ust be recorded in Chaves's favor that he was unable to pay these
fines. Indeed, he seems not to have had means sufficient to employ a
lawyer to defend him, wherefore he was compelled to conduct his own
case; which he was quite competent to do, being a licentiate of the bar.
There was, then, of course no thought of his being able to influence the
course of justice by the use of money, as De Avila was supposed to have
done. Whether he was actually so poor, or whether his fortune had been
so invested in Cuba that he was unable at once to realize upon it, does
not appear. In charity we may accept the former theory, as the more
creditable to him. At any rate, after two years of litigation and
imprisonment, he secured a final reduction of the fines levied against
him to a little more than 100,000 maravedi, which he was required to pay
within a year. This trifling amount he contrived to raise and so
regained his freedom; going thereafter back to Cuba to settle up his
personal affairs there, and thence to Peru, to engage no more in Cuban
politics.

Apart from his prosecution of Chaves, the first act of Gonzalo de Angulo
on assuming the governorship was to attempt a radical solution of the
Indian problem. This he did by proclaiming the full and universal
emancipation of all natives, however and by whomsoever held. Seeing how
strenuously and vociferously similar action had been resisted only a few
years before, as sure to be ruinous to the island, it is worthy of
remark that this provoked no remonstrances and caused no economic
disturbance. The explanation is simple. The former proposals for
emancipation included slaves who had been brought to Cuba from other
lands, while this one applied only to natives. Now the latter, through
disease, fighting, and other causes, had been steadily decreasing in
numbers, until they were now practically a negligible quantity. They
probably numbered not more than twenty-five hundred in the entire
island. It really mattered little, from an industrial point of view,
whether they were enslaved or free. They were in fact set free, in good
faith, and then practically disappeared. They did not relapse into
primitive barbarism, but they lived in squalor, most of them, and
gradually died out.

Not all of them, however, suffered such a fate. Some settled on lands
near if not actually among the Spanish colonists, adopted the ways of
civilization, and prospered. They acquired freehold of land and houses,