in danger of expiring. Then they set about capturing
natives from the other islands and forcing them
into servitude in the mines and on the plantations
of Hispaniola. In 1509» Ferdinand, whose queen
had been squeamish a few years before about the
sending of slaves from “ the Indies ” to Spain, but
was now dead, authorised the sale of the Lucayans
into slavery on the Antilles. T h e y were enticed
from their own islands by an alluring promise that
they were to see their ancestors in a land of happiness,
and in a few years the Bahamas were depopulated,
and the gentle Lucayans died out in their
bondage like the other Arawaks.
Not growing rich fast enough by this policy of
starving and slaughtering their labour force, the
colonists began to seek new fields. T h e earliest
movement was that of Ponce de Leon from the
eastern end of Hispaniola to the island of Borinquen,
which Columbus had called San Juan Bautista, and
which has since been known as Puerto Rico. One of
the places at which Columbus had landed was Agua-
dilla on the western coast, and there De Leon made
his first landing for observation in 1508. Learning
that there was much wealth as well as many people
fit for slaves in the island, he returned to Santo D o mingo
for an armed force and a number of colonists.
He found a splendid bay on the northern coast,
where in 1510 he established the town of Caparra,
on the side of the bay where is now the Pueblo
Viejo, or Old Village. T he next year, however, on
a more favourable site he founded the city of San
Juan de Puerto Rico, “ St. John of the Splendid
P o r t,” and a few years later Caparra was abandoned.
Ponce de Leon pursued the fatal policy
of dividing up the territory into personal allotments
by the process of repartimiento, and forcing
the inhabitants into servitude, slaughtering them
without mercy, and hunting them down with bloodhounds
when they resisted or ran aw a y ; and it
produced the same effect as in Hispaniola. But
in 1512, the year after he got San Juan established,
he was carried away on his quest for the fountain of
youth, and the colony languished. There was an
invasion of Caribs and a destructive hurricane, and
in a few years the island was deserted by the Spanish
colonists. For a century or more it was left
undisturbed and almost without inhabitants.
A fte r the death of the great discoverer, his son,
Diego Colon, became a person of consequence in
Spain. He married Dofia Maria de Toledo, a niece
of the Duke of A lv a , and succeeded to the rights
and dignities of his father in the New World. He
came out to Hispaniola in 1509, and invested himself
with the title of Viceroy of the Colonies in
America. He took possession of Santo Domingo,
and built a splendid palace on the banks of the
Ozama, a solid structure that stands there in ruins
to-day, and is still called the Casa Colon. Diego
was a man of considerable enterprise as well as great
pretension, and did much to extend the colonial
domain of Spain in the Antilles. In the first year
of his power he sent an expedition to Jamaica under
Juan d ’Esquivel, who built a town on the north
coast, and called it Sevilla d ’Oro. T h e oldest town