them down in caravans and canoes.  Thus not only was missionary zeal eclipsed but the desire of conquest likewise, and the spirit of exploration erelong partly subdued, by commercial greed.  By the time of Prince Henry’s death in 1460 Portugal was importing seven or eight hundred negro slaves each year.  From this time forward the traffic was conducted by a succession of companies and individual grantees, to whom the government gave the exclusive right for short terms of years in consideration of money payments and pledges of adding specified measures of exploration.  As new coasts were reached additional facilities were established for trade in pepper, ivory and gold as well as in slaves.  When the route round Africa to India was opened at the end of the century the Guinea trade fell to secondary importance, but it was by no means discontinued.

Of the negroes carried to Portugal in the fifteenth century a large proportion were set to work as slaves on great estates in the southern provinces recently vacated by the Moors, and others were employed as domestic servants in Lisbon and other towns.  Some were sold into Spain where they were similarly employed, and where their numbers were recruited by a Guinea trade in Spanish vessels in spite of Portugal’s claim of monopoly rights, even though Isabella had recognized these in a treaty of 1479.  In short, at the time of the discovery of America Spain as well as Portugal had quite appreciable numbers of negroes in her population and both were maintaining a system of slavery for their control.

When Columbus returned from his first voyage in the spring of 1493 and announced his great landfall, Spain promptly entered upon her career of American conquest and colonization.  So great was the expectation of adventure and achievement that the problem of the government was not how to enlist participants but how to restrain a great exodus.  Under heavy penalties emigration was restricted by royal decrees to those who procured permission to go.  In the autumn of the same year fifteen hundred men, soldiers, courtiers, priests and laborers, accompanied the discoverer on his second voyage, in radiant hopes.  But instead of wealth and high adventure these Argonauts met hard labor and sickness.  Instead of the rich cities of Japan and China sought for, there were found squalid villages of Caribs and Lucayans.  Of gold there was little, of spices none.

Columbus, when planting his colony at Isabella, on the northern coast of Hispaniola (Hayti), promptly found need of draught animals and other equipment.  He wrote to his sovereigns in January, 1494, asking for the supplies needed; and he offered, pending the discovery of more precious things, to defray expenses by shipping to Spain some of the island natives, “who are a wild people fit for any work, well proportioned and very intelligent, and who when they have got rid of their cruel habits to which they have been accustomed will be better than any other kind of slaves."[9]