Domingo. It needs an effort of the imagination for the modern reader to realize the immense importance of the West Indian islands at the beginning of the century, whose close found them depressed and half bankrupt.
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