So slumbered on, only awakening to an occasional gentle revolt against their priests, or the governor sent to them from the Spanish Court, the good Spaniards of Trinidad; till the peace of 1783 woke them up, and they found themselves suddenly in a new, and an unpleasantly lively, world.

Rodney’s victories had crippled Spain utterly; and crippled, too, the French West Indian islands, though not France itself:  but the shrewd eye of a M. Rome de St. Laurent had already seen in Trinidad a mine of wealth, which might set up again, not the Spanish West Indians merely, but those of the French West Indians who had exhausted, as they fancied, by bad cultivation, the soils of Guadaloupe, Martinique, and St. Lucia.  He laid before the Intendant at Caraccas, on whom Trinidad then depended, a scheme of colonisation, which was accepted, and carried out in 1783, by a man who, as far as I can discover, possessed in a pre-eminent degree that instinct of ruling justly, wisely, gently, and firmly, which is just as rare in this age as it was under the ancien regime.  Don Josef Maria Chacon was his name,—­a man, it would seem, like poor Kaiser Joseph of Austria, born before his time.  Among his many honourable deeds, let this one at least be remembered; that he turned out of Trinidad, the last Inquisitor who ever entered it.

Foreigners, who must be Roman Catholics (though on this point Chacon was as liberal as public opinion allowed him to be), were invited to settle on grants of Crown land.  Each white person of either sex was to have some thirty-two acres, and half that quantity for every slave that he should bring.  Free people of colour were to have half the quantity; and a long list of conditions was annexed, which, considering that they were tainted with the original sin of slave-holding, seem wise and just enough.  Two articles especially prevented, as far as possible, absenteeism.  Settlers who retired from the island might take away their property; but they must pay ten per cent on all which they had accumulated; and their lands reverted to the Crown.  Similarly, if the heirs of a deceased settler should not reside in the colony, fifteen per cent was to be levied on the inheritance.  Well had it been for every West Indian island, British or other, if similar laws had been in force in them for the last hundred years.

So into Trinidad poured, for good and evil, a mixed population, principally French, to the number of some 12,000; till within a year or two the island was Spanish only in name.  The old Spaniards, who held, many of them, large sheets of the forests which they had never cleared, had to give them up, with grumblings and heart-burnings, to the newcomers.  The boundaries of these lands were uncertain.  The island had never been surveyed:  and no wonder.  The survey has been only completed during the last few years; and it is a mystery, to the non-scientific eye, how it has ever got done.