The first news of the wonderful achievements of Cortez in Mexico reached San Juan in 1520, and stirred the old adventurer Ponce to renewed action. On February 10, 1521, he wrote to the emperor: "I discovered Florida and some other small islands at my own expense, and now I am going to settle them with plenty of men and two ships, and I am going to explore the coast, to see if it compares with the lands (Cuba) discovered by Velasquez. I will leave here in four or five days, and beg your Majesty to favor me, so that I may be enabled to carry out this great enterprise." Accordingly, he left the port of Aguáda on the 26th of the same month with two ships, well provided with all that was necessary for conquest. But the captain's star of fortune was waning. He had a stormy passage, and when he and his men landed they met with such fierce resistance from the natives that after several encounters and the loss of many men, Ponce himself being seriously wounded, they were forced to reembark. Feeling that his end was approaching, the captain did not return to San Juan, but sought a refuge in Puerto Principe, where he died. One of his ships found its way to Vera Cruz, where its stores of arms and ammunition came as a welcome accession to those of Cortez. The emperor bestowed the father's title of Adelantado of Florida and Bemini on his son, and the remains of the intrepid adventurer, who had found death where he had hoped to find perennial youth, rested in Cuban soil till his grandchildren had them transferred to this island and buried in the Dominican convent. A statue was erected to his memory in 1882. It stands in the plaza of San José in the capital and was cast from the brass cannon left behind by the English after the siege of 1797. CHAPTER XII INCURSIONS OF FUGITIVE BORIQUÉN INDIANS AND CARIBS 1530-1582 The conquest of Boriquén was far from being completed with the death of Guaybána. The panic which the fall of a chief always produces among savages prevented, for the moment, all organized resistance on the part of Guaybána's followers, but _they_ did not constitute the whole population of the island. Their submission gave the Spaniards the dominion over that part of it watered by the Culebrinas and the Añasco, and over the northeastern district in which Ponce had laid the foundations of his first settlement. The inhabitants of the southern and eastern parts of the island, with those of the adjacent smaller islands, were still unsubdued and remained so for years to come. Their caciques were probably as well informed of the character of the newcomers and of their doings in la Española as was the first Guaybána's mother, and they wisely kept aloof so long as their territories were not invaded.