Though this project was discouraged by the crown, Columbus actually took a cargo of Indians for sale in Spain on his return from his third voyage; but Isabella stopped the sale and ordered the captives taken home and liberated.  Columbus, like most of his generation, regarded the Indians as infidel foreigners to be exploited at will.  But Isabella, and to some extent her successors, considered them Spanish subjects whose helplessness called for special protection.  Between the benevolence of the distant monarchs and the rapacity of the present conquerors, however, the fate of the natives was in little doubt.  The crown’s officials in the Indies were the very conquerors themselves, who bent their soft instructions to fit their own hard wills.  A native rebellion in Hispaniola in 1495 was crushed with such slaughter that within three years the population is said to have been reduced by two thirds.  As terms of peace Columbus required annual tribute in gold so great that no amount of labor in washing the sands could furnish it.  As a commutation of tribute and as a means of promoting the conversion of the Indians there was soon inaugurated the encomienda system which afterward spread throughout Spanish America.  To each Spaniard selected as an encomendero was allotted a certain quota of Indians bound to cultivate land for his benefit and entitled to receive from him tutelage in civilization and Christianity.  The grantees, however, were not assigned specified Indians but merely specified numbers of them, with power to seize new ones to replace any who might die or run away.  Thus the encomendero was given little economic interest in preserving the lives and welfare of his workmen.

[Footnote 9:  R.H.  Major, Select Letters of Columbus, 2d. ed., 1890, p. 88.]

In the first phase of the system the Indians were secured in the right of dwelling in their own villages under their own chiefs.  But the encomenderos complained that the aloofness of the natives hampered the work of conversion and asked that a fuller and more intimate control be authorized.  This was promptly granted and as promptly abused.  Such limitations as the law still imposed upon encomendero power were made of no effect by the lack of machinery for enforcement.  The relationship in short, which the law declared to be one of guardian and ward, became harsher than if it had been that of master and slave.  Most of the island natives were submissive in disposition and weak in physique, and they were terribly driven at their work in the fields, on the roads, and at the mines.  With smallpox and other pestilences added to their hardships, they died so fast that before 1510 Hispaniola was confronted with the prospect of the complete disappearance of its laboring population.[10] Meanwhile the same regime was being carried to Porto Rico, Jamaica and Cuba with similar consequences in its train.

[Footnote 10:  E. g.  Bourne, Spain in America (New York, 1904); Wilhelm Roscher, The Spanish Colonial System, Bourne ed. (New York, 1904); Konrad Habler, “The Spanish Colonial Empire,” in Helmolt, History of the World, vol I.]