As a result of the repeated requests for light-draft vessels, 2 brigantines were constructed in Seville in 1531 and shipped, in sections, on board of a ship belonging to Master Juan de Leon, who arrived in June, 1532.  The crown officers immediately invited all who wished to man the brigantines and make war on the Caribs, offering them as pay half of the product of the sale of the slaves they should make, the other half to be applied to the purchase of provisions.

The brigantines were unfit for service.  In February, 1534, the emperor was informed:  “Of the brigantines which your Majesty sent for the defense of this island only the timber came, and half of that was unfit....  We have built brigantines with the money intended for fortifications.”

Governor Lando wrote about the same time:  “We suffer a thousand injuries from the Caribs of Guadeloupe and Dominica.  They come every year to assault us.  Although the city is so poor, we have spent 4,000 pesos in fitting out an expedition of 130 men against them; but, however much they are punished, the evil will not disappear till your Majesty orders these islands to be settled.”  The expedition referred to sailed under the orders of Joan de Ayucar, and reached Dominica in May, 1534.  Fifteen or 16 villages of about 20 houses each were burned, 103 natives were killed, and 70 prisoners were taken, the majority women and boys.  The Spaniards penetrated a distance of ten leagues into the interior of the island, meeting with little resistance, because the warrior population was absent.  Eight or 10 pirogues and more than 20 canoes were also burned.  With this punishment the fears of the people in San Juan were considerably allayed.

In 1536 Sedeno led an expedition against the Caribs of Trinidad and Bartholome.  Carreno fitted out another in 1539.  He brought a number of slaves for sale, and the crown officers asked permission to brand them on the forehead, “as is done in la Espanola and in Cubagua.”

The Indians returned assault for assault.  Between the years 1564 and 1570 they were specially active along the southern coast of San Juan, so that Governor Francisco Bahamonde Lugo had to take the field against them in person and was wounded in the encounter.  Loiza, which had been resettled, was destroyed for the second time in 1582, and a year or so later the Caribs made a night attack on Aguada, where they destroyed the Franciscan convent and killed 3 monks.

With the end of the sixteenth and the commencement of the seventeenth centuries the West Indian archipelago became the theater of French and English maritime enterprise.  The Carib strongholds were occupied, and by degrees their fierce spirit was subdued, their war dances relinquished, their war canoes destroyed, their traditions forgotten, and the bold savages, once the terror of the West Indian seas, succumbed in their turn to the inexorable law of the survival of the fittest.

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