THE
SPANIARDS
IN
AMERICA
289
accounts had reached us at home. We knew that it had lasted ten years, but who had been the parties and what their objects had been was very much a mystery. No sooner was it over than, without reservation or compensa tion, the slaves had been emancipated. How a country was prospering which had undergone such a succession of shocks, and how the Spaniards were dealing with the trials which were bearing so hard on our own islands, were in quiries worth making. But beyond these it was the land of romance. Columbus and Las Casas, Cortez and Pizarro, are the demigods and heroes of the New World. Their names will be familiar to the end of time as the founders of a new era, and although the modern Spaniards sink to the level of the modern Greeks, their illustrious men will hold their place for ever in imagination and memory. Our own Antilles had, as I have said, in their terror of smallpox, placed Jamaica under an interdict. The Spaniards at Cuba were more generous or more careless. Havana is on the north side of the island, facing towards Florida; thus, in going to it from Port Royal, we had to round the westernmost cape, and had four days of sea before us. We slid along the coast of Jamaica in smooth water, the air, while day lasted, intensely hot, but the breeze after nightfall blowing cool from off the moun tains. We had a polite captain, polite officers, and agree able fellow-passengers, two or three Cubans among them, swarthy, dark-eyed, thick-set men—Americanos; Spaniards with a difference — with whom I cultivated a kind of inti macy. In a cabin it was reported that there were again Spanish ladies on their way to the demonic gaieties at Darien, but they did not show. Among the rest of the party was a Canadian gentleman, a Mr. —, exceptionally well-informed and intelligent. Their American treaty having been disallowed, the West Indies had proposed to negotiate a similar one with the v