nditions of
commerce and greed, but had only toiled for the satisfaction of their own
simple wants, were suffering cruelly under the hard labour in the mines,
and the severe driving of their Spanish masters. Under these unnatural
conditions the native population was rapidly dying off, and there was
some likelihood that there would soon be a scarcity of native labour.
These were the circumstances in which the idea of importing black African
labour to the New World was first conceived--a plan which was destined to
have results so tremendous that we have probably not yet seen their full
and ghastly development. There were a great number of African negro
slaves at that time in Spain; a whole generation of them had been born in
slavery in Spain itself; and this generation was bodily imported to
Espanola to relieve and assist the native labour.

These preparations were not made all at once; and it was more than a year
after the return of Columbus before Ovando was ready to sail. In the
meantime Columbus was living in Granada, and looking on with no very
satisfied eye at the plans which were being made to supersede him, and
about which he was probably not very much consulted; feeling very sore
indeed, and dividing his attention between the nursing of his grievances
and other even less wholesome occupations. There was any amount of
smiling kindness for him at Court, but very little of the satisfaction
that his vanity and ambition craved; and in the absence of practical
employment he fell back on visionary speculations. He made great friends
at this time with a monk named Gaspar Gorricio, with whose assistance he
began to make some kind of a study of such utterances of the Prophets and
the Fathers as he conceived to have a bearing on his own career.

Columbus was in fact in a very queer way at this time; and what with his
readings and his meditatings and his grievances, and his visits to his
monkish friend in the convent of Las Cuevas, he fell into a kind of
intellectual stupor, of which the work called 'Libro de las Profecias,'
or Book of the Prophecies, in which he wrote down such considerations as
occurred to him in his stupor, was the result. The manuscript of this
work is in existence, although no human being has ever ventured to
reprint the whole of it; and we would willingly abstain from mentioning
it here if it were not an undeniable act of Columbus's life. The
Admiral, fallen into theological stupor, puts down