The other and more famous of these two men was Bartholomew de Las Casas, known to the world as the "Protector of the Indians" and as the "Apostle to the Indies." As a youth he had accompanied his father on Columbus's third voyage to America, and he had come to the Antilles a second time and permanently with Ovando, the Governor of Hispaniola, in 1502. In 1510 he was ordained to be a priest, and it was in that clerical capacity that he was sent over to Cuba to assist Velasquez in the conquest, pacification and settlement of the island. He appears at first to have had no important religious scruples against oppression of the natives, but joined with Velasquez and Narvaez in their sometimes ruthless policy. When the island was divided among the conquerors under the system of repartimientos, or allotments of natives as practical slaves of the Spaniards, he received and accepted without demur his encomienda or commandery, and held it for some time in partnership with his friend Pedro de Renteria. But a little later, realizing the injustice and cruelties which the natives suffered under this system, he became, as he himself described it, "converted," and thereafter was an earnest, zealous and almost fanatical champion of their rights. He visited Spain several times, to secure commissions of inquiry and other measures for their relief. Also, thinking thus to redeem them from enforced servitude, he secured royal sanction for the introduction of Negro slavery and the importation of Negro slaves into Cuba; a policy which he afterward deeply regretted.
After a brief campaign in Bayamo, which was not particularly successful, beyond the killing of Caguax and the final dispersion of the force which Hatuey had organized, Narvaez formed an expedition of perhaps five hundred men for more extended enterprises, in which he had as his principal companions Las Casas and a young nephew of Velasquez, Juan de Grijalva. The precise route of this expedition cannot now be stated. It certainly, however, traversed the Bayamo region, and went as far west as Camaguey. It also visited the neighborhood of Cape Cruz and there passed through the town of Cueyba, as Las Casas called it, where, as hitherto related, a Spanish mariner, presumably Ojeda, had landed and had established a Christian shrine with a statue of the Holy Virgin. Here and at other places amicable relations were maintained between the Spaniards and the natives.
Unhappily that was not always the rule. At the large town of Caonao, probably near Manzanillo, a number of Spanish soldiers, as if suddenly stricken with madness, began a massacre of the natives, killed a great number, and drove the rest into flight. Narvaez does not seem to have ordered nor to have taken part in the slaughter, but neither did he exert himself to prevent it or to stop it. Whereupon Las Casas, righteously wrathful, bade him to go to the Devil, and thereafter devoted himself to ministering to the sufferers and to reassuring the survivors.
From Caonao the expedition moved westward, through the southern part of the Province of Camaguey, where the natives were so frightened that they fled to the little islands off the coast which Columbus had named the Queen's Gardens. Thence it went across the island to the north coast, and probably in the region of Sagua la Grande, in Santa Clara Province, found some small deposits of gold. After stopping there for some time, it continued its progress into Havana Province, where more gold was found and where, unhappily, serious trouble with the natives was renewed.
On the way across the island Narvaez had heard of three Spaniards, a man and two women, who had been shipwrecked on the coast and were living with the Indians somewhere in the west. He sent word of this report back to Velasquez, who returned him orders to search for the castaways even in preference to gold, and who also dispatched a ship along the north coast to meet Narvaez and his party in the region to which they were going. In Santa Clara the two women were found, unharmed and well, and they presently married members of the expedition. Finally, in Havana the man also was found. He too was unharmed and well, though he had become in speech and habits more like an Indian than a Spaniard. According to his story, he and the two women were the sole survivors of a company of twenty-six. They had fled from Ojeda's ill-starred settlement at Uraba, on the Gulf of Darien, and were trying to make their way back to Hispaniola, but had been driven out of their course around the north coast of Cuba. Not far from Cape San Antonio they had been shipwrecked and thence had made their way by land, along the north coast. Most of them had been killed by natives while trying to cross an arm of the sea, which has been assumed to have been the Bay of Matanzas, which was so named on that account.
On the Havana coast the expedition met the vessel which Velasquez had sent. But leaving it in port there the expedition went across the island again to Xagua, or Cienfuegos, there to meet Velasquez himself and another expedition which he was leading, and there to spend with him the Christmas season of 1513. At the beginning of 1514 Narvaez and a hundred men returned to Havana and thence marched westward into Pinar del Rio, the vessel keeping in touch with them along the coast. How far they went in that province is not now certainly known. Some accounts have it that they stopped at Bahia Honda and there took ship back for Baracoa, while others insist that they got as far as Nombre de Dios. All that is certain is that Narvaez and his comrades visited on this expedition all parts of the island, and thus completed the nominal exploration and occupation of Cuba in the early part of 1514.
CHAPTER VI
Velasquez was for a number of years the dominant figure in Cuban history, and he much more than any other man is to be credited with the settlement of the island and its social, political and economical organization. He was married at Baracoa in the early part of 1513 to Donna Maria de Cuellar, daughter of Christopher de Cuellar, the royal treasurer in the island, but within a week was left a widower. To find solace for his grief in action, he threw himself with extraordinary energy into the work of exploring, pacifying and colonizing the island.
After founding the town of San Salvador de Bayamo he went westward, as already stated, to meet Narvaez and to spend Christmas at Xagua or Cienfuegos. Less than a month later he founded La Villa de Trinidad, and later in the year La Villa de Sancti Spiritus and, finally, Santiago de Cuba. At all of these places excepting the last named gold was found, though not in any large quantities. He was thus encouraged to continue his search for that precious metal, while at the same time he was admonished not to look too much to it for the prosperity of the Island, but to pay attention to the development of its other resources, and particularly its obvious agricultural potentialities.
Accordingly in the spring of 1514 he sent a vessel to Hispaniola for horses and cattle with which to stock Cuba, and for supplies of grain and other seeds, and agricultural implements. In the cargo which it brought back to him lay the germ of the subsequent agricultural greatness of Cuba. At about the same time, also, he founded Cuban commerce by the establishment of regular communication between the island and Jamaica, Darien and other Spanish settlements at the south. In this latter enterprise the King was especially interested, and his directions to Velasquez were that he should develop it to the largest possible extent. He did not expect Cuba ever to rival Darien and other regions in mineral wealth, but that island could, he thought, surpass them in agriculture, and thus could serve as a source of supply to them, and as a base of operations.
It was, indeed, in pursuance of this policy of commerce with the countries at the south and west of the Caribbean that Santiago de Cuba was founded as the seventh of the seven cities among which the island was partitioned, and that it was made the insular capital. The site was, as already stated, the only one at which gold was not found. It was selected partly because of the secure and commodious harbor, one of the finest anywhere on the shores of the Caribbean, and partly because its situation on the south coast made it particularly accessible to and from Jamaica, Darien and the other regions in which the Spanish crown was interested. As soon as it was founded, the seat of civil, military and ecclesiastical authority was transferred thither from Baracoa, and Santiago