To the estates (haciendas) of their royal Highnesses  500
Baltasar de Castro, the factor                    200
Miguel Diaz, the chief constable                  200
Juan Ceron, the mayor                             150
Diego Morales, bachelor-at-law                    150
Amador de Lares                                   150
Louis Soto Mayor                                  100
Miguel Diaz, Daux-factor                          100
the (municipal) council                           100
the hospitals                                     100
Bishop Manso                                      100
Sebastian de la Gama                               90
Gil de Malpartida                                  70
Juan Bono (a merchant)                             70
Juan Velasquez                                     70
Antonio Rivadeneyra                                60
Gracian Cansino                                    60
Louis Aqueyo                                       60
the apothecary                                     60
Francisco Cereceda                                 50
40 other individuals 40 each                    1,600
_____
4,040
Distributed in 1509                                 1,060
_____
Total                                          5,100

These numbers included women and children old enough to perform some kind of labor.  They were employed in the mines, or in the rivers rather (for it was alluvium gold only that the island offered to the greed of the so-called conquerors); they were employed on the plantations as beasts of burden, and in every conceivable capacity under taskmasters who, in spite of Ferdinand’s revocation of the order to reduce them to slavery (September, 1514), had acted on his first dispositions and believed themselves to have the royal warrant to work them to death.

The king’s more lenient dispositions came too late.  They were powerless to check the abuses that were being committed under his own previous ordinances.  The Indians disappeared with fearful rapidity.  Licentiate Sancho Velasquez, who had made the second distribution, wrote to the king April 27, 1515:  " ...  Excepting your Highnesses’ Indians and those of the crown officers, there are not 4,000 left.”  On August 8th of the same year the officers themselves wrote:  " ...  The last smeltings have produced little gold.  Many Indians have died from disease caused by the hurricane as well as from want of food....”

To readjust the proportion of Indians according to the position or other claims of each individual, new distributions were resorted to.  In these, some favored individuals obtained all they wanted at the expense of others, and as the number of distributable Indians grew less and less, reclamations, discontent, strife and rebellion broke out among the oppressors, who thus wreaked upon each other’s heads the criminal treatment of the natives of which they were all alike guilty.