province, gave him the kindest of welcomes, sending him more than twenty or thirty Indians loaded with fowls and other provisions. 10. When he arrived, and had received the gift, he commanded that each Spaniard should take from that multitude of people, as many Indians as he pleased for his service during their stay there, whose duty should be to bring them everything they needed. Each Spaniard took a hundred, or fifty or as many as he reckoned would be sufficient for his service, and those innocent lambs bore with the distribution, and served with all their strength, and almost adored 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