Fernando Columbus tells us that Margarite, instead of striving to overrun and reduce the island, took his soldiers into the great plain known as the Royal Vega, and there gave them up to all forms of wanton excesses. But he soon fell into disputes with the council instituted by the Admiral. After sending its members insolent letters, and finding that he could not reduce them to obedience, he went aboard one of the first ships that came from Spain, and sailed for home. This he appears to have done without giving any account of himself, or leaving any direction in regard to his command. “Upon this,” says Fernando, “every one went away among the Indians wherever he thought fit, taking away their goods and their women, and committing such outrages that the Indians resolved to be revenged on those they found alone or straggling; so that the cacique had killed ten, and privately ordered a house to be fired in which were eleven sick.” The same authority further states that “Most of the Christians committed a thousand insolences, for which they were mortally hated by the Indians, who refused to submit to them.” Such was the condition of affairs on the return of Columbus. All was in such confusion that the very existence of the colony was threatened with the fate that had overtaken La Navidad; and it was for essentially the same cause. The weakness of Margarite and his subsequent desertion of his command had thrown the garrison into anarchy, and given it up to the unbridled indulgence of the most provoking and offensive excesses. Fernando Columbus himself says of the Indians that in consequence of the “thousand insolences” of the Christians, “it was no difficult matter for them all to agree to cast off the Spanish yoke.” That the provocation was chargeable to the Spaniards is admitted both by Don Fernando and by Las Casas. But the fact that the invaders had brought this threatening condition of affairs upon themselves can hardly be thought to have lessened the obligations of Columbus. What he was now confronted with was a condition, not a theory as to how that condition had been brought about. In order to save the colony from immediate and perhaps fatal disaster, he was obliged to act without hesitation.