United States or Benin ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


"Oi knows you will, Loiza, and oi bain't feared as ye'll be jealous if so be as ye've children o' your own. Oi shan't love 'em a bit the less coss oi loves little Polly. She be just the image o' what moi sister Jane was when she war a little thing and oi used to take care o' her. Mother she didn't belong to this village, and the rough ways of the men and the drink frightened her.

On the pedestal is the inscription: Loiza. Along the borders of the river which bears this name there settled, about the year 1514, Pedro Mexia, Sancho Arángo, Francisco Quinaós, Pedro Lopez, and some other Spaniards, with their respective Indian laborers.

Starting at five every morning from his cottage with Polly perched on his shoulder he tramped down to the town, leaving her there before going to work, and calling for her in the evening. A year later he married, and the village supposed that Polly would now be left behind. But they were mistaken. When he became engaged he had said: "Now, Loiza, there's one point as oi wish settled.

In September of the following year there were landings of Englishmen near Loiza and in the neighborhood of San German, of which we know only that they were stoutly opposed; and we learn from an official document that there was another landing at Boca Chica on the south coast in 1743, when the English were once more obliged to reembark with the loss of a pilot-boat.

The river Loiza also contains gold, but, judging from the traces of diggings still here and there visible along the beds of the Mavilla, the Sibúco, the Congo, the Rio Negro, and Carozal, in the north, it would seem that these rivers and their affluents produced the coveted metal in largest quantities.

Loiza, which had been resettled, was destroyed for the second time in 1582, and a year or so later the Caribs made a night attack on Aguáda, where they destroyed the Franciscan convent and killed 3 monks. With the end of the sixteenth and the commencement of the seventeenth centuries the West Indian archipelago became the theater of French and English maritime enterprise.

Thus, one by one, all the original settlements disappeared. Guánica, Sotomayor, Daguáo, Loiza, had been swept away by the Indians. San German fell the victim of the Spanish monarch's war with his neighbor. The only remaining settlement, the capital, was soon to be on the point of being sacrificed in the same way.

Very few of them escaped. The next attack was in the locality now constituting the municipal district of Loiza. This place was settled by several Spaniards, among them Juan Mexia, a man said to have been of herculean strength and great courage.