To make this payment sure, it was necessary to establish other armed posts through the country; and there were speedily built that of Magdalena in the Vega, one called Esperanza in Cibao, another named Catalina, beside La Concepcion, which has already been mentioned.
The change which ensued in the lives of the natives was pitiable. The labor of sifting the sands of the streams for gold, which they had heretofore made a mere pastime to secure bits to pound into ornaments, became a depressing task. To work fields under a tropical sun, where they had basked for sportive rest, converted their native joyousness into despair. They sang their grief in melancholy songs, as Peter Martyr tells us. Gradually they withdrew from their old haunts, and by hiding in the mountains, they sought to avoid the exactions, and to force the Spaniards, thus no longer supplied by native labor with food, to abandon their posts and retire to Isabella, if not to leave the island.
Scant fare for themselves and the misery of dank lurking-places were preferable to the heavy burdens of the taskmasters. They died in their retreats rather than return to their miserable labors. Even the long-tried friend of the Spaniards, Guacanagari, was made no exception. He and his people suffered every exaction with the rest of their countrymen. The cacique himself is said eventually to have buried himself in despair in the mountain fastnesses, and so passed from the sight of men.
The Spaniards were not so easily to be thwarted. They hunted the poor creatures like game, and, under the goading of lashes, such as survived were in time returned to their slavery. So thoroughly was every instinct of vengeance rooted out of the naturally timid nature of the Indians that a Spaniard might, as Las Casas tells us, march solemnly like an army through the most solitary parts of the island and receive tribute at every demand.
[Sidenote: Columbus's interests in Spain.]
It is time to watch the effect of the representations of Margarite and Father Boyle at the Spanish Court. Columbus had been doubtless impelled, in these schemes of cruel exaction, by the fear of their influence, and with the hope of meeting their sneers at his ill success with substantial tribute to the Crown. The charges against Columbus and his policy and against his misrepresentation had all the immediate effect of accusations which are supported by one-sided witnesses. Every sentiment of jealousy and pride was played upon, and every circumstance of palliation and modification was ignored. The suspicious reservation which had more or less characterized the bearing of Ferdinand towards the transactions of the hero could become a background to the newer emotions. Fonseca and the comptroller Juan de Soria are charged with an easy acceptance of every insinuation against the Viceroy. The canonizers cannot execrate Fonseca enough. They make him alternately the creature and beguiler of the King. His subserviency, his trading in bishoprics, and his alleged hatred of Columbus are features of all their portraits of him.