As long as mining remained the chief industry the islands failed to prosper; and the reports of adversity so strongly checked the Spanish impulse for adventure that special inducements by the government were required to sustain any flow of emigration.  But in 1512-1515 the introduction of sugar-cane culture brought the beginning of a change in the industrial situation.  The few surviving gangs of Indians began to be shifted from the mines to the fields, and a demand for a new labor supply arose which could be met only from across the sea.

Apparently no negroes were brought to the islands before 1501.  In that year, however, a royal decree, while excluding Jews and Moors, authorized the transportation of negroes born in Christian lands; and some of these were doubtless carried to Hispaniola in the great fleet of Ovando, the new governor, in 1502.  Ovando’s reports of this experiment were conflicting.  In the year following his arrival he advised that no more negroes be sent, because of their propensity to run away and band with and corrupt the Indians.  But after another year had elapsed he requested that more negroes be sent.  In this interim the humane Isabella died and the more callous Ferdinand acceded to full control.  In consequence a prohibition of the negro trade in 1504 was rescinded in 1505 and replaced by orders that the bureau in charge of colonial trade promote the sending of negroes from Spain in large parcels.  For the next twelve years this policy was maintained—­the sending of Christian negroes was encouraged, while the direct slave trade from Africa to America was prohibited.  The number of negroes who reached the islands under this regime is not ascertainable.  It was clearly almost negligible in comparison with the increasing demand.[11]

[Footnote 11:  The chief authority upon the origin and growth of negro slavery in the Spanish colonies is J.A.  Saco, Historia de la Esclavitud de la Raza Africana en el Nuevo Mundo y en especial en los Paises Americo-Hispanos. (Barcelona, 1879.) This book supplements the same author’s Historia de la Esclavitud desde los Tiempos remotos previously cited.]

The policy of excluding negroes fresh from Africa—­“bozal negroes” the Spaniards called them—­was of course a product of the characteristic resolution to keep the colonies free from all influences hostile to Catholic orthodoxy.  But whereas Jews, Mohammedans and Christian heretics were considered as champions of rival faiths, the pagan blacks came increasingly to be reckoned as having no religion and therefore as a mere passive element ready for christianization.  As early as 1510, in fact, the Spanish crown relaxed its discrimination against pagans by ordering the purchase of above a hundred negro slaves in the Lisbon market for dispatch to Hispaniola.  To quiet its religious scruples the government hit upon the device of requiring the baptism of all pagan slaves upon their disembarkation in the colonial ports.