when he was carried away by his dream of the fountain
of perpetual youth, and went wandering up the
Bahamas; but he returned, and, though he received
the imposing title of Adelantado of Bernini and
Florida, he gave his attention for a time to the
gentle process of exterminating the natives of Puerto
Rico with firearms and bloodhounds, and to meddling
with the Caribs farther south, by way of developing
the resources of the land. He had adopted
the repartimiento plan of dividing up the territory
and its inhabitants, and because the people would
not work as slaves they had to die. A s for the
Caribs, they were no doubt obtrusive and troublesome,
but Ponce de L eon ’s expedition down the
islands for their punishment was a disastrous failure.
Finally, in 1521, the conquistador went to take possession
of his realm of F lo rid a ; but its native denizens
objected vigorously with bows and arrows, and
instead of renewing his youth or prolonging his life,
the visionary warrior retired to Cuba to die of
wounds.
For a long while after that little is known of
Puerto R ico ’s history. In fact there seems to have
been little history to know. The colony was attacked
by Caribs and by hurricanes and gave up the
struggle for e x is tence ; but the Spanish held possession
at San Juan with soldiers and guns in spite of
visits from English and Dutch admirals, French
corsairs, and all manner of smugglers and buccaneers.
Drake in 1 59 5, finding that there was no
ransom to be extorted, sacked the place and left it,
and in 1598, the Duke of Cumberland repeated the
process; but Baldwin Heinrich, the Dutchman, in
1615, met with spirited resistance from the garrison
and lost his life.
A ll through the seventeenth century and far into
the eighteenth the beauty and riches of the island
were left to flourish in lonely desolation, save for
a few places feebly held by soldiers on the coast,
and here and there a languishing settlement. It
is recorded that in 1700 there were only three
villages in all the island, and in 1765 the entire
population numbered 45,000. I t seems like a
strange oversight that the enemies of Spain did
not seize this neglected domain; but though they
stopped to fire guns at the forts of San Juan
now and then, they do not seem to have been
attracted by a land where there was nothing to steal
and one had to work in order to get wealth. A t last
Spain began to wake up to the value of this possession,
and not only were slaves introduced to cultivate
plantations, but Andalusian peasants were sent
out as real colonists. In 1775 the population was
79,000, of which 50,000 consisted of negro slaves,
and when Lord Abercrombie made his attack on
San Juan in 1797, he had to give it up after a siege
of three days.
T h e fertility of the soil and the rich returns that
came from raising coffee and sugar gave a strong
impulse to immigration from Europe, and to the
increase of slaves, and the population grew, the
white element gaining more rapidly than the black
and mixed breeds. A t the time of the revolutions
in South America and in Central America and M ex