Such is the story of the Rape of Ethiopia--a sordid, pitiful, cruel tale. Raphael painted, Luther preached, Corneille wrote, and Milton sung; and through it all, for four hundred years, the dark captives wound to the sea amid the bleaching bones of the dead; for four hundred years the sharks followed the scurrying ships; for four hundred years America was strewn with the living and dying millions of a transplanted race; for four hundred years Ethiopia stretched forth her hands unto God. FOOTNOTES: [70] Cf. Helps: _Spanish Conquest_, IV, 401. [71] Helps, _op. cit._, I, 219-220. [72] Helps, _op. cit._, II, 18-19. [73] Helps, _op. cit._, III, 211-212. [74] Theal: _History and Ethnography of South Africa before 1795_, I, 476. [75] Ingram: _History of Slavery_, p. 152. X THE WEST INDIES AND LATIN AMERICA That was a wonderful century, the fifteenth, when men realized that beyond the scowling waste of western waters were dreams come true. Curious and yet crassly human it is that, with all this poetry and romance, arose at once the filthiest institution of the modern world and the costliest. For on Negro slavery in America was built, not simply the abortive cotton kingdom, but the foundations of that modern imperialism which is based on the despising of backward men. According to some accounts Alonzo, "the Negro," piloted one of the ships of Columbus, and certainly there was Negro blood among his sailors. As early as 1528 there were nearly ten thousand Negroes in the new world. We hear of them in all parts. In Honduras, for instance, a Negro is sent to burn a native village; in 1555 the town council of Santiago de Chile voted to allow an enfranchised Negro possession of land in the town, and evidently treated him just as white applicants were treated. D'Allyon, who explored the coast of Virginia in the first quarter of the sixteenth century, used Negro slaves (who afterward revolted) to build his ships and help in exploration; Balboa had with him thirty Negroes, who, in 1513, helped to build the first ships on the Pacific coast; Cortez had three hundred Negro porters in 1522.