MORGAN. LAS CASAS ON INHABITANTS OF YUCATAN. 253 
in a cluster of houses, four or five in number, or in a single house; and, as 
may be inferred from the’ descriptions of Las Casas, so near together on 
the same rivulet that had not the native forest obstructed the view they 
would have been in sight of each other for miles along its banks. The 
scattered ruins of these pueblos in Yucatan at the present time, often con- 
sisting of a single large structure, confirms this view. 
The tropical region of Yucatan and Central America, then as now, was 
undoubtedly covered with forests, except the limited clearings around the 
pueblos, and, apart from these pueblos, substantially uninhabited. Field 
agriculture was of course unknown, as they had neither domestic animals 
nor plows; but the Indians cultivated maize, beans, squashes, pepper, cot- 
ton, cacao, and tobacco in garden beds, and exercised some care over cer- 
tain native fruits; cultivation tending to localize them in villages. Herrera 
remarks of the Village Indians of Honduras that ‘they sow thrice a year, 
and they were wont to grub up great woods with hatchets made of flint.”" 
Without metallic implements to subdue the forest, or even with copper axes, 
such as were found among the Aztecs, a very small portion only of the 
country would have been brought under cultivation, and that confined 
mainly to the margins of the streams. 
Las Casas, bishop of Chiapas, who was in Yucatan and Chiapas about 
1539, after remarking of the people of the former country that they were 
“better civilized in morals and in what belongs to the good order of socie- 
ties than the rest of the Indians,” proceeds as follows: “The pretence of 
subjecting the Indians to the government of Spain is only made to carry 
on the design of subjecting them to the dominion of private men, who make 
them all their slaves.”? And, again, he quotes from a letter of the bishop of 
St. Martha to the King of Spain, to this effeet: ‘To redress the grievances of 
this provinee, it ought to be delivered from the tyranny of those who ravage 
it, and committed to the care of persons of integrity, who will treat the inhab- 
itants with more kindness and humanity; for if it be left to the mercy of the 
governors, who commit all sorts of outrages with impunity, the province 
will be destroyed in a very short time.’’?® 
1 History of America, iv., 133. 
2 An Account of the First Voyages, etc., in America, Lond. ed., Trans., p. 52. 
3Tb., p. 61. 
