Seeing that Chaves was now doing the very thing that he had condemned his predecessor for doing, the King was disgusted with him, and sent him the sharpest kind of a reprimand, reminding him of his gross inconsistency and bidding him to enforce the law without further ado. Chaves pretended to obey. In fact, he promptly replied that he was obeying. But he obeyed only in pretence. He did not scruple to declare--in Cuba--that he was opposed to giving the natives their freedom. He did not consider them fit for it. Why? Because they were not Christians, and if set free they would not become Christians, and therefore would infallibly be damned eternally. Therefore to save their souls from hell fire, their bodies must be enslaved, so that they could find salvation through being physically compelled to conform with the external practices of Christianity. Particularly necessary was it, he argued, for this system of spiritual salvation through corporeal bondage to prevail in the provinces of Trinidad, Sancti Spiritus and Puerto del Principe, because they had no agricultural interests but were dependent upon mining, and if they could not compel the Indians to work in the mines, they would be ruined.
This logic, more ingenious than ingenuous, did not favorably impress the King, nor was he better pleased with Chaves's proposal that the Indians should be made free in name only, and that while traffic in them as chattels should be forbidden, they should in fact remain in involuntary domestic servitude. Another sharp reprimand was accordingly sent to Chaves, with an intimation that something worse might follow; to which warning the governor was blind and deaf. Accordingly, the blow soon fell.
We have hitherto heard much of Lopez Hurtado, the crabbed, surly and cantankerous old royal treasurer, with his impregnable honesty. It was quite impossible that he should countenance even passively such conduct as that of Chaves. So at the end of 1548 he sent to the King an appalling indictment of the governor, charging him with all manner of public crimes and private vices. He declared that Chaves was enriching himself at the expense of the people, and that he was neglecting public business for private enterprises, that he was permitting his subordinates to practice extortion and oppression, that he was ill-treating and persecuting honest men, and that he was corrupting the women of the island; all of which was probably true.