Although held in general detestation in Hispaniola, as a seditious mischief-maker and an enemy of the Spaniards’ interests, there were not wanting some sympathisers who, when Las Casas arrived, dejected and bankrupt, at Santo Domingo, received him kindly, and even offered to lend him five thousand ducats with which to begin again. The clear thinking and high resolution which had carried him through so many trials seemed at this time to fail him; nor indeed is there just cause for wonder, for there is a limit to human powers of endurance, and if ever a man was overtaken by a dark hour, Las Casas was he. In after years, he arraigned his own conduct at this period with undue severity, reflecting that as the Emperor was back in Spain with the Flemings, and his old friend Cardinal Adrian had become Pope, he might have accomplished his life’s purpose of ending the sufferings of the Indians, had he only adopted the resolution of going directly to Spain. As it was, he wrote an extensive account to the Emperor of all that had occurred and the causes that had brought on the calamity at Cumaná. To the monks of the Dominican order, Las Casas had years since been united by the strong bonds of devotion to a common cause, which was the dominant influence, as it was the sole object, of his life. As they had accompanied and sustained him throughout his long struggle, so it was to them that he naturally turned for sympathy in the extremity of his disappointment, exiled, as he was, amidst the hostile colonists of Hispaniola. These were the saddest days of his tempestuous life, during which doubts began to penetrate his very soul—doubts of his own worthiness to carry on the mission to which he had believed himself called, doubts even as to whether it might not be ordained by the inscrutable wisdom of Divine Providence that the Indians should perish before the advance of the Spaniards. If this were true, then his life had been wasted in a vain conflict with the occult forces that govern the destiny of races. While waiting for answers to the letters he had written to Spain, he found his only consolation in his intercourse with the Dominican friars, with whom in fact he had been for years closely united in spirit. Fray Domingo de Betanzos exercised a great influence upon him at this time, and to him is due the decision of Las Casas to enter the Dominican Order.