from the name of the province, built by the same Velasco, thirty miles from Santiago, which surpasses all other towns of the island by good air, fertile soil and beautiful plains; it is in the center of the island, but merchandise is brought from the sea by the river Caute, which is opposite. Among the treasures of this island are certain stones of divers size, but all perfectly round, so they could serve as cannon balls; they are said to be so numerous on the shores of the river bearing the name of the town, that they seem to have rained from the sky. Oniedo says they are found in a marshy valley almost midway between this city and Santiago.
"Puerto de Principe ranks fourth; town and harbor, much esteemed by mariners, are to the north of the island, forty leagues from Santiago northwest. Not far are springs of bitumen, which Monardes mentions (and which the Indians use as remedy for chills). I believe they are the naptha of the ancients.
"Santi Spiritus of forty to fifty houses is more a village than a town and its harbor is good only for barges and sloops. But vessels stop there on their way from Santiago, Bayamo and Puerto Principe to Havana.
"Trinite-Trinidad—once populated by Indians, now almost deserted, has an inconvenient harbor and was the scene of some shipwrecks.
"Havana receives the sea by a narrow but deep inlet, enlarging into a wide bay, with coasts at first diverging and then meeting, capable of holding a thousand vessels as if in a safe bosom. All the Spanish fleets coming from the meridional continent, New Spain and the islands, loaded with a variety of merchandise and an abundance of gold and silver, stop there to take on water and necessary victuals, and when a sufficient number has collected, in September or later, they go out together or in two fleets through the straits of Bahama towards Spain: The city has besides the garrison (the number of which is uncertain, although the king sends the pay for a thousand soldiers and more) three hundred Spanish families, some Portuguese and a large number of slaves. The governor of the island and the other royal officers reside there. It surpasses not only the other cities of the island, but almost all of America by the size and safety of her port, her wealth and her commerce. The neighboring forests furnish a great abundance of excellent woods, which they use to build their ships, which is a very great convenience. They have also tried to work some copper mines not far from the town; but without success, either because the veins failed, or the laborers were too ignorant or the expense was greater than the profit."
Many of the writers of these books of travel dwell at length upon the wealth of precious woods found on the island. One of them makes a list which contains the following: l'acana, called vegetable iron, cedar, majagna (mahogany) frijolillo, a wood with shaded veins, granadillo, a wood light purple in color, ebony, yew and many others. Wood was so plentiful that it was even used instead of metal in machinery. Foreigners visiting the first sugar refinery in Cuba, which was in 1532 founded by Brigadier Gonzales de Velosa, associated with the veedor Cristobal de Tapia and his brother, found the machines made of hard wood. The variety of fruits is also commented upon by the travelers that visited Cuba in the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century. They mention among the fruit trees abundant in Cuba the cocoa trees of Los Remedios, the ubiquitous banana, the orange, the West India chestnut, the fruit-bearing palms, guesima, garoubier, yaya and others.
François Coréal's "Relation des Voyages aux Indes Occidentales" also contains some interesting data and goes into the causes of the decline of Spanish power in the West Indies. Coréal, who seems to be of Spanish origin or at least citizenship, says among other things:
"There grows in Porto Rico a guiac tree, the wood of which was considered a sovereign remedy against small-pox. Indians sometimes told me, were it but for that wood, one should be glad that America was discovered. These Indians often asked me whether there are any drugs against small pox growing in Europe; and when I told them that many excellent antivenereal remedies came from the West Indies, they remarked with some common sense and not without a touch of irony, that God had much kindness for the Castellanos, having given them their gold, their wives and even their guiac."
In another part of the very readable work he says:
"It is certain the Spaniards owe the rapidity of their conquest of America to the sudden (and almost miraculous) fear with which the Indians were seized at the approach of the new enemy. It seems that without it we would have had much more trouble; but artillery was unknown to these Americans, so was military discipline, which we understood better than they, so they with extraordinary rapidity cleared for us the roads to the South Sea and on to Chili and the Straits of Magellan. This facility of our conquest made for carelessness, which from that time through the luxury and idleness of our people increased, until it became almost inconceivable. As our people rather scorned the Indians and considered them almost a sort of intermediary creature between man and beast, it was believed that lands so easily conquered could not be as easily lost; and there was some reason for this belief, for at that time Spain had no rival on the sea, there was nothing to fear from the Indians themselves, who could not hold out against us conquerors. Later we had even less fear, for the Spanish monarchy became a formidable power to all Europe and when it ceased to be so, interests and politics had so changed that one was obliged to leave us in peaceful ownership of a possession which could have been taken from us as easily as we had conquered it.
"This is according to my opinion the main cause of the decline of Spanish power in America. There are others which are no less real. As soon as one has set foot in the New World, you are confronted with an endless lot of plunderers and marauders, who call themselves soldiers, ravage the beautiful country, pillage the treasures of the Indians, torture the inhabitants and rob them of their property and freedom, under a thousand pretences unworthy of Christianity and of Spanish generosity. So that several of these nations which at the beginning favored the Spaniards, became in time their most mortal enemies. These plunderers, I cannot call them anything else, ruined at the outset the authority of the King and by their wickedness hindered all the good that one could have expected from the friendship of native residents. Royal authority being poorly upheld by these bad subjects of the King, and the facile abundance which they had found, having plunged them into all sorts of vice, their pride made them look upon the Indians as their slaves and even as property acquired by the sword, which succeeded in spoiling our position with the natives. It is quite certain that these people would not wish for more than to throw off the yoke of servitude under which they sigh to-day as did their ancestors before them."
The author of the book printed by Gervais Glouzier, "Relation de ce qui s'est passé dans les îles et la Terra Firma de l'Amérique pendant la dernière guerre avec l'Angleterre, etc." also dwells upon the policy pursued by certain Spanish adventurers and officials towards the natives of the islands:
"The Spaniards pretended to have recognized the natives of these islands as being anthropophagous, and asked the king of Castile permission to capture them, i.e., to take and make them slaves (which they did elsewhere without permission), so they did not approach the Antilles except armed, and in the character of enemies; and the Indians who inhabited them prepared to make upon them the most cruel war, as soon as they saw vessels off their coasts, be it openly or from ambush in the woods, or by surprise attacks, when the strangers wanted to take water or leave the vessels, which irritated these people and many a Spaniard regretted having obliged them to go to such extremities.
"Things of this kind happened in the Antilles during the fifteenth century when the Spaniards were busy making other discoveries, wherever gold or silver attracted them and for the conservation of which and the exploitation of mines they could not furnish a sufficient number of men. They had no idea of settling down to cultivate the soil of these lands, and waiting only to procure the convenience of taking on water or leaving their invalids to recuperate on St. Christopher island, they made peace with the Indians who inhabited this island, and continued to treat as enemies all those of other islands.
"When at the end of this century and the beginning of the sixteenth, the English and French sailed on the seas of America, the first with more considerable forces like those conducted by Drake, Walter Raleigh, Kenits and others, and the French with less armaments, the voyages of the ones and the others in those little frequented climates made some other compatriots conceive the idea of establishing themselves on American soil and found colonies, which would furnish subsistence to a considerable number of their nation and serve as retreat to those vessels