active speculation at rapidly rising prices.  The result was that when slaves finally reached the islands under Garrevod’s grant the prices demanded for them were so exorbitant that the purposes of the original petitioners were in large measure defeated.  Meanwhile the king, in spite of the nominally exclusive character of the Garrevod grant, issued various other licenses on a scale ranging from ten to four hundred slaves each.  For a decade the importations were small, however, and the island clamor increased.

[Footnote 13:  Georges Scelle, Histoire Politique de la Traite Negriere aux Indes de Castille:  Contrats et Traites d’Asiento (Paris, 1906), I, 755.  Book I, chapter 2 of the same volume is an elaborate discussion of the Garrevod grant.]

In 1528 a new exclusive grant was issued to two German courtiers at Seville, Eynger and Sayller, empowering them to carry four thousand slaves from Guinea to the Indies within the space of the following four years.  This differed from Garrevod’s in that it required a payment of 20,000 ducats to the crown and restricted the price at which the slaves were to be sold in the islands to forty ducats each.  In so far it approached the asientos of the full type which became the regular recourse of the Spanish government in the following centuries; but it fell short of the ultimate plan by failing to bind the grantees to the performance of their undertaking and by failing to specify the grades and the proportion of the sexes among the slaves to be delivered.  In short the crown’s regard was still directed more to the enrichment of courtiers than to the promotion of prosperity in the islands.

After the expiration of the Eynger and Sayller grant the king left the control of the slave trade to the regular imperial administrative boards, which, rejecting all asiento overtures for half a century, maintained a policy of granting licenses for competitive trade in return for payments of eight or ten ducats per head until 1560, and of thirty ducats or more thereafter.  At length, after the Spanish annexation of Portugal in 1580, the government gradually reverted to monopoly grants, now however in the definite form of asientos, in which by intent at least the authorities made the public interest, with combined regard to the revenue and a guaranteed labor supply, the primary consideration.[14] The high prices charged for slaves, however, together with the burdensome restrictions constantly maintained upon trade in general, steadily hampered the growth of Spanish colonial industry.  Furthermore the allurements of Mexico and Peru drained the older colonies of virtually all their more vigorous white inhabitants, in spite of severe penalties legally imposed upon emigration but never effectively enforced.

[Footnote 14:  Scelle, I, books 1-3.]