“The negroes, Sir,” he writes to his King, “who have remained fugitives from their masters who have abandoned the island and your Majesty's arms, are more than two hundred, but many have died, and I inform your Majesty so that you may command what is most suitable to your Royal Service to whoever may come to govern the island. I have not done a small thing in conserving them, keeping them under my obedience, when they have been sought after with papers from the enemy. I have promised their Chiefs freedom in your Majesty's name but have not given it until I receive an order for it.” As if his gift of freedom could have mattered very much to the negroes, who already had the freedom of the hills and the hunted Spaniards much at their mercy. And here again we are faced with contradictions that make me glad it is not my business to write history. “The Spaniards in their authority over their slaves,” writes the very verbose Bridges, “appear to have been restrained by no law whatever; but were sanctioned in every act which could extort their labour or secure their obedience, so long however as the strength of the native Indians withstood the execrable cruelties of their Castilian taskmasters, the negroes were considered as very inferior workmen. Ovando complained of their continued importation to Hispaniola, where he found them but idle labourers, who took every opportunity of escaping into the woods, and assisting the natives in their feeble attempts to throw off the Spanish yoke. But as Indian life wasted, negro labour became necessary to supply its place.” And yet after that he goes on to say: “The British conquerors profited but little by the negroes whom they found in the island of Jamaica, and whose services were inseparable from the hard fate of their expatriated owners.... Not five hundred slaves were employed in the cultivation containing more than two million acres of the richest land. The degeneracy of their masters had reduced all classes to nearly an equality; so that in fact slavery hardly existed in Jamaica. Poverty had for a series of years forbidden a further importation of Africans; the negro race had rapidly decayed, and the few that were left were employed to supply the wants of the indolent Spaniards in Saint Jago, by the cultivation of their hatos in the country, and were preserved with the greatest care and cherished as their own children.... The easy condition of the slaves was manifested in their attachment to the fallen fortunes of their masters; and they were confidently left by them to retain possession of an island which they could no longer keep themselves.” Surely a curious way to end a paragraph which began by declaiming against the unbridled cruelty of the Spaniards. So they were not all cruel, and even troubled Ysassi felt sure that the runaway negroes would prefer the Spanish rule to the English. Perhaps there was something in the devil they knew.