on the plantations there. Herrera writes of these negroes that they "prospered so much in the colony that it was the opinion that unless a negro should happen to be hung he would never die, for as yet none had been known to perish from infirmity." Here was the very inception of the American trade. When the Spaniards tried enslaving the aborigines of the island, the unfortunate red men withered like green corn under the hot winds of the unirrigated American desert. Bartholomew de las Casas, filled with pity for the dying Indian race, rose up in its defence. Good people have since been moved to apologize for and explain what this Dominican did, but his acts need no apology from any man. To save the race unfit for labor there, the Dominican proposed substituting negroes who were both physically and mentally capable of enduring even the work of digging gold in the torrid zone under the devil-hearted Spaniards of that day.
Having the true state of affairs placed before him by the humane Dominican, "in the year 1510 the King of Spain ordered fifty slaves to be sent to Hispaniola to work in the gold mines." So says Herrera. That was the beginning of the systematic importation of Africans into the Spanish West Indies. On the whole, the Spanish-American slave-trade was, at its inception, in the interest of humanity, shocking as that assertion may seem at first glance.
That the trade begun in 1510 did not reach our shores until 1619 is readily explained by the fact that our shores were not permanently settled by the whites until nearly a century after that first slave cargo was sent out.
Of the Spanish slave-trade in that first century we
