towns, captured the lords, tortured them--made slaves of
everybody he captured and led numbers away in chains. Women just
confined were loaded down with the baggage they carried for the
wicked Christians and, not being able to carry their infants for
fatigue and the weakness of hunger, they threw them by the roadside
where numbers perished.
12. One wicked Christian having seized a maid by force, to sin with her,
the mother sprang to tear her away from him, but he seized a dagger,
or sword, and cut off the mother's hand; and because the maid would
not consent, he stabbed her and killed her.
13. Among many other free people he unjustly caused to be marked as
slaves, were four thousand five hundred men, women, and nursing
children of a year old; others also of two, three, four and five
years old, although they went forth peacefully to meet him; there
were numberless others that were not counted.
14. When the countless iniquitous and infernal wars and massacres were
terminated, he laid all that country under the usual, pestilential
and tyrannical servitude to which all the tyrant Christians of the
Indies are in the habit of reducing these peoples. In which he
consented that his own majordomos and all the others, should use
cruelty and unheard of tortures to extract gold and tribute from the
Indians.
15. One majordomo of his killed many peaceable Indians, by hanging,
burning them alive, throwing them to fierce dogs, and cutting off
their feet and hands and tearing out their tongues and hearts, for
no other reason than to frighten them into submission and into
giving him gold and tribute, as soon as they recognised him as the
same celebrated tyrant. He also gave them many cruel beatings,
cudgellings, blows and other kinds of cruelty every day and every
hour.
16. It is told of him that he destroyed and burnt eight hundred towns in
that kingdom of Xalisco: he goaded the Indians to rebellion out of
sheer desperation, and after they saw such numbers perish so
cruelly, they killed some Spaniards, in which they were perfectly
justified, and then retreated to the mountains.
17. Afterwards, the injustice and oppression of other recent tyrants who
passed that way to destroy other provinces--which they called
_discovering_ them,--drove ma