Bartholomew Las Casas was born at Seville in 1474. Llorente—a faithful biographer, and able editor and expositor of his writings, of whom farther on we are to say much more—asserts that the family was French in its origin, the true name being Casuas; which appears, indeed, as an alias on the titlepage of some of his writings published by the apostle in his lifetime.[1014] Antoine Las Casas, the father of Bartholomew, was a soldier in the marine service of Spain. We find no reference to him as being either in sympathy or otherwise with the absorbing aim which ennobled the career of his son. He accompanied Columbus on his first western voyage in 1492, and returned with him to Spain in 1493. During the absence of the father on this voyage the son, at the age of eighteen, was completing his studies at Salamanca. In May, 1498,[1015] at the age of about twenty-four, he went to the Indies with his father, in employment under Columbus, and returned to Cadiz, Nov. 25, 1500. In an address to the Emperor in 1542, Bartholomew reminded him that Columbus had given liberty to each of several of his fellow-voyagers to take to Spain a single native of the islands for personal service, and that a youth among those so transported had been intrusted to him. Perhaps under these favoring circumstances this was the occasion of first engaging the sympathies of Las Casas for the race to whose redemption he was to consecrate his life. Isabella, however, was highly indignant at this outrage upon the natives, and under pain of death to the culprits ordered the victims to be restored to their country. It would seem that they were all carried back in 1500 under the Commander Bobadilla, and among them the young Indian who had been in the service of Bartholomew. One loves to imagine that in some of the wide wanderings of the latter, amid the scenes of the New World, he may again have met with this first specimen of a heathen race who had been under intimate relations with himself, and who had undoubtedly been baptized. We shall find farther on that the grievous charge was brought against Las Casas, when he had drawn upon himself bitter animosities, that he was the first to propose the transportation of negro slaves to the islands, in 1517. It is enough to say here, in anticipation, that Governor Ovando, in 1500, received permission to carry thither negro slaves “who had been born under Christian Powers.” The first so carried were born in Seville of parents brought from Africa, and obtained through the Portuguese traffickers.