There were several factors operating in the case of the Negro to fix the status of the slave as his normal condition, the earliest and one of the strongest of which was economic in character. Certainly the influences which brought Negro slavery to the West-Indies and later to the British colonies to the north were primarily economic. As a result of her great commercial expansion in the first half of the fifteenth century Spain had established a thriving slave trade with the west coast of Africa. When it was discovered that the natives of the West Indies, who had been enslaved to meet the labor demands of the new world, were unable to do the work Spain began to import Negro slave labor at the suggestion of Bishop Las Casas, thus turning the stream of slave trade westward about the beginning of the sixteenth century. By way of the English island colonies, the Bermudas and Barbados, the slave trade extended northward to the American colonies, the first slaves being brought from the West Indies to Virginia in 1619, so that by the end of the seventeenth century the traffic had reached proportions that frightened the colonists into taking measures for its restriction.[131] The fact that Negro slavery reached American soil by way of the West Indies is not without significance as throwing light upon the status of the slave especially in the southern colonies such as the Carolinas and Georgia. The first Negro slaves imported into South Carolina came from Barbados in 1671 and there is reason for thinking that the Barbadian slave code and customs were imported with the slaves, for the act passed in Barbados in 1668 declaring Negro slaves to be real estate was copied very closely in the South Carolina act of 1690.[132] The stringency of the Barbadian slave code and the resulting barbarous treatment of the slaves have made the little island famous in history. "For a hundred years," says Johnston, "slaves in Barbados were mutilated, tortured, gibbeted alive and left to starve to death, burnt alive, flung into coppers of boiling sugar, whipped to death, overworked, underfed, obliged from sheer lack of any clothing to expose their nudity to the jeers of the 'poor' whites."[133] And yet the owners of these slaves were English, of the same stock under which developed the mild patriarchal type of slavery of Virginia. The difference in the status of the slave in Virginia and in the northern colonies as opposed to the colonies farther south, where in some places the Barbadian conditions were at least approximated, is to be explained in terms of the different social and economic conditions rather than the character of the slave-owners. The West Indian type of slavery was not conducive to the more intimate and sympathetic relations which arose between slave and master in the colonies to the north where a fairly complete integration of the Negro in the social consciousness of the white took place.