The San Blas Indians who inhabited this country east of Porto Bello, are a peculiar and interesting people. This was the region first occupied by Balboa and his Spanish companions. They found here a pretty dense population of Indians, Carib in language and probably in descent. Their habits were agricultural and their character rather warlike. They were thoroughly subjugated and were worked by the Spaniards under their apartamiento system. Las Casas states that the governor, Pedro Arias, during his governorship of some twenty years, caused the death of three million Indians in the present state of Panama. I have no doubt that such a figure is a very great exaggeration, but it shows what a very good old Spanish priest thought of the destruction of Indian life due to the cruelties of the conquistador. Fifty years later when Sir Francis Drake appeared upon the scene, this Indian population had almost disappeared. Sir Francis Drake, in 1572, secreted his three ships in one of the sheltered and well concealed bays among the San Blas Islands, and marched his one hundred Englishmen through all parts of the present San Blas country. His narrative shows that the Indian population was very much less than that described sixty years before by Balboa, marching through the same country. They had been treated so cruelly by the Spaniards that they thoroughly hated them. As they knew that the English were fighting the Spaniards, they were always ready to help the English and give information. The governor of Panama, all through the colonial period, was constantly trying to overrun this country, and though at various times forts were built in many localities, and these forts garrisoned for a considerable length of time, the country was never conquered, and the Indians after their original conquest by Balboa never recognized the authority of the Spaniards. They early adopted the policy of not allowing, under any pretext whatever, a white man to come into their country. This law they have enforced up to the present time, and still enforce it. Many white men have lost their lives in trying to explore the interior of the San Blas country.