grasp of fiends, and added to the remaining numbers of the Hispaniolan wretches in the mines and plantations. Forty thousand of these poor people were decoyed by this hellish artifice; and Satan himself, on witnessing this Spanish _chef d’œuvre_, must have felt ashamed of his inferiority of tact in his own profession![3] But the climax yet remained to be put to the inflictions on these islanders:—and that was found in the pearl fishery of Cubagua. Columbus had discovered this little wretched island—Columbus had suggested and commenced the slavery of the Indians,—and it seemed as though a Columbus was to complete the fabric of their misery. Don Diego, Columbus’s son, had compelled an acknowledgment of his claims in the vice-royalty of the New World. He had enrolled himself by his marriage with the daughter of Don Ferdinand de Toledo, brother of the Duke of Alva, and a relative of the king, amongst the highest nobility of the land. Coming over to assume his hereditary station, he brought a new swarm of these proud and avaricious hidalgoes with him. He seized upon and distributed amongst them whatever portions of Indians remained unconsumed; and casting his eyes on this sand-bank of Cubagua, he established a colony of pearl-fishers upon it—where the Indians, and especially the wretched ones decoyed from the Lucayos, were compelled to find in diving the last extremity of their sufferings. And was there no voice raised against these dreadful enormities? Yes—and with the success which always attends the attempt to defend the weak against the powerful and rapacious in distant colonies. The Dominican monks, much to their honour, inveighed, from time to time, against them; but the Franciscans, on the other hand, sanctioned them, on the old plea of policy and necessity. It was _necessary_ that the Spaniards should compel the Indians to labour, or they must abandon their grand source of wealth. That was conclusive. Where are the people that carry their religion or their humanity beyond their interest? The thing was not to be expected. One man, indeed, roused by the oppressions of Diego Columbus, and his notorious successor, Albuquerque, a needy man, actually appointed by Ferdinand to the office of Distributor of the Indians!—one man, Bartholomew de Las Casas, dared to stand forward as their champion, and through years of unremitting toil to endeavour to arrest from the government some mitigation of their condition. Once or twice he appeared on the eve of success. At one time Ferdinand declared the Indians free subjects, and to be treated as such; but the furious opposition which arose in the colony on this decision, soon drew from the king another declaration, to wit, that the Pope’s bull gave a clear and satisfactory right to the Indians—that no man must trouble his conscience on account of their treatment, for the king and council would take all that on their own responsibility, and that the monks must cease to trouble the colony with their scruples.