Herrera says that Jamaica was settled prosperously, because Juan de Esquival having brought the natives to submission _without any effusion of blood_, they laboured in planting cotton, and raising other commodities, which yielded great profit. But Esquival in a very few years died in his office, and was buried in Sevilla Nueva, a town which he had built and destined for the seat of government. There is a dark tradition connected with the destruction of this town, which would make us infer that the mildness of Esquival’s government was not imitated by his successors. The Spanish planters assert that the place was destroyed by a vast army of ants, but the popular tradition still triumphs over this tradition of the planters. It maintains, that the injured and oppressed natives rose in their despair and cut off every one of their tyrants, and laid the place in such utter and awful ruin that it never was rebuilt, but avoided as a spot of horror. The city must have been planned with great magnificence, and laid out in great extent, for Sloane, who visited it in 1688, could discover the traces or remains of a fort, a splendid cathedral and monastery, the one inhabited by Peter Martyr, who was abbot and chief missionary of the island. He found a pavement at two miles distance from the church, an indication of the extent of the place, and also many materials for grand arches and noble buildings that had never been erected. The ruins of this city were now overgrown with wood, and turned black with age. Sloane saw timber trees growing within the walls of the cathedral upwards of sixty feet in height; and General Venables in his dispatches to Cromwell, preserved in Thurlow’s State Papers, vol. iii., speaks of Seville as a town that had existed _in times past_.