CHAP, i.] WEST INDIES. 141 



in a very distant and wholly uncultivated part of the 

 country. || It is certain that the town of Seville was 

 not suffered to fall gradually to decay; but was depo- 

 pulated while it was yet in an unfinished state, many 

 years before the conquest of the island by the Eng- 

 lish.* Neither (if this tradition of its catastrophe 

 were true) could a just account be expected from the 

 descendants of men, who had deservedly brought de- 

 struction on themselves ; since the recital of their 

 fate would again have brought the deeds also of their 

 ancestors to remembrance, and they were deeds of 

 darkness, too mournful to contemplate ; too dreadful 

 to be told ! 



Both ancient tradition, and recent discoveries, give 

 too much room to believe, that the work of destruo 

 tion proceeded no less rapidly in this island, after Es- 

 quivel's death, than in Hispaniola; for to this day 



j| It is remarkable, however, that the whole island of" Hispaniola was 

 nearly destroyed by ants about the same period. In 1519, and the two 

 succeeding years, as Oviedo relates, these insefts over-ran that island 

 like an Egyptian plague ; devouring all the roots and plants of the earth, 

 so that the country was nearly depopulated. In our own times, the island 

 of Grenada has suffered prodigiously from the same cause, of which some 

 account will hereafter be 



* See the accounts of Jamaica transmitted to Cromwell by general Ve- 

 nables, preserved in Thuiloe's State Papers, vol. iii. p. 545, wherein he 

 speaks of Sevilje as a town that had existed in tuxes past. And Sloane 

 relates that when the English took the island, the ruins of this city were 

 overgrown with wood, and turned black with a;e. He saw timber-trees 

 growing within the walls of the cathedral, upwards of sixty feet in height. 



me's Hist. Jamaica, vol. i. p. 66. 



