The people of Europe have not stood alone in settling and ruling America,
for the blacks of Africa, brought to the New World as slaves, have made
themselves masters of one of the largest and most fertile islands of the
West Indies, that attractive gem of the tropics which, under the name of
Hispaniola, was the pioneer among Spanish dominions on American soil.
Hispaniola has had a strange and cruel history. The Spaniards enslaved its
original inhabitants and treated them so ruthlessly that they were soon
annihilated. Then the island was filled with negro slaves. About 1630 the
buccaneers, or hunters of wild bulls, made it their haunt, and as these
were mostly French, the western part of the island was ceded to France in
1697. During the century that followed Africans were brought over in
multitudes, until there were nearly half a million blacks in Hayti,--the
Indian name of the island,--while there were less than forty thousand
whites and thirty thousand mulattoes, the latter being neither citizens
nor slaves. These facts are given as a necessary introduction to the story
we are about to tell.
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