In every age gold has presented one of the strongest means of enticing men from their homes to remote lands, and of promoting trade between distant regions and the settlement of previously uninhabited districts. We have received from the earliest antiquity the stories of the voyage of the Argonauts, of the expedition of Hercules after the golden apples of the Hesperides, and of the settlement of the Phœnicians in Spain, the gold of which they carried to the Syrian coast. For gold the Semitic navigators sailed from the Red Sea to Tarshish and Ophir.[1] Portuguese seamen as early as the middle of the fifteenth century brought gold from the west coast of Africa; in order to find a sea-route to the gold-lands of India, Vasco da Gama sailed around the Cape of Good Hope; and in order to obtain a shorter route from Spain to India Christopher Columbus ventured out upon the Atlantic Ocean and there reached the new gold-land, America. On Thursday, October 11, 1492, Columbus landed upon Watling Island, or Guanahani, one of the Bahama group, and on Saturday, the 13th, he wrote: “Many of these people, all men, came from the shore, ... and I was anxious to learn whether they had gold. I saw also that some of them wore little pieces of gold in their perforated noses. I learned by signs that there was a king in the south, or south of the island, who owned many vessels filled with gold.”[2] This was the first trace of gold which the Europeans found in America. Cuba, where the Admiral next landed, afforded him no gold, but he found the precious metal so abundant in Hispaniola (Santo Domingo, or Hayti) that he was able, after he returned, to write from Lisbon to his sovereigns, March 14, 1493: “To make a short story of the profits of this voyage, I promise, with such small helps as our invincible Majesties may afford me, to furnish them all the gold they need.” Hispaniola continued till the first decade of the sixteenth century to be the seat of gold production in the newly discovered western land. The consequences of this gold-seeking to the unhappy natives are well known, and need not be dwelt upon. The operations were continued on this island for only a very short time. As a result of the fearfully rapid disappearance of the aborigines, the supply of laborers began to fail, and the mines fell into disuse, although, according to Herrera,[3] they furnished to the mother-country, Spain, down to the discovery of Mexico, five hundred thousand ducats in gold.