nd twenty-five pesos each.
6. By such excessive disorder, they killed more than a hundred thousand
head of animals, which reduced the country to very great want, while
the natives died of starvation in great numbers. Although there was
more maize in Quito than can be told, this bad order of things
brought such penury on the people that a measure of maize came to
cost ten pesos, and a sheep the same.
7. When the said captain returned from the coast, he determined to
leave Quito, to go in search of Captain Juan de Ampudia. He took
more than two hundred foot and horsemen, among whom he led many
inhabitants of the country of Quito. The said captain permitted the
colonists who accompanied him to draw the lords from their
departments and as many Indians as they liked, and this they did.
8. Alonso Sanchez Nuyta took a lord and more than a hundred Indians
with their wives; Pedro Cobo and his cousin, more than a hundred and
fifty with their wives and many of the children, who otherwise all
died of starvation. And so likewise Moran, an inhabitant of
Popayan, had more than two hundred persons; and all the other
inhabitants and soldiers also took as many as each could.
9. And the said soldiers asked him if he would give them licence to put
the Indians they brought with them, in prison; and he said yes,
until they died, and when these were dead, also others; for if the
Indians were vassals of His Majesty, they were also of the
Spaniards, and they died in war.
10. In this way the said captain left Quito and went to a town called
Otabalo, which he owned at that time by virtue of the distribution,
and he demanded five hundred men for the war from its lord, who gave
them to him with some Indian chiefs. He distributed some of these
people among the soldiers and the rest he took with himself, some
with packs, and others in chains, and some, who served him and
brought him food, were free; the soldiers also took them, bound in
this way with chains and cords.
11. When they left the province of Quito they took away more than six
thousand Indians, men and women of whom not twenty men returned to
their country: because they all died of the great and excessive
labours imposed on them, in countries far from their native land.
12. It happened at this time