Moors were Mohammedans and refused to be converted to Christianity, while heathen Negroes would be better subjects for conversion and stronger laborers.  In the next few years a small number of Negroes continued to be imported into Spain and Portugal as servants.  We find, for instance, in 1474, that Negro slaves were common in Seville.  There is a letter from Ferdinand and Isabella in the year 1474 to a celebrated Negro, Juan de Valladolid, commonly called the “Negro Count” (El Conde Negro), nominating him to the office of “mayoral of the Negroes” in Seville.  The slaves were apparently treated kindly, allowed to keep their own dances and festivals, and to have their own chief, who represented them in the courts, as against their own masters, and settled their private quarrels.

Between 1455 and 1492 little mention is made of slaves in the trade with Africa.  Columbus is said to have suggested Negroes for America, but Ferdinand and Isabella refused.  Nevertheless, by 1501, we have the first incidental mention of Negroes going to America in a declaration that Negro slaves “born in the power of Christians were to be allowed to pass to the Indies, and the officers of the royal revenue were to receive the money to be paid for their permits.”

About 1501 Ovando, Governor of Spanish America, was objecting to Negro slaves and “solicited that no Negro slaves should be sent to Hispaniola, for they fled amongst the Indians and taught them bad customs, and never could be captured.”  Nevertheless a letter from the king to Ovando, dated Segovia, the fifteenth of September, 1505, says, “I will send more Negro slaves as you request; I think there may be a hundred.  At each time a trustworthy person will go with them who may have some share in the gold they may collect and may promise them ease if they work well."[70] There is a record of a hundred slaves being sent out this very year, and Diego Columbus was notified of fifty to be sent from Seville for the mines in 1510.

After this time frequent notices show that Negroes were common in the new world.[71] When Pizarro, for instance, had been slain in Peru, his body was dragged to the cathedral by two Negroes.  After the battle of Anaquito the head of the viceroy was cut off by a Negro, and during the great earthquake in Guatemala a most remarkable figure was a gigantic Negro seen in various parts of the city.  Nunez had thirty Negroes with him on the top of the Sierras, and there was rumor of an aboriginal tribe of Negroes in South America.  One of the last acts of King Ferdinand was to urge that no more Negroes be sent to the West Indies, but under Charles V, Bishop Las Casas drew up a plan of assisted migration to America and asked in 1517 the right for immigrants to import twelve Negro slaves, in return for which the Indians were to be freed.

Las Casas, writing in his old age, owns his error:  “This advice that license should be given to bring Negro slaves to these lands, the Clerigo Casas first gave, not considering the injustice with which the Portuguese take them and make them slaves; which advice, after he had apprehended the nature of the thing, he would not have given for all he had in the world.  For he always held that they had been made slaves unjustly and tyrannically; for the same reason holds good of them as of the Indians[72].”