1. The province of Santa Marta was a country where the Indians had a great deal of gold because both it and the places round about have rich mines which were diligently worked. And for this reason, from the year 1498 till the present 1542, numberless Spanish tyrants have continually gone there with ships to ravage and kill those people and to steal their gold. They afterwards returned in the ships with which they made numerous expeditions, murdering and massacring, with notorious cruelty; this commonly occurred along the seacoast and a few leagues inland, till the year 1523. 2.2. In the year 1523 some Spanish tyrants went to take up their abode here. And because the country, as has been said, was rich, divers captains succeeded one another, each crueller than the other, so that it seemed as though each had made a vow to practise more exorbitant evils and cruelty than the other, in verification of the rule we have given above. 3.3. In the year 1529 there arrived a great tyrant accompanied by many men, devoid of any fear of God or any mercy on mankind; so great were the massacres, slaughter and impiety he perpetrated, that he surpassed all his predecessors. During the space of six, or seven years that he lived, he and his men stole much treasure. (96) 4.4. He died without sacraments after also avoiding the commission of investigation met on his account; and afterwards, other murderous and thieving tyrants succeeded, who continued to destroy those people who had survived the treatment and cruel swords of their predecessors. 5.5. They marched far inland, ruining and exterminating large and numerous provinces; killing, and making slaves of their people in the ways above told of the others, putting lords and their vassals to grievous tortures to force them to disclose the gold and the town where it was to be had: as has been said they surpassed, both in number and quality, the operations of all their predecessors so that from the said year 1529, till to-day, they have devastated in those parts more than four hundred leagues of country, which was as densely peopled as the other. 6.6. I truthfully declare that if I had to relate singly the evil, the massacres, the destruction, injustice, violence, slaughter, and the great sins the Spaniards have committed in this Kingdom of Santa Marta, against God, against the King, and against those innocent nations, I would compose a very long history; I shall relate all this however in due time, if God gives me life. 7.7. Here I wish only to quote some few of the words that the lord bishop of that province now writes to the King: and the date of his letter is the 20th of May, 1541, in which among other words he says thus: 8.8.