* * * *

The first news of the wonderful achievements of Cortez in Mexico
reached San Juan in 1520, and stirred the old adventurer Ponce to
renewed action. On February 10, 1521, he wrote to the emperor: "I
discovered Florida and some other small islands at my own expense, and
now I am going to settle them with plenty of men and two ships, and I
am going to explore the coast, to see if it compares with the lands
(Cuba) discovered by Velasquez. I will leave here in four or five
days, and beg your Majesty to favor me, so that I may be enabled to
carry out this great enterprise."

Accordingly, he left the port of Aguada on the 26th of the same month
with two ships, well provided with all that was necessary for
conquest.

But the captain's star of fortune was waning. He had a stormy passage,
and when he and his men landed they met with such fierce resistance
from the natives that after several encounters and the loss of many
men, Ponce himself being seriously wounded, they were forced to
reembark. Feeling that his end was approaching, the captain did not
return to San Juan, but sought a refuge in Puerto Principe, where he
died.

One of his ships found its way to Vera Cruz, where its stores of arms
and ammunition came as a welcome accession to those of Cortez.

The emperor bestowed the father's title of Adelantado of Florida and
Bemini on his son, and the remains of the intrepid adventurer, who had
found death where he had hoped to find perennial youth, rested in
Cuban soil till his grandchildren had them transferred to this island
and buried in the Dominican convent.

A statue was erected to his memory in 1882. It stands in the plaza of
San Jose in the capital and was cast from the brass cannon left behind
by the English after the siege of 1797.

CHAPTER XII

INCURSIONS OF FUGITIVE BORIQUEN INDIANS AND CARIBS

1530-1582

The conquest of Boriquen was far from being completed with the death
of Guaybana.

The panic which the fall of a chief always produces among savages
prevented, for the moment, all organized resistance on the part of
Guaybana's followers, but _they_ did not constitute the whole
population of the island. Their submission gave the Spaniards the
dominion over that part of it watered by the Culebrinas and the
Anasco, and over the northeastern district in which Ponce had laid the
foundations of his first settlement. The inhabitants of the southern
and eastern parts of th