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High upon a mountain in the region of Palo Blanco with a sheer hillside dropping off a few thousand feet to a river there is an old shaft, now nothing but a depression in the peak. And around that depression is a small quantity of rock which is excellent honeycomb quartz. This rock is bejeweled with flecks of pure gold, and though there is not enough of the substance present to allow a commercial realization, the fact remains that the Spaniards had actually done rock mining three centuries or more ago.
It is very difficult to prospect in Puerto Rico. The entire island is a mass of mountains, rugged and sharp,
and the underbrush outside the confines of the fields is almost impenetrable. And it is obvious that a little ledge of rock only a few feet wide is easier seen when not covered, and almost impossible to see when shrouded by dense tropical vegetation. As the island was not cultivated to any extent at the time of Columbus, it is easy to see that in vein mining, the conquistadors had a colossal task before them.
However, gold mining was almost all they knew, for the customs of the island, most of them still unchanged through four centuries, bear ample evidence of their ignorance of agriculture and industry.
Having colonized the West Indies, Spain was hard put to keep them colonized. Of the two types of men
who rallied to the islands, only one showed any tendency to remain and finish the task before them. This
latter type was, of course, the priest, filled with religious zeal, glorying in the numbers of helpless
heathens whose souls he could save. The other type was the true conquistador who thirsted for gold and
adventure and who used the natives as human machines to perform the tasks set for them. The majority of
Spaniards were of the conquistador variety, and when they landed, where they had expected to find heaps
of glittering gold awaiting them on the waterfront, they found only lowering mountains in a topsy-turvy
country which would divulge its riches only after months, even years, of toil had been spent upon them.
Perhaps because of their pasts in Spain, the conquistadors who landed in Puerto Rico strode into the task of mining their gold. But before much headway could be made with their mines, two things happened. Ponce de Leon arrived as the first governor of the island, and Pizarro whipped the Incas into furnishing golden cargoes for his galleons.
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Upon hearing the story of Pizarro, the Spaniards in Puerto Rico snatched up their plumed hats, buckled on their swords, and began to drum up transportation to the mainland. But Ponce de Leon, cantankerous no doubt over his failure to find his Fountain of Youth, was determined that his colony would remain populated. And so, before even a handful of his gentlemen could put to sea, the governor ordered the remainder to stay. He caused a new gibbet to be erected and his executioner polished up his ax, and the conquistadors thought better of their plans and stayed.
Before many years, most of the placer gold had been exploited, the lode gold had been found to be meager, and it was necessary that, to live, these fighting gentlemen of old Castile must turn their Toledo blades into machetes in an effort to wrest their riches from agriculture.
But they evidently knew vastly more about the art of spitting heathens than they did about cutting their crops. They fell back upon the unreliable trial and error method, and the Puerto Rican brand of agriculture, even as it is accomplished today, came into being.
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