es all the
Indian lords, the aged, the women, and the lads, all of whom they
compelled to serve them day and night, without rest. They employed
even the children, as soon as they could stand, in excess of their
powers. And in this way they have wasted, and to-day still waste
those few that are left, not allowing them to have either a home or
anything of their own. In this they even surpassed the similar
injustice they perpetrated in Hispaniola.
9. They have exhausted and oppressed, and caused the premature death of
many people in this Province, making them carry planks and timber to
build vessels in the port, thirty leagues distant; also by sending
them to seek for honey and wax in the mountains, where they are
devoured by tigers; and they have loaded and do still load pregnant
and confined women, like animals.
10. The most horrible pestilence that has principally destroyed this
Province, was the license which that governor gave to the Spaniards,
to ask slaves from the princes and lords of the towns. Every four
or five months, or whenever one obtained the favour or license from
the said governor, he asked the lord for fifty slaves threatening,
if he did not give them, to burn him alive or to deliver him to
fierce dogs.
11. As the Indians usually do not keep slaves and, at most a lord has
two or three or four, the lords went through their towns and took,
first all the orphans; next, of those who had two children they
asked one, and of those who had three, two: and in this way the lord
completed the number demanded by the tyrant, amidst great wailing
and weeping in the town, for they seem, more than any other people,
to love their children.
12. By such conduct from the year 1523 to 1533, they ruined all this
kingdom. During six or seven years, five or six vessels carried on
this traffic, taking all this multitude of Indians to sell them as
slaves in Panama and Peru, where they all died. It has been
verified and experienced a thousand times that, by taking the
Indians away from their native country, they at once die more
easily: because the Spaniards habitually give them little to eat and
never relieve them from labour, for they are only sold by some and
bought by others, to make them work. In this way they have carried