rls of the island of San Juan de Puerto Rico during the first
twenty-seven years of its occupation by the Spaniards.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 84: Washington Irving estimates the value of the "gold peso"
of the sixteenth century at $3 Spanish money of our day.]

CHAPTER XLI

WEST INDIAN HURRICANES IN PUERTO RICO FROM

1515 TO 1899

Whoever has witnessed the awful magnificence of what the primitive
inhabitants of the West Indian islands called _ou-ra-can,_ will never
forget the sense of his own utter nothingness and absolute
helplessness. With the wind rushing at the rate of 65 or more miles an
hour, amid the roar of waves lashed into furious rolling mountains of
water, the incessant flash of lightning, the dreadful roll of thunder,
the fierce beating of rain, one sees giant trees torn up by the roots
and man's proud constructions of stone and iron broken and scattered
like children's toys.

The tropical latitudes to the east and north of the West Indian
Archipelago are the birthplace of these phenomena. According to Mr.
Redfield[85] they cover simultaneously an extent of surface from 100
to 500 miles in diameter, acting with diminished violence toward the
circumference and with increased energy toward the center of this
space.

In the Weather Bureau's bulletin cited, there is a description of the
most remarkable and destructive among the 355 hurricanes that have
swept over the West Indies from 1492 to 1899. Not a single island has
escaped the tempest's ravages. I have endeavored in vain to make an
approximate computation of the human life and property destroyed by
these visitations of Providence. Such a computation is impossible when
we read of entire towns destroyed not once but 6, 8, and 10 times; of
crops swept away by the tempest's fury, and the subsequent starvation
of untold thousands; of whole fleets of ships swallowed up by the sea
with every soul on board, and of hundreds of others cast on shore like
coco shards.

To give an idea of the appalling disasters caused by these too oft
recurring phenomena, the above-mentioned bulletin gives Flammarion's
description of the great hurricane of 1780.[86]

"The most terrible cyclone of modern times is probably that which
occurred on October 10, 1780, which has been specially called the
great hurricane, and which seems to have embodied all the horrible
scenes that attend a phenomenon of this kind. Starting from Barbados,
where trees and houses were all