Having thus concluded everything, then, and not till then, I told my Spaniard that I had almost resolved to go along with him, at which he appeared exceedingly pleased, and, indeed, in a surprise of joy. I should have said, that, before I told him this, I had set all the rest of the prisoners on shore, at their own request, just between the port of Tucapel and the bay of the Conception, excepting two men, who, as he told me, lived in the open country beyond Baldivia, and, as he observed, were very glad to be set on shore with him, so to travel home, having lost what little they had in the ship, and to whom he communicated nothing of the discourse we had so frequently held, concerning the affair of the mountains. I also dismissed now the two Chilian Indians, but not without a very good reward, not proportioned to their trouble and time only, but proportioned to what I seemed to expect of them, and filled them still with expectations that I would come again, and take a journey with them into the mountains. And now it became necessary that I should, use the utmost freedom with my new friend, the Spaniard, being, as I told him, to put my life in his hands, and the prosperity of my whole adventure, both ship and ship's company. He told me he was sensible that I did put my life into his hands, and that it was a very great token of my confidence in him, even such a one that he, being a stranger to me, had no reason to expect; but he desired me to consider that he was a Christian, not a savage; that he was one I had laid the highest obligation upon, in voluntarily taking him out of the hands of the freebooters, where he might have lost his life. And, in the next place, he said, it was some recommendation that he was a gentleman, and that I should find him to be a man of honour; and, lastly, that it did not appear that he could make any advantage of me, or that he could get anything by using me ill; and, if even that was no argument, yet I should find, when I came to his house, that he was not in a condition to want anything that might be gained, so much as to procure it by such a piece of villany and treachery as to betray and destroy the man who had saved his life, and brought him out of the hands of the devil safe to his country and family, when he might have been carried away God knows whither. But to conclude all, he desired me to accept the offer he had made me at sea, viz., that he would send for his two sons, and leave them on board the ship as hostages for my safety, and desired they might be used on board no otherwise than I was used with him in the country.