s for sale, and the crown officers asked permission to brand them
on the forehead, "as is done in la Espanola and in Cubagua."

The Indians returned assault for assault. Between the years 1564 and
1570 they were specially active along the southern coast of San Juan,
so that Governor Francisco Bahamonde Lugo had to take the field
against them in person and was wounded in the encounter. Loiza, which
had been resettled, was destroyed for the second time in 1582, and a
year or so later the Caribs made a night attack on Aguada, where they
destroyed the Franciscan convent and killed 3 monks.

With the end of the sixteenth and the commencement of the seventeenth
centuries the West Indian archipelago became the theater of French and
English maritime enterprise. The Carib strongholds were occupied, and
by degrees their fierce spirit was subdued, their war dances
relinquished, their war canoes destroyed, their traditions forgotten,
and the bold savages, once the terror of the West Indian seas,
succumbed in their turn to the inexorable law of the survival of the
fittest.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 31: The West Indian islands were inhabited at the time of
discovery by at least three races of different origin. One of these
races occupied the Bahamas. Columbus describes them as simple,
peaceful creatures, whose only weapon was a pointed stick or cane.
They were of a light copper color, rather good-looking, and probably
had formerly occupied the whole eastern part of the archipelago,
whence they had been driven or exterminated by the Caribs, Caribos, or
Guaribos, a savage, warlike, and cruel race, who had invaded the West
Indies from the continent, by way of the Orinoco. The larger Antilles,
Cuba, la Espanola, and Puerto Rico, were occupied by a race which
probably originated from some southern division of the northern
continent. The chroniclers mention the Guaycures and others as their
ancestors, and Stahl traces their origin to a mixture of the
Phoenicians with the Aborigines of remote antiquity]

[Footnote 32: Abbad says 30.]

CHAPTER XIII

DEPOPULATION OF THE ISLAND--PREVENTIVE MEASURES--INTRODUCTION OF
NEGRO SLAVES

1515-1534

The natural consequence of natural calamities and invasions was the
rapid disappearance of the natives. "The Indians are few and serve
badly," wrote Sedeno in 1515, about the same time that the crown
officers, to explain the diminution in the gold product, wrote that
many Indians had died o