Before the end of 1654 two fleets sailed on their several missions. The one, under Blake, entered the Mediterranean, where he was most hospitably received by the Governors of the Spanish ports and by the officials of the Grand Duke of Tuscany at Leghorn. He ransomed a number of English captives at Algiers, but the Bey of Tunis, some of whose subjects had recently been sold for galley-slaves to the Knights of Malta by an English scoundrel, was naturally less compliant. Blake destroyed nine of his vessels at Porto Farina, but Tunis itself was inaccessible, and he was unable to recover a single English slave from that quarter. Penn sailed for Barbados with some 2,500 soldiers on board under Venables. Both in Barbados and in other English islands reinforcements were shipped, and with this ill-compounded force a landing was effected in Hispaniola. The attempt to seize on the city of San Domingo failed, and the expedition sailed for Jamaica, at that time little more than a desert island, and established itself in possession. Some years passed before the colony became self-supporting, but Oliver was unremitting in his resolution not only to increase the numbers of the first military settlers, but to supply them with all things necessary for the foundation of homes in the wilderness. It was annoying that the first operations in the Spanish West Indies had opened with a check, but it was doubtless fortunate that the new English colony was not built up on Spanish foundations. The soldiers who, on their march towards San Domingo, pelted with oranges an image of the Virgin which they had torn down from the walls of a deserted monastery, would hardly have been at their best in the midst of a Roman Catholic population.