the slaughter of these unfortunate wretches, whom with
divers kinds of torment, neither seen nor heard of before,
they have cruelly and inhumanely butchered ; that
of 3,000,000 of people which Hispaniola itself did
contain, there are left remaining alive scarce three hundred
persons. And for the island of Cuba, which contains
as much ground in length as from Valladolid to
Rome, it lies wholly untilled and ruined. The islands
of St. John and Jamaica lie waste and desolate. The
Lucaya Islands, neighbouring toward the north upon
Cuba and Hispaniola, being above sixty or thereabouts
— with those islands that are vulgarly called the Islands
of the Gyants, of which that which is the least fertile is
more fruitful than the King of Spain’s garden at Sevil,
being situate in a pure and temperate air, are now
totally unpeopled and destroyed, the inhabitants thereof,
amounting to above 500,000 souls, partly killed and
partly forced away to work in other places ; so that there
going a ship to visit those parts, and to glean the remainder
of those distressed wretches, there could be
found no more than eleven men. Other islands there
were near St. John, more than thirty in number, which
were totally made desert.”
Finally Las Casas confidently avers—
“ that for those forty years, wherein the Spaniards exercised
their abominable cruelties and detestable tyrannies
in those parts, that there have innocently perished above
12,000,000 of souls, women and children being numbered
in this sad and fatal list. Moreover, I do verily believe
that I should speak within compass should I say that
above 15,000,000 were consumed in this massacre.”
The good bishop’s book appeared in 1542, twenty
SPANISH POSSESSION AND IT S E F F E C T 59
years after he retired to the Dominican monastery,
and twelve years after he shook the dust of the
Indies from his feet, and his statistics are faulty;
but the native population of Cuba had been reduced
to about 4000 in 1552, and in 1564 there were said
to be barely s ix ty families of aborigines leading a
vagrant life in the western part of the island. The
Greater Antilles were virtually stripped of their native
population, which was largely replaced by A fr ican
slaves. I t should be noted that the “ St.
John ” of our old English translation of Las Casas
is San Juan, now Puerto Rico, and not the small
island which bears that name at present. In fact,
the Spaniards met with such fierce resistance when
they attempted to kidnap the Caribs of the Lesser
Antilles that they concluded to leave them alone,
and never attempted to colonise those islands,
though claiming them as possessions.
Before the voyages of Columbus the Portuguese
navigators had indulged in the traffic of buying
negro slaves from the Moors in Africa and selling
them in the peninsula. T h e y had been bought both
in Portugal and in Spain. A few had been brought
out with the first colonists to Hispaniola, and as
early as 1505 the Spanish traders to “ the Indies ”
began to bring them for sale as workers in the
mines. T he dying off and killing off of the natives
speedily stimulated the traffic, and it was even encouraged
b y the priests, who had some little kindness
for the “ Indians,” whom they desired to
convert, but hardly regarded the African negro as a
convertible human being. In 1517, the importa