The next plan for getting labor for the fort was disastrous. A contract was made with a trader to provide three hundred negro slaves, by the end of 1572. He did deliver 191 of them in the summer of that year, and later sent the rest but they never got further than Hispaniola. The 191 whom he did deliver were, however, infected with small pox. A number of them died of that plague after their arrival at Havana, and the contagion got abroad in the city with the result that many other slaves and a number of the Spaniards also perished from it. Still, enough of the slaves in that plague-stricken cargo survived to cause the authorities of Havana much embarrassment in feeding and clothing them. Agriculture was not yet receiving the attention which it deserved, and even a hundred or a hundred and fifty more mouths to feed overtaxed the local resources. Requisition was therefore made upon the government of Yucatan to send a sufficient supply of corn and meat to feed the slaves, while the king himself undertook to clothe them. He was led to do this in a way which strikingly indicates the limitations of Philip's mind. To all appeals for clothing for their comfort or for decent appearance's sake, he was deaf. But when it represented to him that they must have clothes in order to be able to attend mass, he at once ordered them to be clad from his royal bounty!
More money was needed, and was raised in various ways. An examiner went about the island, looking into the accounts of public officials. Generally he found that there was something due to the state from them. Of the money thus collected, nearly all, to the amount of nearly four thousand pesos, was devoted to the costs of the fort. Other funds were taken for the purpose, and when there was still a deficit it was actually proposed to sell some of the slaves to pay for the maintenance of the rest. This counsel of despair was not, however, acted upon. Instead, Sancho Pardo Osorio when acting governor, near the end of Menendez's administration, advanced much money from his own purse, trusting to the government to reimburse him. Another draft of four thousand ducats was finally obtained from Mexico, and smaller sums came from Venezuela and Darien. Thus the enterprise dragged on, until the summer of 1573 found the fort still far from finished, the builders of it heavily in debt for labor, materials and maintenance, and the garrison, workmen, and citizens of Havana all profoundly dissatisfied.
Naturally, and inevitably, this state of affairs reflected upon Menendez, and compassed his downfall. He was not merely governor of Cuba. He was Adelantado of Florida, and he gave to Florida his first thought and chief attention. He spent most of his time there, leaving Cuban affairs to be administered by acting governors of his own selection. This was altogether unsatisfactory to the people of Cuba, and especially of Havana. They wanted their governor to live among them, where he would be accessible, and pay much more attention to them and their interests. So they began agitating against him, and demanded a governor who should not be Adelantado of Florida, nor subject to that functionary. They did more than complain. They refused supplies. They would not send to Florida the supplies which Menendez urgently needed for his enterprises there. When the King reprimanded them and bade them do their duty, they replied with surprising defiance that they wanted payment, first, for supplies long ago furnished to the Havana garrison. They also wanted to be relieved of the burden of being compelled to guard or to watch the coast themselves, at their own cost for arms and ammunition. They wanted these things done for them before they would trouble themselves for the furtherance of the Adelantado's enterprises in Florida.
Meantime, the Council for the Indies, at Seville, was also unfriendly to Menendez. Tired of the delay in building La Fuerza, it recommended to the king his removal in favor of someone who would more vigorously expedite that essential work. It was the bitter irony of fate that he should thus be condemned for failing to do the very thing upon which he had most set his heart to do. The Council also condemned him for faults of administration which were due, it held, to his personal neglect through absence from the island, and it therefore urged that a governor be appointed in his place who would spend his time chiefly in Cuba and would give to that island and its interests his first and best thoughts. These representations were made to the King as early as the spring of 1571, and they had much weight with him.
The sequel was that in 1572 Menendez was recalled to Spain, and was commissioned for a work similar to that in which he had first won distinction, to wit, the protection of Spanish commerce against hostile privateers; only it was not now the commerce between Spain and Mexico which he was to safeguard in the West Indian seas, but that between Spain and the Netherlands, along the coast of France and in the British Channel. In that capacity he was commander of a considerable fleet, and the work was doubtless in itself congenial to him, and one which he was well fitted to perform with success. But his heart was set on Florida, with which he aspired to be identified as Cortez had been with Mexico and Pizarro with Peru; and he bitterly lamented his being so far separated from that country.
So far as his governorship of Cuba was concerned, which is all in which we need here be interested, he had at this time reached the beginning of the end. The king decided to remove him from that office, though probably not so much to get rid of him there as to be able to keep his valuable talents continually employed nearer home. He had decided that Menendez was of more value to him as a captain of his fleet than as a civil administrator. Accordingly at the beginning of 1573 Alfonso de Caceres Ovando, a temporarily retired judge of the Supreme Court of Hispaniola, was commissioned to make the customary investigation of Menendez's administration. He was not, however, appointed to succeed Menendez as governor, but the latter was left for the time in office. This was a mark of the high favor in which Menendez was held by the king; and another token to the same effect was the provision that Menendez need not personally appear to answer any charges which might be made against him, but might, if he preferred, send an attorney in his stead. A third and perhaps still more notable indication of royal favor was in the fact that when Menendez elected not to appear in person, and not to send an attorney, but to ignore the whole investigation, he was not called to task, but was permitted to go without so much as a reprimand.
The investigation did not take place until November, 1573. Though brief it was thorough and searching. But it disclosed little that was to the discredit of Menendez, and nothing that was really serious. He seems to have been a somewhat gloomy and cruel fanatic, but a man of integrity and singular loyalty to his sovereign and his faith. He was zealous and energetic, but better fitted to command a ship or a fleet, or indeed an army, than to govern a state. Yet in both respects he failed. His chief concern in Cuba, as we have seen, was to promote her military defences; but he left La Fuerza incomplete, while the inestimable economic potentialities of the island were altogether neglected. So in Florida, he aimed at conquest with the sword and little else; and while he succeeded in holding the land against French assaults and intrigues, he did not develop there a colony comparable with those which were being developed elsewhere in the New World; and he had the mortification of seeing, in the closing years of his life, French, Dutch and British privateers swarming in defiance of him the seas which Spain claimed for her exclusive own.
It was just a month after the beginning of the investigation into his affairs that Menendez was superseded in office by the appointment as governor of Cuba of Don Gabriel Montalvo. This gentleman was a nobleman of great distinction in Spain. He was a Knight of the Order of Saint James, and he was also high sheriff of the Court of the Holy Inquisition in the city of Granada. The latter office indicates him to have been a man after the King's own heart. It remains to be added that Menendez returned to Spain after being superseded, and died there a few months later, at Santander; men said, of a broken heart at the enforced abandonment of his ambitions in Florida.
Little either attractive or grateful is to be found in the record of the condition of Cuba during the administration of Menendez, or as he left it to his successor. Rich as the island was in agricultural possibilities—it might well have been said of Cuba as Douglas Jerrold said of Australia, "Earth is here so kind, that just tickle her with a hoe and she laughs with a harvest"—and few as were its inhabitants, it yet produced not enough to feed those few. It produced nothing with which to clothe them. After the decline of gold mining, the raising of cattle became the chief industry; chiefly for their hides, which were an important article of export. Bayamo was the centre of this industry, and was also the centre of a thriving but illegitimate commerce.
In fact the whole southeastern part of the Cuban coast was the resort of contraband traders, who brought thither silks