In 1669 Piedrahita returned to America, and after his consecration entered upon the exercise of his functions as bishop of Santa Marta. Here he displayed many of the virtues of the primitive Christian teacher, visited and taught the Indians, distributed his income among the poor and lived in poverty. His charitable gifts left him hardly means for decent clothing. In 1676 he was promoted to the see of Panama, but before he left Santa Marta the town was taken by pirates, who, seeing the meanness of the bishop’s dress, concluded that by his apparently miserly habits he must have large accumulations concealed. The pirates, therefore, took the bishop and tortured him in order to make him reveal the hiding-place of his treasures; unsuccessful in this, they carried him off and brought him before the distinguished and courteous pirate Morgan, who received him with marked consideration, gave him a pontifical robe stolen at Panama, and caused him to be conducted to his new diocese. Here Bishop Piedrahita continued for twelve years the devoted life he had led in Santa Marta, and died at the age of sixty-four. The first part of his _Historia_ was published in Amsterdam the year of his death, 1688. According to Vergara, the second part was lost after the death of the author, since there was no one to care for its publication.[145] [Sidenote: Piedrahita’s style] With respect to his style, Piedrahita represents a considerable advance over the prose writers of South America who preceded him. He wrote clearly in what might not improperly be called modern Spanish. He had not, however, freed himself from the custom of his time, or the practice of writing long and irrelevant introductions to chapters or sections, the custom that induced the chronicler to begin his narrative with the creation of the world. V [Sidenote: Padre Pedro Claver] [Sidenote: Slave-trade at Cartagena] A striking subject for a biography was furnished by the life of Padre Pedro Claver, who was born in Cataluña in 1585 and died at Cartagena in 1654. He became a member of the Society of Jesus, entering upon his novitiate in 1602. For his work among the slaves at Cartagena he became known as the “Apostle to the Negroes.” Cartagena in the seventeenth century had a much larger population than at present, and, in relation to South America, was a much more important port; it was the port at which were landed most of the ships engaged in the African slave-trade. The ships arrived overcrowded, with their human freight in an indescribable condition. The victims of the slave-trader’s greed and inhumanity, in the long voyage in the tropics, had suffered untold misery from an insufficient supply of food, air and water, and at the end of the voyage the living, the moribund, and the dead were found packed in a mass of filth more foul than anything which the fancy can picture.