with a large red
cross on them, and figures of devils and instruments of torture among
the flames of hell. The delinquents, dressed in one of these sacks,
bareheaded and barefooted, were made to do penance, or, if condemned
to be burned, marched to the place of execution. It is said that in
San Juan they were not tied to a stake but enclosed in a hollow
plaster cast, against which the faggots were piled,[80] so that they
were roasted rather than burned to death. The place for burning the
sinners was outside the gate of the fort San Cristobal. Mr. M.F.
Juncos believes that the prisons were in the lower part of the
Dominican Convent, later the territorial audience and now the supreme
court, but Mr. Salvador Brau thinks that they occupied a plot of
ground in the angle formed by Cristo Street and the "Caleta" of San
Juan.

Of Nicolas Ramos, the last Bishop of Puerto Rico, who united the
functions of inquisitor with the duties of the episcopate, Canon
Vargas says: " ... He was very severe, burning and punishing, _as was
his duty_, some of the people whose cases came before him ..."

It seems that the records of the Inquisition in this island were
destroyed and the traditions of its doings suppressed, because nothing
is said regarding them by the native commentators on the island's
history. Only the names of a few of the leading men who came in
contact with the Tribunal have come down to us. Licentiate Sancho
Velasquez, who was accused of speaking against the faith and eating
meat in Lent, appears to have been Manso's first victim, since he died
in a dungeon. A clergyman named Juan Carecras was sent to Spain at the
disposition of the general, for the crime of practising surgery. In
the same year (1536) we find the treasurer, Blas de Villasante, in an
Inquisition dungeon, because, though married in Spain, he cohabited
with a native woman--an offense too common at that time not to leave
room for suspicion that the treasurer must have made himself obnoxious
to the Holy Office in some other way. In 1537, a judge auditor was
sent from the Espanola, but the parties whose accounts were to be
audited contrived to have him arrested by the officers of the
Inquisition on the day of his arrival. Doctor Juan Blazquez, having
attempted to correct some abuses committed by the Admiral's employees
in connivance with the Inquisition agents, suffered forty days'
imprisonment, and was condemned to hear a mass standing erect all the
time, bes