Among the people who are not cannibals [he wrote home] we shall gain great credit by their seeing that we can seize and take captive those from whom they are accustomed to receive injuries, and of whom they are in such terror that they are frightened by one man alone. Alas for either pious or kindly intentions! Not these but economic considerations were really to sink the scales. Columbus had promised to find precious metals in abundance, and yet seven years after his discovery Bernaldez, the Curate of Los Palacios, made a note that the expenses of the various expeditions still continued to exceed the profits. “Since everything passed through the Admiral’s hands,” he adds, “there was much murmuring against him, and he made greater hindrances and delays than he ought in sending back gold to the King.” Gold there was little in these early years of exploration; and demands for precious metals at home were echoed by demands in his own colony for horses, cattle, and sheep to stock the new settlement. In this dilemma the Admiral fell back on the wealth of human life, for which he could reap a handsome profit in the labour-markets of the Old World besides pacifying some of the grumbling in the New. It was no longer the conversion of the heathen nor the civilization of cannibals, that took the first place in his thoughts, but a momentary respite from increasing financial strain. A gift of an Indian apiece to each of his greedy crew; a gang of some five hundred captives of either sex shipped to Europe, huddled together “with no more care taken of them than of animals destined for the slaughter-house.” These, or tales of a like nature, came to the Queen’s ears. “By what right does the Admiral give away my vassals?” she demanded indignantly, and ordered the Indians to be released and re-shipped to their own land. It must be remembered to her credit [says Filson Young, referring to her attitude towards this question,] that in after years, when slavery and an intolerable bloody and brutish oppression had turned the Paradise of Española into a shambles, she fought almost single-handed and with an ethical sense far in advance of her day against the system of slavery practiced in Spain upon the inhabitants of the New World.