Spanish vessels in spite of Portugal's claim of
monopoly rights, even though Isabella had recognized these in a treaty of
1479. In short, at the time of the discovery of America Spain as well as
Portugal had quite appreciable numbers of negroes in her population and
both were maintaining a system of slavery for their control.

When Columbus returned from his first voyage in the spring of 1493 and
announced his great landfall, Spain promptly entered upon her career
of American conquest and colonization. So great was the expectation of
adventure and achievement that the problem of the government was not how
to enlist participants but how to restrain a great exodus. Under heavy
penalties emigration was restricted by royal decrees to those who procured
permission to go. In the autumn of the same year fifteen hundred men,
soldiers, courtiers, priests and laborers, accompanied the discoverer
on his second voyage, in radiant hopes. But instead of wealth and high
adventure these Argonauts met hard labor and sickness. Instead of the rich
cities of Japan and China sought for, there were found squalid villages of
Caribs and Lucayans. Of gold there was little, of spices none.

Columbus, when planting his colony at Isabella, on the northern coast
of Hispaniola (Hayti), promptly found need of draught animals and other
equipment. He wrote to his sovereigns in January, 1494, asking for the
supplies needed; and he offered, pending the discovery of more precious
things, to defray expenses by shipping to Spain some of the island natives,
"who are a wild people fit for any work, well proportioned and very
intelligent, and who when they have got rid of their cruel habits to which
they have been accustomed will be better than any other kind of slaves."[9]
Though this project was discouraged by the crown, Columbus actually took a
cargo of Indians for sale in Spain on his return from his third voyage;
but Isabella stopped the sale and ordered the captives taken home and
liberated. Columbus, like most of his generation, regarded the Indians
as infidel foreigners to be exploited at will. But Isabella, and to some
extent her successors, considered them Spanish subjects whose helplessness
called for special protection. Between the benevolence of the distant
monarchs and the rapacity of the present conquerors, however, the fate of
the natives was in little doubt. The crown's officials in the Indies were
the very conquerors themselves, who bent thei