There were several well-endowed convents, and a fine
hospital. When Sir Francis Drake took possession of San Domingo in
1586, he attempted to induce the inhabitants, who had fled into the
country, to pay an enormous ransom for their city, by threatening to
destroy a number of fine houses every day till it was paid. He
undertook the task, but found that his soldiers were scarcely able to
demolish more than one a day, and he eventually left the city not
materially damaged.
Antonio Herrera, in his "Description of the West Indies," gives the
number of inhabitants of the city in 1530 as six hundred, and says
that there were fourteen thousand Castilians, many of them nobles, who
carried on the different interests of the colony. He has a list of
seventeen towns, with brief descriptions of them.
It appears by this that the island had speedily recovered from the ill
reports of the early emigrants, many of whom returned to Spain broken
in purse and person, with excesses of passion and climate chronicled
in their livid faces[22]. There was a period when everybody who could
get away from the colony left it in disgust, and with the expectation
that it would soon become extinct. It was to prevent such a
catastrophe, which would have effectually terminated the explorations
of Columbus, that he proposed to the Government, in 1496, to commute
the punishments of all criminals and large debtors who were at the
time in prison to a perpetual banishment to the island, persons
convicted of treason or heresy being alone excepted.
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