1. Great and notorious have been the destruction that the Spaniards have worked along the Coast of Paria, (97) extending for two hundred leagues as far as the Gulf of Venezuela, assassinating the inhabitants and capturing as many as they could alive, to sell them as slaves. 2.2. They frequently took them by violating their pledged word and friendship, the Spaniards failing to keep faith, while the Indians received them in their houses, like fathers receive their children, giving them all they possessed and serving them to the best of their ability. 3.3. Certainly it would not be easy to relate, or describe minutely the variety and number of the injustices, wrongs, oppressions, and injury practised upon the people of this coast by the Spaniards from the year 1510 up to the present day. I will relate but two or three instances from which the villany and number of the others, worthy of punishment by every torment and fire may be judged. 4.4. In the island of Trinidad which joins the continent at Paria, and is much larger and more prosperous than Sicily, there are as good and virtuous people as in all the Indies; an assassin going there in the year 1516, with sixty or seventy other habitual robbers, gave the Indians to understand that they had come to dwell and live in that island along with them. 5.5. The Indians received them as though they were children of their own flesh and blood, the lords and their subjects serving them with the greatest affection and joy, bringing them every day double the amount of food required; for it is the usual disposition and liberality of all the Indians of this new world to give the Spaniards in excess of all they need and as much as they themselves possess. 6.6. In accordance with the Spaniards’ wish, they built one great house of timber, where all might live: they needed no more than one in order to carry out what they had in mind and afterwards accomplished. 7.7. When they were putting the straw over the timbers and had covered about the height of two paces so that those inside no longer saw those without, the Spaniards, under pretence of hurrying on the completion of the house, induced many people to go inside; meanwhile they divided, some surrounding the house outside, with their weapons ready for the Indians who should come out, and the others stationing themselves inside the house. The latter drew their swords and threatening the naked Indians with death if they moved, they began to bind them, while some who ran out seeking to escape were cut to pieces with swords. 8.8. Some who got out, wounded, and others sound, joined with one or two hundred natives who had not entered the house, and arming themselves with bows and arrows they retired to another house of the