The natives, who had never been accustomed to hard and regular work under the conditions of commerce and greed, but had only toiled for the satisfaction of their own simple wants, were suffering cruelly under the hard labour in the mines, and the severe driving of their Spanish masters.

Under these unnatural conditions the native population was rapidly dying off, and there was some likelihood that there would soon be a scarcity of native labour.
These were the circumstances in which the idea of importing black African labour to the New World was first conceived--a plan which was destined to have results so tremendous that we have probably not yet seen their full and ghastly development.

There were a great number of African negro slaves at that time in Spain; a whole generation of them had been born in slavery in Spain itself; and this generation was bodily imported to Espanola to relieve and assist the native labour.
These preparations were not made all at once; and it was more than a year after the return of Columbus before Ovando was ready to sail.

In the meantime Columbus was living in Granada, and looking on with no very satisfied eye at the plans which were being made to supersede him, and about which he was probably not very much consulted; feeling very sore indeed, and dividing his attention between the nursing of his grievances and other even less wholesome occupations.

There was any amount of smiling kindness for him at Court, but very little of the satisfaction that his vanity and ambition craved; and in the absence of practical employment he fell back on visionary speculations.