Immediately they settled, the Spaniards rounded-up the luckless Indians. Their lot was hard enough, though possibly not as hard as that of those driven to work in the mines, and as labourers on the _hatos_ they soon began to fail their masters. Perhaps that is not to be wondered at. Las Casas, the benevolent bishop, who is responsible for the first introduction of negro slaves into the New World says, “they hanged the unfortunates by thirteens in honour of the thirteen apostles. I have beheld them throw the Indian infants to their dogs; I have seen five caciques burnt alive; I have heard the Spaniards borrow the limb of an human being to feed their dogs and next day return a quarter to the lender.” It seems a gruesome enough story, and where the mercy came in from Las Casas' point of view in substituting negroes for the Indians I do not know, especially as they say the negroes were infinitely inferior to the Indians, and as long as the Spaniards could get the latter they preferred them. But that the Spaniards destroyed all the Indians there is no doubt. They were a mild and indolent brown people, very like those now to be seen in British Guiana, but historians differ as to their numbers: one man says that “in Jamaica and the adjacent islands within less than twenty years the Spaniards destroyed more than 1,200,000,” but later researches have brought the figure in Jamaica down to about 60,000, a much more likely number, and after all quite enough to destroy in twenty years. They lived, these Spanish conquerors, on the island for over one hundred and fifty years, a poor little company, or so I gather, but rich in the fruits of the earth. And the people at home took a fatherly interest in them. If an emigrant left his wife at home, he had to have her written consent to his going and give security that he would return for her within three years. And this security was evidently very necessary, for among the archives at Seville there is a note touching a lady of Ciudad Rodrigo complaining to the Queen in 1538 that her husband had deserted her twenty-five years before to go to the Indies and had married another lady in Jamaica, where he was settled. But though the Queen ordered that the matter should be looked into and justice done, there is no end to the story.