"Common report accuses you of acting with a degree of severity quite unsuitable for an infant colony, and likely to incite rebellion in it. But the thing I find hardest to pardon is your reducing to slavery many Indians who had done nothing to deserve such a fate. This was contrary to my express orders. As ill fortune willed it, just at the time that news came to me of this breach of my instructions, everybody was complaining of you; no one spoke a word in your favor. I felt obliged to send a commissioner to the Indies to investigate and give me a true report, and, if necessary, to put limits to the authority you were accused of overstepping. If he found you guilty of the charges against you, he was to relieve you of the government and send you to Spain to give an account of your stewardship. This was the extent of his commission. I find that I have made a bad choice in my agent, and I shall take care to make an example of Bobadilla so as to warn others not to exceed their power. But I cannot promise at once to reinstate you as governor. As to your rank of Admiral, I never intended to deprive you of it. But you must abide your time and trust in me." Isabella's reply is a model of fairness and prudence so far as Columbus is concerned, but it is hardly fair to Bobadilla. The comendador had been brutal, it is true; but it was not true that he had gone beyond the extent of his commission. His brutality consisted in pouncing upon the offender without any preliminaries whatever. Yet it turned out that, in acting thus, he did the best possible thing for Columbus's subsequent treatment. There is no doubt that had he proceeded slowly, with a fair and formal inquiry into all the complaints against the Admiral, it would have been clearly shown that, from the very beginning, everything had gone wrong in the colony. The Indians, once friendly, were now bitter against the Spaniards. The colonists were a bad lot, but Columbus himself had examined and accepted most of them before the ships left Spain. If mistakes were committed while he was absent exploring Cuba, they were made by his brothers and by those whom he himself had selected to rule in his absence. All of this evidence would have been against Columbus, who in consequence would have been deposed as governor and sent home to answer Bobadilla's charges before a royal court of inquiry. Arriving as a man disgraced after a fair trial, nobody's sympathies would have been stirred. It was precisely because Bobadilla had acted like a brute instead of like a wise judge that everybody denounced him and pitied his victim.