In the island under Ovando’s rule Columbus saw the logical results of his own original principles of government, which had recognised the right of the Christians to possess the persons and labours of the heathen natives.  Las Casas, who was living in Espanola as a young priest at this time, and was destined by long residence there and in the West Indies to qualify himself as their first historian, saw what Columbus saw, and saw also the even worse things that happened in after years in Cuba and Jamaica; and it is to him that we owe our knowledge of the condition of island affairs at this time.  The colonists whom Ovando had brought out had come very much in the spirit that in our own day characterised the rush to the north-western goldfields of America.  They brought only the slightest equipment, and were no sooner landed at San Domingo than they set out into the island like so many picnic parties, being more careful to carry vessels in which to bring back the gold they were to find than proper provisions and equipment to support them in the labour of finding it.  The roads, says Las Casas, swarmed like ant-hills with these adventurers rushing forth to the mines, which were about twenty-five miles distant from San Domingo; they were in the highest spirits, and they made it a kind of race as to who should get there first.  They thought they had nothing to do but to pick up shining lumps of gold; and when they found that they had to dig and delve in the hard earth, and to dig systematically and continuously, with a great deal of digging for very little gold, their spirits fell.  They were not used to dig; and it happened that most of them began in an unprofitable spot, where they digged for eight days without finding any gold.  Their provisions were soon exhausted; and in a week they were back again in San Domingo, tired, famished, and bitterly disappointed.  They had no genius for steady labour; most of them were virtually without means; and although they lived in San Domingo, on what they had as long as possible, they were soon starving there, and selling the clothes off their backs to procure food.  Some of them took situations with the other settlers, more fell victims to the climate of the island and their own imprudences and distresses; and a thousand of them had died within two years.

Ovando had revived the enthusiasm for mining by two enactments.  He reduced the share of discovered gold payable to the Crown, and he developed Columbus’s system of forced labour to such an extent that the mines were entirely worked by it.  To each Spaniard, whether mining or farming, so many natives were allotted.  It was not called slavery; the natives were supposed to be paid a minute sum, and their employers were also expected to teach them the Christian religion.  That was the plan.  The way in which it worked was that, a body of native men being allotted to a Spanish settler for a period, say, of six or eight months—­for the enactment was precise in