The devastations occasioned in the capital, by the terrible earthquake which happened in the night of the twenty-eighth of October of the above year, and the epidemical diseases by which that calamitous event was immediately followed, occasioned a decrease of the population, of from six to eight thousand souls. The enumeration having been accordingly repeated, by the same mode of framing the estimate, that is, by the books of the confessors, in the year 1757, about fifty-four thousand inhabitants were found. As there is, however, reason to suppose that the population of the plains surrounding the capital was included on this occasion also, it does not appear that the result can be employed in a direct way, in making a positive comparison between that state and the present.
This observation applies to another gross computation made in 1781, and in the years immediately following, by which the population of this capital was regulated at sixty thousand eight hundred souls, and the authors of which expressed their persuasion that it might be extended to seventy thousand. It would seem, however, that an error crept into the elementary data of this account; since, by consulting the testimony of the
an excess of twenty-two thousand seven hundred and forty-one individuals, in the lapse of forty-six years, during which there was not any new cause to be assigned for an increase of population, there is every reason to suppose that the fact was exaggerated by Bravo De Casiilla, from whose document this statement is drawn, with the truly politic idea, that on its coming to the knowledge of foreign nations, they would be deterred from fitting out expeditions for the South Seas, which might be attended by losses and disasters to the Spanish colonies, similar to those that accompanied the expeditions undertaken during the preceding century, and at the commencement of the eighteenth.
