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, besides paying a fine of 50 pesos.

These are the only cases on record.  Only the walls of the Inquisition building, could they speak, could reveal what passed within them from the time of Manso’s arrival in 1520 to the end of the sixteenth century, when the West Indian Superior Tribunal was transferred to Cartagena, and a special subordinate judge only was left in San Juan.  Bishop Rodrigo de Bastidas, who visited San Juan on a Government commission in 1533, perceiving the abuses that were committed in the inquisitor’s name, proposed the abolition of the Holy Office; but the odious institution continued to exist till 1813, when the extraordinary Cortes of Cadiz removed, for a time, this blot on Spanish history.  The decree is dated February 22d, and accompanied by a manifesto which is an instructive historical document in itself.  It shows that the Cortes dared not attempt the suppression of the dreaded Tribunal without first convincing the people of the disconnection of the measure with the religious question, and justifying it as one necessary for the public weal.