ine themselves to the two settlements formed,
but spread through the interior, where they began to lay out farms and
to work the auriferous river sands.

In the beginning the natives showed themselves willing enough to
assist in these labors, but when the brutal treatment to which the
people of la Espanola had been subjected was meted out to them also,
and the greed of gold caused their self-constituted masters to exact
from them labors beyond their strength, the Indians murmured, then
protested, at last they resisted, and at each step the taskmasters
became more exacting, more relentless.

At the time of the arrival of the Spaniards the natives of Boriquen
seem to have led an Arcadian kind of existence; their bows and arrows
were used only when some party of Caribs came to carry off their young
men and maidens. Among themselves they lived at peace, and passed
their days in lazily swinging in their hammocks and playing ball or
dancing their "areytos." With little labor the cultivation of their
patches of yucca[12] required was performed by the women, and beyond
the construction of their canoes and the carving of some battle club,
they knew no industry, except, perhaps, the chipping of some stone
into the rude likeness of a man, or of one of the few animals they
knew.

These creatures were suddenly called upon to labor from morning to
night, to dig and delve, and to stand up to their hips in water
washing the river sands. They were forced to change their habits and
their food, and from free and, in their own way, happy masters of the
soil they became the slaves of a handful of ruthless men from beyond
the sea. When Ponce's order to distribute them among his men confirmed
the hopelessness of their slavery, they looked upon the small number
of their destroyers and began to ask themselves if there were no means
of getting rid of them.

* * * * *

The system of "repartimientos" (distribution), sometimes called
"encomiendas" (patronage), was first introduced in la Espanola by
Columbus and sanctioned later by royal authority. Father Las Casas
insinuates that Ponce acted arbitrarily in introducing it in Boriquen,
but there were precedents for it.

The first tribute imposed by Columbus on the natives of la Espanola
was in gold and in cotton[13](1495). Recognizing that the Indians
could not comply with this demand, the Admiral modified it, but still
they could not satisfy him, and many, to e