Ovando welcomed Mendez cordially, praised him for his plucky voyage, and expressed the greatest concern at the plight of the Admiral; but he was very busy at the moment, and was on the point of transacting a piece of business that furnished a dismal proof of the deterioration which had taken place in him.  Anacaona—­the lady with the daughter whom we remember—­was now ruling over the province of Xaragua, her brother having died; and as perhaps her native subjects had been giving a little trouble to the Governor, he had come to exert his authority.  The narrow official mind, brought into contact with native life, never develops in the direction of humanity; and Ovando had now for some time made the great discovery that it was less trouble to kill people than to try to rule over them wisely.  There had evidently always been a streak of Spanish cruelty in him, which had been much developed by his residence in Espanola; and to cruelty and narrow officialdom he now added treachery of a very monstrous and horrible kind.

He announced his intention of paying a state visit to Anacaona, who thereupon summoned all her tributary chiefs to a kind of levee held in his honour.  In the midst of the levee, at a given signal, Ovando’s soldiers rushed in, seized the caciques, fastened them to the wooden pillars of the house, and set the whole thing on fire; the caciques being thus miserably roasted alive.  While this was going on the atrocious work was completed by the soldiers massacring every native they could see —­children, women, and old men included—­and Anacaona herself was taken and hanged.

All these things Diego Mendez had to witness; and when they were over, Ovando still had excuses for not hurrying to the relief of the Admiral.  He had embarked on a campaign of extermination against the natives, and he followed up his atrocities at Xaragua by an expedition to the eastern end of Espanola, where very much the same kind of business was transacted.  Weeks and months passed in this bloody cruelty, and there was always an excuse for putting off Mendez.  Now it was because of the operations which he dignified by the name of wars, and now because he had no ship suitable for sending to Jamaica; but the truth was that Ovando, the springs of whose humanity had been entirely dried up during his disastrous reign in Espanola, did not want Columbus to see with his own eyes the terrible state of the island, and was callous enough to leave him either to perish or to find his own way back to the world.  It was only when news came that a fleet of caravels was expected from Spain that Ovando could no longer prevent Mendez from going to San Domingo and, purchasing one of them.