ese
improvements, and sailed for Spain.

Gamboa's successor was D. Alvaro de Luna y Sarmiento, a knight of the
Order of Alcantara. During his administration, which began on the
fifteenth of September, 1639, and ended on the twenty-ninth of
September, 1647, the work of constructing defenses was eagerly pushed.
Two leagues leeward of Chorrera a fort was erected. At the mouths of the
rivers Casiguagas and Cojimar were built the two towers that had been
planned by Governor Viamonte; they were intended to protect those
advanced points of the capital. The able engineer Bautista Antonelli
superintended the construction of these works of fortification. As the
cost of these structures was defrayed by the inhabitants of the city,
the governor saw fit to entrust their defense to three companies of men
recruited from the native population. It was the first regiment of the
kind organized on the island. By January of the next year the
fortifications of the Castillo del Morro were also completed.

With the insurrection of Portugal which occurred at this period the
pirates became bolder and renewed their outrages. The Dutch, too,
threatened Havana once more. A squadron commanded by Admiral Fels had
approached close to the coast, but had been driven back by a violent
hurricane. Four of the vessels had been left between Havana and Mariel.
Governor Luna sent Major Lucas de Caravajal against them; three hundred
Dutch were taken prisoners, and seventeen bronze cannon, forty-eight
iron cannons, two pedreros (swivel guns) and a great stock of arms and
ammunition were captured. The captured pieces served to reenforce the
artillery of the forts of La Punta and Morro.

D. Diego de Villalba y Toledo, Knight of the Order of Alcantara, became
the successor of Governor Luna on the twenty-eighth of September, 1647.
His assistant deputy was the Licentiate Francisco de Molina. A great
calamity befell the island in the second year of his administration. A
terrible epidemic broke out in the spring of 1649; the documents and
chronicles of the period give hardly any details about the origin and
the character of the disease, but it was most likely a putrid fever
imported from the Indian population of Mexico and Cartagena by barges
that had come from those places. The people who were attacked by it
succumbed within three days, and it was estimated that in the course of
five months one third of the population died.

Among those who died as victims of the