now on the island was established in 1525 on the
southern coast, and called Santiago de la Vega. It
is the present Spanish Town. ” D ’Esquivel undertook
to deal humanely with the natives, but under
his successors the insatiate greed for gold asserted
itself, and the process of extermination by forced
labour and atrocious cruelty began. This destructive
operation was intended to compel productive
labour in the mines and on the plantations, and to
force the payment of impossible tribute in gold and
cotton. It was also resorted to as a means of suppressing
resistance whenever the wretched victims
presumed to attempt it. T h e result was the rapid
dying out of the native population, which had
almost disappeared in a generation, and the gradual
substitution of negro slaves as a labour force.
Cuba was the first of the Greater Antilles to be
discovered and the last to be actually occupied. It
was not known to be an island until after the death
of Columbus. In 1511, Diego Velasquez was sent
thither from Santo Domingo by Diego Colon with
four vessels and three hundred men. He landed at
a place near Guantanamo, but the first permanent
settlement was made at Baracoa on the north coast.
Among his companions was Hernando Cortez, who,
in 1519, sailed from the young city of Santiago for
Yucatan and proceeded to his career of conquest
in Mexico, in spite of the protests of Velasquez.
Another companion of Velasquez was Bartolomé
Las Casas, whose father had been a companion of
Columbus in his early voyages. He had himself
been educated at Salamanca and destined for the
priesthood, but being of an adventurous disposition
he had accompanied his father on the voyage of
1498, and afterwards came out to Hispaniola with
Ovando and became one of the colonists. His susceptibilities
were outraged by the cruelties perpetrated
upon the natives, and in Cuba he tried in vain
to stop them. He took his allotment of land and
of slaves, but he freed the latter, and cried out
against the whole infamous system. In 1516 he
went to Spain and got a commission appointed to
go to “ the Indies ” and put a stop to the inhuman
treatment of the natives, but it accomplished
nothing. T o mitigate the evil, as he thought, he
encouraged bringing out negroes as slaves, but
awakening to the fact that negroes were also human
beings, and finding that they, too, were treated in
an inhuman manner, he retired to a monastery in
Santo Domingo filled with disgust and indignation,
and afterwards went to Mexico, where he became a
bishop.
Doubtless the feelings of Las Casas, who was
called “ The Apos tle of the Indies,” led him to e x aggerate
when, years after the event, he wrote his
famous Brevissima Relacion de la Destruycion de las
Indias. A fte r speaking of the gentle and harmless
character of the natives of the islands, he said, according
to an old English version of his work— there
is no recent o n e :
“ To these quiet lambs, endued with such blessed
qualities, came the Spaniards like most cruel tygres,
wolves, and lions, enraged with a sharp and tedious hunger
; for these forty years past, minding nothing else but