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To each Spaniard selected as an encomendero was allotted a certain quota of Indians bound to cultivate land for his benefit and entitled to receive from him tutelage in civilization and Christianity. The grantees, however, were not assigned specified Indians but merely specified numbers of them, with power to seize new ones to replace any who might die or run away.
He was urged in the church, before all the people of the village, to divorce one of his wives; but he only answered that he had already been told this. Many of our fathers, as well as his encomendero, therefore besought him with great earnestness to be baptized, but all in vain.
This was promptly granted and as promptly abused. Such limitations as the law still imposed upon encomendero power were made of no effect by the lack of machinery for enforcement. The relationship in short, which the law declared to be one of guardian and ward, became harsher than if it had been that of master and slave.
These ordinances, after enjoining a general kind treatment of the natives, recommend that small pieces of land be assigned to them on which to cultivate corn, yucca, cotton, etc., and raise fowls for their own maintenance. The "encomendero," or master, was to construct four rustic huts for every 50 Indians.
It was in this way that a native chief in one of those neighboring villages, having heard one of Ours preach, became so enamored of the things of our holy faith, and so desirous that he and his villagers might know them, that he went straightway to his encomendero and entreated him to find for them some Indian well instructed in our doctrine, who might impart to them the prayers and catechism.
The fiscal maintains with them a regular plan and order: morning and evening, their prayers and procession; and at night before retiring, and in the morning before dawn, they also offer their prayers so that the Spaniards, their encomendero said, and the collectors are notably edified thereby.
Not only did many civil officials, voicing public opinion in their island communities, urge that the supply of negro slaves be greatly increased as a means of preventing industrial collapse, but a delegation of Jeronimite friars and the famous Bartholomeo de las Casas, who had formerly been a Cuban encomendero and was now a Dominican priest, appeared in Spain to press the same or kindred causes.
Mercado recalls both an honest Spanish encomendero of the region, also named Francisco, and a worthy mestizo Friar, now remembered for his botanical studies, but it is not likely that these influenced Domingo Lam-co in choosing this name for his son.
Thus the encomendero was given little economic interest in preserving the lives and welfare of his workmen. In the first phase of the system the Indians were secured in the right of dwelling in their own villages under their own chiefs. But the encomenderos complained that the aloofness of the natives hampered the work of conversion and asked that a fuller and more intimate control be authorized.
The past year of six hundred and two, some natives found in the island of Sebu a good-sized piece of ambergris, and when their encomendero heard of it, he took it, and traded with them secretly for it, on the account of their tribute. It is said that it weighed a good number of libras. Afterward he brought it out and sold it by the ounce at a higher rate.
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