Moreover, Columbus was tormented by a feeling
of not having "made good." He had promised his sovereigns all sorts of
wealth, and instead he had been able to collect only an insignificant
amount of gold trinkets on Haiti. Desperate for some other source of
wealth, in an evil moment he advised slave-catching.
Besides considering himself to have fallen short in the royal eyes, he
was hounded by the complaints and taunts of the men who had accompanied
him. They hated work, so he tried to appease them by giving them
authority to enslave the natives; and, as our good Las Casas wisely
remarks, "Since men never fall into a single error ... without a greater
one by and by following," so it fell out that the Spaniards were cruel
masters and the natives revolted; to subdue them harsher and harsher
measures were used; not till most of them had been killed did the
remaining ones yield submissively.
CHAPTER XV
ON A SEA OF TROUBLES
In the new colony of Isabella things went badly from the very start. Its
governor comforted himself by thinking that he could still put himself
right with everybody by pushing farther west and discovering whether the
Asiatic mainland--which Martin Alonzo Pinzon had always insisted lay
back of the islands--was really there.
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