Friday, I have watched with care over the morals and the conduct of my subjects, I have taken measures everywhere to prevent all profligate intercourse between the sexes";[20] thus nobly trying to recommend himself to the good Bishop, who had always believed in their capacity for temporal and spiritual elevation. He retired to a place named Boya, a dozen leagues from the capital. All the Indians who could prove their descent from the original inhabitants of the island were allowed to follow him. A few of them still remained in 1750; their number was only four thousand when Dom Henri led them away from Spanish rule to die out undisturbed.[21] After its passionate and blood-thirsty life, the colony was sinking to sleep, not from satiety nor exhaustion, for the same race was holding its orgies in other countries, but from inability to gather fuel for its excesses. A long list of insignificant governors is the history of the island for another century. They did nothing to improve the condition of the inhabitants, whose distress was sometimes severe; but they continued to embellish the capital, which Oviedo described to Charles V. as rivalling in solidity and beauty any city in Spain. He wrote in 1538, and possessed a beautiful residence in the plain of St. John. The private houses were built substantially, in several stories, of stone, embowered in charming gardens; the public edifices, including the cathedral, displayed all the strength and rich ornamentation which had been common for a hundred years in the Spanish cities. 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.