He went to Spain to do something about it. The all-powerful Cardinal Jimenes, confessor of Queen Isabella, thought that he was right, appointed him “Protector of the Indians” and sent him back to America to write a report. Las Casas returned to Mexico but found his superiors completely cold on the subject. The Indians had been given unto the Christians to do their bidding, just like the animals of the field and the birds of the air and the fishes of the sea. (See Genesis 1:28) Why start something that would upset that entire economic fabric of the New World and furthermore would very seriously interfere with profits?
Then las Casas, who took his God-given task very seriously, had a bright idea. The Indian preferred death to captivity, as had been proved in Haiti where the number of natives had dropped from 1,000,000 to 60,000 in less than fifteen years. But the Negro of Africa did not seem to mind being a slave. In the year of 1516 (direful date in the history of the New World) las Casas published the details of his famous humanitarian scheme for the complete liberation of his Indian charges. Each Spaniard living the New Spain was to be granted the right to import twelve African Negroes and the Indian were to be allowed to return what remained of their own farms after the immigrants had deprived them of all the better parts.
Poor las Casas lived long enough to come to a true realization of what he had done. His shame (for he was an honest man) was such that he retired to a monastery in Haiti. Afterwards he returned to public life and tried once more to fight the battles of the unfortunate heathen. But nobody listened to him, and when he died in 1556 new plans were under way to bind the Indians even more fully to the soil and the African slave trade too was in full swing.
What this trade meant to Africa during the 300 years of its existence we can only guess from the few reliable figures that have come down to us. The actual slave-hunting was not done by white men. The Arabs, who could wander at will over the entire northern part which had gradually been converted to Mohammedanism, held a monopoly of that racket. They had sold an occasional shipload of blackamoors to the Portuguese since 1434 but their business did not assume the gigantic proportions of the later days until 1517. There was big money in it. The Emperor Charles V (he of the famous Habsburg chin) bestowed upon one of his Flemish friends a grant which allowed him to carry 4000 African slaves each year to Haiti, Cuba and Porto Rico. The Fleming at once sold his imperial patent to a Genoese speculator who paid him 25,000 ducats for it. The Genoese in turn sold it to a combination of Portuguese and these Portuguese, went to Africa and got in touch with the Arab dealers and the Arab dealers raided a number of Sudanese villages until they had about 10,000 slaves together (one must count on a heavy percentage of loss during the voyage) who were then packed into the hold of some evil-smelling carack and dispatched across the ocean.
Rumors of this new and easy way to get rich spread far and wide. The Papal Bull which had divided the whole world into two halves, one of which belonged to Spain and one to Portugal, made it impossible for the Spaniards to visit the “slave coast” themselves. The actual business of buying and transporting this black merchandise was therefore left to the Portuguese. But as soon as the power of the Portuguese had been broken by the English and the Dutch, slave-running became a monopoly of these two Christian nations. They continued to provide all the world with their “black ivory” (as the Bristol and London merchants playfully called it) until the year 1811, when Parliament finally passed a Bill making the traffic in slaves a felony punishable with a fine and deportation. But it was a long time from 1517 until 1811 and until even afterwards, for slave-smuggling continued for fully another thirty years in spite of all the English warships. It did not fully come to an end until the early sixties of the nineteenth century when practically all European and American nations had abolished slavery definitely. (The Argentine abolished it in 1813, Mexico in 1829, U.S.A. in 1863, Brazil in 1888).
How important the trade was in the eyes of Europe’s rulers and statesmen is proved by the efforts they made to gain a monopoly of the slave traffic for the sole benefit of their own country. The refusal of Spain to continue a slave contract, thus far held by a few English merchants, even led to a war between England and Spain; and one of the stipulations of the famous peace treaty of Utrecht definitely transferred the West India slave monopoly from the Dutch to the English. Not to be outdone, the Dutch, who in 1620 had landed the first African slaves on Virginian soil, hastened to avail themselves of a law passed during the reign of William and Mary which had opened up the slave trade with the colonies to all the nations of the world. Indeed the Dutch West India Company, which through its scandalous neglect was responsible for the loss of Nieuw Amsterdam, only escaped bankruptcy because it made so much money out of its traffic in slaves.