They had, it is obvious, nothing which could survive them as a memorial of their existence. Their architecture, if so it may be called, was most perishable. They had no art, save in pottery, and that was not highly developed. They had no literature. The result was that when they perished through unfavorable contact with a more powerful and aggressive race they left scarcely a trace of themselves behind, save in the records and testimony of their conquerors and destroyers. Some specimens of their pottery have been preserved: the words "hammock" and "canoe" come to us from them; and the use of tobacco is their universal memorial. Such were the aborigines, if not the absolute autochthones, of Cuba. Their only history lives in the brief and scanty records of them made by their destroyers. They left no enduring impress upon the island, save its name. How many they were is unknown, and estimates which are mere guesses differ widely. In a single generation they disappeared, partly through slaughter and partly through such diseases as small pox and measles, which were introduced to the island--of course, not intentionally--by the Spaniards, and which the natives were unable to resist. The only significant history of Cuba begins, therefore, with the landfall of Christopher Columbus upon its shores. CHAPTER II Sunday, October 28, 1492, was the natal day of Cuba; the day of its advent into the ken of the civilized world. At the island which he called Isabella--either Long Island or Crooked Island--Columbus had heard of a very great land which the natives called Cuba, and which, the wish being father to the thought, he instantly identified with Cipango. Toward it, therefore, his course had thereafter been directed. Progress was slow, because of contrary winds and calms, and there were numerous small islands along the way to engage at least passing attention. Particularly was there a group of seven or eight, lying in a row extending north and south, which he called the Islas de Arena, and which we may confidently identify with the Mucaras. Early on the morning of Saturday, October 27, he had left the last of the Sandy Isles behind, and from a point considerably to the eastward of them, probably near what is now known as Rocky Heads, he had set his course a little west of south for the shore of Cuba. Thus he had passed across the southeastern end of the Great Bahama Bank, since most appropriately called the Columbus Bank, until just at nightfall he had seen looming before him on the southern horizon the mountainous form of a vast land. It was too late, however, to continue the voyage that night, so he lay to, and at earliest daybreak of Sunday morning, leaving behind him the islet fittingly called Caya Santo Domingo, completed his course to the land which he fondly but vainly hailed as the much-sought Cipango.