Commentary No. 041
Date: 1510, January 22. Valladolid, Spain.
Theme: The king of Spain ordered colonial governor of La Española Diego Colón to try to expand to the maximum the number of workers assigned to dig gold, including all the “slaves” that the king had in the island. He also promised to reiterate immediately a prior order to have 50 “slaves” sent to the island for the same purpose
Source: PARES, Portal de Archivos Españoles, Archivo General de Indias,INDIFERENTE,418,L.2,F.98R.-98V.
According to this letter from the King, at some point in 1509, Fernando Colón, brother to La Española’s governor Diego Colón, must have arrived in Spain and informed the monarch about the “good news” of the gold found in the island. The king interpreted it as a divine sign and as an indication that “much diligence” should be put into “extracting the most gold that could be extracted.” The monarch considered it especially suitable for investing in the “war of Africa” that he was involved in at the time.
As a result, the king ordered the governor that “all the people that may be necessary and can stand steady must be put into our mines,” including “all the slaves that we have over there,” justifying this concentration on the fact that “it is said that the Indians find it very hard to break the rocks where that gold is found.”
The monarch also mentioned that along with the same message responding to Diego Colón he would send another one to the Casa de la Contratación of Seville reiterating to them an order that, according to him, he had previously sent, directing them to send “fifty slaves that I have ordered them to send for our mines, and that they send them as fast as possible.”
This message from the king additionally confirms the fact that the first enslaved Blacks sent to La Española (and therefore to the Americas) may have been sent by the Crown itself to work in the mining of gold for the Crown, under the justification, among other things, of the comparative inefficiency, reportedly noted earlier by some on the island, of the Indian labor force in performing these tasks.