FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 19: Puerto Rico y su Historia, p. 189.]
CHAPTER VII
NUMBER OF ABORIGINAL INHABITANTS AND SECOND DISTRIBUTION OF INDIANS
1511-1515
Friar Bartolome de Las Casas, in his Relation of the Indies, says with
reference to this island, that when the Spaniards under the orders of
Juan Ceron landed here in 1509, it was as full of people as a beehive
is full of bees and as beautiful and fertile as an orchard. This
simile and some probably incorrect data from the Geography of Bayaeete
led Friar Inigo Abbad to estimate the number of aboriginal inhabitants
at the time of the discovery at 600,000, a number for which there is
no warrant in any of the writings of the Spanish chroniclers, and
which Acosto, Brau, and Stahl, the best authorities on matters of
Puerto Rican history, reject as extremely exaggerated.
Mr. Brau gives some good reasons for reducing the number to about
16,000, though it seems to us that since little or nothing was known
of the island, except that part of it in which the events related in
the preceding chapters took place, any reasoning regarding the
population of the whole island, based upon a knowledge of a part of
it, is liable to error. Ponce's conquest was limited to the northern
and western littoral; the interior with the southern and eastern
districts were not settled by the Spaniards till some years after the
death of Guaybana; and it seems likely that there were caciques in
those parts who, by reason of the distance or other impediments, took
no part in the uprising against the Spaniards.
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