d under a certain agreement and compact, or
condition that was made with them. (99)
2. These men invaded these countries with a force of three hundred or
more and found the people the same gentle lambs, (and much more so),
as they usually find them everywhere in the Indies before the
Spaniards injure them.
3. More cruel beyond comparison than any of the other tyrants we have
told of, was their invasion; and more irrational and furious were
they than the cruellest tigers, or raging wolves and lions. Their
liberty of action was the greater because they held all the
jurisdiction of the country; with greater eagerness and blind
greediness of avarice, and with ways and arts for stealing and
accumulating gold and silver more exquisite than their predecessors,
they abandoned all fear of God and the King and all shame of men,
forgetting that they were mortal beings.
4. These devils incarnate have devastated, destroyed, and depopulated
more than four hundred leagues of most delightful country containing
large and marvellous provinces, valleys extending for forty leagues,
pleasant regions, very large towns, most rich in gold.
5. They have killed and entirely cut to pieces divers large nations and
destroyed many languages, so that not a person who speaks them
remains, except a few, who have hidden in caverns and in the bowels
of the earth to escape from the pestilential sword of the
foreigners.
6 They have killed, destroyed, and sent to hell, (according to my
belief), more than four or five millions of those innocent races by
means of various strange and new kinds of cruel iniquity and
impiety; nor do they, at the present day, cease sending them there.
7. I will relate no more than three or four instances of the endless
injustice, outrages, and slaughter they have done, and are doing
to-day; it may be imagined from these what they must have done to
accomplish the great destruction and depopulation we have described.
8. They took the supreme lord of all the province, putting him to
torture, for no other reason than to obtain his gold. He escaped
and fled to the mountains, where he remained in hiding amongst the
rocks, with his enraged and terrified people. The Spaniards
attacked them in their search for him; they recaptured him and,