his funeral. While
making his novitiate, the letters from the Cardinal (now Pope) Adrian and
his Flemish friends at Court arrived. The Flemings urged his immediate
return to Spain, promising him every assistance in their power, but the
superiors of the monastery in Hispaniola did not deliver these disquieting
epistles to their novice, for fear of shaking his resolution to persevere
in his vocation.

The earliest biographer of Las Casas, Antonio de Remesal, says that he was
chosen Prior of the monastery, and this statement is supported by a letter
from the Auditors of Hispaniola dated June 7, 1533, addressed to Prince
Philip who was governing Spain during the absence of the Emperor his
father, in which Fray Bartholomew is mentioned as Prior of the Monastery
of Santo Domingo in the town of Puerto de Plata. (40) In chapter 146 of
his _Historia Apologetica_, he himself speaks of "conferring the habit" on
a novice, which he could only do if he were Prior.

The first seven years that Las Casas passed in the seclusion of his
monastery were not marked by any salient incident. He devoted himself
with all the intensity of his nature to the practice of the austere rule
of St. Dominic and became, as he himself afterwards described in writing
of that period of his life, as though dead to the world, so little part
did he have in the course of events outside his cloister's walls. He gave
much time to the study of theology, especially to the works of St. Thomas
Aquinas, the glory of the Dominican Order. These studies served to equip
him with stores of canonical and philosophical learning which enabled him,
when the time came, to sustain controversies with some of the most learned
men in Europe.

In the second chapter of his _Historia Apologetica_ the following sentence
occurs: "Three leagues to the west of the extremity of this plain is
Puerto de Plata, and on a hill above and near by the town thus named there
is a monastery of the Dominican Order, where the composition of this
History was begun in the year 1527,--to be finished when and where the will
of God may ordain."(41)

In 1529, he lent his efforts to bringing to an end the long standing
rebellion of the cacique Enrique whose forces, in the mountains of
Baranco, the Spaniards had fought at intervals during fourteen years in
vain. This chief had been educated in the Franciscan convent at Vera Paz
and was a man of unusual intelligence and superior courage; he married a
b