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.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 31: The West Indian islands were inhabited at the time of
discovery by at least three races of different origin.
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