220 THE OCEAN RIVER 



repartimiento as a division of lands in Hispaniola to able 

 and deserving proprietors. And with the land, as in feudal 

 Europe, the present tenants of the land went along as work- 

 ers, to be used and cared for and of course converted to Chris- 

 tianity. Thus, at least, in the mind of Columbus and the 

 intention of the distant royal rulers, fixed responsibilities went 

 along with the proprietorship of lands and the Indian ''peas- 

 ants." But where Spanish greed for gold and a disinclination 

 for work in a hot climate met a similar Indian disinclination 

 to work, plus no concept whatever of private property or ambi- 

 tion for wealth, the good intent of the regulation came to 

 nothing. The Indians acted as slave labor, committed suicide, 

 or were brutally murdered. The same abuse occurred under 

 the encomiendd, which was an allocation of enforced labor 

 presumably for a limited time under definite terms of trust. 

 It must be said that certain priests and landowners, notably 

 Las Casas and the Friars Montesino and Vitoria, preached 

 against this treatment of the Indians; but it was many years 

 before any remedial laws were passed, and these were not 

 carried out in the Caribbean. In a word, the conditions that 

 might have established a separatist democratic society in the 

 West Indies did not develop. Only in Darien under Balboa, 

 himself a man of the people leading peasants and soldiers, 

 was there any mutual sharing of work and government. The 

 lawyers, as Balboa feared they would, soon put an end to this, 

 for they cut off his head. 



Paradoxically enough, the fear of Indian slavery and its 

 resulting cruelty brought negro slavery into the islands, and 

 Las Casas, the defender of the Indians, at least acquiesed if 

 he did not actually recommend this extension of negro slavery 

 as a solution. We can overlook this inconsistency in an other- 

 wise farsighted Christian man on the grounds perhaps that 

 the use of Africans, purchased already from a state of slavery, 

 was an accepted practice, and further that they seemed accli- 



