gold mining, stock raising, and agriculture. The last named was
practised by the Spanish settlers only to an extent sufficient to supply
their own needs for food. Stock raising, both horses and cattle, was
engaged in much more extensively, not only to supply local needs but
also to supply the needs of Spanish explorers and gold-seekers in Mexico
and Central and South America, who had no time nor opportunity in their
strenuous quest there to attend to such matters. But the first thought
of the first settlers in Cuba was for gold, and for many years the
mining of that metal was the most profitable occupation. Within the
first twenty years of Spanish settlement more than 500,000 pesos in gold
were secured. Indeed in a single year, 1531, the mines at Cuyeba
produced 50,000 pesos. There were paying mines at Savanna, at Savanna de
Guaimaro, at Puerto Principe, at Portillo, and elsewhere throughout the
central districts of the island; some of them being ore veins in the
mountains and some placers in the river beds. But in the course of
twenty-five years the mines began to fail and new ones were not
discovered, so that by De Soto's time the output of gold had become
insignificant. This was doubtless one of the strong contributing causes
of the migration of so many settlers from the island, the eagerness of
men to seek new fields in Florida, and the general decline which Cuba
then suffered.

There was some compensation for the decline of gold mining in the
discovery of rich copper mines, though the full value of them was not at
first realized. It was during the first administration of Guzman that
copper was discovered at Cobre, near Santiago. (This was the place
where, as formerly related, Alonzo de Ojeda, in gratitude for his
restoration to health, presented a statue of the Holy Virgin to the
native chief, Comendador, who had been his host and nurse and who had
embraced Christianity. The statue was long famous as Our Lady of Cobre.)
There is reason for believing that the Cuban natives had formerly worked
those mines to a considerable extent, for traffic with other lands,
though they themselves apparently did not make use of the metal in their
own arts. The governor, Guzman, learning of the discovery, urged the
development of the mines as the property of the discoverers, while the
royal treasurer claimed that they should belong to the crown. A
controversy was maintained for some time, with the result that the
crown, lightly este