Indians, armed with bows and arrows, went to meet the Spaniards, and to ask them who they were and what they wanted. Juan Bono replied that his crew were good and peaceable people, who had come to live with the Indians; upon which, as the commencement of good fellowship, the natives offered to build houses for the Spaniards. The Spanish captain expressed a wish to have one large house built. The accommodating Indians set about building it. It was to be in the form of a bell, and to be large enough for a hundred persons to live in. On any great occasion it would hold many more. Every day, while this house was being built, the Spaniards were fed with fish, bread, and fruit by their good-natured hosts. Juan Bono was very anxious to see the roof on, and the Indians continued to work at the building with alacrity. At last it was completed, being two stories high, and so constructed that those within could not see those without. Upon a certain day Juan Bono collected the Indians together, men, women, and children, in the building, to see, as he told them, "what was to be done." Whether they thought they were coming to some festival, or that they were to do something more for the great house, does not appear. However, there they all were, four hundred of them, looking with much delight on their own handiwork. Meanwhile, Juan Bono brought his men round the building, with drawn swords in their hands; then, having thoroughly entrapped his Indian friends, he entered with a party of armed men, and bade the Indians keep still, or he would kill them. They did not listen to him, but rushed against the door. A horrible massacre ensued. Some of the Indians forced their way out, but many of them, stupefied at what they saw, and losing heart, were captured and

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bound. A hundred, however, escaped, and, snatching up their arms, assembled in one of their own houses, and prepared to defend themselves. Juan Bono summoned them to surrender; they would not hear of it; and then, as LAS CASAS says, "he resolved to pay them completely for the hospitality and kind treatment he had received," and so, setting fire to the house, the whole hundred men, together with some women and children, were burned alive. The Spanish captain and his men retired to the ships with their captives; and his vessel happening to touch at Porto Rico when the Jeronimite fathers were there, gave occasion to Las Casas to complain of this proceeding to the fathers, who, however, did nothing in the way of remedy or punishment. The reader will be surprised to hear the clerigo's authority for this deplorable narrative. It is Juan Bono himself. "From his own mouth I heard that which I write." Juan Bono acknowledged that never in his life had he met with the kindness of father and mother but in the island of Trinidad. "Well, then, man of perdition, why did you reward them with such ungrateful wickedness and cruelty?" 6. On my faith, Padre, because they (he meant the auditors) gave me for destruction (he meant instruction) to take them in peace if I could not by war.'

Such were the transactions which Las Casas must have had in his mind when he was pleading the cause of the Indians at the court of Spain; and that man would have been more than mortal who, brooding over these things, and struggling to find a remedy for them, was always temperate in his language and courtly in his demeanor. I feel confident that St. Paul would not have been so.

Returning now to the court of Spain, which this short absence in barbarous parts will have made more welcome to the reader, I will recount what took place immediately after the death of the great cardinal. On that event the administration of the affairs of Spain fell inevitably into much confusion. The king, as mentioned before, was only sixteen years old, and it could not be expected that he was yet to have much real weight in affairs. It has been a common saying that he did not give promise, at this period of his life, of the sagacity which he afterward manifested. This is a mistake. Nobody knew more of the Spanish court than PETER MARTYR. He was a remarkably sincere man, and his testimony in favor of the young king's abilities is very strong. The truth is, that Charles was as a boy what he turned out to be as a man-grave, undemonstrative, cautious, thoughtful, valiant. No doubt he was very observant; and I think it is manifest that the information he now obtained about Indian affairs swayed him throughout his reign, and, as it will hereafter appear, influenced him in the advice he gave in a great matter connected with the government of the Spanish colonies at a period when he had withdrawn for the most part from all human affairs. At this time of his life he trusted to his councilors, like a sensible boy; was very constant to them, and exceedingly liberal to all persons about him.

*

The two men who had now the supreme authority in Spain were Chièvres,† the king's former governor

* "Quoad Regem nil est quod possit ultra desiderari. Est a natura omni egregia dote præditus."-Epist., 608. See also Epist., 113, on the quickness with which the king learned Spanish.

* He is called familiarly Chièvres by writers of that period; but his name was William de Croy, Lord of Chièvres, in Hainault, afterward Marquis or Duke of Aarschot.

man.

and his present Lord Chamberlain, and the Grand Chancellor Jean Salvage, called by the Spaniards Selvagius. The chancellor settled all matters connected with justice; the other, those connected with patronage. Las Casas speaks well of the disposition of the Flemings; especially of their humanity; and he seems to think that the chancellor was an upright Peter Martyr, on the other hand, inveighs furiously against the rapaciousness of the Flemish courtiers, and especially against that of Chièvres and the chancellor. He says that all things at court are now venal; the Flemish courtiers are harpies and hydras; their power of swallowing money he compares to wells and whirlpools; and, dropping the metaphorical style, tells us in plain prose that they remitted to Flanders one million one hundred thousand ducats; added to which, they appear to have taken but little delight in Spain as a country to live in, and were only anxious to get

From the description of Chièvres given by SANDOVAL (Hist. del Emperador, Carlos V., lib. ii., sec. 35), it will be seen that he was a dignified, eloquent, judicious person, and an adroit man of business:

"Fué este Xevres hombre de buena presencia, y claro juyzio, hablava bien, y era en los negocios cuydadoso, y quando en ellos avia dificultades, inventava medios para bien despacharlos."

That last point mentioned in his qualifications, inventive adroitness in the conduct of affairs, may remind the reader of what Bacon notices in reference to those who gain the favor of princes:

"Vidisti virum velocem in opere suo? coram regibus stabit, nec erit inter ignobiles.' Here is observed, that of all virtues for rising to honor, quickness of dispatch is the best; for superiors many times love not to have those they employ too deep or too sufficient, but ready and diligent."-Advancement of Learning: On "the wisdom touching ne

gotiation."

Chièvres is accused, like the rest of the Flemings, and I fear with some justice, of having been rapacious and avaricious. But the charges of Spanish historians on this head against the Flemings must always be looked at with careful scrutiny before they are entirely cred

back to their own northern regions, as if they were the regions of the blessed, "notwithstanding they do not deny that in their own country they live the greater part of the year most wretched, by reason of the thick ice." Then they make no account of the Spaniards, who "redden with shame, bite their lips, and murmur secretly. "* One thing, however, PETER MARTYR mentions as a great discredit to the Spanish chancellor, which will not be thought so in these times. It appears that Selvagius was averse to the powers exercised by the Inquisition; and, on an occasion when the chancellor was ill, PETER MARTYR observes, "It would be for the good of the sacred Inquisition that the chancellor should be gathered to his fathers."t The practice of bribery on the part of the neophytes is alleged as the cause of the chancellor's hostility to the Inquisition; but surely it may well be imagined that a lawyer would be likely to view with great disfavor the mode of proceeding with witnesses adopted by the Inquisition.

The Flemish ministers were not without their especial perplexities. They did not know whom to trust or what to do; and they were too cautious to act without sufficient knowledge. They did not even know the language of the country they governed. The king himself was busy learning it. In this state of things the public business languished.

The affairs of the Indies, however, gained much more attention than might have been expected at this * Epist., 608.

+ "Sacræ Inquisitionis hæreseos expedit ut majores visat suos. Nisi Atropos ejus filum disruperit, sacra prostrabitur inquisitio et miseri Regis fama sternetur, qui se patitur a talibus Harpyis gubernari.”Epist., 620.