anded two hundred men from a caravel a half-league from the city of
Havana, and before daybreak marched on the town and forced the surrender
of the castle. The Spanish governor had time to retire to the country,
where he gathered a small force of Spaniards and negroes, and returned
to surprise the French by night. Fifteen or sixteen of the latter were
killed, and Sore, who himself was wounded, in a rage gave orders for the
massacre of all the prisoners. He burned the cathedral and the hospital,
pillaged the houses and razed most of the city to the ground. After
transferring all the artillery to his vessel, he made several forays
into the country, burned a few plantations, and finally sailed away in
the beginning of August. No record remains of the amount of the booty,
but it must have been enormous. To fill the cup of bitterness for the
poor inhabitants, on 4th October there appeared on the coast another
French ship, which had learned of Sore's visit and of the helpless state
of the Spaniards. Several hundred men disembarked, sacked a few
plantations neglected by their predecessors, tore down or burned the
houses which the Spaniards had begun to rebuild, and seized a caravel
loaded with leather which had recently entered the harbour.[57] It is
true that during these years there was almost constant war in Europe
between the Emperor and France; yet this does not entirely explain the
activity of the French privateers in Spanish America, for we find them
busy there in the years when peace reigned at home. Once unleash the
sea-dogs and it was extremely difficult to bring them again under
restraint.

With the seventeenth century began a new era in the history of the West
Indies. If in the sixteenth the English, French and Dutch came to
tropical America as piratical intruders into seas and countries which
belonged to others, in the following century they came as permanent
colonisers and settlers. The Spaniards, who had explored the whole ring
of the West Indian islands before 1500, from the beginning neglected the
lesser for the larger Antilles--Cuba, Hispaniola, Porto Rico and
Jamaica--and for those islands like Trinidad, which lie close to the
mainland. And when in 1519 Cortez sailed from Cuba for the conquest of
Mexico, and twelve years later Pizarro entered Peru, the emigrants who
left Spain to seek their fortunes in the New World flocked to the vast
territories which the _Conquistadores_ and their lieutenants had subdued