CHAPTER XI.
THE PROVINCE OF VERA CRUZ.
1683-1803.
Extent of the City of Vera Cruz — Entrepôt of Commerce — Character OF the Population — Prosperity of the People — Its Inhabitants — Its Trade — Scarcity of Water — The Black-vomit — The Port of Vera Cruz — The Fortress of San Juan de Ulúa — Its Garrison — The Works Cost Nearly Forty Millions of Pesos — Cessation of Buccaneering Raids — The Towns of Córdoba, Jalapa, and Orizaba.
There are few records as to the condition of the Province of Vera Cruz for some twenty or thirty years after the sack of its capital. About 1730 the city contained perhaps three thousand Spaniards, mulattoes, and negroes, apart from its garrison; the remainder of its heterogeneous population including people from all the western nations of Europe. The city was about one sixth of a league in length and half that distance in width. Most of the inhabitants were mulattoes; some of them being wealthy, for money was readily made at this entrepôt of commerce, and even the negro slaves could accumulate enough to purchase their freedom.
In the middle of the sixteenth century Vera Cruz was but an insignificant port, serving as a landing-place for the bands of adventurers who came to the shores of New Spain. At the opening of the nineteenth century it was the commercial emporium of a territory whose vast resources, little developed as they are even to this day, had excited the envy of the world. At the latter date its population was estimated at over thirty-five thousand, of whom about
