A year or two afterward, encouraged by Da Souza’s success, Duarte Coelho set out with a carefully selected and more numerous company and founded the colony of Pernambuco. Here, as in the south, the country back of the coast was fertile and easily accessible and there was little trouble with the Indians. Sugar planting proved wonderfully profitable, Coelho turned out to be a good manager, and so politic was he in the relations with the mother country that within a few years the colony had become self-supporting and, like the other, possessed of all the elements of permanence and prosperity. Soon afterward São Salvador da Bahia was established. With such a beginning, it was not long before the Portuguese began flocking to Brazil as the Spaniards had to the Caribbean. V In the meanwhile in this region of the Caribbean much progress had been made. Towns had been built, not only in Española, but in Cuba, Jamaica, Porto Rico and in Darien and other places on the Isthmus, landed estates (_repartimientos_) had been apportioned, as rewards for services, among such as desired to cultivate them, mining rights had been allotted. These plantations and the mines were being worked by natives impressed into slavery, some of the communities had become large and thriving, in Spain a Council of the Indies and in the islands local governmental tribunals (_Real Audiencias_) had been created. Whole fleets of ships plied back and forth across the Atlantic, those setting out from Spain laden with implements of agriculture and war, clothes, and fresh companies of adventurers, coming over as colonists, or to continue the work of conquest and the search for treasure; those returning, laden with the products of the tropics and with gold and precious stones. Emeralds had been found near the coast of Colombia, and Balboa had discovered in the Gulf of San Miguel—that famous group of islands where, as Mozans tells us, “pearls were so common that the natives used them for adorning the paddles of their canoes”—pearls “as large as filberts and of exceeding beauty of form and luster,” many of which, “found in the same fisheries a short time subsequently, at once took place among the largest and most perfect of the world’s gems.”