cement the bonds of friendship.

Fancying themselves secure in the friendly disposition of the
natives, prompted by that spirit of reckless daring and adventure that
distinguished most of the followers of Columbus, anxious to be first
to find a gold-bearing stream or get possession of some rich piece of
land, they did not confine themselves to the two settlements formed,
but spread through the interior, where they began to lay out farms and
to work the auriferous river sands.

In the beginning the natives showed themselves willing enough to
assist in these labors, but when the brutal treatment to which the
people of la Española had been subjected was meted out to them also,
and the greed of gold caused their self-constituted masters to exact
from them labors beyond their strength, the Indians murmured, then
protested, at last they resisted, and at each step the taskmasters
became more exacting, more relentless.

At the time of the arrival of the Spaniards the natives of Boriquén
seem to have led an Arcadian kind of existence; their bows and arrows
were used only when some party of Caribs came to carry off their young
men and maidens. Among themselves they lived at peace, and passed
their days in lazily swinging in their hammocks and playing ball or
dancing their "areytos." With little labor the cultivation of their
patches of yucca[12] required was performed by the women, and beyond
the construction of their canoes and the carving of some battle club,
they knew no industry, except, perhaps, the chipping of some stone
into the rude likeness of a man, or of one of the few animals they
knew.