But the prelate pleaded in vain.

Charles V, occupied in opposing the French king’s five armies, could not be expected to give much attention to the affairs of an insignificant island in a remote corner of his vast dominions.  Puerto Rico was left to take care of itself, and San German’s last hour struck on Palm Sunday, 1554, when 3 French ships entered the port of Guadianilla, landed a detachment of men who penetrated a league inland, plundering and destroying whatever they could.  From that day San German, the settlement founded by Miguel del Toro in 1512, disappeared from the face of the land.

The capital remained.  No doubt it owed its preservation from French attacks to the presence of a battery and some pieces of artillery which, as a result of reiterated petitions, had been provided.  The population also was more numerous.  In 1529 there were 120 houses, some of them of stone.  The cathedral was completed, and a Dominican convent was in course of construction with 25 friars waiting to occupy it.  Thus, one by one, all the original settlements disappeared.  Guanica, Sotomayor, Daguao, Loiza, had been swept away by the Indians.  San German fell the victim of the Spanish monarch’s war with his neighbor.  The only remaining settlement, the capital, was soon to be on the point of being sacrificed in the same way.  The existence of the island seemed to be half-forgotten, its connection with the metropolis half-severed, for the crown officers wrote in 1536 that no ship from the Peninsula had entered its ports for two years.

“Negroes and Indians,” says Abbad, “seeing the small number of Spaniards and their misery, escaped to the mountains of Luquillo and Anasco, whence they descended only to rob their masters.”

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 33:  Castilla and Aragon, Navarro, Valencia, Cataluna, Mallorca, Sicily, and Naples.]

[Footnote 34:  Hista. general de Espana por Don Modesto Lafuente.  Barcelona, 1889.]

CHAPTER XV

SEDENO—­CHANGES IN THE SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT

1534-1555

A slight improvement in the gloomy situation of the people of San Juan took place when, driven by necessity, they began to dedicate themselves to agriculture.  At this time, too (1535), Juan Castellanos, the island’s attorney at the court, returned with his own family and 75 colonists.  Yet scarcely had they had time to settle when they were invited to remigrate by one of Ponce’s old companions.