THE TREASURE REVEALED 221 



mated and docile enough to carry on without the more 

 obvious cruelties practiced against the Indians. At any rate, 

 not until his later years did Las Casas admit the error of his 

 first judgment. It is difficult, even for a good man, to think 

 outside the pattern of his times. 



Oviedo, an early historian, put the case against the Spanish 

 occupation in a single statement. By 1535 the native popula- 

 tion of the island of Hispaniola had shrunk from several hun- 

 dred thousand to five hundred. Here was a rich domain 

 waiting for development. Sugar and negro slavery went hand 

 in hand. But before any safe and satisfactory plantation society 

 could grow, the frontiers of anarchy produced by the draining 

 of Spanish settlers to the mainlands had to be overcome. 

 Cattle ran wild in all the islands. Tough, anarchistic indi- 

 viduals moved in to slaughter the cattle and sell the smoked 

 and dried meat called ''bucan" to the ships trading in the 

 Indies. These ''buccaneers'' soon saw that they were mere 

 butlers to the men of true fortune and wealth, the seagoers. 

 So they in turn became ''high-jackers" and took to the sea. 

 A society of well-organized piracy with its headquarters on 

 Tortuga, just north of Hispaniola, finally came into being, 

 and these men were called ''Buccaneers" after their original 

 profession. So within a few generations after Columbus, the 

 West Indies began to be a land of growing slavery and a 

 seaway more and more dominated by freebooters. 



Thus at the very start the failure of a healthy economic and 

 social colonial system under the Spanish was forecast in the 

 Caribbean. As Parry puts it: "The whole of the West Indies 

 was an eager market for cloth, weapons, tools and hardware 

 of all sorts, books, paper, wine, oil and slaves. Spanish pro- 

 ducers could not or would not export these goods in sufficient 

 quantities or at competitive prices. The Indies trade then 

 was a standing temptation, not only to pirates and privateers, 

 but to slavers, smugglers and illicit traders of all nations." 



