AUTHOR'S PREFACE

Some years ago, Mr. Manuel Elzaburu, President of the San Juan
Provincial Atheneum, in a public speech, gave it as his opinion that
the modern historian of Puerto Rico had yet to appear. This was said,
not in disparagement of the island's only existing history, but rather
as a confirmation of the general opinion that the book which does duty
as such is incorrect and incomplete.

This book is Friar Iñigo Abbad's Historia de la Isla San Juan
Bautista, which was written in 1782 by disposition of the Count of
Floridablanca, the Minister of Colonies of Charles III, and published
in Madrid in 1788. In 1830 it was reproduced in San Juan without any
change in the text, and in 1866 Mr. José Julian Acosta published a new
edition with copious notes, comments, and additions, which added much
data relative to the Benedictine monks, corrected numerous errors, and
supplemented the chapters, some of which, in the original, are
exceedingly short, the whole history terminating abruptly with the
nineteenth chapter, that is, with the beginning of the eighteenth
century. The remaining 21 chapters are merely descriptive of the
country and people.

Besides this work there are others by Puerto Rican authors, each one
elucidating one or more phases of the island's history. With these
separate and diverse materials, supplemented by others of my own, I
have constructed the present history.

The transcendental change in the island's social and political
conditions, inaugurated four years ago, made the writing of an English