It appears by this that the island had speedily recovered from the ill reports of the early emigrants, many of whom returned to Spain broken in purse and person, with excesses of passion and climate chronicled in their livid faces[22]. There was a period when everybody who could get away from the colony left it in disgust, and with the expectation that it would soon become extinct. It was to prevent such a catastrophe, which would have effectually terminated the explorations of Columbus, that he proposed to the Government, in 1496, to commute the punishments of all criminals and large debtors who were at the time in prison to a perpetual banishment to the island, persons convicted of treason or heresy being alone excepted. The advice was instantly adopted, without a thought of the consequences of reinforcing the malignant ambition of the colony with such elements. Persons capitally convicted were to serve two years without wages; all others were to serve on the same terms for one year; and they went about with the ingenious clog of a threat of arrest for the old crimes in case they returned to Europe. The Government improved upon the hint of Columbus by decreeing that all the courts in Spain should condemn to the mines a portion of the criminals who would in the course of nature have gone to the galleys.[23] Thus a new country, which invited the benign organization of law and religion, and held out to pure spirits an opportunity richer than all its crops and mines, was poisoned in its cradle. What wonder that its vigor became the aimless gestures of madness, that a bloated habit simulated health, and that decrepitude suddenly fell upon the uneasy life? At the same time it was expressly forbidden to all commanders of caravels to receive on board any person who was not a born subject of the crown of Castile. This was conceived in the exclusive colonial policy of the time. It was a grotesque idea to preserve nationality by insisting that even criminals must respect the Spanish birthright. History counts the fitful pulses of this bluest blood of Europe, and hesitates to declare that such emigrants misrepresented the mother-country. But after the middle of the sixteenth century, the inhabitants were pillaged by the public enemies of the mother-country, and by private adventurers of all lands. And yet, in 1587, the year after Drake's expedition, their fleet carried home 48 quintals of cassia, 50 of sarsaparilla, 134 of logwood, 893 chests of sugar, each weighing 200 pounds, and 350,444 hides of every kind. There is no account of indigo, and the cultivation of cotton had not commenced. Coffee was first introduced at Martinique during the reign of Louis XIV., who died in 1715. Its cultivation was not commenced in Jamaica till 1725.[24]