About this time messengers came from Bohechio and Anacaona, informing the
Adelantado that the tribute of that country was ready for him, and he
accordingly went to fetch it. During his absence from the seat of
government, and under the less vigorous administration of Don Diego
Columbus, who had been left at the head of affairs at Isabella, those
discontents among the Spaniards, which had no doubt been rife for a long
time, broke out in a distinct manner. I allude to the well-known
insurrection of Roldan, whom the admiral, on his departure, had left as
chief justice in the island. The disputes between the chief justice and
the governor were to form the first of a series of similar proceedings to
take place afterwards in many colonies even down to our own times. It may
be imagined that the family of Columbus were a hard race to deal with; and
any one observing that the admiral was very often engaged in disputes, and
almost always in the right, might conjecture that he was one of those
persons who pass through life proving that all people about them are
wrong, and going a great way to make them so. This would have been an easy
mode of explaining many things, and therefore very welcome to a narrator,
but it would not be at all just towards Columbus to saddle upon him any
such character. Here were men who had come out with very grand.
expectations, and who found themselves pinched with hunger, having dire
storms to encounter, and vast labours to undergo; who were restrained
within due bounds by no pressure of society; who were commanded by a
foreigner, or by members of his family, whom they knew to have many
enemies at court; who thought that the Sovereigns themselves could
scarcely reach them at this distance; and who imagined that they had
worked themselves out of an law and order, and that they deserved an
Alsatian immunity. With such men (many of them, perhaps, "not worthy of
water,") the admiral and his brothers had to get useful works of all kinds
done; and did contrive to get vessels navigated, forts built, and some