The dangers that beset the development of Cuba were rapidly multiplying instead of diminishing. Frequent change of administration was not calculated to insure efficiency and stability in the management of the island's affairs. Enterprises begun under one governor were interrupted under the next. Sometimes the original plan was essentially changed and entirely abandoned. A striking example of this sad state of affairs was furnished during the third decade of the seventeenth century. Don Francisco Venegas was inaugurated as governor on the fourteenth of August, 1620. He had been charged with the organization of a war fleet for the protection of the coast from invasions by pirates and freebooters. For that purpose he had brought with him some vessels. They came at an opportune moment for British and Dutch hookers had been roving in West Indian waters. The vessels of the Cuban armadilla under Vazquez de Montiel defeated these intruders at the Island of Tortuga, captured three of them and put their crews to the sword. But joy over this victory was offset by the epidemic of malignant fever which broke out and raged among the population. Another great loss to Spain was occasioned by the hurricane which in the following year sank on the reefs of Los Martires several vessels of the fleet that had been sent by Marquis de Cadreyta, D. Lope Diaz Armendiarez, and were returning to Spain with great riches. Governor Venegas had in obedience to instructions from his government armed an esquadron, for the maintenance of which he had imposed upon the people a special tax. But on his death, on the eighteenth of April, 1624, it was found that the work on the fleet was far from complete, and in spite of the constant menace of invasion by pirates, nothing was heard of a resumption of the task during the governorship of his successors. The political governor who temporarily assumed the reigns of the administration was D. Damian Velasquez de Contreras, assisted by Juan Esquiro Saavedra as military governor. During their interimistic rule a prison was built and a new monastery established. The successor nominated in the place of Venegas in the year 1624 was the Governor of Cartagena, Don Garcia Giron, who, however, resigned on the twentieth of July of the same year. During the interim occasioned by his resignation the names of Esquival Aranda and de Riva-Martiz are mentioned in connection with the management of the island's affairs. There finally arrived from Spain D. Lorenzo de Cabrera, a native of Ubeda, corregido of Cadiz, field-marshal and Knight of the Order of Santiago. He was duly installed in his office on the sixteenth of September, 1626. In the command of the Morro Esquival was replaced by Captain Cristobal de Arranda and in the government of Santiago Rodrigo de Velasco was succeeded by Captain D. Pedro de Fonseca.