small; because they keep no more than they
ordinarily need, which they acquire with little labour; but what is
enough for three households, of ten persons each, for a month, a
Christian eats and destroys in one day. From their using force,
violence and other kinds of vexations, the Indians began to perceive
that these men could not have come from heaven.
2. Some hid their provisions, others, their wives and children: others
fled to the mountains to escape from people of such harsh and
terrible intercourse. The Christians gave them blows in the face,
beatings and cudgellings, even laying hands on the lords of the
land. They reached such recklessness and effrontery, that a
Christian captain violated the lawful wife of the chief king and
lord of all the island.
3. After this deed, the Indians consulted to devise means of driving
the Christians from their country. They took up their weapons,
which are poor enough and little fitted for attack, being of little
force and not even good for defence; For this reason, all their wars
are little more than games with sticks, such as children play in our
countries.
4. The Christians, with their horses and swords and lances, began to
slaughter and practise strange cruelty among them. They penetrated
into the country and spared neither children nor the aged, nor
pregnant women, nor those in child labour, all of whom they ran
through the body and lacerated, as though they were assaulting so
many lambs herded in their sheepfold.
5. They made bets as to who would slit a man in two, or cut off his
head at one blow: or they opened up his bowels. They tore the babes
from their mothers' breast by the feet, and dashed their heads
against the rocks. Others they seized by the shoulders and threw
into the rivers, laughing and joking, and when they fell into the
water they exclaimed: "boil body of so and so!" They spitted the
bodies of other babes, together with their mothers and all who were
before them, on their swords.
6. They made a gallows just high enough for the feet to nearly touch
the ground, and by thirteens, in honour and reverence of our
Redeemer and the twelve Apostles, they put wood underneath and, with
fire, they burned the Indians alive.
7. They wrapped the bodies of others e