they attempted to pass, or forced them off the gangways into the
waste of the ship, which was filled with live cattle. Some threw
themselves voluntarily over the barricades into the waste, and thought
themselves fortunate to lie concealed among the cattle; but the
greatest part escaped up the main-shrouds, and took shelter in the
tops and rigging of the ship. Although the Indians only attacked
the quarter-deck, yet the watch in the forecastle, finding their
communication cut off, and terrified by a few of the wounded who had
been able to force their passage, and not knowing either who were
their enemies, or what were their numbers, they also gave all over for
lost, and in great confusion ran up into the rigging of the foremast
and boltsprit.

Thus these eleven Indians, with a resolution perhaps without example,
possessed themselves almost in an instant of the quarter-deck of a
ship mounting sixty-six guns, and manned by near five hundred hands,
and even continued in peaceable possession of this part for some time.
During a considerable space, the officers in the great cabin, among
whom were Pizarro and Mindinuetta, the crew between decks, and those
who had escaped into the tops and rigging, were merely anxious for
their own safety, and were incapable of forming any project for
suppressing the insurrection and recovering the possession of the
ship. The yells of the Indians, the groans of the wounded, and the
confused clamours of the crew, all heightened by the darkness of the
night, had at first greatly magnified the danger, and filled them with
imaginary terrors. The Spaniards were sensible of the dissatisfaction
of their impressed hands, and were conscious of their barbarity to
their prisoners, wherefore they concluded that the conspiracy was
general, and considered their own destruction as infallible; insomuch,
that some are said to have designed to leap into the sea, but were
prevented by their companions.

When the Indians had entirely cleared the quarter-deck, the tumult in
a great measure subsided; for those who had escaped were kept silent
by their fears, and the Indians were incapable of pursuing them.
Orellana, when master of the quarter-deck, broke open the arm-chest,
which had been ordered there a few days before, on a slight suspicion
of mutiny. He there expected to find cutlasses wherewith to arm
himself and his followers, who were all well skilled in the use of
that weapon, and with these it is imagined