These orders were actually put in force the next year.  Even the restricted importation Ovando found inadvisable, and he very soon requested that Negroes be not sent, as they ran away to the Indians, with whom they soon made friends.  Isabella accordingly withdrew her permission, but after her death Ferdinand reverted to the old plan and in 1505 sent to Ovando seventeen Negro slaves for work in the copper-mines, where the severity of the labor was rapidly destroying the Indians.  In 1510 Ferdinand directed that fifty Negroes be sent immediately, and that more be sent later; and in April of this year over a hundred were bought in the Lisbon market.  This, says Bourne,[1] was the real beginning of the African slave-trade to America.  Already, however, as early as 1504, a considerable number of Negroes had been introduced from Guinea because, as we are informed, “the work of one Negro was worth more than that of four Indians.”  In 1513 thirty Negroes assisted Balboa in building the first ships made on the Pacific Coast of America.  In 1517 Spain formally entered upon the traffic, Charles V on his accession to the throne granting “license for the introduction of Negroes to the number of four hundred,” and thereafter importation to the West Indies became a thriving industry.  Those who came in these early years were sometimes men of considerable intelligence, having been trained as Mohammedans or Catholics.  By 1518 Negroes were at work in the sugar-mills in Hispaniola, where they seem to have suffered from indulgence in drinks made from sugarcane.  In 1521 it was ordered that Negro slaves should not be employed on errands as in general these tended to cultivate too close acquaintance with the Indians.  In 1522 there was a rebellion on the sugar plantations in Hispaniola, primarily because the services of certain Indians were discontinued.  Twenty Negroes from the Admiral’s mill, uniting with twenty others who spoke the same language, killed a number of Christians.  They fled and nine leagues away they killed another Spaniard and sacked a house.  One Negro, assisted by twelve Indian slaves, also killed nine other Christians.  After much trouble the Negroes were apprehended and several of them hanged.  It was about 1526 that Negroes were first introduced within the present limits of the United States, being brought to a colony near what later became Jamestown, Va.  Here the Negroes were harshly treated and in course of time they rose against their oppressors and fired their houses.  The settlement was broken up, and the Negroes and their Spanish companions returned to Hispaniola, whence they had come.  In 1540, in Quivira, in Mexico, there was a Negro who had taken holy orders; and in 1542 there were established at Guamanga three brotherhoods of the True Cross of Spaniards, one being for Indians and one for Negroes.

[Footnote 1:  Spain in America, Vol. 3 in American Nation Series, p. 270.]