[5]
The Government, seeing the advantages to be derived from this single
article, offered to lend five hundred gold piastres to every colonist
who would fit up a sugar-plantation. Thus stimulated, the cultivation
of the cane throve so, that as early as 1518 the island possessed
forty sugar-works with mills worked by horse-power or water. But the
plantations were less merciful to the Indians than the mines, and in
1503 there began to be a scarcity of human labor.
At this date we first hear that negroes had been introduced into the
colony. But their introduction into Spain and Europe took place early
in the fifteenth century. "Ortiz de Zunigo, as Humboldt reports, with
his usual exactness, says distinctly that 'blacks had been already
brought to Seville in the reign of Henry III of Castile,' consequently
before 1406. 'The Catalans and the Normans frequented the western
coast of Africa as far as the Tropic of Cancer at least forty-five
years before the epoch at which Don Henry the Navigator commenced his
series of discoveries beyond Cape Nun.'"[6]
But the practice of buying and selling slaves in Europe can be traced
as far back as the tenth century, when fairs were established in all
the great cities.
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