With smallpox and other pestilences added to their hardships, they died so fast that before 1510 Hispaniola was confronted with the prospect of the complete disappearance of its laboring population.[10] Meanwhile the same regime was being carried to Porto Rico, Jamaica and Cuba with similar consequences in its train.
[Footnote 10: E.g.Bourne, _Spain in America_ (New York, 1904); Wilhelm Roscher, _The Spanish Colonial System_, Bourne ed.

(New York, 1904); Konrad Habler, "The Spanish Colonial Empire," in Helmolt, _History of the World_, vol I.] As long as mining remained the chief industry the islands failed to prosper; and the reports of adversity so strongly checked the Spanish impulse for adventure that special inducements by the government were required to sustain any flow of emigration.

But in 1512-1515 the introduction of sugar-cane culture brought the beginning of a change in the industrial situation.

The few surviving gangs of Indians began to be shifted from the mines to the fields, and a demand for a new labor supply arose which could be met only from across the sea.
Apparently no negroes were brought to the islands before 1501.

In that year, however, a royal decree, while excluding Jews and Moors, authorized the transportation of negroes born in Christian lands; and some of these were doubtless carried to Hispaniola in the great fleet of Ovando, the new governor, in 1502.