While the people of Puerto Rico were thus giving proofs of their loyalty to Spain, and sacrificing their lives and property to preserve their poverty-stricken island to the Spanish crown, the other colonies, rich and important, were breaking the bonds that united them to the mother country.

The example of the English colonies had long since awakened among the more enlightened class of creoles on the continent a desire for emancipation, which the events in France on the one hand, and the ill-advised, often cruel measures adopted by the Spanish authorities to quench that aspiration, on the other hand, had only served to make irresistible.  But Puerto Rico did not aspire to emancipation.  It never had been a colony, there was no creole class, and the only indigenous population—­the “jibaros,” the mixed descendants of Indians, negroes, and Spaniards—­were too poor, too illiterate, too ignorant of everything concerning the outside world to look with anything but suspicion upon the invitations of the insurgents of Colombia and Venezuela to join them or imitate their example.  They, nor the great majority of the masses whom Bolivar, San Martin, Hidalgo, and others liberated from an oppressive yoke, cared little for the rights of man.  When the Colombian insurgents landed on the coast of Puerto Rico, to encourage and assist the people to shake off a yoke which did not gall them, they were looked upon by the natives as freebooters of another class who came to plunder them.

On the 20th of December, 1819, an insurgent brigantine and a sloop attempted a landing at Aguadilla.  They were beaten back by a Spanish sergeant at the head of a detachment of twenty men, while a Mr. Domeneck with his servants attended to the artillery in Fort San Carlos, constructed during Castro’s administration.  In February, 1825, some insurgent ships landed fifty marines at night near Point Boriquen, where the lighthouse now is.  They captured the fort by surprise and dismounted the guns, but the people of Aguadilla replaced them on their carriages the next day and offered such energetic resistance to the landing parties that they had to retreat.

Another landing was effected at Patillas in November, 1829.  This port was opened to commerce by royal decree December 30, 1821.  There were several small trading craft in the port at the time of the attack.  They fell a prey to the invaders; but when they landed they were met by the armed inhabitants, and after a sharp fight, in which the Colombians had 8 men killed, they reembarked.

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The beginning of the nineteenth century found Spain deprived of all that beautiful island world which Columbus had laid at the foot of the throne of Ferdinand and Isabel four centuries ago, of all but a part of the “Espanola,” since called Santo Domingo, and of the two Antilles.  Before the first quarter of the century had passed all the continental colonies had broken the bonds that united them to the mother country, and before the twentieth century the last vestiges of the most extensive and the richest colonial empire ever possessed by any nation refused further allegiance, as the logical result of four centuries of political, religious, and financial myopia.