Bartolomeo de las Casas, the Apostle of the Indians, was one of the first to protest by speech and pen against the hideous cruelties inflicted upon native West Indians by the invading Spaniards; and he left in his writings the record of a bondage compared with which negro slavery was mild. Bartolomeo, the son of Antonio de las Casas, a companion of Columbus on his first voyage of discovery, was born in Seville in 1474. While yet a student at the University of Salamanca he became interested in the natives, through a young Indian whom he owned as slave. He first visited the New World as one of the followers of Columbus in 149-, returning after some years with Nicholas de Ovando, the governor of the Indies. Here his sympathies were fully aroused, as he witnessed the savage treatment of the simple natives and the incessant butcheries and slavery in the mines, which were rapidly depopulating the islands. In 1510 he took holy orders, being probably the first priest ordained in the New World. Las Casas at first was himself a slave-owner, willing to enrich himself by the toil of the red men, though from the very beginning he sympathized with their sufferings. But a sudden illumination came to him as he was preparing to preach a sermon on the Feast of Pentecost, in 1514, taking for his text the 34th chapter of Ecclesiasticus, verses 18 to 22. He awoke to the iniquity of slavery, set free his own Indians, and for forty years thereafter devoted himself heart and soul to the interests of the red men. It was at times a bitter task and made him many enemies among the invaders, who thought themselves curtailed in their natural rights as the superior race. Happily for his cause, Las Casas had powerful friends in Spain, chief among whom was the Emperor Charles V. The good priest crossed the ocean a dozen times to see that monarch on Indian affairs, following him even into Germany and Austria. Finally in 1547, when past his seventieth year, he settled down in Valladolid, in Spain, but still wrote and talked in behalf of the oppressed race. While on an errand for them to Madrid in 1566, he died at the ripe age of ninety-two, with bodily faculties unimpaired.