over the island. Wherever he went, Columbus found the same evidence of
ruin and desolation. Where once innumerable handsome natives had
thronged the forests and the villages, there were now silence and smoking
ruin, and the few natives that he met were emaciated, terrified, dying.
Did he reflect, I wonder, that some part of the responsibility of all
this horror rested on him? That many a system of island government, the
machinery of which was now fed by a steady stream of human lives, had
been set going by him in ignorance, or greed of quick commercial returns?
It is probable that he did not; for he now permanently regarded himself
as a much-injured man, and was far too much occupied with his own wrongs
to realise that they were as nothing compared with the monstrous stream
of wrong and suffering that he had unwittingly sent flowing into the
world.

In the island under Ovando's rule Columbus saw the logical results of his
own original principles of government, which had recognised the right of
the Christians to possess the persons and labours of the heathen natives.
Las Casas, who was living in Espanola as a young priest at this time, and
was destined by long residence there and in the West Indies to qualify
himself as their first historian, saw what Columbus saw, and saw also the
even worse things that happened in after years in Cuba and Jamaica; and
it is to him that we owe our knowledge of the condition of island affairs
at this time. The colonists whom Ovando had brought out had come very
much in the spirit that in our own day characterised the rush to the
north-western goldfields of America. They brought only the slightest
equipment, and were no sooner landed at San Domingo than they set out
into the island like so many picnic parties, being more careful to carry
vessels in which to bring back the gold they were to find than proper
provisions and equipment to support them in the labour of finding it.
The roads, says Las Casas, swarmed like ant-hills with these adventurers