them.
11. In the meantime this captain asked the lords to bring him much gold,
because it was principally to that end that they came. The Indians
replied that they were happy to give all the gold they had, and they
collected a very great quantity of the hatchets they use, which are
made of gilded copper and look like gold, though there is little on
them. The captain ordered that they should be tested and because he
saw they were of copper, he said to the Spaniards: "to the devil
with such a country! let us leave it since there is no gold and let
each one put the Indians who serve him, in chains, and I will order
that they be branded as his slaves." This was done, and they marked
as slaves with the King's brand, all they could bind. And I saw the
son of the prince of that town thus branded.
12. When those Indians who escaped and the others throughout the land
beheld such great iniquity, they began to collect and to arm
themselves. The Spaniards did the greatest slaughter and massacre
among them, after which they returned to Guatemala where they built
a town; and it is that one which has now been by righteous decree of
divine justice, destroyed by three deluges together: the one of
water, the other of earth and the third of stones much bigger than
ten, and twenty oxen.
13. Having thus killed all the lords and the men who could have made
war, they put all the others into the aforesaid infernal slavery;
they demanded slaves as tribute, so the Indians gave their sons and
daughters as they have no other slaves, all of whom they loaded into
ships and sent to be sold in Peru. By other massacres and murders,
besides the above, they have destroyed and devastated a kingdom more
than a hundred leagues square, one of the happiest in the way of
fertility and population in the world. This same tyrant wrote that
it was more populous than the kingdom of Mexico; and he told the
truth.
14. He and his brothers, together with the others, have killed more than
four or five million people in fifteen or sixteen years, from the
year 1524 till 1540, and they continue to kill and destroy those who
are still left; and so they will kill the remainder.
15. It was his custom when he went to make war on some town or province,
to take with him as many of