tyrants, who call themselves privateers; they have enough for only a few more people than the Spaniards who man the ships to make the raids; as these miserable Indians are in want and die of hunger and thirst, the remedy is to throw them in the sea. 29.29. And in truth, one of them told me, that from the Lucayan Islands, where very great havoc of this sort was made, to the Island of Hispaniola, which is more than sixty or seventy leagues, a ship is supposed to have gone without compass or nautical chart, finding its course by the trail of dead Indians who had been thrown out of ships and left in the sea. 30.30. When they are afterwards disembarked at the island where they are taken to be sold, it is enough to break the heart of whomsoever has some spark of compassion to see naked, starving children, old people, men, and women falling, faint from hunger. 31.31. They then divide them like so many lambs, the fathers separated from the children, and the wives from the husbands, making droves of ten or twenty persons and casting lots for them, so that each of the unhappy privateers who contributed to fit out a fleet of two or three vessels, and the tyrant villains who go to capture and prey upon the natives in their homes, receives his share. 32.32. And when the lot falls on a drove in which there is some old or ill person, the tyrant who gets it, says: “Why in the devil do you give this old man to me? That I shall bury him? Why should I take this ill one? To nurse him?” It may be seen how the Spaniards despise the Indians and whether they carry out the precept of divine love to one’s neighbour, upon which rest the law and the prophets. 33.33. The tyranny exercised by the Spaniards upon the Indians in fishing pearls, is as cruel, and reprehensible a thing as there can be in the world. Upon the land there is no life so infernal and hopeless as to be compared to it, although that of digging gold in the mines is the hardest and worst. 34.34. They let them down into the sea three and four and five fathoms deep, from the morning till sunset. They are always swimming under water without respite, gathering the oysters, in which the pearls grow. 35.35. They come up to breathe bringing little nets full of them; there is a hangman Spaniard in a boat and if they linger resting, he beats them with his fists, and, taking them by the hair, throws them in the water to go on fishing. 36.36. Their food is fish and the fish that contain the pearls, and a little cazabi or maize bread, which are the kinds of native bread: the one gives very little sustenance and the other is very difficult to make, so with such food they are never sufficiently nourished. Instead of giving them beds at night, they put them in stocks on the