Page:Letters of Cortes to Emperor Charles V - Vol 2.djvu/245

 being left to protect against such doings. They were the abolitionists of those times, and they had recourse to the severest spiritual penalties, refusing the sacraments, and launching excommunications on the notoriously cruel among the slave-holding colonists. Yielding to the arguments so persistently advanced, temporising measures were adopted; the system being provisionally tolerated while every possible provision for mitigating its evils was prescribed. Some of these were as follows: the holder of an encomienda was bound to pledge himself to an eight years' residence on his estate; no women or boys under twelve years were to do plantation work; Indian labourers could not be let out to others, nor be employed for regulating waterways, excavating canals, nor for building any house other than that of the holder of the encomienda; they were not to be taken away from their native province, and squads of labourers could be summoned for a period of twenty days at a time only, at the ratio of ten men out of every hundred in a village, and this not at their own harvest time; since mules, horses, and oxen had been imported, the Indians were not to be used as beasts of burden, as they were in the beginning; the villages were to be within a given distance of the plantations; the hours of work were from sunrise until one hour before sunset, with a rest at midday, and the proprietor must feed them well, pay them at least one castellano per year, clothe them, and provide for the education of the sons of chiefs in thefriar's school; moreover a priest was to be in charge of every two thousand Indians. Had these, and the many other safeguards provided, been strictly observed by the Spaniards, the state of the Indians would not have been a particularly bad one.

The Indians thus divided in encomiendas were not, strictly speaking, slaves, though their labour was enforced. The slaves were a class apart, and consisted of those who had been held in slavery by the Mexicans before the arrival of Cortes, and of such as had afterwards been condemned to slavery for rebellion.

Mention is several times made in the Letters of whole villages being sold or divided as a punishment for insurrection. How easy it was for the unscrupulous to provoke quarrels and broils, readily magnified into "rebellions, "or to trump up a charge on which natives might be enslaved, may be imagined. All such were branded, and as encomienda Indians could not be sent to the mines or to work at a distance; the slaves were used for these hard purposes. They were procured in immense numbers from Mexican chiefs either by purchase — sometimes for nominal sums — and sometimes in payment of debts, or to discharge obligations, and this opened the way to countless abuses, as the caciques not infrequently delivered free men into Spanish slavery, and, once branded, their status was fixed forever. The trade in human flesh flourished, and thousands were shipped to the islands where the natives were rapidly being exterminated, and the treatment of these poor creatures was so inhuman that many died during the voyage, and others in despair threw themselves overboard and were drowned.